Still pretty numb this morning.
I’m going to talk about the basement now, not because I’m an insensitive, uncaring asshole, but because I’m trying to continue on with my life, as I think everybody in this country is beginning to do. I think that it’s important to move on and not give into these morons. And also because I don’t know what else to do.
Last night I put the b/w TV on in the basement and sanded my brains out while listening to the coverage. I got the box under the stairs edged and mudded, the window edged and mudded, and the closet sanded and mudded. Pretty much everything has one coat of mud and is sanded at least once; I’m going to get up in the stairwell and sand that whole thing tonight and try to get it finished- it’s a hateful place to work because it’s hot and sweaty.
12:54 AM – Pretty numb about everything. No new news; just people talking about how to deal with everything. Depressing.
5:19 PM – Contemplating the talk that’s going around today about “measured response” and “retaliatory action”. I’ve been thinking about the draft; about being called in to serve the country and getting put on a ship and being sent to some hot, sandy nation to obliterate some poor scared guy who knows just as much as I do and wants just as badly to go home. Been thinking that World War I was started by one guy with a pistol killing an archduke (whatever that is) and how events spiraled out of control from there. Been praying that our government does something smart, decisive, and quickly. Been thinking that I’m pissed, I want to kick some butt, and that I’d go, but I hope and I pray that the military leadership of this country isn’t as inept, bumbling, and incompetent as I believe it is.
10:44 PM – And, as if to verify all my fears, doubts and uncertainty, I saw some file footage of Dubya talking (no, more like struggling to convey emotion) to the rescue personnel at the Pentagon. Does anybody else see how absolutely wooden and phony this guy is? I’m supposed to rally around this puppethead? He couldn’t even complete a full sentence, let alone rally these tired, exhausted people into helping him. He sounded weak, confused, and incoherent, and it seemed to me that somebody was piping in half-completed sentences for him to mouth through his Secret Service earpiece. I can’t believe he’s the leader of this nation. Clinton was a liar, but at least I believed that he felt some kind of emotion.
I got the email about the candlelight vigil at 7:00 tomorrow; I’m going to definitely bring a few Dietz lamps and fire them up. I also want to find a big American flag and hang that sucker right on the front of my house.
12:44 AM – Just in case you thought I was going to sleep feeling all righteously indignant, I just read a list of writings by some notable people, gathered by a smarter woman than I, who all say what our country’s leadership should have said about 30 years ago: We’re reaping what we’ve sown. We’ve been very, very lucky up until Tuesday, and somebody finally had the cajones enough to pop the comfortable little bubble we’ve been living in these past 400 years. We as a society conveniently forget, or choose to ignore, what our government does in its spare time, out of sight and under the radar: Central America, Southeast Asia, Cuba, blah blah blah. Today I got schooled by a friend’s father for forwarding a pretty jingoistic reply to a pretty jingoistic email (I’ll omit the details) and pretty much learned to shut my big trap. but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m mad at somebody, and I want some retribution. One thing that does work, based on my limited 30-year study of human nature, is that an overwhelming show of force scares the hell out of a lot of people. We’re a different country now. Things have changed. That will be hard to swallow for a lot of people. But it’s time to rattle the big saber and remind some folks that we are still the preeminent power on this planet, we have the will, and we do not like it when you drive planes into our buildings.
None of this is going to bring any of the innocent people from the WTC or the Pentagon or those planes back. And I’m not advocating what happened in the least. I’m just amazed it hadn’t happened earlier. Now I’m going to bed.
Fuck me. What a mess.
Jen and I got about an hour’s worth of glorious sleep together spooned on the bed, before rising, on a beautiful September morning. After she left for work, I was eating breakfast and listening to Howard Stern at my desk at home, and heard the first reports of the plane hitting the WTC. I went downstairs and turned on the news- it was all over the dial. I called Jen immediately and told her what was happening. She didn’t believe me. As we were talking, the second plane smashed into the second tower. I sat around and watched the coverage for a few minutes yesterday, and being alone, I decided to head north to work to be with people. I got into work and immediately we headed over to Jeff C’s house to watch CNN on his 53″ TV. For a few hours, we sat stunned watching things unfold. I was shocked to hear about the first plane. I was horrified to see the second plane. And I was terrified when I heard about the Pentagon.
I headed back home and went immediately to the store to stock up on supplies, then headed home and hunkered down. Jen came by and we sat to watch the coverage in disbelief and shock. I am grateful she was with me.
People leaping from the 80th stories of the buildings.
A 757 banking into the tower and wiping out the whole side.
Waist-deep ash and debris at the foundation of the building.
The whole building peeling apart and pancaking to the ground.
Today the Greycube server got hacked. I wonder if it’s a random script kiddie?
11:03 AM – Still trying to get work done, actually trying to approach it. Attempting to put it all out of my head.
11:24 AM – Stacey checked in with me- she’s OK.
11:42 AM – Able to log onto Greycube; I’m backing up my files right now as fast as I can. Afraid I’ll lose everything. My last backup was about 2 months ago.
12:02 AM – Ross checked in with me- he’s OK as well.
2:32 PM – Found a real nice site from caterina.net – it’s called the artful dodge. Very nice design with 3 colors and no blending. Yes, I’m shirking work, looking for something else to concentrate on other than this interface and New York.
12:02 PM – For once in this city, a small glimmer of original thought shines through. The program director at WHFS, normally a lock-step ‘Alternative’ radio station, has been playing relatively awesome songs since ‘Loveline’ cut out at 11:40. U2 and ‘One’, Elvis Costello with ‘What’s so Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding’, REM with ‘Everybody Hurts’. Right the hell on. If they had just pushed through their usual disgusting, sticky mass of proto-alternative payola whiny white-men complaining music during all this mess, I probably would have impaled myself on my bass guitar. But somebody alive is actually in the program room; I like to think they’ve barricaded themselves in the DJ booth and are calmly loading the player and smoking their final cigarette while representatives and AR guys from the music labels rush the door wielding boxes of the new ‘Limp Bizkit’ CD-Single.
I had to work in the basement for the evening- I couldn’t listen to the radio, watch the TV or deal with another report of the chaos up in NY. I got a lot done too, but I’m gonna save the description for tomorrow.
Oh, and it’s now back to the regularly scheduled crap rock. I guess the AR guys beat the DJ to death with his microphone.
Back at work today; Jen and I had another great weekend together, even though she was feeling a bit down about work. I know she’s pushing herself really hard to do well, like she does with everything else in her life, but she needs to take it easier on herself about this job- I don’t want to see her burn herself out by worrying about it too much. The two of us had a great evening at Peter’s on friday, capped off with a trip to the balcony at Lista’s for some margaritas, and then a fantastic nightcap.
Saturday I was able to get a lot of work in the basement done- the window is now framed in and enclosed with drywall, and I took some of the old pink foam and insulated the front wall from the A/C ductwork. The shelf went in smoothly and the sides are tapered out about 2 inches wide and one inch tall, so there’s a real nice feeling of openness coming from that wall instead of a porthole effect-I was dreading that possibility, because the front wall had to be framed out about 16″ to clear the gas and water meters. I’m also very happy because the cats will have a great place to sleep, there will be a wonderful place to put some plants, and there’s a ton of light flooding into an otherwise pretty dark room. I was also able to form some flashing around the outside on the bottom and the top of the window box; that was a pain in the ass and took more time than I thought, but it doesn’t look too bad. I probably should have done the bottom section first to practice. The sides should happen sometime this week, before it gets too cold/wet/etc. I also need to recaulk part of the top flashing and borrow a tall ladder from Dad to repair/repoint/recaulk the front picture window.
Pretty impressed with myself for remembering how to ftp via the windows console; I forgot to bring my PC disk in to reinstall some of my software on this machine, so I just wrote this in Notepad.
Anyway, tonight I’m going to buy some metal bead edging and another tub of mud, and try like hell to finish up the sanding as quickly as possible.
Wesley Crusher has a website.
I read that the guy who runs a website is quitting because he put some video of a kitten being killed and readied for eating, and of course three billion people freaked out and decided to start spamming him with death threats. Never mind that the rest of the site is covered in porn and other goodies. Kinda reminds me of rotten.com, another “wait till you get the heck home” sites to look at.
11:30 PM – just up from the basement. I got the right hand side (from the stairs) sheetrocked in; the box containing the stairwell is boxed in and looks pretty good, actually. I got everything done across to the window opening- the upper left side and the way it went together is still bugging me. I have no real way of framing it out or covering it over, and that is going to bug me for a long time. I’m stumped. I did put a brace over the base opening for the window at level, so I can drop a set of planking across it for a real nice windowsill.
Today at work was pretty good- I was able to focus on the interface enough to realize that A. the color choices I made for amber worked equally well as copper, and B. when I added some noise at a 30% screen in the background, it really looked good as copper.
I got some more sanding done in the basement last night, and was able to run the feed from the new computer circuit into a junction box mounted on the wall and up to the second floor office. I’m going to leave the circuit turned off until I can install a new box behind the drywall in there and add a plug. I got some more drywall installed and used the last 4’x4′ sheet, so tonight I’ll buy 3 more sheets, the junction box inserts for the new wiring, another tub of mud, several more 2×4’s, and three large lighted rocker switches for the lighting down there. I’ll probably try to focus on the front window tonight and build the box setup for the enclosure (that should take a while) and maybe get some drywall installed.
I talked to my Mom last night; she was mainly trying to get her iMac online and get the e-mail set up so she could send/receive again (Dad, who is frightened like a little German schoolgirl at all things Mac, got on there the other night and futzed the whole thing up) so I stepped her through the process and got her back online again. After 6 months of her paying for Earthlink modem access while Dad paid for a cable modem sitting in the next room, they finally ditched Earthlink, got her back up on his network after I suggested they buy a DSL/cable modem router like the one I have. Sometimes they drive me nuts.
Yesterday I found an archive of old Commodore 64 games, and found a pair that were listed that reminded me of days gone by. One was a game called ‘Impossible Mission‘, and featured a quote of an English guy saying, “Destroy him, my robots…” in a bad Bela Lugosi impersonation. That one took me back. The other one was a game called Mail Order Monsters, where you could build monsters and equip them with different items of varying deadliness, then drop them into an arena and have ’em fight it out Gladiator-style. I also found a copy of Skyfox, which for its day was a pretty cool game and had me entranced for about a month before I mastered it and it got boring. There was a clip of the IM theme music and a ROM download of the game; I also found an emulator for the PC and a great site to download more ROMS. Maybe if I get super-ultra bored I’ll fire it up and play a round or two. Maybe. This all served to remind me that I need to get back with Stas and see how he’s doing.
Found this site on PriceWatch- the Kodak 3400 is $279. A 48 MB compactFlash card is an additional $40 as well. I’m gonna look in the ol’ bank account and see what’s in there right now.
I’m back, and I have the cash, but I’m not buying it. Must focus on the basement. All I’d be buying the stupid camera for is to take pictures of the basement right now anyway.
This still doesn’t change the fact that I want a digital cam very badly.
Found this article on the Kodak website- i love this place, I have always been fascinated by it ever since I saw a GEO Magazine article on it in 1982, and I want to go to Arizona to see it.
11:30PM – Just came back upstairs from the basement- my back is aching, but in a mildly pleasant ‘I just did 4 hours of honest good work’ kind of way. I bought 3 2x4x10’s, 3 sheets of drywall and the adapters for the steel junction box, which got installed; more drywall up on the inside of the closet- there’s just a spot on the inside right wall that needs to be done and then it just needs a finish mud. The plug went in OK and all I need to do now is test it out tomorrow evening. The left wall of the closet is, in hindsight, about 6″ too close to the side of the furnace, preventing easy access to the humidifier unit, but I’m installing an access panel in the corresponding wall that will allow entry and replacement of the filter. The steel edging is up and 1/2 mudded on the left wall, and most of the inside is sanded. All in all, a good night’s work.
Jen and I had a fantastic weekend together- after some serious issues were discussed, and we actually got to the point where we looked at splitting up. We went north to the Chadd’s Ford Winery and did some antiquing on Sunday, and then went to the festival on Sunday. I bought one of those handy picnic-wine carrier deals where it holds a cold bottle of wine and two glasses. Very nice- i always wanted one of those. Jen packed a picnic basket and we tasted wine, then bought a bottle and sat on the grass in the shade with each other. We didn’t want to leave.
Renie has all kinds of good news about Charles, her new flame; apparently they are officially an item. I am very happy for her- she sounds ecstatic about it, and with good reason. This is the best news I’ve heard for her in a long time, excepting the house, which goes to settlement on Thursday.
I read today that HP and Compaq are going to “merge” to form an “87 billion-dollar company”. OK. I owned a Compaq workstation- hell, I don’t even remember what it was now, about 3 years ago. I bought it from my employer at that time for $250, which was pretty steep but still a decent deal for what i got. Not six months later, in attempting to do something as simple as drop a larger hard drive in the thing, I fried the BIOS on the board because, and the exact details are now hazy, the BIOS could only be accessed by a special program inserted on a floppy disk. So I gutted it, bought a case and new motherboard, and salvaged the remaining parts. What a piece of junk. HP makes great printers in my opinion, but their computers suck just as bad. Good luck, guys.
Mr. Rogers is packing up the farm. I wasn’t even aware he was still around and doing new shows. All the cracks about a 50 year old guy playing with puppets and talking about the “Land of Make-Believe” aside, the guy had an impact on my life, in a positive way. Take care, Fred, and thanks for the memories. You, Sesame Street and the Electric Company were my daily education outside of the New Jersey Public School System. Which, I’m proud to say, taught me the difference between Your and You’re; (i.e. one is overused by stupid idiots) and their, they’re and there.