Excuses Excuses

A week into the year and I have yet to post. Good thing it isn't PoMoOftMo anymore.

Here are a few excuses for my absence. You may pick whatever one(s) work for ya. Some of them are true, others not so much.

* Every time I logged into Blogger, a large tiger came out of nowhere and took a swing at me. I don't really care for being swiped at by a tiger, so I held back on the posting for a while.

* I've been working on the 2006 Movie Retrospective, and it's been taking longer than I thought.

* I got sick and didn't really feel like doing much, even though it wasn't really the kind of illness that affects my ability to think (like a cold or a fuller version of the flu would be).

* I was called away to fight crime in Antarctica. I didn't find out that there isn't much crime in Antarctica until I actually got there.

* Sometimes I get into a funk (a malaise, if you will) that pretty much blocks creative thought.

* The dog that my boss brings into work keeps telling me that blogging is for losers.

* Between the Lois and Clark and Quantum Leap DVDs, there hasn't been much time for anything else.

* On my way back from Antarctica, I made a stop in southern Bolivia and led a revolution that ended up failing so miserably that it didn't even make the news.

* You can't post anything during the 12 Days of Christmas. Everybody knows that!


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Between my last post and this one, I've been sick twice. I thought maybe it was food poisoning from a Chinese buffet I went to the night before New Year's Eve, but now I'm pretty sure that I picked up a stomach bug. Nothing too serious (aside from potential dehydration), but it did make my New Year's Eve and, to a lesser extent, New Years Day a bit miserable. The illness was kind enough to go away during the week before returning for an encore performance this past Friday. Happily, the encore was not as bad, and I'm pretty sure it's gone for good now.

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M and I have quit the Y, as neither of us had gone since July or August. We figured it would be best to save some money (about $200 by the time Baby 2K7 arrives) rather than continue to fool ourselves that we'd go work out on a regular basis. Even on my new-found health kick, which came on the heels of my illness-related weight loss, I'd still rather work out at home with a 5 or 15 pound dumbbell and a pair of running shoes than go through the trouble of going to the gym, despite the gym's computer-calibrated weight and cardio machines.

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Our New Year's Day was fairly quiet until the washing machine started shakin' and boogyin'. That, in and of itself, was no big deal. We were washing jeans, and the spin cycle had become unevenly balanced. Easy to fix. The big deal was the high water level I noticed in the adjacent washbin, where the washing machine dumped out. Having seen this sort of thing recently, I immediately checked the drain for blockages. Aside from some lint, the drain seemed perfectly open and ready to let water into the pipes. But it wasn't draining - not particularly fast, anyway. This had all the makings of an outside pipe blockage. The pool of water in the downstairs shower (and, as a result, the bathroom in which the shower resides) supported this theory.

Luckily, I caught the issue before the wash bin had spilled over (if it had been destined to reach that point - it's possible that the drain could handle the volume of water the washing machine was throwing at it), so all that got wet were a couple of bathmats in the downstairs bathroom, rather than the big, recently dried, carpet. Not so luckily, this drain issue chose New Year's Frickin' Day to happen. I called our landlady, and she called the plumber, who informed her that a visit that day would cost her much, much more than a visit on a regular day would be. So we ended up having to wait a whole day to get it all fixed. In the meantime, we had to take one-minute showers and use the bathroom (and only the upstairs bathroom) as little as possible. If this had happened a day earlier, that would have been a problem.

The outside pipe was fixed up the next morning, and there was no evidence that my recent illness was to blame for the blockage, so I had that going for me.

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Throughout my graphics career, my big weak spot has been Illustrator. It's not exactly the most intuitive program. But for almost a month now (minus a week off for Christmas) we've been learning Illustrator in class, and I'm happy to say that I'm finally getting a handle on it. I am quickly becoming a full-featured graphic artist!

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JACK-FM has surprised me yet again. The station that edits out rap and slightly objectionable lyrics from songs played Ozzy Osbourne the other night. Granted, it was around half past midnight at the time, and it wasn't exactly Black Sabbath era Ozzy, but it was still surprising.

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So, about that movie retrospective. I've been approaching it the same way I did last year's retrospective - list every movie I saw in 2006 with a comment about each movie. That has proven to be very time-consuming, and it's probably too much for you, the reading pubic, to particularly care about anyway. So I'm just going to hand out some fake rewards in a few categories. I should have that done in the next couple of days. Whenever I get to it.

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My previous post had the wrong date on it. It has the day I started it, not the day I finished it. By the time you read this, it will have been corrected.