My popularity is without end, apparently. My comrade-in-arms Tim, husband of Jenny, last year’s Illustrious CostarTM, sent me an email the other day to alert me to my presence in the phonebook.

Of course I’m in the phone book, I replied. Most folks are listed in the whitepages, with the exception of people like my parents, who wish to remain unlisted and below the radar so the government doesn’t find out about their basement meth lab.

Did I say meth lab? I meant free puppy counseling center. That’s it.

Tim says, no dude, you need to check out page 8. So I checked out page 8. Here it is, in all its glory, along with page 9:

(You can click it and see it even bigger!)

It may be a little hard to tell, so here’s the detail:

(Again, click it for the SUPER closeup.)

Yesh, that’s me and Jenny. In the Verizon phonebook for New Castle County, Delaware.

Big ups to the Brandywiners for being brave enough to use a picture of my scary self as an advertisement. Whoof. (My face makes baby Jesus cry.)

Okay, if you can read this, I think the migration from omnis.com to sjtech.net went as planned. I’m still fixing a few issues here and there, but things went remarkably well considering I realized on 6/4 that my current hosting contract would be expiring on 6/9. Muchas gracias to Other Matt for his help setting me up.

Now I have to start getting pictures edited and uploaded, so expect to see them later this week. Hopefully today I can get most of the pictures from the Dover races edited, and ready to post tomorrow, and then by the end of the week I can put up the pictures from Craig and Mel’s wedding, at which there was much revelry, and at which I got to do a lengthy James Brown impression.

As it turns out, I am freakin’ sweet.

I’d just like to take this space to publicly thank my wife for not being very picky about the toilet seat. Partially this is because I leave the whole seat and cover down (I read that every time you flush an open toilet you’re spraying fecal matter into the air, and I keep my toothbrush a mere 4 feet from the bowl), but even when I was a little less Obsessive-Compulsive, she was pretty chill about the whole thing.

Which, from what I’ve seen, is not the norm. When I was in college I had a friend named Emily who was downright militant about the whole thing. She and her roommates left a little sign on the toilet, the exact verbiage of which I don’t quite recall, but the gist of which was that people who stand up to pee are evil, and if we don’t put the seat back down we can expect to be admonished. I was usually in full compliance, but once I forgot, and Emily nearly kicked me out of the house. She was screaming at me like I’d taken a dump in her shampoo bottle or peed in the soy milk or something. I was totally blown away. (This was clearly a larger issue for her and her roommates than things that I would have considered far more pressing, such as the fact that their bathtub never truly drained, so if you wished to shower, you had to stand ankle deep in murky water, portions of which were up to a week old. Just nasty.)

After that escapade, I got around the issue by just leaving the toilet seat down when I peed. I didn’t TRY to get any on the seat, but accidents do happen, you know.

Even my mother gets into the act a bit. She’s an extremely rational person, so she justifies her attitude on the matter in this way:

1. When women use the toilet, the seat will always be down.
2. When men use the toilet, half the time the seat will be down, and half the time the seat will be up.
3. Ergo, the toilet seat is down for 75% of all toilet-related functions.
4. Thusly, it makes more sense to just leave it down except in the 25% of uses, and then immediately it should be put back down.

I guess I can understand her reasoning, except for a few problems:

1. Everyone pees more frequently than they “drop the chalupa.” At least, most folks do, I think. If you poop every time you pee, you should see a doctor. Particularly if it’s some kind of thin gruel-ish substance.
2. By their own admission, girls do not poop at all.
3. I pee about twice as often as everyone else.

By my calculations, if I poop once a day, and a girl pees 4 times a day, and I pee 8-9 times a day (which is my norm), then the toilet seat has been down roughly half the times it’s been used. Just a thought.

However, all of this discussion is sadly just tapdancing around the true fact that I want to get across, which is this: any time a woman comes out of the bathroom, ranting and screaming about you always leaving the toilet seat up, it may sound like she’s saying this:

“Thanks for leaving the seat up again, you jerk! Why won’t you ever learn?”

But in reality, she is saying this:

“I am too stupid to remember to check and see if the seat is down before I plop my ass on the john!”

And the fact that my wife doesn’t do this indicates that she is one of the smart ones. Even if she can’t read.

Er, won’t read. Won’t. Not can’t. She can definitely read. I think.

Last night I dreamt about James Lileks, but I want to make it clear that in my dream, I did not attempt to sex him up. That is an important point that needs to be clearly enunciated. I DID NOT ATTEMPT RELATIONS WITH JAMES LILEKS. AND EVEN IF I DID, HE TURNED ME DOWN. That is, assuming I had attempted to get with him, WHICH I DID NOT DO.

Anyway. So I guess because he’s so awesome, which he is, in my dream I decided I’d like to give him a gift.

Personally.

So I wrapped something (I don’t remember what, exactly), and flew out to Minneapolis, and knocked on his door. No answer for a minute, and then oddly enough my cellphone rings, and it’s James. Huh? I don’t know. Anyway, he asks me what’s up, and I say, “Hi bud, I’m just here to give you a present ’cause you’re rad,” or something to that effect. So he comes down and lets me in.

Just then I realize that I no longer have his present. All I have is one of his books, unwrapped, which would be a strange thing to give him, as one would suspect he probably already had a copy lying around somewhere. Then he informs me that the package I sent him arrived yesterday, and sure enough, there’s my wrapped present, sitting on his kitchen table. To sum up:

1. I flew to Minneapolis to give Lileks a gift that apparently I had already shipped to his home.
2. He thought nothing wrong with this, and had even waited until I showed up to open the package.

The package was about the size of a recipe box, and yet it contained a large wall calendar. A used one. I have no idea what else was in the box, but apparently as a whole, the present was satisfactory, because James and I decided it would be fun to go out for a ride and smoke small cigars. At a gas station. With my parents.

Huh? What in the brightly-colored horse apples?

Then, we decided it would be fun to go to some hotel bar, where we met up with Sean Patrick Thomas (A Delaware native, I’ll have you know!) and his posse, where I did a bit of dancing, and made Sean angry at me for calling him “B,” which apparently in my bizarre dream world is akin to using the “N” word. I apologized profusely.

After the party died down, James took me upstairs into some kind of hotel ballroom, where they were going to have a Doom3 demonstration on a large screen. At this point, I woke up and said very mean things to my wife. I DON’T KNOW WHY. I WAS HALF-ASLEEP. I MAY ALSO HAVE KICKED A CAT IN THE RIBS.

My wakeful life feels so empty now.

Wednesday I was supposed to have a doctor’s appointment, and thank God they cancelled it due to retarded receptionists overbooking the poor MD. It meant HW and I got a chance to rest at home a bit before our usual Wednesday evening rehearsal, and the added fun bonus is that we detected Pete’s issue before he got too sick.

I was sitting playing a video game, motionless but for my thumbs, unblinking and drooling, when I hear a caterwauling from downstairs that rouses me from my reverie. There’s yowling and hissing and spitting, so I figure Pete and Veronichort are having a triple-X throwdown of some kind, and yell at them to cut it out. The unseen violence stops, and I go back to playing GTA: San Andreas, in which I believe I have killed 274 peace officers.

After a few minutes, the feline yelling began yet again, but this time Pete had come upstairs. I turned around to see what his problem was, and he was lying on one haunch, his legs splayed out, with his little thorny cat wang pointing at me and waving. He was alternating screaming at the top of his lungs with periodically reaching down to gnaw on his junk, and anytime any of the other cats went near him he hissed at them. (As a result, of course, the other three cats wouldn’t leave him alone, and kept wandering over to see what the big deal was.)

So I went over and took a look at his “area,” (©2002 Liz Hearn) and noticed that there was a small amount of dark yellow goo leaking out of it. This did not seem healthy, so I called our vet friend Tolly, who said, “Better get him to a hospital right away, he might be blocked up.”

So we called Pike Creek Animal Hospital, and they said they could take him, so we stuffed him in a carrier (he doesn’t like those; I’m still bleeding in a few places) and drove him over. The technician weighed him (almost 15 pounds. He’s a monstrous animal), and took his temperature (rectally. He was absolutely THRILLED with this turn of events, but at least the temperature was normal). Then the vet came in and laid hands on him, pressing on the poor guy’s belly to try and squeeze out some pee. She got a drop or two, but not much, and she said, “He’s blocked. I’m gonna have to unblock him.”

I winced a bit at this.

“Hopefully it’s just at the tip, in which case I won’t have to use anesthetic.”

My first thought was, if anybody ever tries to “unblock” my junk without completely knocking me unconscious and supplying me with a minimum of 1000 grams of uncut heroin for my recovery period, I will plunge a scalpel into their taint, but I remained silent.

“If it’s deeper,” [big wince] “I’ll have to knock him out.”

Lovely. The technician brought us a form to sign (I honestly haven’t the least clue what it says), and then picked him up, and he did his usual death-defyingly cute move of just flopping into her arms and resting his head on her shoulder. It was so pathetic, we almost got choked up.

Yesterday afternoon I called to check on him, and he still hadn’t peed yet, so they wanted to keep him for more observation. Apparently he would sit in the litter box and just stare at the technician. I can’t say I blame him though, since I would imagine trying to pee through his ravaged manmeat would be just about the worst pain of all times. So hopefully we’ll hear from the vet this afternoon and we can go pick him up.

Everybody pray for the health of the wang of Pete, aka His Holiness Pope Peter II, aka Kreplach, aka Krepiss, aka Furdiß, aka Dog.