Yesterday was a big day here. My Internet has been kinda crappy lately, so I finally gave the good folks at Time Warner a call, and darned if they weren’t able to get somebody out here right away. A couple of very nice fellas, who ran some new cable from where it enters the house to where it connects to the cable modem (upon further review, I hadn’t noticed, but it appeared that some varmint of other had partially chewed through one piece of cable), and then swapped out my old DOCSIS 2.0 made in China modem with a newer (if not actually new) DOCSIS 3.0 made in Vietnam modem. It also has much prettier lights (green and blue and very bright – they look quite Christmassy).

So now I’ve gone from a single-channel modem to a multi-channel one, and am ready for when Comcast takes over and offers (so they told me) a 500 Mpbs Internet package (not that that will do me any good unless all the websites and content providers I patronize pay the Comcast ransom that our Preznit’s cable industry lobbyist FCC Chairman is pushing to continue to allow). No doubt they’ll also have a cap of 250 GB per month or so, so that 500 Mb per second (which is 62.5 MB) would last, oh, about an hour and eight minutes if I were to actually use it all (which doesn’t seem all that likely today, but they start offering streaming 4K video and who know what else, it may not seem to crazy).

Of course, Comcast has their own video service call Xfinity, and guess what? That doesn’t count against your data cap. So you can either use what they tell you to, use the crippled providers who refuse to pay for the “fast lane” (more like they refuse to pay the toll to use the highway, so they’re stuck on the old country roads with potholes and trees down that take the long way to get from one place to the other), or use the folks who are willing to pay the fee for access (who will of course pass that cost along to you – which which may or may not be OK until you go over your data cap).

But anyway, right now my Internet is good, and hopefully it’ll stay that way.

I also put together and briefly played with my new power washer (which is Generac that I may or may not have purchased simply because it’s orange – though it does go well with the tractor). There’s an on/off switch for the motor, which is cool because it actually has two positions labeled “on” and “off” and there’s a slidey switch to turn the gas valve on, which doesn’t actually have words, but it’s got a picture of a gas pump with an arrow. So that’s OK, but then there’s a slidey switch for the choke right above the fuel switch and it has an arrow, too. But it doesn’t tell me if the the arrow points to on or off (or full choke, no choke) and the arrow points in the opposite direction of the goddamn fuel switch. So it’s a little confusing.

I should probably read the manual, but I hate to resort to that.

Anyhow, that sucker blasts out pretty good and would probably rip the mirrors off my car if I got close enough to it. So I think I’ll try washing the cats with it later on.

I thought it was a little chilly when I got up at 5:00 this morning, and when I went to the lo-cal teevee station website to check the weather, I saw why.

Damn, that’s gotta be some kind of record.

Looks like we’ve just about made it through another week. Kind of an easy one, what with it being a short one (and following what seemed like an endless week of training). Plus I had the foresight to take Monday off, so it’s another long weekend. I actually went for a brief swim on Tuesday, which was a hot muggy day here. The water was a rather brisk 67° so I didn’t stay in long. I also turned on the pool heater, and by the next day the water was a cozy 83°. but of course it’s been kind of cool and cloudy since then, so I haven’t gotten into the water. Maybe this weekend.

The propane tanks were pretty low, so I had them come and fill them up – which cost me almost $600. Oy. The price on that shit has gone up about 50 ¢ a gallon since I last ordered it (which was 2 years ago). I need to get back to my plans to cobble together a hillbilly water heater. I’m thinking I’ll mount a coil of black garden hose to some plywood and hook it to a submersible pump or something.

Once again, I got an e-mail from the Working Families Party with a link to a survey asking if they should rubberstamp an endorsement for Governor Snotball or endorse a progressive (if you’re in NY, you should fill it out), and I once again told them to endorse a progressive. I’ll even give them money if they don’t reward Snottie for his decidedly unfriendly behavior toward the working people of NY. And for once it looks like they may actually be about to do the right thing.

For weeks now, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, a Democrat seeking re-election this year, has been working behind the scenes to soothe misgivings by the leadership of a small but influential political party made up of labor unions and liberal activists who believe his policies have veered too far to the right.

Late on Thursday, a co-chairwoman of that group, the Working Families Party, said Mr. Cuomo’s efforts were not likely to be successful.

“Unless there is a significant new development in the next 24 hours, I don’t expect the state committee to endorse the governor,” said the co-chairwoman, Karen Scharff, who as executive director of the liberal advocacy group Citizen Action of New York wields considerable influence in the party.

Instead, she said, the party expects to put its support behind an academic with scarcely any chance to defeat Mr. Cuomo: Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham law professor who was the director of online organizing for Howard Dean’s presidential bid.

OK, well, I thought a couple of weeks ago there was a decent chance to get a third-party candidate elected. But even if she doesn’t win, Zephyr Teachout has got to be one of the best candidate names I’ve ever heard. For some reason, just hearing it makes me look to the sky and flash the peace sign. And the real key is to ruin any chance Andy has of running for Preznit. It would be nice to get rid of him in NY, but not at the expense of having him become President (or VP in the Clinton II Administration, though they probably wouldn’t go with two NY people – even though Hillary could probably officially move back to Illinois or Arkansas or something).

Besides, I don’t think Hillary is the shoo-in that everybody else seems to think she is.

Speaking of elections, I had a dream last night that a black guy (don’t think he was a real person) got the Republican presidential nomination. And my mailman (who was also a black guy) was really ecstatic about it. As was I – though I didn’t want him to actually win the election, ‘cuz he was still a Republican, but it was quite the historical moment. And fictional, of course. I mean, not only is my mailman not black, she’s not even a man. She also doesn’t always seem too good at distinguishing addresses. I mean, there are a total of five houses on my street (well, between my house and the next street up – you’ve gotta go about a mile in the other direction before you hit another house, and that’s in a different town) and she seems to constantly mix things up.

Which probably explains the “delinquent dog license” letter I got in mail the other day. I never got the original renewal, so it’s probably sitting in one of the neighbor’s junk mail pile. That’s all I need, to have them come and arrest the dogs (though there’s one who’s been pushing me lately, and might deserve a couple of nights in the cooler).

Oh well, I guess I better get cracking here. I didn’t make coffee ahead of time last night, and I need a little something to charge me up and get through the day. Good thing it’s a work-at-home kinda day.

Greetings from the Birthplace of Memorial Day. OK, actually from about 30 miles east of the Birthplace of Memorial Day (which in itself is a title that is somewhat in dispute, as I’ve no doubt mentioned far too many times over the past nine or so Memorial Days we’ve been through over the years).

It’s been mostly a weekend of chores around here. The first order of bidness on Saturday was to get the pool open. Really shoulda done it two weeks ago when the weather first warmed up and I took a peek under the cover. The water looked a bit cloudy but I could see the bottom on the deep end, which was a good sign. But I slacked off, and last weekend was cold and rainy and miserable and damned if Memorial Day weekend didn’t sneak up on us kinda early this year (not that I’m complaining – beats being a work this morning).

I’d wanted to change the sand in the filter last year but didn’t, so it seemed like this would be a good time to actually get around to doing it and the wife was kind enough to stop by the pool store on her way home from work on Friday night to get 300 lbs of sand. Clearly, I wasn’t moving that by hand, so I needed to get the front end loader on the tractor, which only takes a minute or so but there was really no point in doing that until I cut the grass, so that was the first task on the list.

So, that done and sand changed it was time to pull off the cover and of course the water had by this time turned nice and green and the bottom wasn’t in sight on the shallow end, let alone the deep end. Fortunately, I was prepared with my trusty chemicals.

After dumping them all in, I was sitting around reading the directions on the empty bottle of algaecide to see what I’d done wrong (holy shit, this stuff sounds dangerous!) and I came across this section:

DANGER: IF YOU CANNOT READ ENGLISH, ASK YOUR SUPERVISOR TO EXPLAIN THE APPROPRIATE DIRECTIONS FOR USE BEFORE WORKING WITH THIS PRODUCT.

So, like what’s the point of that? I mean, if I can’t read English, how am I gonna read the part that tells me what to do if I can’t read English? To be fair, just before that part, there’s a part that reads:

PELIGRO: SI NO PUEDE LEER EN INGLES, PREGUNTE A SU SUPERVISOR SOBRE LAS INSTRUCCIONES DE USO APROPRIADA ANTES DE TRABAJAR CON ESTE PRODUCTO.

…which I assume means the same thing in Spanish (either that or it’s something about making sure your boss is sober when he leers at Laura Ingles and gets her pregnant while smoking a cigar.

But what if you don’t happen to be able to read Spanish, either? Shouldn’t it say “if you can’t read English OR Spanish…?” (and probably “if you can’t read at all, please have somebody read these directions to you”). Or do they just assume you can either read English or your pool boy Alejandro’s gonna do the work for you? Though if I was doing the hiring, the pool boy would probably be named Maria.

So yesterday there were more chores. I tried out my new cordless hedge trimmer (because Ricardo the gardner has the weekend off) that I got mostly because I wanted another battery and charger for my cordless weed wacker and it only cost a couple bucks more to get a charger and battery that happens to come with a tool than to get just the battery and charger separately. And I also jacked up and stabilized the steps that lead to some sort of treehouse or deer blind or whatever it is that the previous folks built up in the pine trees, and I took apart the front wall of it (not hard, as it was falling down anyway) so we can sit up there and admire the view – though it might be a bit of a precarious perch after a few cold frosty ones.

All of which brings us to today. I should probably head out into the woods with the chainsaw and cut up some firewood. I’ve used up pretty much everything within easy reach, and have been hankering for a fire the past couple nights.

Oh well, time’s a wastin’, so I better get busy. Whatever you do today – picnic, barbeque, head to the beach, toss the horseshoes, play blindfolded lawn darts (my favorite – especially after a few beers), or even honor our fallen veterans (crazy as that seems) – have a good day.

‘Cuz it’s back to cursed work tomorrow.

As feared the past four days have been a more or less mind-numbingly boring ordeal. And I didn’t come away from it with much of anything useful, job-wise (unless you count the “Certificate of Completion” which is like the little league trophy that all the kids get just for participating). It wasn’t the fault of the instructor, who seemed like an OK guy (a bit of a geek, as you might suspect, who looked suspiciously like the illegitimate spawn of Weird Al Yankovic and Dee Snider), but more the course content. Oh well, I did get some scuttlebutt on a job opening I may or may not pursue, so there was that.

It was kind of a tough week, ‘cuz I wound up doing a lot of yard type stuff last weekend (nothing major, mind you) and all the walking around got my feet (more specifically, my achilles tendons and my right ankle) all kinds of fired up. It hasn’t been this bad for a while, and it really sucked to have to sit in a chair all day long every day (at least a my work desk, I can take the shoes off and put my feet up a bit, and of course at home I can keep them in a bucket of cold water, which is what I’m doing right now).

Thankfully, I get to decompress by working from home today and then of course Monday is a holiday, so that’s nice. We’ll get the pool open, but it’ll be too damn cold to swim in (and probably too cloudy and green, too). Still, it’s nice to sit by it and count the dollar bills running through the electric meter as the pump runs. And if the water’s really cold (which I’m sure it is), I can sink my feet in it until they’re both too numb to feel.

So what’s been going on? The Prez was in my neck of the woods yesterday, visiting the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Hopefully he tried some Belgian style ale from Brewery Ommegang. As Art may know, they brew the official Game of Thrones Fire and Blood (named for House Targaryen) Red Ale. I must confess, I have yet to try it out (at 6.8% ABV, it’s a bit “lighter” than my typical brew). Belgian isn’t my favorite style, but I do enjoy an occasional seven-fifty of cave-aged Three Philosophers.

I suspect Obama sticks with Bud Light, sadly (I would make a joke that he’d prefer to sit down with a quart of Colt 45 and a pack of Newports, but somebody might take offense).

The NY State Senate Health Committee for the first time ever passed medical marijuana legislation by a 9-8 vote yesterday. Hopefully this means it will get a full vote in the Senate and be signed into law. It’s a terribly limited and anal piece of legislation (why are these people so goddamned afraid of letting people catch a buzz?), but hopefully it will be the proverbial slippery slope that will allow me to legally smoke dope one day. At least by the time I retire – I’d definitely prefer to run out the clock with a good buzz on.

Not gonna happen today, though, so I guess I’d better see what fresh hell awaits in my work email inbox and see if I can’t make it through this damn week already.

I had a rather odd dream last night. It involved a spider that I think came from a previous dream. Either that, or the spider in the dream was a spider from my past (in the dream). At any rate, at some point I found and raised a young spider. By “raised” I guess I mean I didn’t kill it, and instead put it someplace where it would be safe (which was in some sort of a big crocheted hat type thing). I may even have fed it, but I’m not quite sure as, in the dream, I had forgotten all about it until one day I was sitting on a couch or something with somebody else (and the big crocheted thing) when I noticed several very large hairy moving legs inside.

My dream self was apparently not as manly as my real self, as he (or I) kind of screamed like a little girl and exclaimed “holy shit, it’s still alive!” Or id didn’t die, or something like that. Anyhow, this little baby spider was now huge, and as it emerged from its lair I realized it was the size of a small dog. Being humans (not to mention Americans), we immediately tried to kill it, but it’s unclear whether or not we were successful. Set-up for a dream sequel, no doubt.

So, flash-forward to, well, to the next thing I remember, and we found a puppy in the house. I should also mention that we (not really sure who “we” were, other than me) had lots of dogs in this dream. Like, way more than the three I have now. And possibly cats, too, as I recall saying that the giant spider was large enough to kill a cat, though I don’t recall actually seeing any cats (or stepping in anything cat-related).

Anyhow, we found this very cute little puppy, and it was immediately clear to us (for some reason I’m not certain of – perhaps because we didn’t have any recently knocked-up girl doggies around, but also due to a “family resemblance” type of thing) that this puppy was the spawn of the recently evicted (if not exterminated) spider. Not quite sure of the logistics on that one, since, as far as I know, spiders lay eggs. But anyway, it was a dream-certainty that the otherwise normal-looking puppy came from the spider.

About the last thing I recall was somebody – not sure if he was resident in the house, or a “specialist” we’d called in, though I believe he was British, which may or may not be due to the fact that I watched two BBC-type shows before I went to bed last night – who was apparently an arachnologist explaining to us that sometimes spiders have young that are poisonous and act as bait to kill predators. Since we weren’t planning on eating the puppy, that didn’t seem to be a problem.

Then I woke up.

So if you happen to be an expert in Oneirology, let me know what that one means.

Otherwise, it’s back to the grind today. Not to work, per se, but to a four-day training class on how to optimize Oracle. Oh, don’t let the title fool you – it’s not as exciting as it sounds, though it has the potential to be really useful. It also has the potential to be four days of mind-numbingly boring hell. It all really depends on the instructor and the other kids in the class (all of whom I know, and most of whom – with a couple of exceptions – are not the kinds of people that I’d choose to be locked in a room with for four days).

The worst part is, it’s right around the corner from where I work so it’s not like I get the benefit of being someplace closer to home (or at least in a different direction). I took a three-day thing a few years back that was at Cornell, which is not only a pleasant ride, but I got mileage (which at 100 miles round trip per day to sit in my car and listen to tunes for a couple of hours was easy money).

Oh well, they’re paying something like $1,200 per person for this class, so I guess I’d better get ready to go get their money’s worth. Besides, I think I was the one who suggested this shit in the first place.

These are my favorite types of weeks. I worked from home last Friday, took Monday off, and am working from home today. This means I’m away from the office for six days, until tomorrow. And while tomorrow sucks in that it’s my late day, I at least don’t have to scurry about trying to get my shit together early in the morning, either. Not that I sleep in or anything, but it always seems like time gets compressed right before I need to leave (not that I have to punch a clock, but I have preferred time windows for hitting the road to avoid traffic, dump trucks, and those dreaded school buses – thank goodness there’s only another month or so of them left, though I’d prefer it if they kept going to school while I took the summer off).

Other than not having to go to work, it was a somewhat frustrating weekend. First off, the black flies are now in biting mode. If you’ve never had the pleasure of dealing with the little bastards, they’re typically out early in the spring, when they swarm into your ears, eyes, nose, hair, behind you knees, up your shorts – basically anyplace where can be maximum annoyance. After that comes stage two – they do the same things as stage one, except they bit the shit out of you. And the welts their bites cause are huge, painful, and itchy all at once. Plus those bites are in those heretofore mentioned most annoying of all body parts. These little fickers are like the pirhana fish of the air. Small with huge (if only metaphorical) teeth.

Normally theses little assholes aren’t that bad around here (up in the Adirondacks, they can be downright intolerable this time of year), but whether it’s climate change, wet weather, or just that Jesus has lifted his veil of protection from us, I dunno.

Of course the skeeters are out, too, so it’s a win-win situation. But the mosquitoes at least have the decency of taking a nap or whatever it is they do for most of the day and only come out and torture you at certain times. Goddamn black flies are just insidious. Makes one long for subzero weather again.

Fortunately, the little bastards should be gone in another couple of weeks (and then we can eagerly await the return of Deer Fly season.

Besides being bugged out, I’ve also had to fart around with the tractor. After finally getting the mower on (always fun, as you get to lie across the deck trying to hook up the goddamn PTO), I drove a bit and heard a clunk. Turned out the u-joint on the shaft that connects the tranny to the front transfer case had come off, and the pin that’s supposed to hold it on was sticking out.

So, off came the mower. I tried to pound the pin in, and figured I had it good enough so I was able to put the mower back on and cut the grass. When I was done – clunk. Fell off again. So yesterday I pulled the mower off yet again and found that the pin had sheared off. So I pounded it out and tried to insert a new pin, but I’ll be damned if I could get it in all the way, and I’m afraid it’ll just shear off again (much as I love taking the mower on/off, I’d really rather not have to do it again this season).

So I reckon when I’m in the big city tomorrow, I’ll go get an “official” Kubota part. The pin I was trying to insert is 1/4″, which is like 6.35mm, so I figure the frickin’ thing is like 6mm or something (and they aint got no metric roll pins around these parts – not that I could find, anyway). Pain in the ass (among other places).

So, if you’re interested in why Net Neutrality is important and how US cable Internet providers are screwing up over and trying to blackmail not only content providers but also large Internet backbone providers, I recommend a couple of blog posts over at Level 3 (one of the large backbone providers). They’re both fairly short and not terribly technical in nature. First is “Chicken” | A Game Played as a Child and by some ISPs with the Internet from back in March, and then another one from a week or so to go called “Observations of an Internet Middleman.”

If you don’t feel like reading, here are the main points….

Big providers like Level 3 have thousands of customers – like Amazon, Google – the big boys – who buy Internet access from them. It doesn’t really do these customers much good if they can’t connect to the parts of the Internet not covered by Level 3’s network, so they engage in what’s called “Peering” arrangements. I let your traffic travel across my network, you let mine travel across yours. Where we have to interconnect, we’ll share the cost of the datacenter. Everybody’s happy. Level 3 has 51 “peers” worldwide.

As the Internet grows and traffic shifts, more capacity is required amongst the peers and they all pretty much agree to upgrade their switches, equipment, etc. to provide the best service possible for their customers.

A port that is on average utilised at 90 percent will be saturated, dropping packets, for several hours a day. We have congested ports saturated to those levels with 12 of our 51 peers. Six of those 12 have a single congested port, and we are both (Level 3 and our peer) in the process of making upgrades – this is business as usual and happens occasionally as traffic swings around the Internet as customers change providers.

That leaves the remaining six peers with congestion on almost all of the interconnect ports between us. Congestion that is permanent, has been in place for well over a year and where our peer refuses to augment capacity. They are deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers. They are not allowing us to fulfil the requests their customers make for content.

Five of those congested peers are in the United States and one is in Europe. There are none in any other part of the world. All six are large Broadband consumer networks with a dominant or exclusive market share in their local market. In countries or markets where consumers have multiple Broadband choices (like the UK) there are no congested peers.
[…]
One final point; the companies with the congested peering interconnects also happen to rank dead last in customer satisfaction across all industries in the U.S.[2] Not only dead last, but by a massive statistical margin of almost three standard deviations.

Shouldn’t a broadband consumer network with near monopoly control over their customers be expected, if not obligated, to deliver a better experience than this?

The author declines to name these “peers,” but I think we can guess at at least who a few of them are – Comcast and Time Warner, for sure.

Don’t worry, though, FCC Chariman Tom Wheeler says it’s all gonna be great.

I don’t necessarily recommend becoming an orphan, but since I don’t have a mother anymore and there in no mother of my children out there (that I know of, anyway), it at least gets me out of the whole Mother’s Day thing. But to those of you who are mothers, Happy Mother’s Day. Hopefully your day will be as nice as the one they’re predicting for us today.

Of course the other big thing is that it’s Graduation Day for SU (yesterday being Convocation Day). And this year, a fell by the name of Michael Jordan is in town to see his daughter graduate with a degree in Sports Management or something. Apparently this guy Jordan played some minor league baseball 20 years ago with the Birmingham Barons and Scottsdale Scorpions. Oh, I think he played some basketball, too.

No doubt there will be some moms in attendance today as the mens and womens NCAA lacrosse tournament starts up. Both our guys’ and gals’ teams are #2 seeds this year – the boys having had a bit of a rocky path before turning their season around (even if they lose the ACC tournament championship to Notre Fucking Dame), while the girls have been good all season, losing to only one team (Maryland, who is the best team in the country, twice).

Oh well, time to finish my coffee and then finish cutting the grass.

If you’ve never seen the Fox teevee show ‘Almost Human,’ you’re not alone. While the show’s ratings weren’t terrible, they weren’t overwhelming, either. Still the show did well enough to warrant getting renewed. Sadly, Fox has a history of prematurely killing good Sci-Fi shows (most famously, Firefly), and they’ve killed this one after one measly season. And there are a lot of unresolved plot lines, too, goddamn it. For those who don’t know, the show was about a cop (played by Karl Urban, the “new” Dr. McCoy in the Star Trek movies) with an android for a partner. The android is a older model that was decommissioned because their AI was just a little bit too human-like (so some of them were a tad unstable). Almost human, if you like.

So, anyhow, while you may not actually care about the show, there’s a petition to save it, and since we’re all about petitions for lost causes around here, I figured I’d pass the link along (they want you to put your name and address in, but obviously you can make something up – put your neighbor’s address in or something).

You’d think at the very least the SyFy Channel would be interested in it, but then you recall that they were bought by NBC Universal (who was purchased by Comcast) and they put “Pro” Wrestling on Friday Nights (not to mention changing Sci-Fi to the ridiculous “SyFy” fer chrissakes). So I don’t hold out much hope, but they have over 15,000 signatures so far, so, hey, who knows.

Otherwise, after a bit of a noisy night (thunder-wise) and early morning (no sleep for me or the terrified 90 pound dog sitting on my chest, panting), it’s turned sunny out there, and is actually supposed to get above 80° today (and then more t-storms later, no doubt). Who knows, maybe we’ll even open the pool this weekend. Or I could just fill up a wheelbarrow full of dollar bills and dump them in the woods.

Basically the same thing.

Today we experience an event so rare it occurs only once per annum. This year, Cinco de Mayo happens on May 5th. Why this isn’t a Monday holiday is beyond me, and I look forward to our future Hispanic overlords turning it into one once they’re in the majority. I’ve mentioned before that any excuse for a day off is fine by me, but if we have to ditch another holiday to make room, might I suggest Columbus Day? I mean, by October we’ve just had Labor Day and are looking forward to Veterans’ Day and then Thanksgiving. But right now we’ve haven’t had a holiday since February and it’s still a long way ’til Memorial Day. Plus, by all accounts, Columbus was a dick.

Here’s a question for you dog owners out there. If you were to leave a big-ass block of cheese sitting out – uncovered – on the kitchen counter and then leave the house, would be be surprised if if one of your more-or-less counter-height dogs absconded with said block of cheese? No? Me neither.

I never want to hear anybody diss the Postal Service again. I ordered something that’s supposed to arrive today (a pair of mechanical pencils – yeah, that’s how exciting I am), and have been following the always extensive USPS tracking. My package left Rochester at 06:26 this morning, and arrives at the PO in my town at 06:40. By my reckoning, it traveled at roughly 342 mph on that leg of the journey. Pretty impressive (even if it did take another 52 minutes to get through sorting).

Despite the holiday (and the new pencils), today is shaping up to be a difficult day for me. First, they closed my on-ramp for paving this morning (WTF, don’t they know it’s a holiday?), forcing me to detour around. This added, like, 5-7 minutes to my morning commute. Such an inconvenience!

Then when I finally did get to work, I realized that I forgot my water bottle (I had that nagging feeling I forgot something when I was leaving – now I know why my backpack felt so light). How I’ll make it through the day w/o water is beyond me. I might have to go to the store to get some, ‘cuz I’ve become way too hoity-toity to drink water fountain water.

Plus it turns out I have the stupid on-call duty this week AND it’s Stupid Meeting Week, so I have to worry about going to that on Wednesday.

Sucks.

As everybody no doubt is aware, in an apparent homage to Sylvester the cat, today (May 4th) has been declared “Star Wars Day” – as in, “May the Fourth” be with you. I must confess, I don’t know if this is new or if this has been around for years – I was totally unaware of it until recently.

But then I’m not really one of those big Star Wars kinda guys (which may come as a surprise to some). I was one of the 37 people alive in 1977 who didn’t actually see the first movie at the theatre, and I still find the aliens in the “Cantina” scene very fake and hokey looking.

I did eventually see the movies, though, and overall I like them. The first ones, that is. I used to really enjoy playing my X-Wing vs. the Tie Fighter computer game, and recently came across the installation CD while pawing through shit in the basement. I also came across my Sidewinder joystick and was about to see if I could the game and stick to work on my PC before I realized it was a serial port joystick and I aint got no serial ports anymore (on a side note, if anybody needs a 25′ serial printer cable, let me know – I’ll give you a deal on it).

Unlike movie one, I did see Episode One in the theatre and, well, let’s just say I’m not a big fan of the Jar-Jar, and I found little Darth to be kind of annoying. But the big race was pretty cool.

Anyhow, you’d think that SWD would be on May 25th, since that’s the original release date of the first movie in 1977 (on a side note: Holy shit! That was 37 years ago!). In May of ’77, I was winding up my junior year of high school getting ready to take the German, Social Studies, and (I think) English Regents exams. And I guess whatever Math class I took as a junior. Oh, and Chemistry, too, I guess. Ah, those were the days.

Junior year comes to mind this morning because we’re starting to see “prom pictures” show up on the local newspaper website (front page – bet you don’t see that in the NY Times). It reminds me of the one girl I asked to go, way back then. I am, by nature, a shy person, and as pathetic as I am now, I was 100 times worse back then. As I approached her, I distinctly remember my heart pounding so hard, I thought it was going to explode. Shame it didn’t.

She, of course, said “no” (in retrospect, I can’t really blame her since I didn’t actually know her and I guess I wasn’t exactly what you’re call a “catch”). I’m pretty sure that was the last time I ever asked anybody to go out with me ever again.

Saved me the cost renting a pastel powder blue tuxedo with matching ruffled shirt, I guess – let alone chipping in with all my friends (yes, all but me) on a limo or something.

The truly ironic part is that I think I was on the Prom Committee (we went with a “Color My World” theme, as I recall).

I don’t recall what I did instead that night, but odds are I hung by myself out in the woods someplace and got stoned.

Ah, those were the days.

Well, I see by the old clock on the wall(paper) that it’s time to get dressed and get ready to head to Tractor Supply. I need a Zerk fitting for my mower.