Another 5-day week for me, and this was a tough one. Thank goodness I have three days off, as I seem to have contracted some sort of disease. Summer cold, sinus infection, free-radical poisoning from coconut oil left on the stove to fill the house up with smoke – I dunno. Whatever it is, it’s been long and lingering and has made it difficult to breathe and to sleep. I still have a pretty snotty head and a sore throat, but that part seems to be abating.

Unfortunately, I seem to have something else going on that I don’t know whether it’s related or not. I’ve been getting frequent heartburn and bouts of nausea. Feelings of pain and pressure on my diaphragm (brought on by the simplest of things like drinking water, fer chrissakes). I’ve even been awakened in the middle of the night by stomach (actually, more up higher than that) pain and lying there trying not to puke. I was at work yesterday and wasn’t sure if I was going to pass out or throw up (or maybe both).

As if I wasn’t nauseated enough, last night was the first game of the SU football season against Villanova (an “FCS” team, which I think used to be called Division I-AA, and which is in theory a step down from an FBS school like Syracuse). We had (not, I say “had”) high hopes going into this season, but Syracuse was terrible – the QB got thrown out of the game in the first half for lamely punching another player in the face mask, which is pretty pathetic; if you’re gonna get tossed out, might as well go for the throat) – and barely escaped with a one-point win in two overtimes.

It would appear that another long season is at hand.

This is the first time we played Villanova since 1975 – I game I went to with my dad and my sister. My dad used to get tickets from where he worked from time to time, so we’d get to go. On this occasion, he was sitting with the other guys from work somewhere arouind midfield, and we were in the end zone of good old Archbold Stadium – a big bowl dug out of the ground back in 1907 with concrete “seats.”

To me, it looked like the Roman Coliseum.

As I recall, it rained so hard in the ends zone during the second half that my sister and I wound up going into the building behind the stadium and watching the rest of the game through a window. It never rained on my dad’s part of the stadium – in fact, I remember him saying they never even knew it rained at all. Welcome to Syracuse weather.

It’s amazing for me to think that I’m pretty much the same age now as my dad was back then. Of course, unlike me, he was a grownup with four kids – three old-timers in their mid to late twenties (one of which had already gone to and thankfully come back from Vietnam) – and 14-yr old me.

I know a lot of people think sports are stupid. Maybe they are, I dunno. To me, football (in particular) elicits memories of good times. My sister is 9 years older than I am, and when I was just a little fella, she, my dad, and I would go to the high school games on crisp autumn afternoons (no “Friday Night Lights” back then – or even electric scoreboards). I remember the high school kids looking so grown up, and the players looking so big. And I remember the cheerleaders jumping and twirling so I could see their red panties (yes, I was a little pervert even back then).

And then of course there were the times when we’d get to go see SU play – and even sometimes make the trip down the Thruway to see the Bills play. When Syracuse tore down Archbold and played a couple of games at Rich Stadium in Buffalo (where, at the time, I was going to school), my family came to visit and we went to the games, and we also went to the first game in the new stadium a year later.

So I guess that’s at least one reason I like sports – makes me think of good times with my dad. Then again, so does going to the laundromat – which the trio of my dad, sister, and me did on Saturday nights for several years when I was a kid and we had no washing machine. I don’t remember it as a chore at all – we got to hang out, and I always got a Welch’s grape soda from the machine (damn, those were good), and I even remember having fun helping to fold the sheets and blankets and stuff.

Of course, my thoughts are even more with my dad than usual right about now. Next Thursday, it’ll be 20 years since he died. Two decades – I don’t know what’s harder to believe, that he’s been gone for so long or that I’m in my fifties now.

Neither one of those ideas seem real.

Finally, the web host seems to have gotten things back up and running after being down for several hours. Not that they bothered to tell anybody there was a problem (I don’t expect a personal e-mail, I guess, but they have a “support” Twitter feed that I follow and there was nary a word). I guess they figure if nobody noticed, then it didn’t happen. I’d go with somebody else, but, well, they’re cheap. Not as cheap as they used to be, though.

It’s been a weekend of computer problems. The latest issue was my mother-in-law’s crappy little netbook. She inherited it from my stepson, who had it trashed by Homeland Security a few years back when they told him he had to check it as baggage on a flight. Or something. By the time he bothered to mention it to anybody, it was too late to do anything about it. I guess. I wasn’t really involved.

At any rate, the screen is AFU and it only works with an external monitor so it’s been in a drawer someplace for the last few years. But the wife’s mother needed a new computer so she got this piece of crap. It’s got an Atom processor in it and has Windows 7 “Starter” edition. I bumped the RAM up to the max – 2 gigs – and that’s pretty much as good as it’s gonna get. It’s OK for what it is, but what it is aint much.

Her big complaint is that when she calls people on Skype, they complain of a little echo. So of course she calls Skype and they tell her that her computer is too slow. I tried to tell her that if it’s too slow then she needs to spend some money and get a better computer, ‘cuz this thing was crap five years (or more) ago, and it aint gonna get any better. She doesn’t seem to believe me.

So of course when she goes to various websites and gets popup messages saying “Computer slow? Install this shit and make it even worse!” or gets spam that says “we can make your PC faster” or “you have a virus” or whatever, she of course installs it and then I have to uninstall all this shit and then tell her, look, THESE PEOPLE ARE LYING TO YOU!! HONEST!!! STOP INSTALLING SHIT!!!!

Finally, I took away her administrator rights and gave my wife an admin account and if she needed to install shit she’d have to ask my wife who could tell her, “no,” but damned if she can’t figure out ways to install shit every now and again.

The latest issue was something or other about her doing a “Windows Update” and it had her put in a password (which she never needed to do before) and now she doesn’t know what the password is. So I’m supposed to fix it.

I managed to boot to a USB drive with UBCD on it and I cleared her password. It appears that she somehow managed to boot to the restore partition and restore the damn thing and now her account is admin and there are no other accounts and why she didn’t write her damn password down on a sticky and stick it to her monitor, I dunno.

I find this all very tedious and tiring. If I screw up my computer, that’s one thing – then I have to fix it. But when I have to repeatedly pay the price for other people’s fuckups, I start to get annoyed.

OK, I guess I’m done venting for now. Time to go put a second coat of stain on the back porches.

We were graced by the presence of Governor Andy yesterday as he arrived to officially open the NY State Fair on “Governor’s Day.” Since NY Governor’s typically come from south of the 42nd parallel (what we up here refer to as “Downstate”), I generally get the sense that they’re somewhere between bemused and annoyed at having to come up here to the provinces and pretend to think we’re not a bunch of redneck hicks (when Ed Koch ran for Governor in 1982, he remarked to Playboy Magazine that if you live up here, you’re “…wasting time in a pickup truck when you have to drive 20 miles to buy a gingham dress or a Sears Roebuck suit…. This rural America thing — I’m telling you, it’s a joke.” Unfortunately for Ed, one of his staffers subsequently showed him a map of NY that didn’t come from the cover of the New Yorker Magazine and he realized that to be the Guv, you gotta get the votes of at least a few of us losers up here). They’re expected to choke down one of our famous sausage sandwiches, eat some Dinosaur Barbeque, and feign interest in the livestock (“that’s a cow, right? I think they had those last year, too.”).

Of course this is also an election year, so Andy’s challengers were all in town as well, including some Republican from Westchester who was here for the first time (because, like, why would he have ever come up here before?) and said his sausage sandwich had “a kick to it.”

Hah! The real “kick” from those things comes about an hour after you eat one.

As an indicator of how much chance this Republican has of winning here in NY, I will only say that the story in the lo-cal newspaper about his visit referred to him as Rob “Astorino,” “Astorin,” and “Astorinio” – all in the same story.

Also in town were Andy’s Democratic Primary challengers – Randy Credico and my personal favorite, Zephyr Teachout (and her middle name is ‘Rain’). Zephyr is a Forham Law PRofessor, but we aren’t holding that against her because she grew up on a farm in Vermont, and I must say she looked quite comfortable around the critters at the Fair (no sausage sandwich, but she got a rack of BBQ ribs and any chick willing to eat ribs in front of the cameras is OK in my book).

If anybody ever wanted to shoot video of me eating ribs, I’d have to let them know beforehand that was not gonna be a pretty sight.

This is the first time in many years that I regret not being a registered Democrat, because I’d really like to vote for Zephyr.

One fella who didn’t have to travel far was our own transplanted San Franciscan, Teamster, and perpetual Green Party candidate for, well, you name it and I think he’s had a run for it, Howie Hawkins.

Governor Snotball arrived early in the day, bringing with him about four inches of rain and lots of thunder and lightning. After that, things cleared up and got pretty nice (though rather humid, what with the sun boiling off all that precipitation). At least, that’s what I heard. I wouldn’t know, ‘cuz I was stuck inside my windowless office all day.

Speaking of which, I guess I better get ready to head back there today and get this really long week (five whole days, and all of them in the office – I’m really not used to this).

For those of you who are still here, have a good Friday and an even better weekend.

It is with heavy heart that I note that tomorrow is the start of the Great NY State Fair (Governor’s Day, so we’ll be graced by the presence of St. Andrew of Cuomo). This means that after today there are only ten more days left of summer.

Since I know you’re all wondering, let me start out by telling you that this year’s butter sculpture has been unveiled, and the them is “The Great American Milk Drive.” So there you have it.

Also announced is this year’s entry in the Worst Food Possible contest – the TwinX: A Twinkie stuffed with Twix wrapped in four slices of bacon, battered, fried, and drizzled in chocolate. I could maybe go along with shoving a Twix bar into a Twinkie, but wrapping it all up in bacon just doesn’t sound appealing to me. I guess I’m just weird that way.

I spent some time this morning putting my monthly income and outgo into a spreadsheet (I tend to start thinking about these things this time of the year as the school tax bill typically arrives during the first week of September).

No matter how detailed I try to be, I always forget a ton of expenses. For instance, it just now occurs to me that I left off dog food (which is probably about $150 a month).

Might be time to scale back on a thing or two, what with heating season coming up and all. At least I’ll be able to shut the pool pump off soon (just ordered the closing chemicals today, and the way the weather’s been, I’m not sure I’ll actually get back in again before we shut it all down).

We’ve had a brief respite from the “Deficit Reduction” plan for the past two months, but come September they go back to stealing 1.6% of my annual gross pay for the next 20 pay periods. So that’s nice.

Oh well, time to get back to work, I guess.

No doubt you’re as saddened by the news that Gilligan Gregory has been shitcanned from Press the Meat as I am. Sad, mostly because they replaced him with Chuck Toad. But I guess when you have to clear your selection through John McCain and Li’l Lindsey Graham as well as the Comcast Board of Directors, you’re choices are somewhat limited. Me? I’d have gone with Luke “Timmy Jr” Russert.

Hey, did you hear the shocking news from Ferguson? If you don’t treat police work (which once upon a time was defined as “to serve and protect”) like a full-on military assault, people will protest peacefully even after you continue to kill their unarmed kids.

Who knew?

Why cops in an urban setting wear jungle camo is beyond me. I guess ‘cuz it looks cool or something. Perhaps they should just go ahead and join the Army if that’s what they’re after.

So, like most people facing a day of work, I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out how long it’ll be before I die. Our HR department just sent out an e-mail detailing “the importance of accumulated sick leave credits.” Among other things, you can use up to 200 days of credit when you retire to pay for (or at least supplement) your share of retiree health insurance premiums.

Basically, they take the dollar value of your remaining sick days and divide it by the number of months they figure you’ve got left to live when you retire and then that’s the monthly credit you get off your insurance.

So the goal is to retire with 200 days of sick leave (and not one damn minute more). According to the retirement system, if I retire at 62, I’ll have a life expectancy of 269 months – meaning I’ll be dead when I’m about 84-85 years old. As I review the impressive pulchritude that is my physique and combine that with the knowledge that my dad only made it to 74 and longevity doesn’t exactly run on either side of my family, I’m thinking 269 months is a bit optimistic.

Still, assuming the Republicans don’t completely nuke Medicare and Social Security in the next 10 years or so, I at least shouldn’t have to worry about health insurance as I move forward on the journey toward my ultimate demise, no matter when it happens.

Assuming it’s not going to happen today, though, I reckon I’d better get back to doing some work. TGIF.

I was gonna get up and bitch about having to go back to work today after being off for about 10 days. Then I saw the news about Robin Williams, and I guess I don’t feel like complaining about work. When I was a projectionist, we ran the hell out of ‘Dead Poets Society’ after having run the sneak for it a couple of weeks before it officially came out (one of the rare times the production company actually called after the show to ask about the audience reaction).

I remember seeing Robin Williams on several of his Tonight Show appearances. It was like watching an unstoppable force of nature – he was so fast and so funny it was exhausting just to watch. His stand up shows were no different (just longer and even more exhausting). He made a ton of exceptional movies (I even liked Popeye – so sue me) as well and I ran a couple of them back in the day – aside from DPS (where I had to teach one of my ushers that it’s “i before e except after c or even after what sounds like ‘see'” because he spelled it “Sieze the Day” on the side of the marquee – which I always like to think of as the Marquee de Side. Fun fact, a few years before DPS, Williams was in the movie adaptation of Saul Bellow’s “Seize the Day”), there was Good Morning Vietnam, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen .

Ah, we were both so much younger back then.

I guess Robin found a kindred spirit in the late, great Jonathan Winters. I’d have loved to have been on the set of Mork and Mindy to watch those two together off stage. I think maybe to be that funny, you have to have a lot of pain in your heart.

And the world is suddenly a lot less funny today.

The weather around here hasn’t been horrible, but it hasn’t really cooperated the way we would have liked, what with the munchkins in for a visit. After a mostly OK day Monday, an unexpected (by me, anyway) downpour dumped almost four inches of rain on us in 90 minutes. Rather impressive. It rained a bit Tuesday night, and rained again yesterday afternoon as we attempted to celebrate four or five or something summer birthdays and it hasn’t been all that warm, either. Hey, it’s August here – let’s get some drought conditions going. We’ll be closing up the pool in about a month, ferchrissakes.

Otherwise, it’s been nice to have a few days off. I can’t really recall the last time I took a whole week vacation (not that it was probably all that long ago – I just can’t remember), so it’s probably gonna be tough to get back into the swing of things next Tuesday.

So I’m sure you saw that “Nearly 40% Of Those On The Government’s Terrorist Watchlist Have ‘No Affiliation With Recognized Terrorism Groups’” according to