She answered, they’re out of Forever stamps, until Tuesday, and looked at me like she was kind of expecting me to get mad. But I just said, okay, well, do you have any regular first class stamps? (Seriously, it’s stamps, who gets mad over stamps?) So she got out the stamp varieties and held them out for me to pick one. I picked out the Black Heritage ones. She immediately perked up and became totally enthusiastic.

The stamp I chose features Anna Julia Cooper, who was an educator, activist, and the fourth black woman in American history to earn a Ph.D, from the Sorbonne, no less. She asked if I’ve got a passport, and when I said yeah, she said that she’s got a quote in there, and I promised to go look for it. She was telling me how they get to learn about all kinds of history, every time the Post Office puts out a new stamp, and how much fun it was. And she was just so enthusiastic, telling me all this stuff about this historical figure that I’d never heard of. It was, like, Instant Happy Postal Worker, just add stamps. It kind of made my day too, actually.

The passport quote is: The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class – it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.

So now I have a story, I have learned something new, and I have stamps. Pretty awesome, huh?

i went to petsmart right after work and came home to clean some stuff up before the Apartment Weenies came to do a showing (5 hours notice! — which was enough to get an OK from me to show the place; however, the guy who tried to give me 30 minutes notice at 3PM went away disappointed and, i think, not entirely prepared to be rejected since when i said “i’d prefer not until after 6″ he was silent for a good ten seconds before he recovered), and plugged it in then before leaving. when i got home later after meeting d. for dinner, both cats were utterly chilled out. kiyoshi hasn’t been in the computer room *once* in 20 minutes to howl at me. he hasn’t bothered me. he’s hanging out lying on the living room floor. tiger’s napping with his chin on my foot.

THIS MAGIC KITTY PHEROMONE CALMER-DOWNER THINGIE IS THE BEST THINGIE EVER, OMG. that $35 (plus tax) was so worth it! i love you, magic kitty tranq!

so i got my Digital TV converter box coupons in the mail yesterday — the two $40 coupons to use to buy a box to convert ATSC (digital over-the-air antenna) signals into NTSC (analogue ota signal, what all equipment used prior to this whole pesky digital revolution thingie). then i started googling looking for reviews and advice for using them with my tivos. i thought it would be as simple as using my tivos’ external IR blasters (faux remote controls; they let the tivo change the channel on the converter box, so the tivo can still change the channel on cable boxes and stuff without manual intervention, v. important for recording shows when you are not actually watching tv, which i am generally not doing while it records them). and then i checked the tivo community forums and discovered that tivo hasn’t even decided yet if they’re going to support the converter boxes — which is important, because tivo has to add support for the spectrum of digital channels (which have weird numbers, like 5.5 instead of 5), in addition to adding drivers to support using the IR blaster to understand which remote controls it’s supposed to be emulating per converter device. to boot, i could find precious few reviews at all for the converter boxes — in fact, only one, and that because it was the only one i could find on amazon.

well, fuck.

yes, this is very early on into the process, and no doubt things will become clearer later in the year, as we progress to the february 2009 deadline for conversion to ATSC. however, i do not want to spend 1000 hours tied up in quibbling over which gadget i want best. i pretty much just want to get it dealt with and move on with my life. so i thought about it, and thought about adding more boxes and more clutter, plus wires of IR blasters for two boxes, plus new HD antennas to replace my beloved rabbit ears, plus oy what a pain in my ass this is… and decided fuck it, i’m just going to buy a new tivo with an ATSC tuner.

now, i’m an existing tivo customer. i love my tivo. my tivos love me. i have two — i had one series2 DVR, which is about 5 years old or so. about 3 or 4 years ago it lost the ability to output sound: it would record just fine, but no sound ever comes out of the box. i was totally broke, but i found identical tivos at target for $99 and bought one, and i just use the second one for recording, then transfer the shows over the wireless to the first one when i want to watch them. it works out fine, for the most part. i pay $20/mo for the two service plans, which is not too bad, especially when you consider the fact that tivo is the thing that makes tv worth watching. (I LOVE TIVO! TIVO RULES, VCRS DROOL!) so anyways, i decided that since i cannot possibly be the only tivo customer in this situation i should call them up and see if they have any special retention or other offers for existing customers to buy new ATSC equipment.

my first call got disconnected when the customer service agent was mid-sentence. (probably not her fault, the line just went dead and about 20 seconds later it started beeping the beep of disconnecty death.) my second call got me to Regina, the Agent of Cluelessness. i explained that i was an existing customer, i wanted to replace my two series2 tivos with a single new dual-tuner ATSC-capable box (in fact, after browsing the boxes on the tivo web site, i had my eye on a TiVO HD DVR already), and what could she do for me?

she explained that there was in fact nothing she could do for me. she said there were no dual-tuner over-the-air capable boxes. i brought up the HD DVR and she said it could only do cable. ohhhh-kaay then. so i said, okay, well, i’ll just order from the web site then, thanks. i went back to the web site and dropped a TiVO HD DVR into my shopping cart, and was then confronted by its request that i choose a service plan, all of which were discounted because i have a multiple-tivo discount. but then, if i bought it with a multiple-tivo discount, and got rid of the other tivos, what would happen to the cost? i decided to call back. i got regina again, who obviously didn’t recognize me (how many ATSC dual-tuner-wanting existing customers wanting to upgrade do you get in a 20-minute time span, Regina?), and she said that in order to deal with the service plan issue, i should go to a store, because tivo only sells direct with service plans bundled, but if i get a tivo at a store i have to activate it separately, and i can deal with the two-into-one issue then. well okay then! if you guys don’t want to sell me a tivo, i can take a hint…

so i started googling around and found the HD DVR at amazon for $250, $50 off tivo.com’s price anyways. woo! and it was amazon prime, so free two day shipping, yay for me. i placed my order, threw in a shiny new HD antenna (bye bye rabbit ears, i’ll miss you. i probably won’t miss your shitty CBS2 reception with the vertical roll, though.), and a copy of the Twin Peaks DVD box set just to celebrate. (hey, i hadn’t spent any of my $2700 tax refund, cut me a break. i can have a $72 DVD set if i want!) i went to bed with the order in pre-processing, satisfied that by friday all this digital conversion bullshit could pretty much idly pass me by.

so after a couple hours’ drama yesterday, this morning i get up at oh-god-thirty in the morning, and check my rss reader, and what is today’s woot? a (refurbished) TiVO HD DVR, for $179 (plus five bucks for shipping)! i shit you not. i clicked “i want one!” and ordered, planning to cancel the amazon order. well, i checked on it and it’s pre-shipping so they won’t let me cancel it; i’ll have to do a return. so at the moment i’ve spent (on visa) $435 on my shiny new tivo, but at least $250 will be refunded probably next week, if i turn the amazon one around promptly. the woot tivo will ship in 5 days, with probably another couple days to arrive — my amazon tivo is supposed to arrive on friday — but, srsly. $185 instead $300?

go, go gadget coincidence!

but the hidden gem in the episode was an excerpt from a short by Rookie TV, called Meatshake:

don’t you have a protest to get to, hippie?!?

now, as you may or may not recall, in early 2004, i was busily looking for a new apartment, signing papers for one, finding money to pay for the move, packing, and, finally, moving. i in fact moved in april of 2004. i filed my taxes electronically on the morning of april 15 — i recall, because i had insomnia that night, so i gave up on sleep at around 2AM, then got up and did my taxes. (really, you’d think the taxes would have put me back to sleep, but nooooo.) it actually worked out to my benefit, because of course the evening of april 15, everyone’s servers exploded due to those who procrastinated ever so slightly more than i. (not that i hadn’t planned to do my taxes that evening. it was just that, with the insomnia and all, i had nothing better to do than my taxes.) after that, the tax information got packed — i remembered very distinctly putting it someplace specific so that i wouldn’t lose it, in case i needed it. it is to this day a mystery why i didn’t leave it with all my other goddamn files of back tax years.

i never did find that goddamn folder, and wouldn’t you know it, that’s the one year i ever had an issue with my taxes?

fast forward a couple of years, and the irs is getting ever more cranky about this strange gap in my taxpaying history, and i cannot find that file. i mean, it’s the file folder with everything — W2s, 1099s, mortgage interest statements, donation receipts, everything. it’s the file. and i have no clue, none — for years running, i have no idea! — what i did with it, despite having made a point to put it some place i wouldn’t lose it. in the end, i started running down the list of everybody i can remember, trying to get duplicate papers for everything — which is a pain in the ass, because you try remembering everyone you might have done tax-related business with five years ago. in the end, i actually stooped to calling the irs (which, honestly, should probably have been step #1, but since i am Denial Girl, step #1 was, well, denial), and the nice lady said “oh, do you still have a copy of your 1040? just send it to us, don’t worry about the rest — everybody sends us your W2 and 1099s anyways.” and since i had filed electronically and had saved myself a PDF — like i always do — i did in fact still have my 1040 (and nothing else).

so i mailed it in, and now, three months later, i’m all good. denial is really, i must admit, an ineffectual approach to this sort of situation. oh well.

but now we come to the life lesson part of the story.

you ever have something in your house that you know what’s in it, you don’t have to look? i mean, you’re quite sure what’s in it, and you don’t have to deal with that (nor do you want to), so you’re not even going to open it?

so i was cleaning my office this afternoon, because frankly it was a fucking mess, and it got so bad i couldn’t stand it anymore (chiefly driven by my attempt to start cleaning yesterday afternoon, which in fact resulted in increased mess), so i went through every bit of paper i had been piling up for a rainy day, shredded everything that looked interesting, pitched every single envelope, sorted the rest, pitched a bunch more crap i didn’t care about, shredded some more stuff, generated a huge trash bag of ripped-open envelopes and the stupid inserts they put in your electric bill and another huge bag full of shredded goodness, and as i was transferring some files from my filing cabinet into a filing box i’d newly emptied of piled-up old mail i didn’t care about in 2006 and sure-hell didn’t care about now, i noticed a banker’s envelope leaning against my bookshelf. now, this envelope was full of correspondance, from a while ago — i’d briefly enjoyed some cross-Atlantic penpal chatter after having been bored one day and putting a penpal ad in SFX magazine, which to this day remains the one and only magazine to which i have ever subscribed which enjoys the privilege of my actually reading every single issue as soon as it arrived, though i digress — and we’d all long since quit writing. by ‘long since,’ i mean, since i lived in hyde park. where i moved out of in early 2004. i thought to myself, well, i’m throwing shit out, i might as well dump that shit. so i unwrapped the closure on the folder, and sure enough, piles of letters and unused airmail envelopes inside, … along with a bright red hanging file folder.

i always store all my tax files in bright red hanging file folders.

yes kids, after four long years of searching, in two different apartments, and after having finally gotten the goddamn mess figured out with the IRS, i have finally got my 2003 tax folder back.

…

and that is why you should always obey the two year rule, because if you don’t, you assume you know what it is that you’re ignoring, but since you’ve ignored it for years now, you’re wrong, and man, doesn’t that make you feel like a damnfool idiot?

but now, if you’ll excuse me, i have to vacuum and try to forget what a damnfool idiot i am.

One of our pigeons laid an egg on the windowsill outside our office. I wish it wasn’t quite so close to the edge…

Inside the towel-dispenser in the second-floor ladies in the Truman College tech building — where most towel dispensers would have a trash bin — there is a small, shallow tray with this green-dyed sawdust stuff. I cannot figure out what on earth it would be there for. Even if it wasn’t a completely non-smoking building, you can’t use sawdust for ashtray filler. But why would you have a tray of small particulate matter in the bathroom? Especially a tray that’s not even deep enough to hide anything in. This is truly a mystery.

The microwave is angry.

“Redeems you in his eyes and takes the edge off sinning.”

dude. I WANT ONE!

(even if i do have the daleks from the new series shrieking “BLAS-PHE-MY! BLAS-PHE-MY!” in my head, now. i’m still flat on my ass with laughter. i am so going to hell.)