You're Doing It Wrong

I bought Shadow a Halloween costume. Every woman I mentioned this to said, “How cute.” Every man that heard about it said, “Poor dog.” I guess Shadow, who was once a he but now suffers the indignities of being an it, wasn’t excited about being Batman.

Halloween was uneventful at our house. I think the doorbell rang 10 times. Bob is the door answerer because he likes to do it and says dopey things like, “Ooh, what a scary ghost.” For some reason I hate doing this. Yeah, opening the door to strangers who knock and want something. I don’t like it. Especially around 8:00 there’s always a group of teenagers who aren’t remotely ashamed when you suggest that maybe they’re a little old for this.

I distinctly remember my last year trick-or-treating, which was probably 8th grade, and we got a lot of grief for being too old. I’m trying to come up with some epic Halloween tale from my youth but I’ve got nothing. My only remark is that the candy was bigger. For real, not some idealistic memory like “When I was a girl the weather was better and people were nicer and unicorns frolicked on the back lawn.” A mini candy bar was at least three good bites. Sweet tarts came with 4 nickel sized candies (possible exaggeration). Even the Tootsie rolls were bigger and I think there was more variety.

Okay, on the variety thing, I’m full of crap. I have no idea what kind of loot the kids are raking in. But from the person shopping for candy point of view: it all looks like chocolate to me.

In honor of NaBloPoMo, I’ve turned comments on. I think. I’m too lazy to read the directions and not sure how it works so I suspect I’ll get nothing but porn spam. But at least I’m trying. If you’re not a NaBloPoMo blogger you can also participate by leaving a comment a day.

You See Your Gypsy
Here’s what my Halloween costume looks like except without the bird. They told me I couldn’t bring a pigeon into the building. (That was the only bird I could find.) And my outfit looks different because I was afraid all that swirly stuff might slow me down when I’m running back and forth from the copy room. I’m Stevie on the inside.

Yesterday I had two panic attacks.

The first one had to do with our property taxes which are due today. I am brand new to online billpay and I paid this bill two weeks ago but the trusty Clark County treasurer’s office webpage where they tell you to check indicated that they were still waiting for the payment.

It took a couple of phone calls before I found help. The guy at Wells filled me in that generally they recommend that you not use online billpay to pay government agencies because if there’s a problem you’re stuck with their bureaucracy. When they say that they recommend this, apparently that means when there’s a potential problem, they’ll bring it up.

Then I went through the Clark County phone menu until I got a person who told me that my payment had cleared but it takes 3 days to update the website. How handy. So panic averted. Taxes paid.

The second panic session had to do when I tried to post here and blogger gave me an error message. I’m not a technical person but as I understood it, it thought my domain didn’t exist. I could access my page and email so I’m not sure what the problem was, but I had my panties all in a bunch because tomorrow starts NaBloPoMo and how was I going to do it if blogger thinks my domain doesn’t exist. Later in the day it worked, so hopefully this isn’t foreshadowing some new technological research project.

Three Things for Monday
1. Yesterday I saw XMen 3 on DVD and thought it was a major stinker. Possibly part of the problem could be watching it at home on little screen with interruptions. I saw 1 and 2 on big screen and thought both were great. This one was just another big dumb action movie with a particular fondness for tossing cars around or smushing them.

2. Everyone I’ve told this to has been fairly horrified: I don’t hate the new Justin Timberlake. I’m not going to run out and buy it or put it on my iPod or beg the DJ to play it over and over when I’m dancing on my barstool. I’m just saying when it comes on the radio, I don’t hate it. I listen to the whole song and even hum a few bars quietly to myself later on.

3. Did anyone else get this class action suit settlement against Verizon? It’s a bunch of tiny writing so I’m still not sure what it’s all about but what I do get is: Verizon will be punished by giving me $15 off when I add another year onto my contract. Wow, way to stick it to Verizon. That’s not the only choice. There are about 6 others. They have to give me $30 if I extend my contract 2 more years. Seriously, attorneys made money negotiating this settlement?

This Year’s Harvest
I was going to have a pumpkin picture with the special effects camera and then draw a picture of my pumpkin crop using my amazing Illustrator skills. But look, the camera worked fine. What do you think this means? Maybe the outdoor light makes it tweak? Maybe there was a hoozit loose and I bumped it back in? My guess is that it’s still broken and this is the anomaly.

Last night I got rid of a door-to-door salesman by whining. It’s not such a great story but the gist of it is, he was a nice guy and I didn’t want to be an ass but I really didn’t want to deal with him, especially at that moment because I had food on the stove. He did his script where no matter what I said, he had a response and he wanted to make an appointment and if I’ve learned anything in this life, it’s that if you put your name and phone number on a piece of paper, you will be tormented without mercy until the end of time. Don’t do it.

He kept doing his thing and I finally interrupted him with my whiniest whine and said, “I know you’re trying to do your job but I don’t want to deal with this.” He thanked me for hearing him out and left.

The power of WHINE.

I Catch Up With My Senses
I’m not going to do NaNoWriMo (the novel one). It would be too much and amount to a typing contest and I would make myself crazy because I’m just the kind of person to make myself crazy over some self-imposed radical discipline. I made this decision during my Illustrator class when I realized that I have only the faintest hint of a clue what’s going on and need to go back and review the homework and should be using my spare time to learn this program.

I felt so good about this decision that I celebrated by going to see The Prestige the first movie I’ve seen on big screen in months. It’s one of those movies that the less you know going in, the better, so I’m not going to say much except: I enjoyed it a great deal and would love to talk about it so if someone I know could go see it, that would be grand.

I’ve also decided that I’m going to buy a new camera and use the broken one as a special effects camera. The above was taken this afternoon as I pointed my camera straight into the shiny sky. I’ve done some very preliminary research and things aren’t set up so that one can purchase a camera based on the handful of memory cards plus card reader that one already owns. That’s my main criteria at this point. I’m looking for something on the low end because I like to carry it everywhere which means it bounces around in my purse and backpack and the car.

I’m not sure what my next step is. Maybe a trip to Costco. I can’t figure it all out right now.

Enforcement Overkill
One of my missions in life is to lead a campaign to end the high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane on I-5 northbound to Vancouver. I’m going to write more about this next month. (Can you believe Wikipedia has an I-5 entry?)

Last night, as I sat in the bumper to bumper scramble that occurs where people who need to be out of the HOV lane try to merge right while the people who want to be in the HOV lane very purposefully “ooh-look-at-me-with-two-people-in-my-car-everyone-out-of-my-way-so-I-can-get-over” try to merge left, I was trying to remember the last time I saw any police enforcement. At least one out of every five cars in the HOV lane has a single occupant zooming along at 60 MPH neener-neenering those of us following the rules and rolling along at lawn mower speeds.

A short moment later, I spot flashing red and blue lights. Someone was pulled over. And, oh look, another. And another.

THIRTEEN Cops between Alberta and Delta Park where the HOV ends.

Who Woke Up the Long Dormant Overachiever?
On Friday we have our first test in my Illustrator class. When I originally talked about taking the class, I asked Bob if I could take it pass/no pass. Maybe I’m high here but I seem to remember when I went to college, this was a choice you could make by checking a box on a form and getting your instructor to sign off on it. You could only use it in certain circumstances, such as when I realized I wasn’t going to make it as an engineering major and was never going to pass second quarter calculus. I converted my grading option to P/NP and my failure to understand whatever second quarter calculus is all about, did not tank my GPA.

This seemed the perfect option for the Illustrator class because I want to learn Illustrator and I’m confident I can pass the class by showing up and doing the homework. I don’t want to worry about it any more than that.

I guess there’s a failure to communicate or maybe I’m triggering Bob’s harried department-head personality but whenever I bring this up he gets this sort of vague look on his face and waves his arms around and makes it sound harder than a box on a form.

So now I’m taking this class for a grade and I have a test and I really don’t want to study for it. I keep saying, “I don’t care what kind of grade I get but I don’t want to do badly,” which sounds suspiciously like I care. And I do. But I don’t want to study. On the plus side, I was so busy procrastinating on studying that I got epic amounts of yardwork done this weekend.

Meanwhile, as you may already know, next month is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). You write a 50,000 word novel during the month. Of course I wouldn’t do that and decided to sign up for the much less punishing National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) where you write a post a day and no cheating with the dates. I figured I could do this and already have a list of about 12 post ideas to reach for when I get stuck.

I’ve been talking about writing another novel but haven’t gotten too far. I have a vague idea who and where and peripheral stuff but not a clear idea of what is going to be the thing that hangs the whole masterpiece together. When I wrote Little Friday before I wrote the first word I knew exactly where I was going to start and where was going to end up so at least I had a direction when I started to type.

Monday night as I drove home thinking about how badly I didn’t want to study for my test, I got the what. The whole thing started to flood my head. I came home and told Bob I couldn’t eat dinner right then because I had to scratch it all out while it was fresh in my mind.

So now I’m thinking, maybe I should just do this NaNoWriMo (the novel one) and go for it. It’s about 1600 words a day. I probably can’t do that every weekday, but if I wrote 1000 on weekdays and made the rest up on weekends … . But I already signed up for NaBloPoMo (the blog one) and I’m still taking the Illustrator class and the final project and another test are happening the first week of December. Thank God I didn’t sign up for that knitting class.

It’s not like they’re going to take my birthday away if I fail at any of the above. Or to stop me from writing my novel during the month of December, instead. But my inner schoolgirl wants to follow the rules and wants to do good.

I’m gonna think about it.

The Comcast Experience
On Friday I went to Comcast to swap out for a new DVR. It actually wasn’t that bad but I’m going to complain about it anyway.

First, the parking lot was obviously the prize winning entry in a challenge to build America’s stupidest parking lot. It didn’t win first prize because that honor went to the Bank of America on Hwy 99 in Hazel Dell across from Fred Meyer which only has 8 spots, all slightly smaller than any normal car and only one entry/exit so that there are 8 cars trying to get out and 8 cars trying to get in at the same time. It’s the Rubik’s Cube of parking lots.

At Comcast I missed the first spot where I was supposed to turn into the customer parking area and the second spot said DO NOT ENTER which meant that I had to drive all the way back around where the vans are and into what must have been the employee parking lot and then make an 150 point turn to get back out because it all dead ends right there.

Once I got myself parked, I went in and it was basically the DMV except smaller and with better technology. Way better technology. They spent big on the electronic signs and digital announcement to let you know it’s your turn and there was nothing left for the waiting area. There’s a gizmo where you get your ticket and you have to pick TV, Internet and I can’t remember what the third thing is, phone service? It prints you out a ticket and you can go sit down on the 4 padded cubes (they couldn’t even pony up for chairs with backs) which were all full so I had to stand there in the middle of the room holding my DVR.

Of course there was a giant flat screen TV cranking out CNN, strategically placed BEHIND the seats so that the only people who could conveniently watch were the joyless clerks who were a tad overqualified for the DMV so they got this job instead, and me standing in the middle of the room and hating all forms of televised news. (Except the Daily Show.)

I didn’t wait long and they got me set up and were polite to all the crazy customers who were demanding extra receipts and asking nutty questions such as holding up their modems and asking if it could be tested for how fast it worked. I guess under these circumstances, I’d be joyless too.

Now I’ve got my TV back.

Fall Colors?
Yesterday I went for a walk with my camera and this is what I ended up with. H’ep! (Although does look cool.)

Could we just go for 3 weeks without something breaking around here? I’m going to fiddle with it this afternoon. Maybe this is just a freak anomaly and the camera is just fine.

Last entry on the Potter adverb watch: sychophantically.

I finished the book this morning and the last 300 pages redeem the tome. Great set up for last book.

I thought I had more to report but I’m drawing a blank and don’t see any scraps of paper with hints around.

This is the last of my tomato crop, taken before the camera died, in case that wasn’t clear.

Camera Update: I tried swapping cards and jiggling the handle. Still looks kaput to me. Crap.

At last, a good night’s sleep last night. I feel 100% better.

The DVR gave up the ghost this week which means that I missed almost all my shows, which is fine. I like my shows but I get along fine without them. However, it’s amazing how dependent one can become on this kind of technology. I don’t even know when my shows are on or what channel. If I want some TV, I tune in to the DVR and see what’s waiting.

This afternoon after class I’m going to Comcast to swap out for a new box. I should be up and running in time for Battlestar Galactica tonight.

I’ve decided to take a 24 hour computer break this weekend. Between work and the Illustrator class, I think I ruined my neck. Or it could be this yoga pose that I did for the first time these past two weeks. Mine looks a lot more free style than this photo, which I borrowed without permission from Bill.

I’m going to do crafts tomorrow and organize my spice cupboard. See ya.