That’s what Alissa said, and she should know. Oh, fine, she was talking about the can I painted today in Painter, my first endeavor with both the tablet and the program itself.

It’s rough, yes, but I don’t really have any idea what I’m doing, so I think it came out pretty okay for a first time. And, no, the cast shadows aren’t quite right, but it’s also unfinished. It’ll have to remain that way for the time being.

I’d write more, but, honestly, Lost is pretty much all tonight is about. I have to get all of my duties done early so we can watch it uninterrupted.

I’ve got my brand new Wacom Intuos tablet sitting by my side as I write this. I installed it a couple hours ago and got to play around with it for a bit, then let the mind-blowingness of it settle in while we watched tonight’s installment of “make fun of huge egos/the misguided,” AKA American Idol. Don’t worry - last year’s experiment in which I actually watched the whole damned season will not be repeated. It wasn’t torture. No, it was something worse, in a way. It was a sort of silent, meaningless soul-sucking loss of time. This, for a handful of nights, is at least entertaining. And then it’s over.

Anyway, as I expected, I got nothing of any value done, but I did find that it was much easier to pick up than I expected. In fact, it’s addictive. Far more rewarding to use than a mouse. It is exactly the must-have for designers and artists that everyone says it is. I’ll hopefully have something productive done after a day playing with it tomorrow. Maybe I’ll even be brave enough to reveal it here . . .

I canceled an upcoming CD I had preordered at Amazon just a bit ago. They make you tell them why you don’t want it. I filled out the box with the words “I NO WANT.”

I may start preordering things just to cancel and send them weird things. Maybe I’ll write a serialized short story via text box. I did that with the yearbook in high school one year. If you could somehow get all of the yearbooks that I signed together, you’d have a very odd story spanning many yearbooks. Well, okay, a handful of yearbooks. But it was an odd story.

But, hey, it’s better than the stupid song lyrics the one dumbass left me one year. I’ll never understand what possessed him to write that, of all things. This is the same kid who bought a remote control car that I had built, then came back hours later crying that he wanted his money back, HAD TO have this money back, and that his dad was going to beat him or some such nonsense. Well, maybe he was going to beat him, I don’t know. I know I wanted to. I know he was faking - no actual tears but plenty of “sobbing” going on. All sales are final! I think he wanted his money back to buy drugs. His act worked. My parents made me give him his damned money back. And then that little shit goes and writes that stupid song in my yearbook. Permanent record, man. And in my yearbook. He got no story in his yearbook.

A couple weeks back, after I got my new earphones, I considered selling the lower-end models of the same brand that I have, but I never did anything about it. This morning, about three miles down the road on the way to work, I thanked myself for not doing that. I left my brand new earphones on my desk in their big box (put in there for safe keeping while moving my computer around last night) and drove off without them this morning. These will simply be my permanent backups.

The rain has abated, hard to believe. It felt like it was never going to stop. Our yard was flooded past the edge of the house, which is very unusual. We have built-in water run-off areas in the yard and water tends to pool there when it rains heavy and hard like this, but it’s never looked like this before.

Shortly before bed last night I pulled the trigger: I bought another Wacom tablet, this time from Provantage. This has been eating at me for a couple weeks and I spent much of my online time this weekend watching auctions on Ebay and trying to find the lowest-priced retailer (that seemed legit, I mean.) After realizing that most people were buying the tablet I wanted on Ebay for nearly full price, it didn’t make much sense to go that route and miss out on the two-year warranty, so I gave up on Ebay. Amazon was out, again, and NewEgg was full retail price, but Provantage gave me basically the same price I got on the one that turned out to be a sham a couple weeks ago. So hopefully by the end of this week or maybe early next week I’ll have a new toy to play with.

Along with that I took a chance on one of those “too good to be true” things on Ebay - the full Corel Painter X (which complements a tablet so well) for a mere $40. The seller swears it is a full-retail version, not a knock-off nor an academic version, and his feedback backs it up. We’ll see. If it turns out to be a fake, I’ll simply file a complaint with Ebay and Paypal and get my money back. No loss in trying on this one.

And now I can start all over again. It’s exciting but daunting. I fear I’m going to suck at this, but I’ll be taking it to work to use during down time so that should really help with the exposure to the new medium. I’ve lost a lot of my feel for natural medium being so digitally-dependent and this is as close as it gets on the computer, at least in this price range. I’m used to doing things a very certain way and with the combination of not only the tablet, which is a whole new way to create, but Painter, which is a program I’m not familiar with, it’s really new territory. Depending on how brave I feel, you may get to see the (possibly rotten) fruits of my endeavors here . . .

It began raining sometime last night and hasn’t let up once. Not once. It never stopped raining this entire day. I’m not exaggerating - there has not been a point in this entire day when there wasn’t water falling from the sky. That is extremely unusual. I like rain. We don’t get that much of it here in Arizona. But I like rain where it falls and makes things wet and shiny and the air smell like ozone and then it goes away, and the sun peeks out from behind the clouds. I don’t like when the day is just grey-blue. It’s miserable, and that’s kind of how the day felt. I could never make it in a place like Seattle.

Regardless, it was a productive day. I went out and got a couple of air filters for the cars and replaced both the engine and cabin air filters . . . well, I replaced my engine air filter because the one I got for Alissa’s car turned out to be the wrong one. Stupid book at Pep Boys listed two filters for her Accord. I grabbed the second one for no apparent reason and it turned out to be wrong for no apparent reason. And after all that damned work - Honda doesn’t make it easy like some other manufactures do to replace air filters. You know, a few nice clips and it pops open. No, they’ve got screws and then some screwy orientation where junk is attached that keeps the filter cover from moving. It was a job and it shouldn’t have been. I blame this on Honda’s ridiculous desire to keep owners coming back to them for service. I don’t like doing these jobs myself, but I know for $15 I can do this in 15 minutes. Sure I’ll be a mess, but it’s a lot cheaper than having them do it. As for the cabin air filter, this is always a nice service - it takes 2 minutes and is very easy, and the end result is clean, fresh air that flows a lot faster. (And, believe it or not, I ordered those filters online - it was far cheaper to order two and pay shipping than to buy both and get them locally. That’s kind of sad, but it’s reality.)

Then I hung up a couple of very clever devices. If I had any idea what they were called, I’d tell you, but I’ll just have to describe: they simply hold your handled yard tools (rakes, brooms, shovels, etc.) by pressure exerted with a little rolling wheel that moves up against the handle, so many different sizes can be handled easily. It’s a very handy way to clean up a messy bunch of tools like I have and took about 15 minutes to install. Bought ‘em at Costco if you’re looking for them for about $6 (for two!)

I also installed my new CD/DVD writer tonight, which, so far hasn’t panned out at all. The drive came with a SATA data cable but unfortunately did not come with a 4-pin molex to SATA power converter cable, leaving with an unusable new drive in place of my old unusable drive, and now a second unusable drive because I messed up the heirarchy by removing the master (the old, bad drive) and didn’t make any changes to my back-up drive. Nevermind - I know this is all geek speak. Suffice it to say that I can’t do much of anything when it comes to CDs or CDRs/DVDRs until at least tomorrow evening if I get the proper converter cable. Sigh - it never ends with computers.

We took Amanda to Cold Stone Creamery last night where she got a little cup of strawberry ice cream with M&Ms mixed in. She didn’t quite get the “mix in” concept and picked out the M&Ms by hand to eat separately. She enjoyed it, however, and, as they say, it all ends up in the same place anyway. Feeling adventurous, I had my first chocolate ice cream in about 18 months last night. I got a waffle bowl with chocolate and Reese’s peanut butter cups. It was everything I hoped it would be.

For those keeping track, I’m pretty sure I can confirm that chocolate does not trigger migraines but an unusual craving may be a warning sign. Friday I came home from work with chocolate on my mind and it simply would not let me go. I avoided it and, in fact, avoided caffeine, just to see what would happen. Wouldn’t you know it, in the middle of the night I awoke to the alarming flashing of lights in my head, and later a typical, but not awful migraine ensued. No chocolate, no caffeine, but still a migraine. Eat what you want, people, it’s not food that’s causing these things. Face the likely fact that some of us are just susceptible to something, perhaps hormonal, that causes migraines, while others never get them.

Eh, I had more to say, but honestly I just want to go sit down. Today is over.

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I don’t like ham. But that’s beside the point. It’s a funny meat. Pork.

Does anyone remember a series of AM/PM Mini-Market commercials from the late 80s or early 90s that starred Ruth Buzzi and Arte Johnson from Laugh-in, in the characters they respectively made famous?

 

I think about this often because, well, for seconds (I’ll start with this first because it’s less funny) no one ever knows what I’m talking about, and first, because it had one of my all-time favorite lines, delivered by Johnson’s Tyrone F. Horneigh to Buzzi’s Gladys Ormphby - something about “the succulence of ham, the tightly-packed sausage,” which, of course, elicits a vicious beating from Gladys’ handbag.

And I can’t find it anywhere. I’ve found a couple of minor references to it but never the actual commercials themselves, and I just can’t believe someone didn’t archive these things. Of all the crap that people saved on tapes, all the dumb commercials that have wound up archived for future generations to ignore, somehow these escaped?

No matter how dumb things seemed to have been, at some point in your life you’re going to want to see it again. And no matter how advanced we get and no matter how big and easy storage gets, one factor will always figure into things: most people forget to save the little things that truly marked our generation. So while we’re all obsessing over making sure our TV-on-DVD reflects the exact shows we saw because we think that’s going to be important to remember this time, the things that really reflected “our now” are the most easily ignored - ads, commercials, etc. Few things respond as quickly to public whimsy as ads do and commercials are a little glimpse of what society was truly like at any particular time. Sure, they’re glossed up and polished, but taken as a whole, it’s very easy to see where a society’s interests lie.

Maybe the commercial I’m looking for is long gone, but think what it represented - those weird times where things were strangely provocative, yet there were still so many taboos. That that commercial even made it to air is kind of surprising given how suggestive it is, but perhaps that’s why it is goes unrecognized when I mention it - maybe it did get pulled because it was offensive. In a way, things have gotten so safe that I don’t think anything like that could even air today. So, in effect, maybe with a commercial like that disappearing, that represents what we’ve lost.

As you may recall, last week ScAmazon sent me the Wacom Intuos graphics tablet I’ve been coveting. As it turns out, some little freak swapped out their smaller 4×6″ tablet for the surprising much larger 6×8″ that was in the box and sent it back to Amazon as a return. They either didn’t bother to check the package and decided to resell it again (a problem in itself) or knew it was the wrong item and opted to see if I was paying attention (which basically amounts to fraud. Of course, I caught this within seconds and was on the phone to Amazon to see what could be done.

UPS authorization received, box re-packed, and shipped, and I heard no more. I figured it had to arrive yesterday or maybe today, knowing how UPS Ground shipping goes, and checking my tracking numbers shows that it arrived yesterday. But no refund for me. So I sent off an email to Amazon and waited all afternoon for some information only to get the very annoying news that it will likely take a week or more to get the refund, but could take as long as FOUR WEEKS. Come on, give me a break. I’m expected to pay for this in order to get it. Why shouldn’t they be expected to pay me back when they get it back? I realize someone could conceivably scam them on some returns, but they do retain the power of the credit card and the law, and it also appears that they don’t even pay attention to what you return. So why should I have to wait? I’m a little peeved, to say the least.

Not to mention that a CD I’ve had on order with them, which I ordered weeks ago, and they’re saying it won’t ship until the middle of next week. It came out this Tuesday. I saw it in a local music store yesterday. Other online music stores have it available to ship right now. Normally I could cancel and just buy it locally, except Amazon is holding my order hostage. I can’t make any changes to it because, as they claim, it’s “processing to ship,” or however they put it. Now, how in the hell can something process to ship if it’s not going to even move until next week? So, screw it, I bought it today and enjoyed the friggin’ hell out of it on the way home today. What did I find when I got home? An email from Amazon saying that the CD shipped. Of course. Anyone want the latest Super Furry Animals album?

A few years ago a coworker of mine revealed to us that he enjoyed the benefits of this thing called a neti pot. In case you don’t know - in case you somehow missed one of Oprah’s earth-shattering events in which she declared this a Favorite Thing, neti pots are basically, as Dr. Oz explained on her show, “nose bidets.” It washes your nose out with a sterile saline solution. For those of us who have really bad allergies, this is a good thing. I have the drugs, which work fairly well, and I have this little squeeze bottle of saline that I shoot up there trying to help, but I knew in the back of my mind that I needed to give one of these contraptions a shot - scary as they may be. Water up my nose? Not exactly something most of us seek out. But seek it out I did.

Back then, my coworker sent this horrifying video of what appeared to be cyborgs using the neti pot. It made us all laugh, and really no one took it seriously. He laughed too, but I suspect that he really did continue using it despite he claims that he bought it on a whim and tried it on a dare. Watching that video again, it’s hard not to get freaked out, but I’ve seen nothing but praise for them, so I’ve been looking for these things for a while and always missed my opportunity to pick them up. Well, tonight, while at Walgreen’s, my opportunity presented itself in the last neti pot in the store. “You better grab that one quick, they go fast,” the pharmacist said, and I did grab it. Now I needed to build up confidence to use it.

It looks like a little blue, plastic teapot. Imagine sticking the spout of that up your nose. I’m sure it’s blue to soothe worried nerves but, really, come on. We’re talking about purposely putting water up my nose. I hesitantly mixed in the saline and carefully re-read the instructions, then put the spout up to my nose. For a moment, it felt exactly like I worried it would - like I was drowning, and then, a moment later, the water came right back out my other nostril. I switched sides, and not much later I was done. I blew my nose and it was then that I understood. I could breathe. I mean really breathe - through both nostrils, something I rarely get the opportunity to do with ease. Suffering the past week with some pretty bad sinus headaches, this is truly amazing.

I’ll have to do this a few more times before I get the full benefits out of it, but I’m already sold. I won’t, however, ever do this:

I’ve been thinking about migraines today because, well, I feel kind of crappy, unfortunately. Yesterday started out bad, got better, and then by bedtime, I started feeling weird again. Headachey and crappy feeling, but it’s not terrible. There are just days like this. You learn to live with them. Luckily I have fewer of them now than ever before.

In thinking about it, I’ve hit Google because it’s always fascinating to read other people’s experiences, such as the bizarre Alice In Wonderland syndrome, something I get from time to time (essentially, you or part of you feels out of proportion with the rest of you or the world. It is VERY strange. What I repeatedly experience is that my head feels very far away from the rest of me, and if I don’t concentrate on my hands, say, when I’m typing, they will look from the bottom of my eyes to be about two feet further away than they really are. Once I look at them they’re fine, but the sensation will return once I take my concentration away. It’s not disturbing, just weird. You get used to things like this, believe it or not.)

When I was a kid, I used to have a really strange phenomenon that repeated many nights. I would start to drift off to sleep but would find it hard to commit, and instead I would be in a state of some kind in between where a kind of static was all around me. It’s hard for me not to think of this without thinking of vomit - I never got sick, but that’s how it made me feel. It was a very rhythmic, unrelenting static/snow going on in the background of my mind and on top of it was a feeling of being pursued and panicky. If actual events were happening in it, they happened in slow motion, but very angry slow motion. For instance, if my parents were in it, they would be yelling at me at their most angry, shaking their fingers, in a rage, but it would be happening very slowly. This happened a lot, or enough to make a deep impression on me, for I still think of it often today. I may never know what the hell was going on back then. At least it doesn’t happen anymore - I think I’d be in need of some seriously psychiatric help if I still suffered these things.