Why American politics is fundamentally broken:

Republican Healthcare Plan Held Constitutional by Right-Wing Supreme Court. Republicans are Furious, Call For Treason, Seriously.

Yep, we're screwed.

What was I saying?

My last post was fairly optimistic, or at least trying to be.

Then the power went out for 48 hours, starting Monday around 2:30 in the afternoon.

It was fucking frightening, and I've been through multiple hurricanes and tornadoes. One minute it was light, then the next it was dark. 30 minutes later, this HUGE gust of wind started taking away stuff from neighbors's yards while I was finishing walking the dog. Then the rain started, and then there was this freakish alien lightshow outside my window, and then there was no power. And then 30 minutes after that the sun was out again.

No AC, it was hot as hell, and I don't have much food that doesn't require cooking. We got sandwich stuff and that was fine and all. It was a nightmare trying to get to sleep in the heat, and then the next door neighbors had such a big domestic violence meltdown (mom vs daughter) that I went out there and wound up calling the cops sometime after midnight. The toddlers were out and crying too, which means we're probably calling the child welfare folks sometime in the near future.

And then no power yesterday, with almost 200,000 without power total. And I sat home losing my mind from cabin fever and whatnot. And then the hunt for ice, so that our freezer full of food wouldn't spoil. And then seeing that all of our neighbors had power except for us.

And then today, finding out that the power has been restored for all but around 5000 of us, and the power company didn't even know we hadn't had our power restored. Joy. I had to grab someone from another crew and walk him over to my backyard and show him where trees and power lines met. At least I have power now, you know... two days after the rich white folks got their power back up. So it goes.

It's not all bad...

... I got $1.40 per gallon off on gas this week.

... I have all my hair and most of my teeth.

... I've never been on Maury to take a DNA test. I am NOT the father!

... My wife hasn't divorced me yet.

... I guess I'm going to start doing yoga. Is that good? Maybe?

And any day that involves yummy leftover paella for lunch, followed by a nap, can't be that bad.

Food insecurity

Yeah, well... last week's budget crisis turned out to be a bit overstated. Not so much that we're not poor, as that we're going to be able to juggle most of the bills to next week. So, since we had money for groceries, I bought groceries. A lot of groceries.

A metric shit-ton of groceries.

See, as I was lying awake all night last Thursday and into Friday morning, I was trying desperately to figure out how to stretch our budget to feel me and my wife two meals a day plus continue to feed the cats and dog the high-quality kibble they have happily grown accustomed to. It doesn't help that I usually just buy enough food to last two weeks maximum, plus a second trip for fresh veggies in between paydays. Doesn't leave a lot of room for error, which I now realize is an incredibly bad idea.

So now, I have food. A lot of food for two people I guess. If pressed, I can make approximately a month of two meals a day, since my wife gets lunch at work and I rarely eat breakfast. The best part is that I have cans of stuff that won't go bad, and a pretty packed freezer, plus lots and lots of rice and sauces and sauce fixings. That way, it isn't just ramen noodle soup when the "good stuff" runs out. Some of the meal ideas are pretty simple too, like pasta and a quick clam sauce with a red cabbage salad that I can whip up in the time it takes the pasta to cook. And I think I'm going to do a little more stocking up next payday as well, as far as buying canned goods as "emergency rations."

Keeping more money in a savings account would probably be smarter, but I'm taking baby steps here.

It just keeps getting worse

So I walk a bag of trash out to the trash can... and a tree branch falls out of the neighboring house's tree and nearly takes out the back windshield of my wife's car. It is hotter here than in Florida. The air conditioning can't keep up. My wife missed close to a week of work that she won't get paid for, and we're going to have to try to make $100 stretch out for 2 weeks worth of groceries. One cat keeps shitting on the floor, and another keeps pissing on everything.

Life will just keep getting worse, won't it? Forever. Or better? Or something? Some random number of steps forward, and who knows how many steps back. I can't even guess.

Lesson totally not learned!!!

I keep trying to drink my way out of being sick, and it keeps on not working. What's up with that? Lest night I felt OK so I started slamming some beers. I thought I was being slick by drinking some "vitamin-enhanced" water the whole time I was drinking the beers, in order to avoid any hangover-like side effects. Instead I wound up starting to feel hung-over after a few hours and had to stop drinking entirely. Just weird weird stuff.

In other news, I've actually been reading books again. I read over 50 books last year, and this year I read 1 book between January and the first of June. I the last two weeks I've read more than 1. I started with the third book in Mira Grant's Newsflesh Trilogy, Blackout. Then it was Redshirts by John Scalzi, which is a must-read for any classic Star Trek fans. Then... what came next? Oh, Dust and Decay by Jonathan Maberry, the second in his young adult zombie series. Now I'm starting in on Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey, and I've got its sequel sitting with it waiting to be devoured. After that? More books than I can count. If I read one book a day for the rest of the year, I think I would still have unread books on my shelves/Kindle. Been sort of book hoarding...

Then games. Lollipop Chainsaw, as soon as I get done with Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions. "WTF is a Lollipop Chainsaw" you ask? I'm not 100% sure, but it is zombies and cheerleaders and I guess I'm down with that. :)

Dying of the flu!

Oh it is bad, so so so bad! I went to bed last night at 7:30, got out of bed at 7:30 this morning and felt more tired when I woke up than when I went to bed. My body is sore, especially where I strained a muscle in my side from coughing so hard. I thought it was bad last night, but looking back I managed to install a Tremol-No and a D-Tuna on my guitar...

... just as an aside, one of the fun/weird things about the world of guitar gear is the funny names things get. Tremol-No isn't that funny, and it is a useful tool to stabilize the bridge on guitars with whammy bars. The D-Tuna is a detuner (get it?!) for the low E string that lets you change the tuning between E and D, which as invented for Eddie Van Halen since he likes to switch between the two tunings and on guitars with whammy bars it is way too complicated to do live. Effects pedals get the best names, like the Big Muff Pi and it's British cousin the English Muff'n. Or the Way Huge Swollen Pickle. Or the Talent Boost.

...anyways, I installed stuff on my guitar, plus a string change and intonation set-up, all really difficult at the best of times. Also cooked a pretty complicated dinner last night, although I didn't do the dishes. That was pretty fun to wake up to. And then I went to the store and bought stuff for chicken noodle soup, because I'm sick right? Of course, normal people would just buy soup, but not me. NOOOOO.... I have to make homemade soup. At least I'm not making homemade chicken and dumplings, although it was sort of iffy there for a few minutes. It is an all-day process, but the house smells so very good right now. I roasted the chicken for 3 hours, let it rest for an hour, and then stripped off the meat and started boiling the carcass with the tops of the celery. Right now, the carcass has another 45 minutes or so, and then I'll let it cool and let the fat separate and float to the top so I can skim it off before adding back the meat plus veggies and noodles.

Here's what's simmering on the stove right now:

Of course, I might go back to bed and not finish cooking until tomorrow. It is too early to say.

Definitely the plague... and books!

Ugh... I'm so sick. Headache, sore muscles, sneezing and wheezing and coughing up little egg yolk-style balls of phlegm. My wife is in the other room hacking up chunks of pancreas and sucking on a nebulizer for dear life. It is a lovely time in our happy home, let me tells you. Luckily, we have a stack of books to keep us company.

We just both of us finished reading Redshirts by John Scalzi. If you're a fan of Star Trek at all, you're required to read this book. So, seriously, read the fine print on your birth certificate. No, the long-form! She also read Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey and has started on Amped by Daniel A Wilson. I'll catch up once I get done with Dust & Decay by Jonathan Maberry, which is I guess a YA zombie book and second in a series. I really enjoyed the first one.

Been gaming a bit. Played Max Payne 3 last week, and this week it is a double-header from game design guy Suda 51. Shadows of the Damned and Lollipop Chainsaw. Both sort of humorous gross-out violence games. Cool, as long as I don't die before I finish them.

I think it is the plague!

Holy crapatoonie.

So, my wife has been sick since last Thursday, and she went to the doctor today and found out she's got bronchitis. She's just miserable suffering poor baby. The best part? I think she's given it to me, despite my best efforts to avoid the infection. Bugger.

Summer colds are the worst.

Let's hear it for "God"!!!

Or, at least, Morgan Freeman...

Here's what he's got to say in a recent interview:

Did we invent God?  

Yes.  

So there isn't a God up in the sky somewhere.  

We came up with God ourselves. Well, here's a scientific question: Has anybody ever seen hard evidence? What we get is theories from our earlier prophets. Now, people who think that God invented us think that the Earth can't be more than 6,000 years old. So I guess it's a question of belief. My belief system doesn't support a creator as such, as we can call God, who created us in His/Her/Its image.

Would you consider yourself an atheist, or agnostic? 

It's a hard question because as I said at the start, I think we invented God. So if I believe in God, and I do, it's because I think I'm God.

I'm not sure if he's an atheist or not, but he sure as hell is a bad motherfucker.

Ray Bradbury, Michael Bay, and a giant flame-breathing robot T-Rex

RIP, Ray... your politics were shit, but your stories were awesome.

Michael Bay is still alive, unfortunately. He's also talking about directing Transformers 4: More Incomprehensible Insulting (and likely racist) Bullshit IN REALLY LOUD 3D!!!!!!!!!!!!11!!!111!!!!ONE!!11!! Granted, Michael Bay movies are better than Adam Sandler movies, but they aren't really any good. The plots are bare-bones and yet also somehow profoundly illogical, there's a bunch of immature irrelevant and uninteresting "humor" and in the case of the Transformers series the robot action is hampered by shoddy design and even more shoddy cinematography. The fights look like someone tossed a bunch of scrap metal and a bomb-proof camera in an industrial washing machine set on "Spin" and occasionally tosses a Molotov cocktail in for color... plus random slo-mo so that you're not sure whether or not you're having a stroke and these are the half-speed last moments of your wasted life.

By comparison, here's the trailer for this fall's Transformers: Fall of Cybertron video game. It is set at night, and yet the robots and their action are more clearly visible and more coherent from a visual storytelling perspective than anything Bay has ever done. There's a great song in the background, and it is directed in such a way that there's more actual emotional connection between the characters in unspoken body language than in anything Shia LaDouche said in all three of those shitty movies. Check it out.

There's someone wrong on the Internet!

... 

AND I'M GOING TO ARGUE WITH THEM!

No, seriously I need to learn to pull away and let shit go. I just DO. Gotta find a new hobby, like underwater basket weaving or something. I've got video games to play and books to read and TV to watch with my wife,  and life is too short to get too wrapped up in Internet bullshit.

So we're watching Community from the beginning which should be cool. It is a STRANGE show, stranger still because we started watching it a couple of episodes before the end of this season, and have never seen any of the earlier episodes. It is a really meta-pop reference show NOW, but it apparently started out as a fairly traditional Scrubs-style sitcom. I liked Scrubs, except that Zach Braff is one of those upper-class northeastern smug assholes who I want to punch in the face all the time. No Zach Braff on Community, so I'm happy. 

Thank Odin for Taco Sunday!

Jeez. This is how it always goes. Payday comes around, I buy a bunch of food, we east really fancy for most of a week or ten days. Then I sort of run out of steam, and what's left in the freezer is the stuff I'm not all that interested in cooking. Plus I'm sort of tired of doing dishes by this point. I've got some chicken tenders and chicken wings in there, a skirt steak, a pork tenderloin, some baby back ribs, and some other stuff. What do I do with them? I guess cook the chicken and serve it over pasta with some white clam sauce? Buffalo chicken wings and macaroni salad? I guess. It will taste fine, but it isn't exactly making me all excited or anything.

So thank goodness that I know I can always count on Sundays and tacos. It doesn't matter if I'm interested or not, if I'm feeling inspired or not, I just whip up some ground beef and bake the shells and eat me some tacos. Plus not even much in the way of dishes!

Another screwed-up night!

Some crazy dude standing on the corner talking to himself, with a cheap tape player on a shoe-string around his neck. The cop showed up, and took away the screwdriver/knife the guy was carrying in his pocket, and then a couple of paramedics came and carted his ass off.

But, you know. I'm being unreasonable carrying a gun when I walk the dog in this neighborhood after dark. Surely nothing could happen to me!