The Burlap Soulmate

I'm realizing that Itunes at work is much more enjoyable when you don't keep skipping over the songs you don't know, and trust that your significant other would not spend her hard-earned Itunes money on crap. I'm so grateful that Staz has such great taste in music. I am able to escape the corporate monolith of top 40 radio and enjoy some really talented artists. In other news, I can say that my psrsonal effects have been violated for the second time in less than a year. I came out to my truck the other morning to go to work and after climbing in, went to pick up my glasses...not there. I looked all over the cab and nothing. What was all the more perplexing was I distinctly remembered placing them on the transmission hump the night before, since we had gone shopping and they had been in Staz's car. My only explanation was that someone had taken them, not a really hard task since I never lock my truck. I mean who's going to steal prescription glasses? Turns out someone would after all. I called the condo management lady and she said someone else had reported a minor theft, also from an unlocked car. So apparently some fu&$wad was just going from car to car and seeing if they were locked? and stole some glasses that were worthless to anyone but me. Apart from feeling violated, a part of me just can't rectify the "why" of it. If you're going to steal something, steal something valuable, like my $10 sunshade. Hell you turned down about $80.00 of tools in the unlocked toolbox. But glasses??? So now we're out about $150. Thats just a guess. I figure we will be lucky if thats all it will cost to get a new eye exam (since my prescription is at least 5 years old) and a new set of specs. In the meantime, I'm stuck squinting into the sun during the day and wearing my hopelessly outdated back up glasses at night. The ones Staz affectionately refers to as my 'Bill Gates' glasses. They are VERY 80's and pretty damn ugly to boot. Or maybe I can just squint my way home today.

Assuming anyone still comes here, I have a question to pose. I hope you all can take a moment and provide some insight. Having just returned from Tar-jay and Chipot-lay, it is now 10:15pm. Now I had meant to call both my mother and my sister before the end of the day. My question is this? Is there a time after which you stop making callsto people? and if so, when? I have always operated under the 10pm rule and still do. But I'm curious as to what other people think. And don't tell me you call your cousin in California at 1:00am. Time zone differences don't count unless you list their time.

The other day, having just returned from taking our rambunctious beagle for a much needed walk, I entered our apartment to find Staz standing in the office with a terror-stricken look on her face. Assuming the worst (Spider alert) I rushed in, shoe in hand. Turns out it wasn't a spider, but the computer monitor was hissing, spitting, and throwing sparks (!) everywhere. Needless to say, we powered everything down. After a quick disassembly, I was rewarded with a view of the fried guts of the monitor. A nice blackened hole in the main board and some melted plastic around it pretty much abandoned any hope of repair. This marks the 3rd time in as many months that something on our computer has sizzled, burned, smoked, or otherwise blown up. We now have two dead monitors and one dead power supply taking up space in our office. I have no idea what to do with them. Every piece of research on the subject says that THOU SHALT NOT put computer stuff into a landfill. So I'm still trying to find out how I can be rid of them and yet still be environmentally responsible. In the meantime, I feel like a Mir Astronaut. I know our computer is old, decrepid, falling apart. I just need to nurse a few more days, weeks, months out of it until we can afford a new system. We're constantly hitting our heads on it's paltry 10GB of memory, enough such that I'm getting another 10GB drive on ebay. Woohoo. Double the space! So in the short term, we made another Goodwill run and picked up a $20.00 monitor. It works, thankfully, but it's Circa 1995. You'd swear at some point, it was used to play Space Invaders on a 2600...or Oregon Trail on a Tandy. Thank God theres no thermal tiles on this thing.

You know those warnings on over-the-counter antihistamines that say, 'May cause drowsiness.' They ain't kidding...zzzzzz...

Growing up in Northern Michigan, you get VERY accustomed to tourists (a.k.a. fudgies) being around in the summer. And as a kid, I always wondered, what was the big deal? Why did you people drive the 400, 800, 1200 miles from Tenessee, Georgia, Texas, Florida, Missouri, just to see our little patch of land? Little did I know how good I had it. For now, twenty years later, I find myself as an adult making the same trek, and loving it immensely. I guess you could say I have make the successful transformation from local to fudgie. Even more exciting is my indoctrination of Staz as well. With this last trip I think I've finally gotten her to stop thinking of my home state as, 'where HIS FAMILY is', and start thinking about it as a really cool, really beautiful, really unique place to go and spend time and appreciate some amazing natural beauty. Oh, and by the way, she said, 'Yes.' But I'll let her tell you more about that.