Lack of real content here...

Yeah. Well.

What do you want me to do? Engage with the evil enough to post about it? Sweet flaming Satan, it would drive me mad!!!!

Have you ever listened to American Family Radio? It is a "ministry" of right-wing anti-American sociopaths, and it is one of the few stations my car radio picks up on the "FM dial". And they represent the mainstream Republican voter! Holy fucksticks, Batman! These hateful goons think that Obama is a socialist, and that the solution to all problems is to ban abortion and eliminate(murder?) gay people, because then their completely imaginary god will make everyone(who counts) rich and healthy and happy and successful. Fuckers... but should I post about them?

What about the creationist assholes who want to destroy American science education because real science says that the world is a bit older than their moronic religion claims? What about the anti-science "holistic medicine" idiots who lead people to their deaths by convincing them to forgo real medicine in favor of stupid fucking nonsense? How about the misogynistic demons who want to make it illegal for women to even talk to their doctor on the Internet about reproductive health issues that might include abortions or even birth control? Don't even get me started on libertarians, or general Republican "tax the poor" economic plans that seek to destroy the economy (and any reasonable practice of sustainable capitalism) in the name of short-term profits. I'll lose my goddamned mind!

Instead, I'll talk about the cat that lives under my car. Or the three cats that live in my house. Or my sweet doggy-girl who loves us like only a dog can. Or my wife who is happier than she's been in years thanks to her new job. Or stuff I want to buy, or the minor problems of moving into a new house, or cooking secrets, or anything that isn't the wider world that seems to be crumbling under our feet even as the top 1% get richer and richer while complaining more and more that the rest of us are being mean to them!

Yeah... Irish whiskey is the cure, and I'm going to drink your share and mine and try not to sink too far into despair.

Gun-nuttery!!

Well... there's been a little bit of change in the Improbable household.

You know it started with "Joe, you don't need a gun" from Mrs. iJoe. That was semi-reasonable, since we lived somewhere safe, where we locked the front door to keep the cats in and not to keep the burglars out. At some point, my wife took a job in the ghetto... and she started thinking that guns aren't so bad. Then we started talking about moving to Richmond, and the crime stats aren't great, and Joe getting a handgun didn't seem like such a bad idea.

Now we live here. Things are different from what we are used to. We have an alley behind our house where it is convenient to walk the dog without having to pick up her poop, but there are strangers walking through the alleys in the middle of the day sipping on bottles of liquor in brown paper bags. We have a nice big front porch and the weather is nice and moderate and it is nice to sit out there and enjoy the fresh air, but weird guys on bicycles try to talk to my wife, and drunk/high ladies want to borrow things from us, and there are way too many shady-looking people who look like they are peeing on the lawn of the house across the street from us...

So. We have been here less than three weeks, and it has gone from "I guess it is cool if you have a gun" to "thank goodness you have a gun" to "when can you take me to the range and teach me how to shoot your gun" to "maybe I should get my own gun?" It doesn't help/hurt when we're sitting at home on a Sunday and we hear what sounds like gunshots pretty close, and then someone running past my wife in the alley behind the house.

At what point does gun-nuttery become gun-sanity? Maybe when there's a real and present danger of people shooting at you near your house. I don't know for sure, but I'm damned glad that I have the choice to be armed or not.

The pain, it is unbearable!

Been busy this week. Messed around with organizing, did some grocery shopping, fell down the back porch steps, opened some boxes...

FELL DOWN THE BACK PORCH STAIRS?!?!?!?!

Yep. It was raining Wednesday, leaves fell all over the stairs, I went out to walk the dog. I don't know if she pulled me or if I just slipped, because the whole thing was a blur. An incredibly painful blur. I know I hit with my left calf, then my right hip, and somewhere in there my right side just below my ribs. All of that was blanked out when, as I continued to slide down the stairs, the back of my right arm hit a step and dragged across the step with much of my weight on it. I don't remember turning almost 270° counter-clockwise, but I landed face first in the dirt at the bottom of the steps that way. Somehow, miraculously, I held onto the leash and didn't lose the dog. I got up, brushed myself off, and walked the damned dog.

Holy crap, the pain. The impact was bad. The bruise on my hip is almost black, about the size of a frisbie, and has spread out to cover part of my ass and lower back... I guess, I'm too scared to look but that's how it feels and my wife was pretty horrified when she looked at it today. My arm aches pretty bad, and so does my left calf, and my bad right ankle took a hit somewhere in there.

The real pain is in my right side. It is a low-level dull ache now, but I sleep on my side and tend to toss and turn a bit, and the angle and twisting motion cause the sort of heavy, deep, and wide pain that makes you feel like you're going to puke.

And of course, no insurance. I just have to tough it out. Luckily, I have whisky and whiskey to keep me company, and enough beer to drown a cat in. Woo?

... and my office is completely trashed again!

UGH!

The rest of the house is starting to look pretty good, minus the cool shelving and stuff we need to buy. For instance, we used to have a walk-in closet, now we have a mini-closet and a nook in the bedroom set up for a tiny TV stand (based on the outlet/cable junction box) and not much else. We're going to convert that into a hanging space like so:

Rubbermaid makes a whole collection of matching stuffs that will let us expand our storage space considerably, and as we have the money I'll be installing the stuff left and right.

In the meanwhile, my someday office is waiting for those organizing tools, and is currently covered with crap in random places. Some of this stuff needs to go upstairs, some of it is waiting for me to own an actual desk, and some of it is waiting for all of those other things to happen, so that there's an actual home for them someday. I need to hang shelves for my bobbleheads. I need to figure out a spot for my amp, and whether or not I'll have space to hang my guitars back up on the wall. Stuff like that.

Watched a whole marathon of that 'Hoarders' show yesterday... my office looks like one of their cleaner rooms! Egads!

Wow...

This unpacking shit sucks. Seriously. I still have to unpack the wardrobe boxes, and figure out where the garage stuff goes. No garage means no place for more stuff than I realized. We'd like to get a storage shed, and probably will at some point, but until then I guess upstairs somewhere? Crap.

We got my "office" mostly cleared out, but I still need a desk and to figure out what to do with the guitars. I'm going to need curtains, and I've got shelves to hang and stuff. Just not today, I think I've had enough.

So has Randall. Here's him taking a break from the unpacking:

One week in the (ancient!) new house

Well, that's been a fun week.

I've puked, the water line to the upstairs bathroom sprung a leak, the cats made a break for the great outdoors, the cats decided outdoors was scary and ran right the fuck back inside, I've had two different cable boxes, and most of the unpacking is still waiting to be done.

A couple of those things are related to each other. Part of the reason that the unpacking hasn't been done is that I've had people in and out of the house all day every day since Monday. The shower curtain went up I guess Saturday, and Sunday my wife noticed water leaking from the ceiling below the upstairs bathroom. I waited around all day Monday for someone to come by, and for the cable guy. The cable guy showed up around 2-ish, the plumbing guy showed up at 5 and said "see you tomorrow." The cable guy brought the wrong box, and the leak wasn't completely fixed and patched over until yesterday.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I have a hard time digging through boxes of my personal belongings when there are a bunch of strangers walking in and out of your house all day. Plus, I had to lock up the pets so that they wouldn't get out and disappear into the great outdoors. I accidentally left the back door open while I was walking the dog, and I saw cats poke their heads out... and then jump back inside really fast. Indoor cats forever(I hope!)

Anyhoo, we're using my new office as the staging area for most of the boxes, and the cats have turned that into their playpen, so that's where they got locked up and I couldn't pull boxes out of that room without risking a great escape. Now that I have a couple of days without workers in my house, maybe I can get some unpacking done. It is hard to see an end though. Old houses are cool if you're a woman who likes words like "quaint" and "rustic" and is impressed with French doors, and lots of sunlight from lots of windows. If you're me, you look at all the windows and say "there's a useless wall I can't put anything against... and another, and another, and another..." and get really frustrated.

Not a lot of closet space either. We're going to be hanging some wire shelves and such, try to maximize what usable space we have. This place is probably 50% larger than our last house, but there's not really more space from a practical standpoint. My wife gets her own office if she wants one though. Otherwise, there are two tiny bedrooms upstairs that aren't going to see any real use at all.

I can't believe I just threw up! (All sorts of puke content, Not Safe for Your Tummy!)

I don't know about the rest of you folks, but I'm very familiar with vomiting. I was a sickly child, I've gotten various stomach bugs over the years, and I've been an big fan of heavy drinking for half of my life. :)

That being said, over the last 10-12 years the drinking-related vomit has been pretty rare. I puked a few weeks ago, when I threw vodka on top of pumpkin-flavored beer. I puked right before the wedding, on a few dozen shots of tequila. I puked once over drinking TWO mojito-flavored malt liquor drinks in the middle of the afternoon, which was based solely on that crap making me nauseous rather than as an effect of the alcohol.

And I just got done puking. Yeah, just like 5 minutes ago.

Clearly, from the lack of obvious typos I'm not the sort of shitfaced drunk that would normally lead to puking. So what happened? Well... I got sentimental, an since I moved to the Highland Park section of Richmond, I bought a bottle of Highland Park Scotch whisky. I paid about $70 for the bottle. I thought it would be cool, since that's the name of where I live, right?

Well, I pulled out my Glenfiddich tasting glass. I poured a little less than a shot into the glass. I sniffed it, and it wasn't too pleasing. I thought about the $70 I spent on the bottle and decided I should drink it down and see what it tasted like. It tasted like a fucking sewer, and my mouth immediately started doing the pre-puke watering. I managed to aim the vomit in an inoffensive direction... into the toilet. Lucky me. The rest of the Scotch in the bottle, $70 worth of Scotch, went down the drain right behind it.

Part of me feels bad about throwing away anything that expensive. That part of me can keep dry heaving, while the sane, sensible parts of me are cooking food to replace the dinner I just coughed up. I mean, holy shite, the rancid flavor! In the future, I think I'll be a little less sentimental, and a whole lot less adventurous. I know that  Glenfiddich and The Macallan taste good and don't leave me with a wicked hangover, so I'll stick to those brands from now on.

Internet speed blues

It is all the blues these days... Here's what I get when I plug my laptop directly into the modem:

Here's what I get through my laptop's built-in wireless thingy:

That qualifies as a problem. Granted, my laptop is pretty old, but my wife's isn't getting any faster speeds. I'm not sure what the solution is, but I don't have any money to throw at the problem. I've never been able to figure out how to make the router do what I want it to do, but I'm going to keep on trying. Maybe someday I can make it work for me?

Probably not. I'm not particularly impressed with myself.