All it takes to ruin an evening...

... is a dead body.

Yep, they carried one of those loud-mouthed ghetto nasty shithead neighbors out in a body bag tonight. Sort of puts a crimp in your plans and your good mood, even if you don't really care about the dead person in question. Mostly because the goddamned cops and paramedics were out there for 4-5 hours before they hauled the corpse out of the flophouse across the street.

Wow, a new "best meal ever"?

So, last night I cooked something slightly different than normal. I didn't think it was especially impressive, just breaded thin-sliced chicken breast, steamed asparagus, and farfalle pasta in store-bought pesto. Except... the sauce was new.

The way I normally cook asparagus is to cut off the tips and toss the rest away. Last night, I took the leftover bits. boiled the hell out of them, and then pureed them along with some heavy cream, grated Parmesan, thyme, and a spoonful of pesto, and then simmered it for a few minutes. Apparently the sauce put the meal over the top, because my wife told me that this has shot up to a top slot in the "best meals" list. Funny, since I thought the chicken should have cooked at a higher temperature for a little more crispiness.

Tonight I'm thinking about trying some fried shrimp in the same breading (a mix of flour and masa with a creole spice blend) and topped with a roasted red pepper sauce, with some twice-cooked potatoes topped with bacon and cheese, and possibly sautéed  butternut squash and mushrooms. Sounds like a complicated meal when I type it out but the reality is that it is all sort of simple and everything not holding food will be clean before I sit down to eat. My wife is totally going to love me extra tonight!

Urrrrrrrr... yeah! SATAN!!!!

*grins*

Today at least, I'm OK with being a terrible person. More importantly, I'm totally digging on my new guitar, appropriately dubbed the HELLRAISER!!! No, literally... that's what it says on the truss rod cover.

Not my guitar. My guitar has a string angle bar  thingy covering the  letters.

I used to have this guitar without the whammy bar a LONG time ago, probably the first year my wife and I were married. My playing has evolved some since then, and I tend more towards clean and classic tones... but there is totally something about a really heavy guitar tone that I love and will probably always love. Funny thought... I'm part of one of the first few generations of eventually old people who will be in an old folks home and really seriously love metal. This should be fun.

Anyhoo... it has been an OK day. I had plans that I forgot, but I also managed to get a lot of other stuff done so I'm cool on that front. I'm drinking some Woodchuck Hard Cider, listening to Pantera, and I've just served myself up a bowl of rice and beans, with some butternut squash chopped into the beans for a little extra coolnessability. And then back to the brutality of the HELLRAISER!!!

... until my wife tells me to knock it off. :)

Some days, it just don't pays

... to even get out of bed. Seriously.



So I have spent the last 3-4 days cleaning carpets in the house with my fancy new carpet cleaner. It would probably be a good idea to clean the area rugs more than once every 7 years, by the amount of filth I'm STILL pulling out of them. But you know, is cool to do and the house smells way much better.

Well... except that I come down the stairs and someone, not naming any names here, someone peed right in the middle of the rug in the foyer. Just a big old puddle right in the middle of it. Ugh. And then my wife went to McDonalds and got me some chicken nuggets, and they were burned and nasty and sad. Probably OK, because I've got some nasty butt action going already and I should probably not be eating chicken nuggets especially not with sriracha chili sauce. Ahhh, sriracha chili sauce, with the rooster on the bottle.

I think I'm going to get back into bed with the Kindle and read... and hope that nothing else goes wrong.

it is pretty clear

I'm a terrible human being. the three of you who read my blog can feel free to stop.

Mah new BABAY!!!!

... which is funny, because I had the same guitar without the whammy bar like 5-6 years ago. Before my blog, even. Just goes to show.

This one is a used guitar I bought at the big box chain music store in town. New it goes for $900, I got for $500 out the door which is sort of incredible considering that the online store listings for a used version of this model in this condition is over $700. The SAD part is that this guitar was in significantly better shape than a bunch of the new models I played and looked at in the store. People come in, screw up the tuning, break things, steal parts, bang and scratch and ding up the guitars... and then hang the guitars back on a hook and walk away. I guess because this is a used guitar and hanging a bit higher up on the wall, the sort of people who come in and break/steal weren't interested and didn't mess with it. In any case, I've got her home, and her name is SATAN!!!

Oh, and this is my 700th published post. Wow, I'm a narcissist!

Out of the woods

Well, Ginger seems to be fine. My current theory is that Ginger swallowed a chicken bone a few weeks ago and a fragment of it got stuck somewhere. She's been grazing on grass for a couple of weeks, but since she puked up whatever she puked up yesterday morning she's been fine and eating her food and not at all interested in grazing anymore. So we're just going to cross our fingers and hope that she's OK going forward.

Happy puppy, with 100% more blurry tail wagging!

Other than that, nothing interesting here. My wife loves her new job, in no small part because they don't expect her to work 14 hours a day. There's nothing like leaving the house AND getting home when the sun is out to improve your mood! :)

Separation anxiety

My poor sick puppy. She's not eating and she's puking all over the house... and I hope that wasn't blood in her puke but I can't be sure. She's been grazing the yard for the past few weeks, and I'm afraid she ate something that she shouldn't have. She's been OK today so far, but she's still not eating yet. What's making it worse is that she feels terrible and my wife isn't here to comfort her. She got fired from her job on the 11th of this month, and she started her new job yesterday, so she had an unpaid week's vacation.

My poor sick puppy is really HER poor sick puppy. We got a cat for her, who was a poor sick Randall the first week we took him home from the Humane Society. Coincidentally that was the same time that I was home sick with the most infected tonsils in recorded medical history, and the week I had them out my wife was out of town at a conference for work. Me and the Boobster bonded, and he became my cat. So then we went to get a dog, and Ginger was grinning so big at us from her cage in the corner that we had to take her home. Somehow, Ginger became my wife's dog... and she didn't even want a dog! We went to go get me a dog of my own, and we wound up getting another cat! Dogs and cats, living together!

So anyhoo, Ginger is my wife's dog. Since she's a lazy dog and my wife was taking a lazy week off, they basically sat together for the entire day, and then of course Ginger sleeps in the bed, so they have been together pretty much nonstop for 9-10 days in a row. Now my wife is at work, and Ginger is sick, and Ginger is in my office on the floor behind me as I type this. I'm a poor substitute for Ginger's mommy, but she'll take what she can get at this point.

Actual poor sick puppy.

Obviously Mitt Romney is a man of deeply held convictions...

“I’m not familiar precisely with what I said, but I’ll stand by what I said, whatever it was.”


Yep, you can tell he's taken a strong, principled stand on that issue... whatever that stand is, which he's not entire sure of but will nevertheless back 110%. I guess once you've reduced your position to a bunch of bumper sticker slogans the way that the Republicans have, all you really need from your politicians is an ability to regurgitate them while looking like a rich middle-aged white guy. And then after awhile you even stop caring if they can even regurgitate those slogans accurately, because really you're just the party of hating poor people, non-whites, women, and the LGBT community and the slogans are just for show. 

And....

... I guess my wife has a job again. Go figure, it looks like we're going to be in better shape than before, money-wise. Cheaper insurance plus the money we're saving on cable, minus the increase in the phone bill, plus the fact that we only have 5-6 car payments left... 2013 could be a pretty good year.

Kind of screwed the pooch here...

So Thursday was grocery day and I did grocery shopping and I made a long and elaborate list. I flipped through magazines and websites for recipes and I made the list based on those recipes. And then I lost the list, and have no goddamned clue what most of the recipes were or what any of these ingredients are for. Why did I buy shallots again? What's the radicchio for again?

Luckily the beer doesn't require any heavy thinking.

Random Friday Crap!

Weird combination of high and low tech in my house this week. I needed a reverb pedal for my guitar rig. "Reverb" for those who don't know is the sound a room makes when sound bounces around in it. You get it naturally when you crank a big amp in a big room, or you can fake it various ways like with a digital pedal or springs inside the amplifier. The spring reverb is pretty subtle, but the digital stuff can get pretty extreme. I've owned a half-dozen of the pedals, but never found one that I really loved. I sold the last one a few weeks ago.

I have been shopping for a new one, looking at stuff as high as $300. I don't have $300, mind you. Anyhoo, long story short I bought one yesterday for $150 and it has a USB port on the back to update the firmware and to download artist presets from the Internet. Or, you can use the iPhone app. The iPhone app is the most high/low tech combination I've seen in the 21st century. Does anyone remember the original telephone modem things? I don't just mean "dial up"... you used to have to actually use an old-style telephone and place the handset into a cradle and the beeping noises would play into the cradle and carry the signal. The iPhone app works the same way. You hold the phone up to the guitar and it plays a fast dial-up modem sound into the pickups, which travels down the cord to the pedal and changes the presets. It is the weirdest thing ever this week!

Also this week, I've fallen and I can't get up playing with Lily who has decided to not hate me. She still sheds hair like it is going out of style, and she's still skinny as hell.

I just saw a trailer for a Bobcat Goldthwait movie called God Bless America. Fun stuff.





... and my wife just got fired from her job. Lovely.

Yeah? Yeah... guitar stuff

Here's what I used to have:

Here's what I had a couple of weeks ago:

I've changed things up a bit. I've got a lot fewer pedals now:

And I switched the pickups on my Les Paul from nickel covered BurstBuckers to Slash signature pickups. Zebra!

I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about getting rid of what I have to get new stuff. The problem is that I traded away all of the stuff in that first picture (plus lots of cash) to get the stuff I have now, and I really wish I had the stuff I used to have. Not instead of, also. Maybe that's not fair or practical, but that's who I am and how I feel. So I've decided that I am NEVER trading or selling anything again, barring financial disaster. If I want a different sort of guitar or amp, I have to buy another guitar or amp.

This isn't going to exactly make my wife happy... but all this trading and selling is actually more expensive in the long run, and doesn't make either of us happy. Now who is going to help me collect donations for my new gear? If everyone who reads this blog sends me a dollar, I'll have... 18 dollars.