So if you're a regular reader you've probably noticed that I haven't updated this in a while. Actually, if you're a regular reader you probably need to Get A Life since I don't appear to update this frequently enough to encourage regular reading. But anyway. Maybe you're using spyonit and letting the online-diarist-addict's best friend tell you when I've updated.

Curiously, they sent me email several weeks ago, the content of which was, "we notice lots of our users are setting up spies for your site, wanna put up a button for them to make it easy?" My response was, well, a non-response. Although I did check around with other diarists I know to find out if they too had gotten the email. I think one of them had, the rest all uniformly went, "Spyonit? What's that?" If you want to set up a spy, you probably already know how anyway and don't need no steenking button.

Anyway, I haven't updated because I haven't really been particularly communicative or had any interesting anecdotes to relate, or at least ones about which I could come up with more than 50 words or so. I get this way occasionally. Ask me a personal or pseudo-personal question and you'll get about four words out of me. You could say, if you were the sort of person inclined to say such things, that it's my own personal Calvin Coolidge mode. Not Very Wordy. Odd, that, considering how Overly Wordy I am on most occasions.

(Astrologers among you will be quick to point out that Mercury was retro recently, coinciding with my lack of verbosity ... you're probably right, but I never bothered to line up the dates with an ephemeris all the other times this happened and I'm not about to start now. That would require getting up off the couch.)

This is going to be an entry where I say "anyway" a lot. I can tell.

Anyway, since I left you I've seen Brave Combo twice, passed on one additional opportunity to see them because it would have involved a three hour drive (potentially rainy or in thunderstorms) to an outdoor venue (potentially wet due to rain during the day) for an evening show (50% chance of more rain that night) on a school night, and passed up a much less inconvenient show the next night in Baltimore because I somehow knew that if I went home I'd be asleep by 11. And I was. The two shows (Raleigh and Silver Spring) were quite good, my calves were sore for a couple days, and I really enjoyed getting to see Amber again and getting to meet her fiancé. He'd look better with a shave and a haircut, but what do I know? Other than that superficial comment he's very nice, and possibly the most awkwardly geeky of anybody I've seen Amber involved with (but I don't think I'd be considered an impartial judge).

Um. What else?

Two movies this week, both with Rob: Tuesday saw us at Jesus' Son (go, see it, trust me on this), last night (Rob returned my call of Saturday morning - a possible invitation to go see DC United and Newcastle United play an exhibition game, which turned out not to sound interesting enough to be worth $14 to either of us - to reveal that he'd inadvertently splashed toilet bowl cleaner (diluted with bowl water, luckily) in his eye and was at the hospital when I'd called) at Dupont for the rereleased Blood Simple (go, see it, and you shouldn't even need to trust me on that one).

This reminds me I came up with a framework for a novel. Unfortunately I don't actually have a story to go in said novel, so I guess I can share the framework with you: Footnotes. I talk in parentheticals too much as it is. So, extend that idea out to the point that there's a running column on every page of all the possible parentheticals, to the extent that there's probably more notes than actual text. Now that I write that out, it occurs to me that T.S. Eliot already did that. They call it his masterpiece. I did my senior paper in high school English on it. Oh well. There are no new ideas after all.

Anyway.

I spent far too much of this weekend sprawled on the couch watching the teevee. I used to be one of those people who "didn't watch TV" - except that I didn't even make it to the 7 hour average per week usually watched by people who claimed they didn't watch television. When I heard that statistic I monitored myself for about a month. I came to maybe 2 hours in a heavy week. The Simpsons did me in.

I don't watch a whole lot of teevee anymore, and I don't watch it with any regularity except for the FOX Sunday night lineup (and probably South Park and Space Ghost on Sunday nights as well, if I remember to watch them both and if South Park isn't a rerun). But since moving into the basement and getting the new big teevee I've been watching more. Or at least it's been on more. I don't consider myself a "TV Watcher," and I've never seen Survivor or Big Brother, or the revival of Twenty-One, and I've only seen about 10 minutes of that R*g*s show on ABC. Regardless, I've been a lazy-ass mofo the past few weeks and I've soaked up quite a bit of the Discovery Channel. (Note to the Discovery people: perhaps you wouldn't have had to pull the IPO for discovery dot com if your ads for it weren't so lame - they even fail at irony, guys). And there was the free preview of all the Showtime networks that had me suffering through Hideous Kinky (I kept expecting that at any moment it would actually get interesting - or at least we'd get to see more boobies, since I'm sure as hell not going to rent Titanic just to see them - but it continued wandering aimlessly around apparently hoping that a cohesive plot would suddenly materialize, much as its protagonist seemed to think that if she wandered around Marrakech long enough then enlightment would just find her) but then having the Sundance channel redeem itself with Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. Somehow I'd not managed to see that in theaters, although Rob had seen it and would have gladly seen it a second time if I'd wanted to go.

This reminds me that I used to pay for Sundance Channel and grew weary of it - only to find out when I called to cancel it that if I wanted to reconnect it in the future they'd charge me more money. Never mind that they'd never told me anything about the price increase before I canceled. Whatever. It's not worth nine bucks now. I guess maybe if I knew there'd be two movies every month that I'd definitely watch then it would be worth it, but I can't say when I had it that I watched it four hours per month. I'm such a cheapskate.

Ooo. Skate. I need to get out on my skates at some point. Remind me. I enjoy the skating when I actually do it. Do I ever actually do it though? No, I do not. The K2s continue to sit in the closet, most decidedly not going anywhere. Oh, and does anybody know if the actor playing the dad on Malcolm did his own skating? I'm thinking he did all the simpler stuff but they had a double for the real stunts, considering where all the cuts were (you never get a look at the face of the guy doing all the tricks in the same camera shot, so they could be using a double). Blah blah blah. I'm random tonight.

Work sucks less, but has been quite busy the past couple weeks. We're interviewing people for the group I've been working in (more involvement than I expected or wished for), but I've been in that and also meetings and conference calls about software platforms, and also a new project that I'm supposed to get involved in, and I'm supposed to write up yet another executive summary of the thing I've already written three executive summaries of since the executive in question couldn't be bothered to read the first three. Guh.

At least it's getting better. But then I got my "raise" for the new company year (they just went to a corp-wide review/raise period of July-July) and it's a prorated joke, so they take a step forward and a step and a half back. Ugh.

Yawning. Late. Tired. Maybe I'll fill in more random stuff tomorrow. Later today, really. Then again, maybe I won't.

(2000-07-24)