Ok, here it goes *big flourish*

the new journal is callipsofacto . Stop on by, have a look, take your shoes off (try not to get the new carpets dirty). Many of you will be getting emails soon about the gmail/aim accounts also. I'm going to keep this one around, in case I decide this was a terrible idea or I get nostalgic and go through old entries (unlikely, I've read them and I always end up thinking 'what a neurotic twit!' But I digress). Hope to see you there.

Yesterday, on a whim, I started gmail, lj, and okcupid accounts under a new user id. I don't have any particular reason to switch; I think I just like the idea of a fresh start.

Does anyone have compelling reasons why I shouldn't start using the new accounts? I'm undecided.

So I was forwarded a poem this morning. A lovely poem. I used to like it (from the New Yorker):

before you reconffigure

mount a scratch monkey.
A dogcow makes
a moof. An aliasing bug
can smash the stack.

Who writes these tunes,
these runes you need
black art to parse?
Don't think it's only

genius (flaming) humor (dry),
a briefcase of cerebral dust.
A hat's a shark fin, and the tilde's dash
is swung;the daughter of the programmer
but got her period.  It's about wetware at last,

and wetware lives in meatspace.

Heather McHugh


This was forwarded to a friend, who offered me the challenge of trying to translate this poem for the benefit of another friend. Now, not being a hacker or coder of any kind, I'm terribly unsuited to the task, but that didn't stop me from exercising my google-fu and making an effort. It took most of the day.

If the analysis seems unusually dumbed down, it's because the person I wrote this for is 69 years old, and until a few months ago his only exposure to the internet was WebTV.

Also, caveat: I know I don't know what I'm talking about. Feel free to add, subtract, and debate, but please don't get mad at me if I misunderstood something and come across as a complete idiot. Even though I spent about 5 hours on this, I almost didn't post it because I'm afraid I got it all wrong.

( that said, here's the dissection )

Hours from move in it takes for house to go from 'awesome toy' to 'pain in the ass': about 24.

We've got a block in the plumbing that has rendered both the bathtub and the toilet unusable. Peter's going to ask his dad to bring the snake over later today. Yay homeownership!

I am thankful P. took a few days off after move in to get stuff like this sorted out.

So this morning I woke up with the following song playing in my head (tune of "Nowhere Man" by the Beatles):

He's a real lawnmower man / Sitting in his lawnmower land / Making all his lawnmower plans / for... lawnmowers?

not sure what's that about.

The way Memorial Day weekend is panning out, it looks like that Saturday will be mostly family and neighbors, and Monday will be for friends. We'll just do an open house kinda thing, where we'll hang out all afternoon and people can pop in when they feel like it.

Movers show up Tuesday at 9am and I'm kinda freaking out about it. It's technically possible to get done what needs done by then, it just seems so... unlikely. Plus things look worse than they really are because the roommates aren't leaving, so large swaths of the house will still be unpacked when the time comes.

Oh, any advice about getting rid of large, broken furniture? We have a loveseat that's so messed up we can't give it away (tried Craigslist and Goodwill), and we don't have a truck. So I can either pay the movers to take it to a place where it can get picked up, have a friend with a truck take it to the dump and pay the dump to take it, or borrow a chainsaw and cut it into pieces small enough to fit into our garbage can. All of those options are annoying and/or expensive. Any other ideas?

We painted the house today. We got there before 8am, and I just got home. The living room is a greyish lavender, the bedroom is green, the office is bright red (with white wainscoting), and the bathroom is a deep gold. We didn't start on the kitchen yet, which will be the same green as the bedroom, and I only primed the front door, which will be dark brick red, along with the shutters. Pics when I get around to it.

In related news, my joints hurt like a motherfucker. I'm the most out of shape I've ever been (which is saying quite a bit for me), and getting up and down the stepladder to paint just broke me.

But it's worth it. I've never been able to paint my walls a color. When I was young we always lived in apartments, and my Dad's houses were always kept neutral for easy resale. So it's thrilling, in a slightly retarded way, just to sit in my house and take in the color on the walls.

I have a tentative date for our housewarming; I'm basically calling it all of memorial day weekend. Some people can make it Saturday and some on Monday; we'll take what we can get. If you can read this, you're invited. If you've got plans memorial day weekend, come see us some other time. We're not going anywhere for a while.

We have a wishlist, for those who are so inclined. I'm going to go collapse now.

But seriously, you should know about this: we don't have the whole story about piracy in Somalia.

Hey look, It's Prozac in musical form!

Howdy!

I'm feeling chipper today. I'm cautiously optimistic that things are moving forward on the house. For about a week, my mortgage broker was stalking me; she emailed or called me just about every day with a new piece of information required or a form that needed signed. Toward the end we were starting to worry we'd be asked to produce recommendation letters from our elementary school teachers, or our sequenced genomes for evaluation.

We signed the bulk of the mortgage paperwork on Monday, and bulk doesn't even begin to describe it. If you've signed a conventional mortgage, you know that it's a hefty waste of a tree. Now add another 50% or so to that because ours is an FHA loan. Now double that, because according to new laws, since Peter and I aren't married, the bank can't let us see one another's financial information, so we each had to sign independent mortgage agreements. We took turn massaging each other's cramped hands later.

Yesterday, hotarugirl  and I celebrated her birthday. We had lunch, briefly went antiquing, then checked into a nice hotel downtown and cuddled in luxury. We had dinner at a restaurant called Ri Ra's (there should be accent marks on the vowels, but I don't know how to make them). It was a nice Irish or faux-Irish pub, and the food was pretty good. Hotarugirl got birthday spankings, and we took advantage of their wacky shower stall setup that had four shower heads: One big 'rainshower' thing at the top, one regular large one, and two waist level-ish jet like ones. Happy birthday, sweetie!

Finally, I haven't commented on a news item in a long time, but I felt the need to point this one out. The Pope has been a real asshole lately. First, he upheld the excommunication of the parents and doctors of a 9 year old girl who had to abort her twin babies to save her life. What really gets my ire up is the reporting from both sources calling what was done to her 'alleged rape' (emphasis mine). When a 9 year old turns up pregnant, there's nothing alleged about it. I would permit a rephrase that indicates that the rapist is allegedly her stepfather, implying it could be someone else, but that little girl did not impregnate herself. *Takes a deep breath* Second, il Papa has drawn criticism for saying that the AIDS epidemic in Africa "cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which can even increase the problem." I'll save my blood pressure and assume you all instantly see how much harm that idiotic statement does.

In light of these recent decisions, I'm upping the Pope's evil status from 'menacingly stupid' to 'actively and single-mindedly visiting suffering on the helpless people most in need of a church's compassion and help.' He should be getting a commendation from Bad Horse any day now.