i almost got hit by a car three times on my way to work today.
the first two times were as a pedestrian crossing in the crosswalk with the light. the second time was as a person driving in the middle of three lanes at moderate speed when someone in the left lane decided to switch lanes — into the space i was already occupying. then, i got off lake shore drive and passed TWO smashups on the last mile to work, one of which was a three-car job! what the fuck, people! it’s not even a full moon! ATTENTION DRIVERS: YOU ARE OPERATING A MOBILE DEATH MACHINE. WATCH WHERE YOU’RE FUCKING GOING, ASSHOLES.i cannot count the number of people who have poked their heads in my office and remarked upon my choice of music today. nobody ever remarks when i’m listening to classical, or pop, or jazz, or dance, or hip-hop, or classic rock, or new wave, or any of the five thousand other genres i like to listen to. but thriller, apparently surprising. go figure.
- as transport for london might have said, last night there was an incident between my bread knife and my left hand. actually, it was more of a real falling out between friends. mostly, it’s Left Hand that’s holding a grudge, while Bread Knife is magnetically glued to the knife rack at home wondering what he did wrong. Left Hand, meanwhile bound up in gauze and tape (and i, still weighing relative merits of scarring vs. the hours-long wait in the UCH ER to get it looked at in case i need stitches), is not buying Bread Knife’s protestations. Left Hand is still in full snit, no matter how many times Bread Knife says he didn’t really mean it.
- while “last night i hurt myself to see if i still feel” is poetry enough for the lyricists, i can’t say that it applies so much to me. i clearly feel plenty. and while cutting my hand was bad enough, watching it bleed all over the damn place, such that it even dripped all over my hand and onto the floor was worse — and worse yet was the part when i finally had gotten the bleeding slowed enough to try and wrap it, and went to peel bandage tape off the roll… and got lightheaded, my vision darkened, my ears were rushing, i felt like i was having a hot flash, and i guess i felt like i was going to faint. that’s just plain embarassing. i’m tougher than that, dammit! i don’t faint at the sight of my own blood! (even if there was a quantifiable amount of it.) nonetheless, mental protestations at the ridiculousness of the situation did not help, so i had to lie down until it stopped. alas, i have no fainting couch, so i laid on the carpeted floor and stared at my ceiling sprinkler fixture. apparently, also, my ceiling was patched at some point in time, in a sort of 1.5×1.5 foot square shape. i wonder why? … nevertheless, did eventually recover enough to bind up my poor wounded hand. neosporin is totally my friend. Bread Knife is still in the doghouse, however.
- knitting-foo — i finished up my january blues scarf sunday night. it’s orange and white and everything else (a multicolored yarn worked double with orange or white yarn). it’s thiiiiick and fuzzzzzzy and warm and i even decided to put little fringies on the ends. i named it my january blues scarf because, despite the fact that it’s not actually blue, it’s bright and perky and will make me happy on days when the weather sucks. did i mention it’s THICK AND WOOLY? it’s totally going to stand up to those bitchy chicago winter winds. anyways, it’s not blocked yet (so i guess it’s not /technically/ done), but once i get it to that point i’ll try and post a picture.
- i also have a little black scarf i’m working on — my original plan was to finish it last night, and i did get most of the ways before the Incident, but it turns out to be kinda burdensome to knit with a big blob of gauze on your hand, so it is not finished. alas. nonetheless, it’s about 64 of 72 inches total, and i started it on sunday, i think, so i’m feeling pretty good about that. also it’s my first lacey thing, so that’s cool.
- as for other knitting WIPs, i still have my little backpack that i’m working on when i get around to it (i seem to mostly get to work on that one on game nights at
kaynorr‘s). plus i need to work on pirate dan’s third hat (the first two don’t count), and jayne hats for both the leader and bill. - speaking of jayne, serenity is an awesome movie and one of the best i’ve seen in a while and i’m totally going to see it again because that’s how much it rocks. oh, and you should go too. because it rocks. and because nathan fillion is a cutie pie.
- i made a quiche sunday. including pastry from scratch. julia child would have been proud of me (and richard simmons would have burned me in effigy), as since i don’t have shortening, i used all butter. so i figure that each slice of quiche has about a tablespoon of butter in it, but beyond that, since i used egg whites and broccoli and mushrooms, i don’t think it’s all that awful on the cholestrol and evil, evil fats front. besides, it’s tasty and delicious and that crust is way more awesome than anything from a store. plus, broccoli! we loves the broccoli! which is convenient since, as a single person living alone, a whole quiche is kinda leftoverriffic.
- so, as reminded by jss1113, today’s National Coming Out Day. this year’s theme is apparently “Talk About It.” apparently one of the items of note, and encouragement to “Talk About It” some more, is that only 3% of “out” survey respondants are out to their doctors. well, i don’t know if this is the case for everyone but i can’t say it’s ever really come up in conversation. it’s not so much that i think any of my physicians would care, it’s just that “my knee hurts and i wonder if i did something to it and oh by the way do you kiss girls because sometimes i do” never really feels like a natural conversation starter. — i’d bring it up with my shrink tomorrow, but he’s on vacation, that lucky thing. god, i want a vacation.
- am hatching a plan to cope with the loss of my DVD player. i can apparently use MacTheRipper to rip DVDs, stripping the region encoding, and possibly doing PAL to NTSC conversion as well (not exactly sure about the necessity of that). then i can recompress them to a new DVD or just watch them straight off the hard disk, thus not rendering completely useless all of my region 2 and 4 DVDs. this will serve well enough until i get off my ass and buy a new DVD player — which i think i’m going to try and put off until i get a new television, one which will have separate inputs so i won’t have to run the DVD through the VCR (thus requiring macrovision disablement just to use the damned thing, forget copyright infringement). someday, some way i’ll get a new television. probably not for over a year though.
- recent music purchases this month include: new Death Cab for Cutie; Madonna: I’m Breathless; Sufjan Stevens: Illinois; Various Artists, Motown 1s; The Jackson 5, The Ultimate Collection; and Michael Jackson’s “Ben” single and the remastered/special edition Thriller, of which all of the commentary tracks are about to get unchecked in iTunes. yeah, i’m on a detroit kick at the moment. but that’s about the end of it, as that’s a fair number of CDs to have bought this month. woe! however, i will note that i had at least one network engineer dancing in my office to the J5 today, so it’s totally worth it.
for the first time in not long enough, i’m contemplating having to write my own sendmail ruleset(s) to accomplish some fuckery i can’t figure out a way to force sendmail to do on its own.
last time i did this, it took me a summer and the only thing that got me through it was promising myself that at the end of it all i’d go out to a firing range and shoot the living shit out of my bat book. … there’s got to be a better way.
