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Archive for March, 2008

March 20th, 2008 4 comments

Spammers are getting tricky, I tell you! It wasn’t enough to send us emails from people who could TOTALLY be folks I know, like “Reginald M. Jabberwocky” and “Anthouse Maltextract, III”, and putting in totally enticing subject headers like “u r smal? get girth fastly!” Now they’re appealing to everyone with a guilt complex. Today I received the following email subject, from a kind lady named Emilia Rudolph:

Why are you not replying?

I felt ashamed. All she wanted was for me to write back and console her tender heart. Perhaps she had been the victim of some kind of malfeasance, like a Nigerian spam scam, and just needed someone to whom she could pour her soul. So, I opened the mail1:

Hello! I am bored tonight. I am nice girl that would like to chat with you. Email me
at Louise@BestGolova.com only, because I am using my friend’s email to write this.
Would you mind if I share some of my pictures with you?

Well, this sounded like an opportunity! If there’s anything in this world I love, it’s nice girls willing to share their photography portfolios with me. Perhaps she had some nice architectural shots, or even some nice still-lifes! So I began writing my reply:

Hi Louise! Superb to hear from you. What sort of pictures do you have? I’d love to see them! I work mostly in a digital format, because my amateur eye isn’t capable yet of spotting the really quality shots until it’s often too late. My DSLR makes it so easy to just hold the button down and wait for the beauty to happen! Write back soon!

But, just before I hit “send,” I thought to myself: hm. Using her friend’s email? That seems a tad…shady. Perhaps I am setting myself up to be a victim of malfeasance, or VOM! That would be unacceptable. I do have a family to think of, after all. Damn you, Emilia/Louise, and your tantalizing offers of photography discourse! DAMN YOU TO HELL!

On a completely unrelated note, what the heck, Weather? Isn’t today an Equinox, aka One of Two Of The Mediumest-length Days Of The Year? Make with the springtime, Mother Earth! It’s like 45 degrees outside, and windy as all get-out! Unacceptable. Looking at the 10 Day Forecast for New Castle, it looks like we’re barely even getting out of the 50s by April. I can’t speak for anybody but myself (and possibly my cats, who defer to me as I am the Supreme Lord and Governor of Hearn House and they are my subjects), but after the tepid, nearly snow-free winter we’ve had, I’m ready for some warm weather, shorts, and slightly translucent beach shirts. (I like to make sure as many people as possible are aware of the tragedy that is my nude torso.) In short: it’s cold, and quit it. The end.

Oh, and happy End of Lent, for those of you who celebrate such things. I’ll be at church tonight and most of the weekend, doing my utmost to stave off damnation. Hope you manage the same!


Footnote 1: I open all my mail in a PHP web browser, not some stupid product like Outlook, so I’m not terribly concerned about viruses and malware and all that good stuff. Worry not: I know what I am doing.

Categories: musings, wtf Tags:

March 17th, 2008 No comments

Who’s the king of unfulfilled promises? (Points to self) This guy!!! Here is the batch of Charles pictures I promised would be up on Friday. Forgive me; I know not how stupid I am.

Categories: charles Tags:

March 13th, 2008 No comments

Go see “In The Heights” on Broadway, as it is totally rad. Don’t believe me? Here’s what the NY Times had to say on the subject. I think they’re pretty much spot-on, which means I agree with the Times on something, a scary thought. The music and dancing are FANTASTIC (the pit orchestra is particularly good), the dialogue reasonably funny, the plot sort of predictable and disjointed, but it’s Musical Theater, not an Albee play.

It doesn’t hurt that our friend Shaun is in it, primarily as a chorus member but also an understudy for two of the leads. So go see it.

We drove up last Saturday, a day those of you on the Eastern Seaboard was mostly one long torrential downpour. The drive was stressful. Two hours of driving at 60mph on horrible New Jersey roads, not being able to see more than about 100 feet in front of the car. Seriously, NJ, is there any reason why your roads have to be bumpier than my face? The Jersey Turnpike is one long rumble strip. It was particularly nice when the wind would blow from right to left, and I’d steer to the right to keep in my lane, and watch in wonder as the car continued to drift to the left because the front wheels had started hydroplaning. I’d lift off the gas, the wheels would stick, and the car would jerk to the right. One poor soul almost spun his Jetta in front of me, would would have resulted in Death and Dismemberment for all concerned.

We finally arrived in Manhattan, parked at a reasonably non-shady parking garage near Times Square, and walked the half-block to the DoubleTree Suites. My parents were up for the weekend as well and had already checked in, so we just grabbed a room key from the desk and headed up. Thank SGLBJ for high-speed elevators, says I, because we were on the 29th floor. The view was fantastic, and I had my camera, so it’s a surprising oversight of mine that I didn’t take a single picture of anything all weekend. Sorry about that.

I plopped myself in a chair to try and bleed off some stress, while Sarah mixed me a tasty intoxicating beverage from the stash we’d brought with us (because if you’re going to open the minibar at a hotel anywhere in the world, and triply so in New York, you may as well just start wiping your ass with twenties). After we changed clothes and relaxed a bit, we headed out to meet our friends for dinner at “El Deportivo,” which sounds like some kind of place the INS takes detainees for a last meal before shipping them back to Nicaragua. We ordered drinks, met up with our friends, and then I left.

I had to work, you see. Some application guys had scheduled a major upgrade for the weekend, and needed someone to run a backup of their system first, and I was the guy. I’m always the guy. Remember when I said I’d been working too hard? Yeah, having to interrupt drinking and fun to go do work is not good times. Luckily, it went superfast, so I ran back out to meet up with the family and friends at a bar near the Richard Rodgers theatre named “House of Brews,” which had cask ale. This is not something one normally finds in America, so I had one, and it was fantastic. Man…English beer. Good stuff.

The theatre was pretty bumpin’, a good crowd for the last preview show before Opening Night (which was on Sunday). We had pretty decent seats, on the lower level, good view of the stage. My knees were pressed hard into the back of the seat in front of me, which kinda sucked for the guy sitting therein, because I have a tendency to start pretending to play the drums when I hear funky latin beats, and my bass-drum leg was making that poor fellow’s seat bounce up and down like Carmen Electra on a trampoline. He almost turned around to say something and I realized and stopped, but it was an effort to remain reasonably still for the remainder of the performance.

Luckily, it was captivating. Like I said, a little predictable, but who cares about that. I know how “No Country For Old Men” ends (I read the book), but I’m still beyond stoked to see the movie. “In The Heights” is the kind of show that I almost hope doesn’t have too long a run, because it’d be nice to have MTI or Tams-Witmark get hold of it so I could do it at Brandywine High in a few years, although we’d have to have one HELL of a pit band to pull it off. It’s just fun from beginning to end. And the guy that wrote it, and stars in it, is all of 28. Speaking as someone who is slightly older than 28: I hate him. Go see the show.

After the show, we met Shaun at the stage door, and he was able to take us inside and show us the set, which was ridiculously detailed. One of the leads had brought in a high school portrait of herself which they hung in the shop owned by her character’s parents. There was an ATM with graffiti on it (it appeared to have signatures of the cast and/or crew all over it in bright neon colors). The sidewalk upstage had GUM STAINS ON IT. These are the kind of details you can do, I guess, when you have months to construct a set. (My favorite set of all time, although I’m hardly an expert on such things, was the one they had for “Sunset Boulevard” where a house descended from the rafters. Not a small house, either, but the entire downstairs interior of a Hollywood mansion, covering almost the entire stage, simply dropped into place, with Glenn Close walking around on it as they did so.)

Sarah and I took the opportunity to bust a few moves on the stage, so we can now say (and in fact have been telling everyone we know) that we have Danced On Broadway.

Afterwards, Shaun took us to a club named either “W” or “The Whiskey,” I’m not entirely sure which. The confusion stemmed from the fact that it was all basically one club, but with two completely separate environments: a 7th floor lounge, where we stood around for a while and were bored, and a basement dance club, where we found ourselves around midnight and simply threw down the moves for upwards of 90 minutes. I awoke on Sunday with crippling thigh pain because of my unstoppableness on the dance floor. Eventually, we tired, and some folks had to take trains and cars to get back to their normal lives, but the rest of us headed to a pizza place, where I ate half a pie and part of another to soak up the staggering amount of gin I’d taken in by that point. Eventually, Sarah and I made it back to the hotel, where we crashed hard on the pull-out bed.

The next day, we managed to actually get up, get breakfast, and get on the road shortly after noon, and aside from an incident where I did something stupid in the Lincoln Tunnel and almost caused an accident, made it back to Delaware safe and sound. Whoo. The next day, I went back to work, and nearly wept at my desk.

Tomorrow: the final installment of pictures of Charles from like 2 months ago. I’ll have to take some more; he’s probably grown an inch since then.

Categories: dear diary Tags:

March 11th, 2008 No comments

Okay, so here is what has been going on, and it is crazy.

We have a new customer at work, about whom I can basically say nothing, except that

  1. it’s actually a pretty cool client to work with, and
  2. contractual obligations have required us to have things in place on an INSANE timetable.

So, in short, I’ve been working ridiculously hard, something that is anathema to my very soul. This has left little time for sleep, not least because the stress prevents me from sleeping very well, and when coupled with the spring high school show we’re doing again this year (Wizard of Oz, April 10th,11th,12th, be there or be crushed by a flying house) and the supposedly-only-21-months-old-but-the-size-of-a-3-year-old toddler that’s destroying my house, I end up doing things like writing 89-word run-on sentences with multiple nested parenthetical asides (like this one (and this one)).

Luckily, things at work have slowed JUST a teense (although I still have some stuff ramping up that I’m hoping to get ahead of before it gets too insane), just in time of course for the musical to get super busy. Extra-luckily, we learned from our mistake with last year’s show (doing it in mid-March after only about 2 months of rehearsals, many of which got snowed out) and are doing it almost a full month later this year, plus not many rehearsals got snowed out, so we’re in good shape. Of course, we have to deal with spring break in the middle of rehearsals, because Easter is about as early as it can possibly be, but that’s a small price to pay for, say, not opening this weekend, which would have me cutting my legs like emo girl.

Plus, I found a little time to start working on a novel. Yes, I’m writing a novel! As you might expect, it’s pretty bad! Like, almost painful. But I’ve decided that dammit, I’m gonna finish it, even if it’s just a practice one. If it turns out to be not a complete embarrassment, I might share it with you. If after about 17 drafts it actually ends up being half-decent, I might send it around to some publishers, as soon as I figure out how to do that. This is not likely, however, as so far the only redeeming quality seems to be that some of my fishing reel trivia is correct.

See? I told you. BAD.

Later this week, you’ll have one more righteous picture update from Charles, and I might actually take a break from going insane to tell you all about going to see “In The Heights” on Broadway last week. Hint: I HAVE DANCED ON THE BROADWAY STAGE!

Categories: dear diary, wtf Tags:

March 7th, 2008 No comments

Charles has been busy, again. Woo!

Categories: charles Tags: