Oot of Toon

I will be in Connecticut stuffing myself with turkey-related foodstuffs and surviving my mother's relatives for the next few days. There may be a "Dear God, get me out of here!" post, but likely not.

I'll be back Monday night to fill you all in on the joyous rapture that is four days in Connecticut with my relatives who either
a) are crazy,
b) drive me crazy, or
c) both.

Eh, whatever. I'll survive.

To all the rest of you, Happy Thanksgiving, and remember to cook your stuffing seperately from your turkey, because food poisoning fucking blows.

Well, almost...

My vow to not drink for the rest of November died when I heard Nate got a job, and I felt a need to drink to that, but I only had one drink.

Granted, it was a screwdriver in a rather large brandy snifter from when a bunch of us went to The Dome when we were in Dallas for Elisa's wedding, but whatever.

One drink in an entire month is not too bad. And I know I'm not going to drink anything the rest of the weekend...one drink around my mom's family and they're convinced you're an alcoholic.

Which is odd, because they're Irish. They should, by all ethnic stereotypes, be fucking plastered tomorrow. Alas, about the only alcohol I see this weekend will be a touch of cooking brandy.

You gotta love it

Hell(, Michigan) Freezes Over.

Only In America...

..are there people who are paranoid their TiVo thinks they're gay.

Mystery Solved

If you've ever wondered where my stunning obliviousness comes from, I believe the answer has presented itself in the form of my mother.

Mom called me up this afternoon, asking when my flight back to Chicago was. I thought this was an odd question, since she had told me she was planning to leave Saturday night.

She had made such a big hoo-hah when I told her I wasn't leaving til Monday evening, but she had repeatedly told me that she hadn't booked her tickets yet before I booked mine, and was awaiting my word on when I was going to book hers.

I had given her an estimate of flying in Wednesday or Thursday and leaving Saturday night.

She never told me she had booked her flight, and if she had, I would have made arrangements to come back Saturday night as well, partly to avoid two extra days in Connecticut, but mostly to avoid the ensuing blow up over "I thought you said you were gonna leave Saturday!"

But situation being as it was, I had figured out that I would stay with my aunt Louise for a couple of days and then come home.

So I asked my mom why she was asking, and she told me: "When I was reading my flight info off to Louise, I realized, instead of booking myself a 6:20pm flight, I accidentally booked a 6:20am flight."

This despite the fact that Southwest:
1. Puts available flights in chronological order from earliest to latest when offering you options.
2. Gives you at least two "Are you sure these are the flights you want" screens before making your purchase.
3. Lets you print out your flight info and email it to yourself.

My mom even printed the damn info out and didn't notice it!

This certainly explains a whole hell of a lot about my occasional utter obliviousness to detail...

Grocery Madness

1. Deer runs into Kroger in Roanoke, VA.

2. Psychotic shoppers battle for turkeys in the DC suburbs.

Hee

Ah, the fortune cookie game (where you add "in bed" to the end of your fortune and giggle commesurately).

My fortune: You are capable, competent, creative, careful. Prove it....in bed. (Yeah, if only I had the opportunity...)

Nate's fortune: Your sparkling eyes give a healing light to those you meet...in bed. (I'd have to ask Liz about the accuracy of that one...)

3,000!

So sometime over the weekend, my counter went up to 3,000 hits. I've had this thing up here, sporadically, since summer. I think it's been up and working for a grand total of about 3 months. So there's 1,000 people reading this a month...

Or, far more likely, 25 or 30 reading it over and over and over.

I'm glad this little excercise in weirdness seems to have gone so well. I initially started this because I was interested in the venting possibilities, and because I missed the excitement of being able to communicate with people since I haven't performed much lately.

I certainly won't say it's a substitute for performing, since you can't see the audience's reaction, but it's still nice little ego boost to know that people find this amusing enough to read on at least a semi-regular basis.

It's even done enough to bump me up to being the first thing that comes up when I Google myself.

I've been bitching and whining about wanting to start performing and recording again lately, since I've been pretty much silent for much of the last two years. First it was work, then it was being in a relationship, then it was work again, and it still is work.

But I'm glad that I at least have had some way, over the last seven and a half months, of amusing and entertaining people.

I'm still not linking this off my main site, because my parents still have no idea of the existence of these Adventures, and that's the way I prefer it, since there are large slices of my life that I'm fine telling my friends and even total strangers about, but I'd prefer my folks remain blissfully ignorant to.

And guys, if you do know, for fuck's sake DON'T TELL ME. I feel a lot more comfortable talking about my drunken exploits to strangers (who, theoretically, don't care) than I do to my various parental units (who certainly will).

Thanks for reading, and on to 4,000!

How much do I not want to write this paper?

So much that I did all my studying for my Italian test, which isn't until Tuesday either, before even starting this paper.

So much that half the first page is taken up by user comments from IMDB.com.

So much that I went to Television Without Pity and read ER summaries from 3 years ago.

So much that I did reading that I technically am not required to do.

So much that I cleaned off my desk.

So much that I've been sitting here trying to think of all the dumb shit I've done to avoid writing this paper for at least 10 minutes.

Ahhhhhhh...

The heat problems in our apartment have been mostly fixed. I can actually still feel my fingers despite the fact that I've been doing work in my room for hours.

The problem tonight is that I have really poor circulation in my feet (seeing as how they have to carry a great deal more weight than they're meant to), and occasionally they turn into blocks of ice.

I've discovered a solution I wish I had discovered earlier: going into the living room, where the most accessible (and hottest) radiator is located, and placing my feet either directly on it or while still in my slippers, to provide a bit of a buffer.

After about ten minutes, my feet are warm enough to get me through at least another hour of typing the World's Dumbest Paper (topic: Why I Wanted To Defend Hook But Can't).

Of course, I could just put on socks, but that wouldn't give me an excuse to run screaming from my computer once every hour or two and relieve the stress and at least a bit of the eye strain. God damn, I need an LCD monitor...