The Blog With No Name

July 2001 to June 2008

Originally uploaded by hoyameb.

Here she is, starting kindergarten a few weeks before her fifth birthday, and now off to junior high school (complete with attitude, can’t you tell)!

If you have car trouble, and have to call your insurance company’s roadside assistance, take a picture of the truck when it gets there. That way, if the complete f***ing asshole who patches your flat tire also happens to take off one standard lugnut from each tire and replace it with one for which your dealer doesn’t have a socket, so that when you have driven all the way across town for a tire rotation that can’t be performed, you can call the jerk and have HIM come rotate the tires, instead of paying another $40 (and driving across town again) to have the dealer do who-knows-what to finally get the things off.

Bastards.

• My in-laws live in Cedar Falls. Great portions of Cedar Falls are now under water. My in-laws’ house may be in that category. Oy.
• My daughter’s new principal phoned us just now to let us know that she will be in all possible advanced classes. YAY!!!!!!!! Cannot EXPRESS how much this has been worrying me.
• Went to a baseball game last night. Kids are now old enough (!) that they can walk around the stadium (in the case of the daughter, with her posse) by themselves. Wow, we actually got to watch the game!
• Fireworks following the game (the home team won, but the enemy team was a Cubs farm team - oh the tangled loyalties…) - why is it that “Sweet Home Alabama” goes so perfectly with fireworks?

The Boy is out of school, The Daughter still has a week, and all of a sudden I am consumed with worry about getting her into the proper classes in junior high school. The left hand of the school district knoweth not what the right hand is up to. The house is a wreck, the bills aren’t paid, checkbook isn’t balanced.

ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG

TIME TO FOCUS!

We saw the Crystal Skull last night. Overall it was quite fun, but. Harrison Ford is too old for this shit. That’s just all there is to it. Or maybe I’m still a little squicked at the “abandon your wife and run off with the anorexic chick” crap. Dunno. Cate Blanchett makes a fine villain, and that Shia kid is a cutie. Extra added bonus - I understood all the vulgar Russian things the bad guys were saying during their car chases. Heh heh.

So, when I was at Target today I picked up DVDs of the first and third Indiana Jones movies (there was a second movie? really? la la la, I can’t hear you……) and we watched the Last Crusade this evening. Very entertaining, hearing the kiddies discuss the theology/science of living eternally. They kept asking me whether Dr. Schneider was a GOOD GUY or a BAD GUY (she was the Nazi mad scientist). I tried to explain the non-binary, oh-so-subtly-nuanced nature of her, um, nature, but I don’t think I succeeded. They decided she was just crazy.

It was also sad to see Denholm Eliot’s character turned into a buffoon (sort of like Gimli in Lord of the Rings). Oh well.

Firefox 3, Release Candidate 1 - LIKE LIGHTNING, BABY!

So there has been this bike lurking around in our alley for a few days - I think it started out as an OK bike, but the seat is a little beat up, and the squishy stuff on the handles is worn away, and so on. We’ve all been staring at it, wondering to whom it belongs, why did they leave it here. Charles came home from camping out last night, and asked me whether I had loaned *his* bike out to anyone. Turns out his bike has been stolen right out of our garage, and whoever did it just left his old one there next to our driveway!! Duh!!!

The scary thing is, this is the second time such a thing has happened. The first time was last summer; our babysitter’s bike was stolen right out of our front yard.

The moral of this story is, I need to make sure the garage is locked more often. Don’t let the kiddies take the key out there and then leave it unlocked.

I am in a monumentally bad mood, and have been all day. Perhaps not co-incidentally, my car is full (to the point where my nice neighbor is loaning me her car tomorrow morning to take the kiddies to school) of obsolete computer equipment that I have collected from work and church and various individuals. I am going to recycle it at the electronic demanufacturing facility in Davenport, Iowa. I wonder whether, once my car is empty, I will feel better. I always feel like the clutter is weighing me down, waiting to pounce on me, and in my car right at this moment that is literally true - heaven help me if I have to stop suddenly, I’ll get a monitor straight to the back of my skull.

(Of course, I could also be in a bad mood because my children are complete dorks, but it’s more fun to be all metaphysical about it. Plus, I have just started reading It’s All Too Much.)

Went to DC. Had a great time. Holocaust Museum - stunning. American Indian Museum - also stunning. Possibly the two best-designed museums I’ve ever visited.

I have gotten as far as moving our photos from the digital camera to my computer. Next step - getting the kids (esp The Boy, who seems to have photographed every item at the Air and Space Annex) to pick which photos they want to have online to show their classmates. Will be on Flickr Real Soon Now, I promise!

Got all over the place (even out to Dulles to see the Air and Space Museum Annex [space shuttle!!!]) by public transportation, thanks to Charles’ l33t Metro-website-surfing skillz. Feeling somewhat smug about that. Also, SMS (text-messaging) plus Google equals PURE AWESOME. I found addresses, opening/closing times,  phone numbers, etc etc that way.

I noticed that most of the jobs previously seen to be held by African-Americans in DC (e.g., McDonald’s staff) are now held by Spanish-speaking people, presumably (but not inevitably? I’m trying not to leap to conclusions here…) immigrants. I would not have thought this possible when I lived here twenty years ago.

I dined with Merujo *waves* in a part of town that, twenty years ago, you could not have dragged me there with a Mack truck, such would have been my fear of being mugged/accosted by drug dealers/etc. Now, staggeringly, they have a by-God TARGET STORE in the area.

I want to know where all these non-gentry people are living now that their neighborhoods are being taken over. You can’t just wave your roll of architect’s drawings and make that many people *vanish*. This can’t be healthy.

Back home. Kids tired of school. All tired of the DAMNED WEATHER. My daughter’s re-introduction to soccer games in pouring rain and freezing wind did nothing to make the sport appeal to her, oh well.

I am applying the “you can do anything for 15 minutes” principle to making a listing of the parochial archives stored (improperly) in my office. I figure that the synod might be marginally more interested in at least some of them if I can tell them just what we have. Keep y’alls fingers crossed on that one, please.

Keith Olberman’s views on George Bush. Maybe he should run for President.