This semester, Wednesdays for me entail fourteen hours of non-stop work. It starts off with an internship that lasts for over six hours, and then I work for eight hours as soon as that is done. So when I found out I’d have the day off, I took the opportunity to not go anywhere because I didn’t fucking have to.

When I got off work last night, I dragged my flat ass, tired from that day’s fourteen hours of joy (same deal as Wednesdays), home to collapse. Normally, I walk in the door, drop everything where I stand, and if I’m lucky I’ll make it to the couch. Last night, however, I nearly collapsed before I even reached the door. And not from exhaustion.

I live in a guest house, which means that I make my home in someone else’s back yard. It’s nice and all, and you’d think that having that back yard space would be a bonus. It is, generally, only there’s the problem of forever having people walk by your window and operating loud machinery at ungodly hours of the morning. But only if your landlord happens to be a contractor. Which, as it happens, mine is.

About twice a year, my landlord decides to go green. Not ‘green’ in the let’s protect the environment sense, but rather ‘green’ in the let’s try to grow some green grass sense. So he orders what I can only assume to be, judging by the smell, two semi-truck loads full of manure. And then he plops all that shit all over the yard.

So to put this in perspective here: whose kitchen window overlooks a grassy part of the yard? Mine. Whose main windows are open all the time and are literally only a few feet from large areas of grass? Mine. So who got home last night and almost passed out from the fumes? That would be me.

The whole loathsome smell thing aside, I simply cannot figure out why the man does this. The logic of it escapes me. When I first got glasses, I was talking to my oldest brother at some point about how much better I was able to see. He decided to try them on, and he lasted for all of five seconds before he yanked them off, handed them back, and said “Dang, Phil, I don’t know how you can see through those things.” Such a comment might have made sense had I removed my actual eyeballs and let him try those on, sure, but these were just glasses.

My landlord, evidently, uses the same such logic regarding his grass. He has a dog, a Border Collie who can run twenty miles per hour in his sleep, and whose antics in the backyard tear up the grass like it was tissue paper. It seems obvious, at least to me, that trying to achieve perfect grass is a waste of time and money. Not to mention a waste of all that waste he dumped all up in the yard.

When he asks me why the electricity bill was so much higher even though it’s been cooler out and “haven’t you been keeping your windows open why are you running the air conditioner?!” I’ll offer two words in response: COW SHIT.

Perhaps it was the effects of the drag show and Halloween, or just from being tired all the time, or something, but last weekend I got all fired up and decided to undertake a small project to fix my bedroom up a bit. Because I live in a house that I think may have been built in the seventies (an odd time during which houses were built with lots and lots of paneled wood), or thereabouts, it’s got a number of odd features.

One such oddity is what I’ve come to call a vanity, despite the presence of a window there. It’s strange, I know. The problem is that, as my schedule becomes increasingly hectic during the semester, this one spot of my room literally mimics the state of my life. To put it lightly, it was a train wreck.

It wasn't me, I swear!

The window sported the same awful, hideous, unforgivably yellow beige drapes that the two main windows to this place used to sport (which I ousted in favor of blinds sometime last year). Notice also that they did not close completely, either.

This picture does no justice to these curtains. Take my word for it, even kittens couldn't make these cute.

I found some nice white drapes to replace these. They were about thirteen inches too long, so I used some safety pins and did a little homestyle hemming, and the result is this. Note quite perfect, but certainly close enough for me. Not bad for my first time, eh?

Beauties! Too bad it wasn't sunny when I took this one.

Finally, I put together two sets of wire shelving units to add additional storage space. I was afraid that they might not work with the room, but it turns out they fit right in, and they nearly triple the amount of flat storage place I have right there. It’s easy to keep everything organized, and I don’t have to cringe and pretend I can’t see every time I go near that part of the room.

I did it myself! And it's awesome, too.

I’m very pleased with the outcome, and thrilled that I achieved exactly what I wanted with less than $75. I priced custom shelving, which while nice, I could not get below $120 even with the most generous of offers. Larger shelving was available that would have fit, though a single unit of such shelving runs at least $70, even on sale. My route, while it did take a bit more searching to find exactly what I wanted and what would fit, was much more budget friendly and it has surpassed my expectations. Next up: tackling and simplifying the rest of the room. Little by little, I’m getting there.

October 30, 2009. The day I unleashed my inner drag queen. Replete with a dress designed just for me, a fully stuffed chest, a bouncy hairdo, fabulous make-up, and four-inch heels. In other words, it was me at my fiercest. And oh, what a time it was, as clearly evidenced here by this glamorous shot before the show in the green room. Fierce!

I can only assume that that’s the sound of an unplanned almost one-month hiatus on this website. The amount of shit flowing through my brain¹ has been staggering, really, and I’ve had every reason to want to write every day. Only I’ve been devoid of any energy to really do so, and I have a thing about always wanting to be at the top of my game when I write.

Beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-beep.

Much of my writing energy at this time is being consumed by grad school. This bothers me less than I imagined it would, actually, except for the fact that the topics about which I’ve had to write don’t exactly have top billing for me. Still, at least I am writing, and kicking ass at it, yo.

Beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-beep.

My little brother and his girlfriend are visiting for the weekend, and so far we’ve managed to tear it up quite a bit out here.

Beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-beep.

A little over a year ago, I bought a watch because I was told I needed one for my clinical therapy time. I went to Target and bought a $40 watch that was on clearance for $17 or so. I had no intention of wearing it save for the four hours a week of therapy time, so I begged the poor Target employee to set it for me. She was sweet enough to do so, or else I was belligerent enough that she was begrudgingly humoring me. Since then, the only function I’ve figured out how to use is the stopwatch, and its usefulness is overshadowed by how much effort it requires for me to get it to work.

Needless to say, the watch spends half the year at the correct time and the rest of the year at the correct time for my neighboring time zone. I tried to read the manual once, but its tiny print, not to mention it’s sixteen tiny pages, made me give up after all of five seconds.

About two months ago, I heard the beep-beeping of a tiny alarm, and for the life of me could not figure out what it was. It was 7 o’clock in the morning, and what I was doing awake at that hour escapes me. The beeping stopped after thirty seconds and I forgot about it until the next morning at precisely the same time. I keep the watch in my bag, and perhaps my stoic gait one day caused it to bump a little button here and there, and consequently set the alarm function.

The alarm goes off daily at 7am, and short of throwing the watch into a pool or giving it to someone who wasn’t asking for a watch, per se, I have no idea how to turn the damn thing off. So it serves, forevermore at this time, as a daily reminder that yet another day has passed and there is so much that I still have yet to do.

Beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-beep.

¹That’s right, I’ve been listening to Ben Folds again.

After a while we wandered over to the outdoor area, where there were dogs galore! And suddenly, all those dogs had two gay men walking from kennel to kennel, fawning over them and petting their paws and telling them how cute they were and how much we wished we could just take them all home right now. Amidst the barrage of gay affection, there was suddenly a sound that stopped us cold¹. It sounded like someone crying, perhaps for help? We decided to investigate, and that’s when we met this guy:

Yes, the culprit of the crying was this goat. A veritable bounty of cuteness, sideways pupils and all. He calmed down as soon as we arrived on the scene, which leads me to believe that that was his intention from the start: to steal our attention away from all the dogs and reel us in with that tractor beam-like bray of his.

Which further settles the score for my case: even the goat was more social than the bunnies. It’s decided: I win.

¹You know it had to be loud to overcome all the high-pitched gay voices we were emitting. I mean, really.

And, let’s face it, the stress and pressure of life leads to the consumption of things that help deal with such things: I’m speaking mostly of cookies here. They’re glorious, and I am hereby making a declaration: I never again want to eat a store-bought cookie. Not even the ones from the grocery’s so-called bakery.

It occurred to me today that if I don’t have the time to make something, there’s a good chance I shouldn’t then bother eating it at all. What helped me come to this conclusion? Why, the listed ingredients of some soft (and suspiciously chewy) chocolate chip cookies from a local Vons grocery store:

Bleached enriched flour (wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin and folic acid), sugar, semisweet chocolate (sugar, chocolate liquor, cocoa butter, dextrose, soy lecithin, vanilla, milk), margarine (palm oil, water, salt, vegetable monoglycerides, natural butter flavor, citric acid, vitamin A palmitate and beta carob (color), milk), vegetable oil (palm), eggs, high fructose corn syrup, molasses, water, baking soda, salt, natural and artificial flavor, sodium acid pyrophosphate. **Contains: wheat, eggs, soy, and milk.**

One interpretation of that list of ingredients is that to eat something composed of all such items would not be unlike ingesting one of those free plastic frisbees real estate companies used to offer ironically¹ to potential home-buyers.

What I’m getting at here is that for Labor Day, I was invited to spend the day with a good friend of mine in Long Beach. He’d just move there, so I tried to think up a good gift to bring as a house-warming gift. I had gone to IKEA on Saturday, but of course every such shopping excursion to that store ends up involving me walking out with some piece of furniture clutched in my arms; in this case I exited the premises with some organizational cabinet shelves that I simply could not live without. I shop for myself there, bitches, and even if you only want a gift card there, I’ll probably use said gift card for myself and get you a gift card to someplace that doesn’t make me drool quite so much.

I decided that, since it was Labor Day, some food would be in order, and hey, chocolate chip cookies are always a good addition to a barbecue. So I dragged myself out of bed at the ungodly hour of 8:45-10:00² and, once I was done with all that grooming nonsense, I started baking. (In case you’re wondering about my timeliness here, I started baking around 10:45.)

The night before, I’d gone to the grocery to get some last-minute supplies. While there, I picked up the aforementioned store-bought cookies; I figured I would do a taste-test sort of experiment, a Cookie Championship to determine whose cookies were more savory.

My cookies contained the following:

Organic flour, organic brown sugar, organic granulated sugar, butter (from cows that do not ingest growth hormones), vanilla extract, salt, baking soda, eggs, and semi-sweet chocolate chips.

And here’s what they looked like:

Verdict: my nine-ingredient cookies beat the pants off of Vons’s nearly thirty-ingredient cookies. They looked more delicious, tasted more delicious, and best of all, they didn’t bounce off the floor when I dropped them.

Were they a hit? Well, I made nearly four dozen cookies and walked away with a couple of plates that didn’t even have any crumbs left to show what once had graced them. I’d say that’s a mission accomplished.

¹There’s nothing really ironic about that. Which, I suppose, is kind of the point.
²I require at minimum one hour to actually go from being ‘asleep’ to ‘awake.’ In that time, I pound the snooze on my alarm repeatedly, then proceed to brush my teeth with my eyes closed. If I’m particularly energetic, I may even squeeze a shower in during that time-frame, but it’s just as likely that that will happen during the next hour block.

And while yes, I know this time of year is fire season, because the extreme dry weather and the extreme heat make the conditions just right, I can’t help but get really pissed off when I find out that, hey, what do you know, turns out this fire was arson and is also a pending homicide investigation. No seriously, it is.

A few weeks back, I got it into my head that hey, wouldn’t it be fun to add a techie element to this blog. I have learned so much just from blogging and crawling the internet, so what better way to give a little back? It’s stunning how little I know, in the grand scheme of things, but I thought why not share what I do know, and what I have learned? I learn more all the time, so it will be a great place to bring all that together.

So I introduce this, a whenever-I-like-it (I’m hoping weekly but I make no promises) post about something tech-related. It could be software I like to use, gadgets I enjoy, or websites I find useful. Just to offer fair warning, I use Apple computers, so a good deal of this content will be geared toward Mac products and software. That said, whenever possible, I will mention things that are Windows- or other operating-system-based, in the spirit of making information useful to whoever wants to find it useful.

And finally, a huge thanks to Jamie for listening to my ideas and for helping make sure I didn’t blind you with my special little graphic here (see below). Thanks, Jamie! And now, let’s begin…

Since it’s my first week back at school, let’s kick it off with a fantastic little study tool I use. It’s a simple little flashcard program that’s intuitive and makes learning a quick, easy task. The program, appropriately called Genius, is free and runs on any Mac, both PPC and Intel, running any version of OS X as well as Mac OS Classic. You can find Genius here.

I would recommend Genius for anything you need to memorize. It is exclusively designed as flashcard memory, and has a study function that reviews items for you a few at a time, and as you master items, it adds new items accordingly. Your answers are scored and you can even write in keywords during study sessions for Genius to recognize and score as correct even if you don’t repeat items strictly verbatim. If you establish preferences manually, you can select exact, case sensitive, or lexical similarity.

The only drawback to Genius is that its format is fixed. You have to expand the size of the window in order to view lengthier questions and answers in the editing pane, and the study panel style is sometimes difficult to read. But your information is there, the set-up is good, and at $0 cost, these are par for the course. Genius a great ticket for any college student, and will improve your grades without even touching your wallet.

Or

The Most Unproductive Nap Ever

Or

An Inordinate Amount of Dialogue Considering This Is A Slumbering Monologue

I think I’ll close my eyes. Yes, yes! Excellent idea. Oooh, I’m drifitng to sleep. With my glasses on.

(30 minutes later.)

Hey, I’ve been asleep. With my glasses on. Well take them off dammit!

(Glasses are removed. Sleep recommences. 30 more minutes pass.)

How long have been asleep? I don’t know but I’m so sleepy I can’t open my eyes.What time is it? How should I know? I can’t open my eyes.

(An hour later.)

Wait, have I been asleep? Duh. I can’t seem to open my eyes. Yes I can. Try. I just did again. Nothing. Well maybe I’m just dreaming about all this. Maybe I’m just dreaming that I can’t open my eyes. What a fucking useless dream. Tell me about it. But I still can’t! Yes but even though I’m conscious of this, I can’t bring myself to open my eyes. Right? And then I’ll just fall asleep and then have the same stupid dream again. Arrrrrrrgggghhhhhh.

(And then I woke up.)