I’ve been back in LA for a few days. My timing was miserable, showing up just as the forested hills around the city decided to burst into flames.

There have been fires here before, and they’ve aggravated my lungs a bit, but nothing’s set off my asthma like the giant fire that’s still burning almost completely out of control tonight.

My one attempt to work out since getting home ended rather disastrously after half an hour on Thursday, having to come home and use my inhaler like I used to when I was a kid and just a little exercise would set my lungs off.

I haven’t had to use my inhaler daily in years, but I’ve had to every day since then. And that’s without working out at all.

What gets me is that the smoke really isn’t that bad in my neighborhood – It’s certainly not as bad as when there was a smaller, much closer fire a couple of years ago. That fire was only three or four miles away at its worst point (I could smell the smoke much more distinctly), and I don’t think I had to use my inhaler once.

I don’t know if it’s the lack of transition after being up in the bracingly clear, thin air of Idaho for a week, or if there’s something in my air conditioner (running non-stop for the first time in well over a year) that’s making my lungs even angrier.

The bottom line is, I’m stuck at home, waiting for the air to clear out, unable to get my stress out through working out, and feeling like my old, fat, sickly self as I manage to need a hit off the inhaler from the strenuous effort of watching TV.

I thought I was losing my mind before I left. I thought the walls were closing in on me before.

I’d been a little reluctant to go to a family event in Denver this coming weekend. Now I wish I’d decided to spend this week there, because at least I could fucking breathe.

Well, I’m now pretty damn glad I got the iPhone.

I’m leaving tomorrow to visit dad and Ray Ann in Idaho and of course, last night one of the speakers on my laptop decided it didn’t want to go on the trip.

A few seconds of popping, and then an unbelievably high pitched squealing that did not stop until I turned the computer off were all I needed to send me running to the Apple store.

I knew I was probably going to lose the computer for a few days for the repair, so I ran a backup and went to do one final sync of my iPhone…and the whole thing went nuts.

The phone didn’t sync right, I had to restore from a backup, the whole thing was just so annoying. Luckily after considerable fiddling I got it to work, but I was still re-syncing all my music when I got to the Apple store.

The speaker was pretty clearly a hardware issue, so they’re going to fix it. Of course, it’s a 5-7 day turnaround, so I just sucked it up and handed over my computer, asking them to run every diagnostic they has so if anything else was screwy, it’d at least get fixed now.

Godspeed, little computer.

So now I get to have another laptop-less vacation because of a hardware issue (my video card crapped out at Christmas, if you recall).

I think this one will be a little more survivable for 2 reasons – the iPhone is considerably easier to use as a standalone device than the crackberry was, and the fact that it’s Idaho instead of Connecticut also helps.

It’s biking and hiking and fishing and rafting, and not sitting and eating and sitting and eating. It’s the fact that I’m driving and can hop in my own car if my folks start to drive me nuts and just go out.

All that to say: I’m off to Vegas tomorrow morning, then up to Idaho on Wednesday. Hope you all have a good week, and I apologize if I’m slightly incommunicado.

Six years ago tomorrow, I was driving a rented Budget 15-foot truck across Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska. My co-worker/building mate Jen, who was also moving to LA and whose stuff occupied half the truck, drove her brand new Mitsubishi convertible along with me.

We’d left Chicago at 6 in the morning to avoid the rush hour traffic, and we were making pretty good time. All those states being relatively flat, the truck could go about 75 or 80, and Jen could take her car out a couple miles at ridiculous speeds, then slow down and wait for me to catch up.

We had a set of little walkie talkies we could use to communicate with each other over a distance of about four miles, and we’d use them to try and time food, gas, and bathroom breaks.

We actually made it all the way across Nebraska. We’d started so early and the sun stayed up so late that even when we got to our “It would be great if we got to…” point of Sidney, Nebraska, we decided to go on to the next exit at Kimball, putting us spitting distance from Wyoming.

When we got to Kimball, I went to call my anal-retentive parents and let them know we’d arrived in one piece, and I couldn’t get my mom, who was in D.C., on the phone because the circuits were overloaded.

I can’t remember if we just happened to turn on the TV or if my dad told us about it when I called him in Atlanta, but that’s when we found out what was happening on most of the East Coast that day: A fucking gigantic blackout.

I don’t remember why I wasn’t listening to the radio – something in the back of my mind tells me I’d managed to hook some speakers up to a portable CD player, this being the dark ages before I had an iPod, but long after I’d given up finding any radio worth listening to on cross-country drives.

I did somehow manage to get a blog post up that night, maybe off the hotel’s computer, but it sheds little light on what the hell happened, and it raises the question of what election I’m talking about, because I have absolutely no idea.

It’s weird to me to see pictures of it now, because I was so wrapped up in the process of moving that I really don’t remember that story the way I do most big news stories. I was detached from the internet and the news, detached from the world in a way I rarely am anymore, and certainly wouldn’t be if I were making the same move today.

I was reminded of the date by a website that linked to someone’s tweet about their blog post about the blackout, and went down a minor internet rabbit hole remembering, and often learning, what happened that day.

One that I’ve been saving for a while because it so defines the existence of the unemployed person, courtesy of Garfield Minus Garfield:

And one that was recently reposted by The Onion, Unemployed Man Getting Really Good At Unemployment:

Through a months-long process of trial and error, Higby has learned the tricks of the unemployment trade.

“Leaving the house every single day is very important, even if it’s just to spend a few hours at the coffee shop organizing the MP3 files on your laptop,” Higby said. “I try to be out the door by 2 or 3 in the afternoon—no exceptions. You have to get out and do something during the day in order to not feel guilty about going out drinking that night.”

It only took a year after I switched from Blogger to WordPress and moved the location of the blog, but I put up an HTML redirect for the old page and XML redirects for the old RSS feeds, which will hopefully redirect everyone who thought I gave up on blogging here.

So if you haven’t seen me for a while…hi!

Chaplin has decided that on some mornings, I don’t get to sleep in.

He bats at my glasses on the table next to my bed, making a loud clatter when he knocks them down or forcing me to get up and chase him if he manages to pick them up with his teeth. He stares out the window, yowling at anything that walks by.

I know why he does it – he wants me to feed him. But half the time I’ll get up to feed him and he’ll still have plenty of food left. Since I put him on the super-expensive prescription wet food, I generally don’t give him any more food until he’s finished what he’s got.

Sometimes if I just move to the couch to sleep (which I’ve been doing a fair amount lately anyway to relieve the back pain caused by my craptastic mattress), he’ll leave me alone. But sometimes he’ll just jump up on the coffee table and start knocking things off of it instead.

And of course, once I’m actually up and at ‘em, even if I haven’t fed him, he’ll stop being a little shit. He just wants to play. I would understand a bit more if I were working, because he’d be home alone all day. But being unemployed he’s got me to play with all damn day most of the time, and he generally just sleeps in the bedroom.

Of course, not working it’s more of an annoyance than anything else, since whatever sleep I lose I’ll almost definitely make up with a nap. Probably with him sleeping on my chest.

It’s always fun to play the game, “Do I feel blah because…?” This week’s candidates:

• I’m bored out of my mind and am slowly feeling my sanity slip away as I go deeper into my fourth month of unemployment?
• I’m coming down with something?
• My increasingly unbearable bed is causing me to sleep so poorly that I actually feel worse when I wake up?

I’m at least trying to do something about #1 and #3 – I decided to take a couple computer science classes in the fall at my friendly local community college to prevent my brain from turning completely to mush, and to do so online so I can keep going even if I do get a job.

I also decided it’s time to break down and crack into some super-on-ice-pretend-they-don’t-exist funds and get a new mattress, just to be able to get a decent night’s sleep for once.

I’m just going to have to cross my fingers it’s not #2.