Income tax refund and new projects

Well, our check is on the way, and already spent. We're going to be current on all our bills, pay for some things that we had to buy to get settled into the house, and we're going to even have a few bucks over. My wife is going to buy some clothing and put a handgun on layaway. I'm going to consider putting an acoustic guitar on layaway and I'm going to restore my amp. Here's the guitar:

Now the amp? The amp new looks like this:

Mine looks like this:

Not so awesome, but not terrible. Dirty, scratched, got holes in it. My wife insisted I name the damned thing. She was going with "Bertha" until I picked a name. I decided on "Glory" as in "restored to its former glory." I started out thinking of just making it look identical to its original state. Tweed cloth is super expensive though, and I figured as long as I'm going to use vinyl Tolex covering I have my choice of colors. 

Choice of colors!!!! CHOICE OF COLORS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! MWAHAHAHAHAHA!!

... ahem. 

I started looking at companies that do custom colors, just for inspiration. My wife and I looked around, and she decided on green, which is my favorite color. Something like this, with leather corners and a leather handle. Orange piping to match the corners. 

This should be FUN! Or I'll break the amp, one or the other. 

Weirdest thing about my blog...

So I type "chuck norris crazy" into a Google search, and the first thing that comes up is a blog entry I did in 2009. Yeah. #3 on Yahoo. Woo.

Life is a strange old thing, isn't it?

I need a funny hat

... yeah, that's pretty much the size of it. Can someone help me find a funny hat to wear?

More weird dreams...

Yeah, I has them.

Last night it started in a mall, where I was chasing/being chased by a giant pink Doctor Who monster saying "where are my babies?!?!" over and over again. In an old British lady accent.

Then it shifted to waiting in line for security at an airport with a bunch of my old buddies from the Marines and they were being a bit dickish. We didn't get through security and wound up in a hotel. In the dream I had a ceramic knife I was going to try to sneak onto the plane, which I was showing off. For some reason I got on an elevator (elevators figure into a lot of my dreams) and I couldn't find my way back to the room so I ended up taking the stairs. We were about to start drinking beers and shooting pool in the hotel room(NICE ROOM!) when I woke up.

I've got to stop putting so much sriracha on my chicken strips. Seriously!

Cat news!

This is Lily:

We picked Lily up off the porch of our evicted neighbors after they abandoned her. We finally got her to the vet this week, and we found out that she's actually at least a year old and has a yeast infection in her ears. She may or may not have already been spayed, but no one knows for sure. I guess if she goes into heat, that would be an answer?

Anyhoo, she's a little sweetheart when she's not trying to claw the flesh off of my arms.

The best part of waking up...

... is the home security system going off before the sun comes up because your wife didn't deactivate the alarm before going out to warm up her car. So the ear-splitting alarm is followed by a mad dash down the stairs to deactivate the alarm before the automatic signal is sent out so that I would have had to call the security company before they would cancel the call to the police.

Why I can't deal with politics anymore

From Mark Sumner at Daily Kos:

However, just because it's possible to unearth grizzled examples of ugliness doesn't mean that the current season is not unique. Uniquely dangerous. And what makes it dangerous is the pretense that we're still in that fantasyland were ideas arm wrestle for history's approval. In fact, that time is long past. It's not even that what's now coming from the right consists of 100% emotional, fear-based appeals without a factual basis. In 2012, a campaign of suggestive fear-mongering seems almost quaint.

It's that the Republicans have staked out a position that requires that they lie, 24/7, 365. Not shade the facts their way. Not put their own spin on the situation. Lie. Big, sloppy, and constantly. [emphasis mine]

The Republicans had their chance during the Bush years to finally prove the utility of their "Free Market" cult's belief system. Taxes were cut significantly, regulations were weakened, religion got government funding... and the economy tanked hard. The only thing that kept the economy from completely crashing was government intervention in the market, bailouts and whatnot... which started under Bush and was voted for by lots of Republicans, and it was the right thing to do.

The second the ink dried, however, they disavowed their own economy-saving actions. Obama was no sooner sworn in president than Republicans handed him the blame for the economic downturn that began years before he was elected. In the same sense that right-wingers pretended that Bush's first term started on September 12, 2001, blamed the terrorist attacks on Clinton, and claimed that there were no attacks under Bush, Bush's second term ended in December 2007 when the recession started.

Other lies quickly followed. Obama cut some taxes immediately, and we're at record lows for taxation... so Republicans  claim that taxes are way too high and Obama has been raising them. Obama's record on gun control is almost nil, except for cutting a couple of regulations, so the NRA says that Obama plans to steal our guns if he gets reelected. Economics 101 says that in a recession the government needs to spend money to stimulate the system and get things growing again, so Republicans demand that we make poor people suffer to pay off the deficit... while cutting taxes even more for corporations and making the deficit even larger.

They just lie about EVERYTHING. Forget the hatred of non-whites, women and children, poor people, homosexuals, non-fundie Christians, and the rest of their culture war against American values. The things that can be judged purely objectively, the Republicans fail on 100% every time. This isn't a conservative party, or a party of values and political positions. It is an anti-American economic death cult. Anyone who votes for Republicans on the national stage is some combination of ignorant, stupid, misinformed, and evil.

That's why I can't deal with politics. We have a Democratic Party that is basically the Republican Party of the 1970s, and a Republican Party that is filled with lunatics and racists and economic witch doctors and domestic terrorists and all the fringe elements of the Right that were excluded from serious discussions until the last few decades. So every time Obama wants to compromise with them, it is like he's negotiating with a serial killer holding hostages, when he should just send in a SWAT team. How can anyone pretend otherwise?

Matt Paxton is my hero! (or, How to Clean the Joe Way)

Matt Paxton, perched on a pile of poop.

Yeah, I'm a big fan of A&E's Hoarders show, you know... the one where people never throw away anything and have 110 cats and their home is stacked floor-to-ceiling with newspapers and garbage? Often, after a decade or more of hoarding, the electricity and plumbing go out and since no one can get into the house to fix anything, they switch to pooping in adult diapers or 5-gallon buckets. Then those diapers or buckets get added to the piles of trash. Good times!

Maybe the best part of it (besides the mountains of poopy diapers) is Matt Paxton, "extreme cleaning specialist." And it turns out we live in the same city, which is extra cool. :) He's the world's leading expert in shoveling people's poop, and has written a book and has a podcast on top of the TV show to talk about shoveling poop. He's a real inspiration to lazy people like me who don't want to clean their house.

Of course, my messes are a couple of beer bottles on an end table and a plate on the floor that I let the dog lick clean. Sometimes my wife will forget to clean the litter box upstairs and it is double nasty when she cleans it the next day. My kitchen needs dishes put away, and a couple of glasses and a cereal bowl washed, and the microwave wiped out. The houses that Matt cleans up look more like this:

And somehow, Matt doesn't yell and scream at these people even while they are yelling and screaming at him. Hoarders are often trauma survivors, and suffering from some sort of mental disorder like depression or PTSD. So even while Matt is arguing with someone about keeping a sweater with a giant hole in it that's stained with cat and rat poop, he tries to be sensitive to the emotional needs of the hoarder. He's a much nicer guy than I am, believe me.

I'm thinking about all of this because I'm busy cleaning the house. Not that the house is particularly bad, but I'm particularly lazy. This is the first time I've ever lived in a house with an upstairs and downstairs, and I really need a dumbwaiter and a complete second set of cleaning stuff for the upstairs. Carrying the vacuum upstairs is hard work.

I have to clean while my wife is out, because she sucks really bad at it and it pisses me off really badly. It's weird, because it isn't like I'm a neat freak or any better at keeping things clean and neat. The problem is that I have a system, and my wife has no system and won't use mine and it winds up driving me nuts. I work room to room, zone to zone, in two passes. The first pass is all the brute-force work: wash dishes, take out trash, sweep and mop and vacuum, make the bed, do the laundry. If there's any energy left after that, there's a second sweep of cleaning out the fridge, straightening up closets, going though the junk basket in the foyer, tackling the stack of non-essential mail, etc. I will clean two rooms, and check on my wife and she's done half a room and gone through the junk mail and then stopped to pay a bill. Drives me INSANE.

Anyhoo, here's Joe's Plan for Cleaning House today:

• Start at 10AM
• 30 minutes per room/area maximum
• Leftover minutes can be used for breaks or more in-depth cleaning/organizing
• NO POOFTERS!
• Do laundry as I go, so that I don't have a pile of it waiting for me at the end
• Lots of beer at the end... there's some motivation for me!

So, I started at 10AM. I have cleaned the entire upstairs, vacuumed the stairs, and cleaned the foyer including cleaning out the junk baskets. I'm about 45 minutes ahead of schedule right now, and I should get even further ahead, which will give me time to clean out the refrigerator and such. And then the beer... oh precious beer. 

Weirdest thing I've thought all year...

... and that's saying a lot. I'm not allowed to have a Twitter account, because if I wrote down the shit I think as I'm thinking it, I'd be committed in a week tops.

This one takes the cake though. We sort of screwed the pooch on the budget for the next two weeks. My wife forgot to mention her medication when we discussed the budget, which was going to be tight anyways. It would have been nice if she had called BEFORE I handed the dude $100 for the guitar. Anyhoo, what's left is the food budget, the only place where there's any money that can be flexible. So how do I stretch our food budget to last two weeks, minus a quarter of what's left?

Beer. I'm going to use beer as a dietary supplement. It IS calories, after all. Calories keep you alive, right? Your body doesn't care, does it? I've got vitamins, I've got some food. I have 40-something home-brewed beers in boxes in my office. I've got 13 days until payday, I can drink three beers a day, I can survive dammit!

I'm not sure in which direction my wife thinks I've lost my mind... but clearly she thinks I've slipped into LaLa Land.

New Guitar Day!

Yeah!!!!

So, I did some wheeling and dealing on Craigslist. I had the cute little amp that I replaced with the bigger beat-up amp, and an old bicycle. Got cash for the bike, traded the cash and the amp for a guitar. Ta-DA!

I might keep it, or I might trade it for whatever's behind door #2. It certainly completes my transition from metal to classic rock, doesn't it?

I used to have this:

Now I have this:

....


....


.... I feels so old.