So, I get complained at whenever I don't update this frequently. C'mon people, I didn't name this Fits and Starts for nothing. ;-)

Had a weekend. The teevee was supposed to be delivered within a three hour window of 3pm on Friday. At 5:30 I called the dispatchers, who said the driver said it'd be 7:30 because of traffic. At 8:30 they said he'd be here in half an hour. At 9:25 I walked outside to figure out if I needed to call dispatch again, and the driver drove up while I was out there. Yes, boys and girls, the three hour window took six and a half hours. The driver must have been a cable installer in another life.

Odd thing: shipping weight of the teevee is 94 pounds, and he picked the box up by hand, which is interesting for two reasons - there were no handle cutouts in the box, and he wasn't wearing a lift belt. Anyway, got the box inside, looked it over, didn't see any signs of damage, signed the bill of lading, and sent the driver on his merry way.

And then when I opened the box I discovered damage on the teevee anyway. It's merely cosmetic, but argh. You'd think they'd package them well enough so that sort of thing wouldn't happen.

So I watched DVDs for most of the weekend. Friday night was The Matrix. Saturday I cleaned up a bit before my guests arrived (including koogle and chinacat) and then we watched Brazil (super-geeky Criterion release) and Rushmore (another Criterion release, including hysterical interpretations by the Max Fisher Players of a few other movies). Then after they left and I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to sleep immediately, I put in The Third Man (surprise, surprise, it's another Criterion release), which happens to be one of my favorite movies ever. It's a lot of people's favorite movie, actually. The British Film Institute named it their number one. I didn't actually get that far before turning off the teevee and falling asleep on the couch. So I watched it this afternoon.

Tonight I watched the Iron Chef New York Battle. The first hour was some of the most appalling television I've ever sat through. If it hadn't been Iron Chef I'd have changed the channel the minute I saw Gordon Elliott. (Ack). The whole bit with the kid at the end was horrifying. I had thought that it was one two hour show, but it turned out that it was two one hour shows, and I could have completely skipped the first hour.

The second hour, well, I have two words: LOCK CLAB! And I'm not really sure of the choice of Bobby Flay, but whatever. And where was Chen? Is he no longer part of the program? Is there something I've missed by not remembering to see the show every weekend?

Oh, and I also played some on the Playstation, plugged into the new teevee. One of these days I'll finish the original Tomb Raider and can move on to #2.

So for a weekend that involved a new teevee, well, I got a lot of couch lounging in.

Oh, yeah, I bought groceries yesterday. I'm not sure how long it'd been since I'd been to the grocery store. A hundred and sixty-two bucks. That included a case and a half of beer (I already had a case picked out when I got suckered in by samples from a smallish brewery in PA) and silly things like Pop Tarts, Nilla Wafers, and Cap'n Crunch. There was also a pretty good supply of near-instant foods (I was even out of ramen, that ought to tell you how long it had been since I'd been grocery shopping) and some snackies for movie night. I forgot again to buy a degreaser for the wok though.

There's a story behind that wok. It was free. It was also rather pockmarked with rust, so I never used it for anything. I got it when somebody I knew in college moved out of her apartment and she virtually made me take it instead of just throwing it away. I've since moved it three times myself, without ever using it. But recently I had this inexplicable craving for fresh popcorn, so I went to the Kwik-E-Mart around the corner and bought some kernels, determined that the wok was the most suitable vessel in terms of surface area, and that it wouldn't kill me since the cooking surface was clean of rust (after a little scraping, anyway), and I made popcorn. It worked surprisingly well. So I've tried a couple different ways to clean it up some more since then (including a 500 degree oven for a while, which burned off quite a bit of stuff but also discolored the lid and set off the smoke detector), but now it's got sort of a coating of oil mixed with cellulose. I've scrubbed it every time I've used it, but that coating doesn't remove very easily. So I need a degreaser to get that gunk off, then I may be able to shine it up pretty well. The good news is the rust is gone already - the oven took care of that for good.

It's a shame. I actually like to cook, and I'm pretty successful at it when I bother, but if I buy fresh stuff I never get around to cooking with it before it's of questionable status. About the only way I accomplish that is if I make a day of it - grocery list in the morning, grocery shopping in the afternoon, cooking in the evening, then cleaning up the dishes that night. If I don't do it that way it generally doesn't get done.

So is this all random enough for ya?

link (2000-06-25)