So I was going through a box of stuff from my childhood that my Mom kept. It pretty much seems to have everything I ever did in kindergarden through jr high. I mean everything: pictures I drew (and that she wrote on it what I told her it was), report cards (that still have that funny copy smell) to my girl scout handbook.

Most of the early stuff I don’t remember drawing, including this picture:

It was in a book, as much as 30 pages of construction paper bound with yarn is a book, with the subtitle “This is me at school”.

Interesting outfit I have on. Knowing my mom, she let me pick it out. . .

I also found this “Graphic Training Aid”, GTA 21-1-3 June 1970, which I must have gotten in Basic Training, and is prolly out of date by now as the Army stopped using the M16A1 a while back:

It feels a bit odd to “find” pictures and items from my past that I don’t even remember. Now I know how artifacts from the past can be “lost” to the ages. . .

So last night I went to see They Might Be Giants play up at the Somerville theater.

A friend of mine asked me a couple months ago if I’d like to go see them. I said sure. I’ve seen them once before, at Lupo’s in Providence, and it was a good time. So after work yesterday I headed up to the “T” stop to catch the subway into Boston. We met up at South Station and then up the Red Line we went to Davis Square. We stepped out and presto! There was Somerville theater. It couldn’t have been any easier to find.

We still had a half hour before the show started so we found a local eatery / coffee shop and got a mocha latte with an espresso shot. Normally I don’t drink caffeine that late at night but I figured I’d need it to stay up late past my bedtime. Plus it was pretty dang tasty with the “elephant ear” pastry and pastichio muffin we had.

When we went to the theater, the lobby was pretty packed. The show was sold out, but of course there was a scalper out front trying to sell tickets. We made our way upstairs to the balcony and had an usher guide us to our seats in the darken theater. We sat down in the super cramped seats: there was no room between my knees and the seat ahead of me. Though we were only in the 2nd row of the balcony and on the end of the row by center stage; so great seats other then the lack of knee space.

The opening act, Apollo Sunshine, was  on stage, and the bass player with his red hair and beard was so getting into his music. It was kinda infectious. So much that I got their first CD downstairs after the show for $10.

While they were still playing, an usher came by with another couple and asked us what seats we were in. So we told him, he asked for our tickets and then stated that our seats were all the way on the other side of the theater. He pointed them out for us, and we got up and moved. The new seats didn’t seem any better as far as leg room was concerned, but we still a had a great view of the stage.

There was a short intermission while the road crew took down Apollo Sunshine’s gear and set up TMBG’s stuff.  Then they came out and played a great set. And as luck has it nowadays, the set list is up on the internets, from the This Might Be A Wiki:

* Doctor Worm
* Why Does The Sun Shine?
* Clap Your Hands
* The Guitar
* Particle Man
* I Love To Sing
* Letterbox
* Hey, Mr. DJ, I Thought You Said We Had A Deal
* Hot Topics
* Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head
* Graveyard
* Withered Hope
* Contrecoup
* Older
* Experimental Film
* Robot Parade
* New York City
* The Mesopotamians
* Damn Good Times
* Alphabet Of Nations
* Take Out The Trash
* James K. Polk
* She’s An Angel
* Ana Ng
* Cyclops Rock

* One Dozen Monkeys
* Birdhouse In Your Soul
* Fingertips

They played a few new songs from their most recent album, but it was a lot of old songs as well, which I just loved. Hearing She’s An Angel and Older were great. Heck, hearing all those old songs were great. I wish I had brought my camera to take pictures, but I wasn’t sure if they were allowed or not (as the venue’s website wasn’t too clear on it).

During the show they shot off some confetti, and the lighting guy loved to flash the white super-bright lights on the audience, I was blinded several times.  John F was a ham for the entire act, at one time walking across the front of the stage holding his guitar low enough so the audience could reach up and strum / touch it. Another time during I’m Having An Heart Attack he  started sings like “I’m having a heart attack for you” and kissing his fingers and then pointing them at audience members. A funny guy.

Overall, it was a great show and a great time (I just wish we had more leg room!).

So I had this odd dream, again. I have a lot of odd dreams every night, but for some reason this stuck with me; of course now only 5 minutes after I wake up, I can only remember bits and pieces:

I’m at some house, which turns out to be an apartment I’m now living at. There are people in there with me, and not all of them are friendly. I look outside and I have this feeling that we are being attacked. Behind me is a tall cliff face that stretches for as far as I can see. The sky is dark, almost a darkish purplish color that borders on black. The cliffs are being attacked by lighting, and every time they are I can see the face of Einstein. I get the impression that he is in the cliffs and being attacked, and he will die if I allow that attack to continue, and that I am the only one that has a chance of stopping it. I fly up to the cliff face, to a large patch of lighting: it had been coming in waves, but now it is just pounding away at this one section of the cliff face, and Einstein’s face, which is like a projection of his face, I don’t know if it is him, or someone else, is crying out. I fly into the lighting, thinking I can stop it by aborsbing its power. The next thing I know it is the future and I’m looking down at these two cute girls. One of the girls thanks the other girl for saving her so many years ago, that is she hadn’t saved her, she would’ve died. I get the feeling that these two girls are the ones that were the face of Einstein and the girl that flew up into the lighting, and I’m watching them, looking out at window down onto them. The Einstein girl is standing behing the other girl, holding her, and they kiss. I have the feeling that they are a couple, and they love each other very much. 

A bit odd, almost like a movie with so many plot holes. . .I just had to write it down, lest is slip from my memory forever.

So thanks to Pam’s House Blend blog, I found out how silly our government is. . .and just confirmed why I vote Libertarian.  This guy from  Attleboro was married to his husband, and then applied to the US government to get the name on his passport and social security card changed. I don’t know what he used for “official documentation”, but he prolly tried to use his marriage license, which is the quickest way to do this.

Unfortunately for him,  on September 21, 1996 a democratic President signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law. It wasn’t only Bill’s fault, as many other Democrats followed the Republican’s lead and also voted “yea” for it.

Though I note that my Senator, good ole John Kerry, voted against it. One of only 14 nay votes in the Senate, the man has balls.

So the State department said no, citing the DOMA, and Social Security Administration changed the name on his social security card. . .umm. Nothing like being told by the government that you’re a second class citizen. I wonder if the guy will change his name via the courts, and then send in that paperwork or try to fight it in the courts.

The only thing the paper mentions is that the only thing he can do is change his name back to his “single” (is it right to call it maiden, as he isn’t a “maid”) name. I think he should fight it through the courts, as one of the gay rights or civil rights organizations out there would prolly front the legal costs. However, the guy wants to go on a volunteer mission to Africa this July and I don’t think his case would make it through the system by then. I say change his name through the courts (like how I changed my name from my married name to my current last name), and send in that paperwork instead of his marriage certificate or license, if that is indeed what he used.

I still can’t believe that in the 21st century people are still being discriminated against. “Special” rights? Ha! I just want equal rights. There is no way this would happen to a het couple.

And for as much as I love my adopted state of Massachusetts, they need to change their marriage license form. Why? The only copy of a form is the one I found at “MassResistance” website (an anti-gay anti-family site so no linky for them) and the information I could find on GLAD both state that gender is still a required information:

I also don’t see how boxes 13 (occupation)and 15 (number of marriage and widowed or divorced) is relevant either, and should be removed. But those boxes at the end, #22 and #23, should be removed from the license. If they were, then the federal government wouldn’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to DOMA. Umm, I would think DOMA would contain some kind of language requiring state licenses to contain gender on them, but as far as I can see, it doesn’t.

So how ’bout it Massachusetts? You’ve got the balls to enact marriage equality, how ’bout taking it the full way and getting rid of those antiquated boxes?

Wowza. Has it really been 13 years since I got out of the Army? Those memories seem like just yesterday. ‘Specially when it was just yesterday I dug up some pictures for the Military Police homepage. I served at my first duty station with the site admin. Small world, eh? And I just learned that one of the Sergeants at my first duty station, who PCSed around the same time I did to the same unit in Panama, is still in! Yoinks! He went in about 4 years before me, and now he has his 20 years in. He’ll be able to retire and he ain’t that much older then me. If I stayed in, I would’ve had 20 years in two years (2010). Which is just odd for me to think about. Of course it would mean going to engineerings school at 38 instead of 28, but still – retired!

Unless of course, stop loss measures were still in place.

Oh! The pictures, yeah, they were some beauts. They are kinda cracked and the color on some of them as seen much better days, but it still gave me a kick to see them:

The one above is of the LEA (Law Enforcement Activity; as we weren’t a deployable MP Company, just a road unit, so we didn’t get any fancy numbers for our company’s name) from Ft Monroe, VA during a FTX (field training excerise) at Ft Eustis, VA. The person with her head down and coming out of the swamp first is me. The mud was so deep and we weren’t making any progress going through the swamp so someone up ahead shouted turn around. Trust me, I was out of there as quick as I could be – I felt like I was sinking into 6″ (if not more) of mud. . .

And this classic one from Basic Training. How we managed to sneak a camera to the field training is beyond me.

Man oh man. It was one of those days that a shitstorm was left for me last night and it just never let up. A constant swirl of non-compliance reports, questions, issues and headaches. All dealing with the same customer! Seesh.

One of the techs on a piece of equipment I’m the engineer for stopped me some time after noon and said you’re running around today aren’t you? And even when I was headed to 2nd break (oh, I made sure to get to break. It was about the only time I was sitting down), I was hustling arse to get there. The woman I was walking to break with said she couldn’t keep up ’cause her legs were shorter then mine. I said nah, it ain’t that – it’s just that I’ve been zipping around all day and I just haven’t let up.

::sigh::

Then to top off my crazy day – we head out to my car to go to lunch and my rear passenger tire was completely flat. I mean, not just a little soft – but completely flat. Like someone took a knife to it. It was a bit soft this morning, at least enough that I thought I should get some air it after work. But damn. I didn’t think it would go that flat that quick.

So I called up triple A with the card that said it was good to 2010.

Yeah, not so good. The account, which was actually my mom’s had been canceled.  So either I fix the flat myself (in the cold cold weather with a crappy small jack), pay $25 for the triple A guy to fix it, or join triple A for like $50 or something. I took the membership. Almost paid for itself, and lord knows when it’d come in handy again.

After my crazy day I went to get a new tire and ended up getting two new ones for the rear. A busy hectic no rest for the weary day and then a bill for $300 for new tires and an alignment.

::sigh::

So I’ve been working on the Cerebus Wiki some more. I only had the front cover pages of a couple of the phonebooks, so I scanned in the front, spine and back and pieced them together as best as I could. I use those images for the individual phonebook pages, but for the “phonebook” page itself so the group together looks like this:

I also created some templates for “phonebookbox” and “singleissuebox”: The phonebook info box template gives some basic info on the phonebooks that I didn’t have listed in the checklist, but thought would be handy to have somewhere:

Once I figured how to get the infobox template, which Chowbok (thanks man for all your help on the wiki!) made for the individual Cerebus issues, set up for single issues like Cerebus Jam and the World Tour Book, then it was easy enough to manipulate it to create the phonebook info box. If y’all can think of any other handy info you’d like in the box, then let me know.

Now I need to do one for people so I can get pictures and other info up.

Also, I’ve been busy adding the articles for the different “Cerebus Miscellany” stories. I’ve done over 20 some of them so far, and there are still a few to go. All in all, it brings the wiki up to 650 articles.

Still a lot of work that can be done to the Cerebus Wiki, as there are a lot of “stub” pages and “requested” pages, plus a few other tasks that have been discussed. Prolly some other stuff that hasn’t been though of yet either. So if you have a few free minutes, and some Cerebus tidbits floating around in your noggin, please drop by and help out!

I usually grab a 3 L of ginger ale when I go shopping. Now the store brand I get is pretty cheap, which would prolly explain why it contains no real ginger. As it is, it still tastes halfway decent and eases my upset belly. Plus its caffiene free.

So discover my pleasant surprise when a coworker introduced me to Reed’s Ginger Brews, both the ale ~ with 17 grams of ginger and a great bite to it. The beer has more bite, with 25 grams of ginger in it. Very tasty stuff.

***

Season three of Battlestar Galactica came out today. I had it at the top of my netflix queue so it arrived today in my mailbox. So far it is pretty preachy stuff. Don’t get me wrong, the first couple of seasons had their preaching, but it was kept to the minimum. This season? I’ve only watched the first two episodes, but good lord, the ties to the war in Iraq are overwhelming. With the humans as the Iraq insurgents and the “toasters” as the American occupying forces.

Seesh. I don’t know what to make of it yet. We shall see.

***

So one of my recent aquistions was this:

Yup, the original logo for the Swords of Cerebus books. It is on a 11″ x 17″ Bainbridge 72 board, the kind Dave uses for regular original art from Cerebus.  You can see all the white out along the top of the Cerebus portion, how the logo appears to be tilted with regards to the registration marks, and if you zoom in closer (by clicking on the image above and then going to the larger size), you can see the pencil marks that finish the logo.

***

Holy shit! Spoilers for BSG season 3. . .

HOLY SHIT! Episode 4. . .that jump? BSG’s jump? If you’ve seen it, you know what I mean. All I can say is HOLY SHIT that was a hell of sight. I didn’t know a battlestar could do that! Brings a tear to my eye. And then that thing with Pegasus? Wow again. The thing with Kara is getting old (quick). . .she was played like a player.  But still, a nice wrap for the first four episodes, the first dvd.

This week at work we had an vendor in to work on the machine for which I’m the process engineer. Since I was out sick on Monday, 3/4 of my 4 day week were spent with the field engineer going over the machine. Basically just tweaking it to keep it going. The machine is getting old, and as I like to say, as a personality all her own. When something happens with it, I try to troubleshoot it as best I can, but there are bits and pieces in it that I have no clue how it works.

So when the field engineer comes in to tweak it, I stand back and take notes. I can learn some ins and outs of the machine that aren’t in the manual. At the end of every day I wrote the more interesting bits and posted them in an email to my boss, the manager of the area, and the VP of the area and CC’ed the head of maintenance. Little did I know what the VP was forwarding my emails to another VP and the President of the company.

I hadn’t gotten any feedback on the emails, they were going out more as an FYI to everyone, and so I’d have a written log of what transpired (as all my sent mail is saved in my sent mail folder).

Then today, I sent the last one out pretty late, about 4:35pm or so.

About  10 minutes later I get an email from the President of the company with a thanks and a kudos in it.

Wah? Sure he has given me compliments, but they are few and far between. I would say I could prolly count the number on one hand, if I could remember them. So it was pretty nice, it gave me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

Well, I’m feeling a heck of a lot better. I woke up at 6am this morning to the alarm clock, with some coughing and a sore throat still, so I called the boss-lady to let her know I wouldn’t be in. When I called and left the voicemail, my voice sounded like a cross between Kate Hepburn and Janis Joplin: like I had smoked 3 packs of methanols while downing them with a fifth of SoCo. Blargh.

I didn’t take any naps at all today, and my muscles don’t feel sore any more. I still have the occasional sneeze and cough, and plenty of mucus exiting my nose. I even had some chunks of lung come up this morning, but that has stopped (hopefully).  Though a recent cough (or maybe it was sneeze?) caused the hearing in my left ear to be cut to almost nothing.

::sigh::

So as on Friday I was prolly around 60% of my normal production, Saturday I was down to 30% and Sunday I was hovering around 25%, today I was back up to 60%. Not good enough to go in and deal with the working world, but good enough that I could eat two meals (!) and not feel sick. Good enough to veg out on the chair watching DVDs (season 4 of Futurama), and not feel so exhausted that I had to take a nap. But yet not at 100%. Which I better be tomorrow, as calling in sick two days in row?

I could only imagine the pile of stuff that would be waiting for me on my desk. . .