Finally, it’s Friday. Good news for most of us, with what in America passes for a “long” weekend (I think three days is barely adequate; four days might qualify as long, and two days are just plain way too short). Not so good news for my wife, who told me last night that she has to work tomorrow. That makes six days this week (quite a few shifts for a part time job, no?). Too bad, ‘cuz she has a lot of work to do this weekend.

I’ve got an awful lot of things I need to do this weekend, too. Not sure how much my foot will allow, though. It was hurting like hell by the end of the day, yesterday. I think it has something to do with wearing shoes, so I’m sitting here at my desk with one shoe and sock off. Maybe that’ll help. Hopefully there aren’t any critters under there.

Oh well, time to get back to getting this week over with.

It may only be Thursday, but my brain has already left for the Memorial Day weekend. This is unfortunate, given that I still have the better part of two days to get through. It ought to be a real challenge. And when I’m facing a challenge, it’s clear that I need to do at least one thing to get through it: buy beer. So that’s what I’ll be devoting my lunch time to today. I even brought the thermal bags filled with fake ice packs so it’ll stay fairly cold in what is supposed to be 80+ degree temperatures this afternoon.

I’m not really looking forward to limping around the grocery store with my half-painful, half-paralyzed foot, but whattya gonna do?

Speaking of the paralyzed foot thing, I was looking at some stretches to do to help it out. The first one said to spread my feet shoulder width or more apart, then bend over and put my palms flat on the floor without bending my knees. Once I got done laughing, I gave it a try. I’d be pretty pleased if I could get my fingertips on the ground.

But, since I’m alone in the office today (my roommate had the good sense to take both today and tomorrow off; I wish I’d done that), I’ll give it a try once in a while. If nothing else, it ought to kill time ’til Friday.

It was a bad foot night last night, and my half-throbbing, have numb foot kept me awake for pretty much all of it. This is what happens when I don’t drink. The other interesting thing is that, where my foot is numb, it can still feel itchy. Even better, though I can feel the itch, I can’t feel the scratch, so there’s not only no relief, but a tendency to claw it raw.

Today is Bob Moog’s 78th birthday (or would be, if he hadn’t croaked in 2005). If you’d like to play around with a Moog synthesizer, visit the Google classic home page today (using Chrome preferably, but anything other than IE should work).

This morning, I decided that my project for the day would be to paint my firetruck. It’s an olde tyme firetruck – no top, with the ladders hung on the sides. I thought I’d give it a nice new red paint job. Then, a couple of things occurred to me. First, it’s not the weekend. And second, I don’t have a firetruck, which is odd, because I was looking at it, and there it was. That’s when a third thing occurred to me: I was dreaming. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately. I’m not quite sure if I’m awake or asleep, but it feels like I’m awake, and I know I’m dreaming. More like daydreaming, really. It’s kind of strange. I’m hoping to get to the point where I can do things like fly on demand or something.

I used to think it’d be great if you could learn to segment your brain, so that half of it was on automatic, and used to accomplish the boring day-to-day tasks, while the other half could conjure up a fantasy world that you could more or less stay in all the time, unaware of what the other half was up to. I mean, you wouldn’t need much of a job – just enough to buy some food and rent a time little place to live, because you’d always be in a better place. You wouldn’t need to interact with much of anything outside of your imagination.

Yep, that’d be nice.

For a while this morning, I was in bed thinking it was Sunday. When I realized it was actually Monday, I was severely depressed. In fact, I’m still quite depressed. But, quick as it went, it was a good weekend. Very warm and sunny, and I got quite a bit done (though not everything on my list, of course). Now it’s back in my windowless cave of an office, wondering how the hell I’m gonna make it through the day (let alone the week).

If you missed 60 Minutes last night, and want to see Roger Waters, here you go….

I know I say this a lot (‘cuz it’s true), but this has been a long week. All I can think if is how much I need to do this weekend, and how I probably won’t get much of it done. My first goal is to get the pool open, and at least see what crawled under the cover over the winter. I’m really hoping there aren’t any critters in there. Especially mammals. Toads, frogs, and worms are bad enough, but mice and moles are really icky. Especially if they’ve been in there for a while. Then I need to take a trip to “the Depot” to get some more decking. There’s an endless job. The grass needs to be cut, the deck needs to be stained, the laundry needs to get laundered…. I’m sure there’s more. Two days just aint enough.

Remember that $2 billion loss JP Morgan had? Well, looks like that was a wee bit off. Now it’s said to be at least $3 billion. Oops. Of course, that’s just a pittance, and taxpayers are ever eager to help them out should times get tough. And, no, we certainly don’t expect a share of the profits when times are good. That would be socialism.

Republicans in the Senate joined their pals over in the House by voting for so-called Ryan Budget, a plan that…

…would phase out the existing Medicare program and replace it with a subsidized private insurance system for seniors; dramatically slash Medicaid spending and hand the program over to the states; cut food and nutrition programs for poor people; and allow interest rates on student loans to double; all while dramatically reducing taxes, particularly on wealthy Americans.

Hey, sounds good to me. Rich people need to lay less, and if that screws over poor folks and old folks, well, tough. They should have been born rich (and stayed young).

Another case of “unlimited” actually having a limit, this time at Chuck’s Place, and its “All You Can Eat Fish Fry.”

A Wisconsin man got cut off after he wolfed down a dozen pieces of fish at an all-you-can-eat fish fry, so he did what any red-blooded American would do: he made a picket sign and protested.

Bill Wisth — a fish-eating machine at 6-foot-6-inches tall and 350 lbs — was miffed when workers at his favorite local restaurant in Thiensville, Chuck’s Place, said they were running out of yummy sea creatures.

“It’s false advertising,” Wisth told TMJ4. “We asked for more fish, and they refused to give us more fish.”
[…]
But Wisth said he’s not done fighting the great fish fight, nor is he finished with fish-fry Fridays at Chuck’s Place. Heck, he still admits the food is irresistible.

“They do have like some of the best pizza in town, if you like deep dish pizza,” he told TMJ4.

He plans to picket every Sunday until the restaurant lets him eat all he can eat.

Go for it, Homer Bill!

Somebody named Juliana Smoot keeps writing to me. She seems to think I would find it totally awesome to have my name on a stock car called “Powered by the American People.” So awesome that I’d pay $5 for the honor. It’s something to do with “Charlotte in 2012,” which I’m guess is the Democratic convention. Today is my “last chance,” so hopefully she’ll leave me alone now.

So, you’ve probably heard of Steve Rothstein, who bought a “golden ticket” from American Airlines in 1987 that gave him unlimited air mileage. He spent $250,000 for it, and another $150,000 for a “companion” ticket (‘cuz who wants to fly alone?). Well, it appears that it wasn’t actually “unlimited” after all, and AA has cut him off (accusing him of “fraud” for booking companion seats in fake names when he wasn’t yet certain who his companion would be – which sounds like bullshit to me).

This reminds me of a trip to NYC I took once, where we went to a Brew-n-Burger. They had a deal, where you could get a burger and all-you-can drink pitcher of beer. Turns out, it was only all you can drink if you could only drink two pitchers. I felt rather robbed on that one. Plus the burger sucked.

This was a terribly short weekend. Nice weather, at least, but two days just aren’t enough. I need a nap.

Finally, it’s Friday. And the shitty weather of the past few days appears to be taking a turn for better. It’s actually supposed to be sunny and warm today. I had to come in rather early this morning because we were implementing a major change to one of our systems that had the potential to be a real nightmare if something went wrong (which would have been a bummer, since it’s me who wrote it). Fortunately, there were only a couple of minor glitches (so far, anyway – knock on wood), and it looks as though my early day can be parlayed into an early release for the weekend.

How ’bout that John Travolta, huh? Now he’s got a third dude saying he was sexually harassed by Vinnie Barbarino. I would suggest that Johnny get some psychiatric help, but, them people don’t believe in all that. But I think a few extra auditing sessions are called for, at the least.

So, have you seen this new Time Magazine cover? Of course you have – it’s big huge news (for some reason). I have to admit, it seems a bit odd to me to nurse your kid until he or she is, like, 4 or 5 years old. But, hey, what do I know. We didn’t have those newfangled breast thingies back in my day. All we had were bottles (and rubber nipples).

So, Mitt the bully prankster doesn’t remember being an asshole, but he clearly remembers that, if he was an asshole, it wasn’t because the kid he doesn’t remember assaulting being an asshole to was gay.

Sounds reasonable.

So, President Obama has finally realized that gay people have as much right to get married as anybody else does. Well good for him, though he should have done it sooner. Not in the sense that it was the morally correct thing to do (though there’s that, too), but in the sense that it would have been politically more expedient to come out (so to speak) and say it a lot sooner. Whether this will help, hurt, or have no affect (I’m betting on either no affect – as Barney Frank said – or maybe some slight help; homophobes weren’t gonna vote for him anyway) on his reelection remains to be seen, but it must be heartening to those who support marriage equality after the horrid North Carolina thing. Now if Barry would just quit it already with his obsession of keeping pot illegal.

We’d get no help on the pot front from a President Romney (who is – or at least was, back in his all-boys prep school days – apparently a bit of a dick), either. He says pot is a “gateway drug.” But then he’s Mormon, so he’d probably want to make beer illegal (which, if I had a Super PAC, is a rumor I’d be starting: Mitt Romney wants to take you beer away!).

Funny how these hypocrites always talk about “big government” and the “nanny state” and how the government should keep its nose out of our business, but only when it comes to universal health care or taxing rich people or regulating the dumping of shit in the water and stuff like that.

Big government seems to be fine when it comes to telling you who should sleep with or what substances you can ingest when you wanna take the edge off a little bit.

Bastards.