If it is sunny out in the morning, I’ll check the weather forecast to see if rain is coming or now that fall is drawing to a close if the temperature is above freezing. Yesterday weather.com said it was 28 deg F in my town. Umm. Yeah, I didn’t ride. I went out to the car, and on my way I locked my bike. Its seat had frost on it. Brrr!

Today I get up, and once again it is sunny out. So I check the temperature: 37 deg F. A nice balmy New England morning. So I get geared up: long sleeve tee-shirt, jacket liner, jacket, gloves, and I carry my bakalva outside to the bike. When I get out there, I notice that the seat of the bike has frost on it! What the . . .so I wipe it off with my rag and open the choke up. I figure I better get her started as she might need to warm up a bit longer (like she did when it was 33 deg F out. She doesn’t like cold mornings.)

So I push the ignition. She grumbles. I push it again and give her a little gas. More grumbling and then she starts up. She idles as I put my bakalva on, then my helmet and I hop on the bike. I push the choke in and she is doing okay. Umm. Not as cold as it seems. On that 33 deg F day she needed the choke fully open until we left the parking lot.

Anyways, I put my goggles on last of all, as they’ll fog up if I sit too long, and I take off. A little brrrr, but not that bad. About half way to work my fingers were starting to get nippy and I could feel the cold biting away at them. So I made a note to wear my thicker Army issued gloves (hey, if they are good enough for Ft Drum weather, they’re good enough for bike riding) when I ride again in weather this cold. My thighs started to feel a bit chilly next, about 2/3 of the way in. I know a pair of chaps would solve that problem, but right now: 1. money is being used for other things (i.e. sister’s baby shower) and 2. going to see Dave and some Cerebus art in a week or two. . .

::sigh::

So I’ll suck up the cold weather – long warm socks up with my calves, but the only thing I can see that will help with cold thighs are either chaps or thermal underwear. . .umm. That means going to the bathroom when I get to work to take them off. . .and then putting them on the back of the bike when I’m headed home (as I won’t need to wear them then).

As I only got in 2 riding days last week, I hope I get some more in this week. . .as I see my riding days for this season dwindling. . .

Ohh goodness gracious my. 52 to 7. 52. To. 7. I couldn’t believe it. One of the best defenses in the NFL  (well, top five at least) and the Patsies manage to get 52 points?!? Yoinks! It was never close. The one TD that the Redskins got was late in the 4th quarter. Either the NFC just sucks, or the Patsies are just that good.

Or perhaps a little from column A, a little from column B.

Now all eyes will be on the match-up next weekend: Patsies vs the Colts. In Indy.  Indy is going to be tough, they’ve actually have a tougher schedule then us, and have beaten some really good teams. The Colts now have the #4 defense overall in the NFL, compared to the Patsies #1 offense.  Though the Pats do have the #3 defense, compared to Indy’s #3 offense. . .

I don’t see many other teams in the NFL as good as these two.  And seeing how we are playing in their house, where it can be so very very loud. . .I’m not to concern with our offense producing points, I’m worried that our defense won’t be able to stop Indy.  Though we did get Richard Seymour back this week, and the guys played much better this week then they did against Miami – ohhh, we had so many missed tackles that day.

And this is what worries me as a Patsies fan: they’ll score and score, and be up 21 to 3, and then bam!bam!bam! the other team scores on our slacking D and they win the game.

Sound familar?

Last year’s AFC championship game in Indy. . .

So we better take care of business next week. To make up for that . . mess last year.

That they haunt you the rest of the day? Though ‘haunt’ give the false sense that they were nightmares. . .Far from it. But yet the dream was so real, that it lingers, yes that is better, it lingered with me for the day. Making me look over my shoulder, or into space for a few minutes lost in a memory that never happened.

I used to have deja vu so bad that my tummy would get upset. I was c onvinced that I was relieving a future memory. This is how the dream was to me today,  minus the upset tummy, but with a sense of sadness instead.

I prefer the upset tummy.

***

I’m prolly the only one in Massachusetts not watching the world series tonight. Not that I don’t care, I hope the Sox win.  But watching baseball on teevee is about as boring as shopping for nursing uniforms with my mom. Gah!

Now watching baseball, like hockey, is much better in person – with the spirit of the crowd, and the smell of it all, the energy that you get from being at the game. But on television? Forget about it. Dull as heck to me.

I watched the highlights of game 7 of the ALCS and my eyes started to glaze over: show me the runs coming in, a good play or two, but dang, watching some man with a pot belly trying to run the bases in what appeared to be super slow motion? Get a move on it! Seesh. Almost as painful as watching Bledsoe stand in the pocket until he either took the sack or threw an interception. . .

::sigh::

So I’ll check the score every hour or two, and oh – 3 to 0, whoa, now 4 to 1. . .that is about as much as I need to know.

So I pulled into my apartment complex – there are many buildings and so a couple different roads in it – and I take a turn and drive up to the road my building is on, but there is another cross street before that. To my left on the cross street is a parking area and on my right is a girl, prolly 11 or 12, on a dirt bike.

She is riding on the cross street, which doesn’t have a stop sign that I can remember, but it is a “side street” in the complex and I’m on the main road. Can you see where this is going? She continues to ride her bike straight out into the middle of my road. I have to hit my brakes and come to a stop or I would’ve hit her.

As she is passing in front of me, I notice she is on the phone. She is talking on the cell phone! I look at her and I’m saying (though she can’t hear me because  my window is rolled up) “what the fuck are you doing crossing the street in front of a 3000 lb car you short stack of shit?”. Well, maybe not exactly that.

There was more cursing involved.

If a kid doesn’t have the self preservation, the common sense, to stay out of the way of a car, then in a righteous society that kid would be taken out by the moving car and the gene pool cleansed of such stupidity.

Fucking kids. Get off my lawn.

Well, for once during a Patriots game I didn’t have the upset belly oh-my-goodness-we’re-going-to-implode feeling.  The first half was amazing to watch. Brady was perfect. Literally, I mean he had a perfect passer rating. The two touch down passes caught by Moss brought a tear to my eye. He jumped up in the middle of double coverage and caught the pass in between the hands of the defense backs. It was incredible to watch.

The other three years when the Patriots won the Super Bowl, it wasn’t this easy. The games were nail biters and very close. The last 7 games? They haven’t even been close.  And 7 and 0? That hasn’t happen before in team history.

But today? Watching Brady just move the offense down the field? Amazing. But I can only guess what Belichick will be saying to the guys on Wednesday: how there is room for improvement. While Brady did great in the passing game, our running game lacked a lot. And our defense couldn’t stop the Phins from scoring.

Next week are the Redskins at Gillette Stadium. And the Redskins have one of the top five defenses – it will be a great test for the Patsies offense. (Which looking at the stats: Brady has 27 TDs as of game 7 and the next closest QB? Tony Romo with 16 TDs)

What a week.

A friend had an extra ticket to the Tori Amos concert at the Orpheum theater for this past Thursday. Of course I had to go. I’ve seen Tori in concert twice before: once at Red Rocks in Colorado and once at “PPAC” in Providence. Both were excellent concerts.  I had never been to the Orpheum, but it was easy enough to find: right off the green line on Park.

The theater itself is from the mid 1800s, so it looks pretty neat from the inside – from the outside I couldn’t see much the way we went in: down this alley – but the paint is starting to chip and fall off, the seats are worn and torn, and it looks like it could use some TLC.  The seats were up in the third balcony,  but we still had a great view. It helped that no one sat in front of us: so our view was unobstructed and I didn’t have to worry about my knees pressing up against the seats ahead of us. They were some tight rows, and some small chairs.

Tori put on a great show, appearing as two of her “alternative personas” for the show, starting with Pip in a blue dress with black vinyl leggings and then switching to Tori with a shiny gold pantsuit number.  Tori plays the piano like a woman possessed. It was amazing to see her playing her regular piano with one hand and the keyboard with the other hand  singing with her amazing voice.

The set list:

01 cruel           7:39
02 bliss         4:01
03 fat slut         0:43
04 smokey joe         7:20
05 teenage hustling         4:10
06 waitress         7:53
07 professional widow         6:11
08 big wheel         4:24
09 crucify         7:47
10 concertina         5:17
11 cornflake girl         7:24
12 putting the damage on         6:03
13 take to the sky         7:28
14 improv-miss massachusetts         6:13
15 jackie’s strength         5:53
16 etienne         5:32
17 virginia         4:52
18 hotel         6:22
19 code red         7:27
20  precious things         7:44
21 digital ghost         5:09
22 bouncing off clouds         6:11

And amazingly enough, you can buy MP3 or FLAC recordings of each concert from this tour at Tori Amos Bootlegs. All official and legal like. The link for the bootleg site came from her official site, and the set list came from the bootleg site. The sound from the bootlegs (so far) is great. The download came with art to print out for a CD and pictures of Tori as Pip from the show.

One of the best songs of the evening was her improv “Miss Massachusetts” where she asks “If you had to choose between me and the Donald, who would you choose Miss Massachusetts?”.  The song had me laughing out loud. One of the other great performances was Digital Ghost, it felt like the music was enveloping me.

And when someone in the audience during “Jackie’s Strength” line “But virgins always get backstage” said I’m going back stage, Tori stopped for a second and said “You are not a fucking virgin.” Oh, great stuff!

***

I rode in to work the other day and it was 33 deg F out. A bit chilly. I had my liner in my coat on and my baklava along with my gloves and long wool socks.  Then it rained for most of the week, so I was only able to ride to work two days this week as opposed to many other weeks were I’ve ridden in pretty much every day.

The days of riding in a tee-shirt are over for this season it seems. But there are still good riding days left. Like today I went out with no liner in my coat and my gloves on. It was about 60 something out, and partially sunny. It had rained all last night, so going through some wooded areas, I could smell the dampness of the woodland along with the wood stoves going in places. The trees surrounded me with a blanket of colors: red, yellow, green, orange. It was a bit brisk, but not bad at all. Just comfortable, I didn’t get cold at all.

I was just nervous at the wet areas of the road that remained from the storm last night. ‘Specially where there were still leaves and pine needles in the puddles. Super slick. I avoided those areas.  Other then that, it was a great day for riding. I only saw a couple other bikers out there. Though one on a speed bike was wearing shorts! Shorts! I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t that nice out.

***

I still need to respond to Dave Sim’s Blog & Mail’s from a couple weeks back wherein he answered my letters.  And then in a more recent B&M (Oct 17), Dave said:

Ideally, I would need someone like Margaret to move in after I was dead and just make sure that everything was documented. I say “someone like Margaret” because she has the instinct of an archivist. Most other people I could picture would probably start documenting everything and end up reading comic books most of the day. Or talking on the phone all day just to show off that they’re the one in the driver’s seat, especially if they were pulling a salary on my life insurance. “Hey, let’s go do a three-hour lunch. The Archive will keep.” Unless I miss my guess, if Margaret started reading anything it would only be to figure out where it belongs and as soon as she figured out where it belonged and put it there, she’d be on to the next thing.

That was pretty much how I was with the notebooks. I scanned them in, and looked through them to see what issues they represented. If I saw something interesting I would quickly read it, and was thinking of how it would fit into a wiki (this was before the Wiki btw) or on my site, or better yet, on the searchable database (once it is all set up and stuff is inputted). And some of my reactions were will Dave really want this “published” via the online searchable database once it goes live?

But the reason I got through the notebooks so quickly is I just basically scanned. Those large thick notebooks for Mothers & Daughters, ‘specially the one around the time of Reads, had tonnes of notes in them, pages and pages of handwritten notes, dialogue, etc.  But I didn’t read it all – I figure there’ll be time for the full reading later on. I just wanted to get them all scanned.

Though I love organizing stuff. You wouldn’t think it looking at my apartment, but for example, I love the ISO system at work. The giving of numbers to all documents (and the organizing them by form, instruction, procedure, etc) and giving parts their own numbers, in such a methodical way, it satisfies my inner Virgo, the military anal retentive part of me.

So when the Cerebus Archive project came along, I got into the system of how to set up the different document numbers, how to catalog it all.  And I take Dave’s above words as a compliment to that inner organizational quality I have (the same quality that makes me love Excel spreadsheets and make one up for the Cerebus Checklist items).

Dave continues on to say:

I suspect that if I did designate Margaret as the future custodian of the house, that would be the day that she fell in love and bought a house with someone or moved to Puerto Rico or something.

Dave’s use of the pronoun “someone” made me laugh.  My girlfriend. It ain’t too hard to say.  But that is trival. What I take has a higher compliment is that Dave even thought of designating me as the future custodian of the Off White House. Amazing.

If Dave asked if I could right now pack my bags, move into the Off White house and start archiving, I would love to, but I have bills to pay – if those bills could be eliminated, then I would do it in a heart beat. Get me a working visa, I’m moving to Canada.

I still think the idea of a Cerebus Legacy Group is what is needed to keep Cerebus and the archive going when Dave has passed on. Though the optimal situation would be for a larger organization, like an university, which has the resources, to house the Cerebus Archive, and the Cerebus Legacy Group would exist to ensure that the holding organization of the archive doesn’t do anything impudent like selling it the highest bidder or producing a trashy movie based on the material.

(Though to be honest, I thought what would I do if I moved in to the Off White house? My first thought was to be like a archaeologist: document the house and contents itself. Take pictures of all the rooms and their contents, document what is in each room (by document / item number) and either scan in all the documents and/or take pictures of the items.  I would also work on the archive proper, setting aside the majority of the hours in the day for that, the main “mission” so to speak.

Still. Even when the Patsies were up 41-27 with only 3:59 left in the fourth quarter my belly was still in knots. I kept thinking what is going to fuck this up, when is Brady going to throw that inception that will be returned for a TD and then have the ensuing kick off bobbled and grabbed by the kicking team for another TD.  And our 41 – 27 lead would become a 41 – 41 tie that in overtime we would just imploded and lose.

I’m so use to a New England team imploding, that even when the Patriots are 6 – 0  and up by two TDs, I worry. It was a great worry off my belly ache when Seau intercepted Romo and the Patsies drove down the field for another 7 points.

::whew!::

So when people start saying that we were “running up the score“? Damn straight. We don’t need some imposion coming back to haunt us.

Like last year’s AFC championship game. If “running up the score” will prevent that from happening again? Tom can throw TDs all day long, right the last minute.

The sun was out all day, and not a cloud to be seen. I think the temperature managed to reach the mid 60s, if that. I went out for a bike ride, to go to the mall to pick up some stuff for my mom and sister. I ended up getting some comics too, and felt that rush of “new comics” day – even though it is a Saturday, and my “new” comics prolly have been sitting on the shelf for a couple weeks at least.

The ride to the mall was a bit chilly, as I had my jacket on,  and only my blue fleece, instead of the usual liner, underneath it. When I got to Plymouth I got a hot sammich and a mocha latte – since I took my nap early (’bout 11:30 / noonish) rather then the usual mid-afternoon time, I needed a bit of a caffine hit and something warm in my belly.

I sat there more or less reading the US Today, a sad excuse for a newspaper, being that I rather have a local paper with some national news then a national paper with no local news, listening to several young  girls talk about other young girls and boys. They must have been in high school or college, for they had the glow of youth about them, and their discussion never delved deeper then a discussion about someone’s outward physical appearance. It was at once fascinating and irritating.

The mall, thankfully, wasn’t that busy, and I got my few items and immediately left. Shoving my purchases under the netting on the back “seat” of the bike.  The ride home was a bit warmer, but still crisp, and my legs and nose were cold when I got back.

Of course I couldn’t stay at home too long with the window open looking at the sun reflect off the chrome of the bike without thinking about going out for a ride. This time I put the liner on under my jacket, but it was still a bit brisk out. Even though the day was bright and sunny, I didn’t see to many other bikers out on the road. I’m trying to shove all the bike riding in I can, before the temperature drops too low. . .

Makes me wonder why the hell my upstairs neighbors have their AC on. . .at least I don’t have to listen to them talking with their house guests at 11pm at night.

. . .Come again another day. Or perhaps another night.  For the past four months that I’ve had my bike, I’ve ridden to work pretty much every day. Not this week – I’ve driven the car more times then not.

Not that I don’t like the ‘Stang, I just rather be riding the bike. And with all the  rain we’re getting here, it isn’t make that easy. So the cover goes on the bike, and the keys for the ‘Stang come out.

::sigh::

I hope the sun comes out tomorrow morning. As much as I like sleeping to the sound of rain, I like waking up to a beautiful sunrise. Because that means bike riding!

w00t!

So yesterday I went into work. In fact, pretty much my whole division went into work. So no real luck in being able to get any work done. It was just like a regular day of work, but I got wear a tee-shirt. Even the VP and the President of the company were in. . .which makes me think that is why my division came in. . .

But so did manufacturing – so as fast as I moved the work off my desk, I had more work appear. And the questions. . .like I said, it was like being in during a “regular” work day. So forget getting any of the other stuff done that I wanted to get done. . .I much rather have just slept in and took the morning easy. At least the boss brought in some coffee and all the fixings for us, what was nice.

***

I printed out Alexx Kay’s Cerebus  Time Line (version 5). All 70 pages of it. Amazing stuff.  There was a discussion on the Cerebus Yahoo!Group about the different Suenteus Po characters thanks to Steve’s blog post on the subject. It made me want to read through the time line and see if any material jumped out at me that warrented follow up on the Wiki. The Po article on the wiki could use some filling out and Alexx’s timeline is an index of sorts or the series. Sure it is chronological order rather then alphabetical order, but it still works – points me at page numbers for different Po items, rather then reading through the entire 300 issues (again) for tidbits, they’re right there.

Which is what I want to have with the wiki, in a searchable format, but it takes finding, sorting and entering the “data” first. . .