The Center of the Anomaly

Feh. March 30, 2007

Today is not going well.  First, I wake up at the time I’m usually walking out the door to go to work.  I guess I’m just going to be late today.

 Nrrk.  My butt was just dragging all morning – I had to pour several cups of iced coffee down my throat to give me a caffine infusion to keep from conking out entirely.  Then Jonah puts up one of his damnable timewasters on The Corner and any hope of getting anything useful done this morning is entirely shot.

Lunch time – no time to pack anything of course so I glance at some menus of local eateries around here.  Baja Fresh!  It’s a quick-food Mexican place that doesn’t make you Feel Real Bad an hour after eating at it like the Twin Taco Hells of the Del and Bell.  I haven’t been there in a while.  One Burrito Ultimo with carnitas and a side of guac should hit the spot and hopefully improve my day.  A quick call and I’m on my way to pick up and bring back.

So, I saunter in and stand behind a lady picking up a HUGE order – two big bags of stuff.  For the whole office no doubt.  Anyway she staggers off with her load and I’m up.  The gal behind the counter asks for my name and I tell her.  She punches up my order. 

“Burritio somethingorother, Pronto Guac, and medium drink?”  Well, no – I didn’t order a drink, and I ordered a side order of guac, not the “Pronto Guac” which is a side order of guac with chips, but since you get chips with the burrito, that’s just too many chips, but they always push the “Pronto” at you for some reason.  Gotta move those chips, I guess. 

Anyway, I said “Yeah.”  I felt like getting something fizzy to drink after all and I could just deal with the chip surplus.  She has problems with the touch screen register thingy.  Mash.  Mash.  Mashmashmashmaaaasssh!  “Oh, Jesus.”  Maaaaaaash!  She concedes defeat to the unresponsive, overly touched and all touched out touch screen and it seems that the Lord doesn’t do Tech Support.   She makes change out of the other register.

I get my cup filled with ice and Mountainly Dewy fizziness and get some extra goodies from the salsa bar.   A cup of the pico de gallo, a cup of the hot, red salsa, a cup of the mild, green salsa, and a cup of the medium, black salsa.  Yes – black.  I’ve never seen black salsa before going to that place and rarely anywhere else.  It’s good though after I finish monkeying with it.  I pop the cups into my bag and head back to the office. 

The Burrito Experience

I get back and plop into my chair at my desk.  I open the bag and start doing the salsa.  Baja Fresh’s hot salsa is a little too hot for my taste, and the medium is a little too mild.  I also like mine chunkier and more tomatoey.  I pull out a small bowl and dump the pico de gallo, then the black salsa and a bit of the red.  Mix it up and voila!  Salsa just the way I like it.  I fire up the interwebberytubes and start checking up on the Usual Suspects. 

I unwrap the burrito and slather on some guac.  The first few bites of a burrito are always dominated by the tortilla.  You don’t get into the good stuff until you’re a ways in, typically.  Slather, eat, repeat.  I intersperse with chips and salsa while reading.  After a bit, I notice that Something Is Very Wrong.  The burrito does not taste right.  I peer into its unslathered innards.  Vegetableness as far as the eye can see.  No deliciously seasoned pork present.  They gave me the wrong burrito!  I pull out the receipt – yup it’s the Vegetarian Burrito.  GAH!  There isn’t even any cheese!

This sucks, but it’s too late to do anything about it of course.  I take a closer look at the receipt.  The name on it is one that is similar to mine, but a couple letters off.  I got someone else’s order.  Somewhere else some dude is gonna munch into my Burrito Ultimo and get a mouthful of pork when he does not expect it.  If there’s any justice in the world it will be some PETA prick who discovers, to his horror that he’s chewing on the FLESH OF A DEAD ANIMAL!!!!  I hope, too that he further discovers to his self-loathing and disgust that HE LOVES THE TASTE OF MURDER!!!

Alas, that will probably not be the case.  I eat the rest of the Burrito Inferiorimo without much enthusiasm and I eventually run out of salsa long before I run out of chips.

Oh well.  Back to work.

Inheriting Stuff Early (post title fixed) March 19, 2007

The moving truck showed up at my Parent’s place today and unloaded all thier stuff.  They have too much stuff.  They’ve had too much stuff for years, but now they’re downsizing a bit, which means I get stuff.  Some of the stuff is on the order of “Hey do you want this?” and other stuff is “This has been in the family forever and you usually have to wait for us to die before you can get this” variety.   The former is a small refridgerator I put upstairs in my “Aritist’s Studio” room.  A member of the latter is a solid cedar wood chest and custom-built cedar wood stand for it in the same room.  This is the chest where my Mom has stored all her old, precious memory stuff since before I was born.  It’s still there.  I took a cursory look:  Mother’s Day cards, birthday cards, my Dad’s high school diploma, a chocholate box stuffed full with old letters, a Texaco charge card stub from 1973, a plastic cup with a slip of my “art” encased in it from 1976, etc, etc.  A time capsule of family memories that will have to find a new home.  For a while. 

Another of the latter variety I’ll get in a couple weeks is The Organ.  The Organ has been In The Family for at least a hundred years.  It’s a beautiful old-fashioned foot-pump organ my Dad restored some years ago.  I’ll post some pictures of it when it gets here.  Oh, yes – it still plays.

Another item is a large collection of Depression Era amber glassware.  The Parental Units have been buying this stuff from antique stores all across the U.S. for years.  I wouldn’t be surprised to find the collection to be worth a couple thousand dollars at least.

A couple more items of newstuff:  a “lawyer’s bookcase”, a custom built super kitty scratching post, and some wicker patio furniture.   Their patio is over furnished – I’m doing them a favor by taking it off their hands, really.  Oh, and my Dad wants a new computer desk.  His current one is nicer than mine, so we’ll swap that out too.

iPod Random 10 March 17, 2007

Mr. Slublog has one of those blog-meme thingies going.  Since I’m a fellow ipoditarian I let mine pop out a random 10 songs too.  Here’s the results:

1. Homer Simpson quote: “Gasp!  Computers can do that?”

2. Max Headroom quote:  “M-m-m-m-m-Max Headroom”

Okay, those aren’t songs.  I have a couple hundred of .wav files of movie and TV lines loaded on this thing.  Any random selection is going to pop off a few of these.

1.2  “She Moved Through the Fair” – Anuna on “The Celtic Circle”.  Over the last few years I’ve become increasingly tired of the “Classic” rock stuff I’ve been listening to since the mid-’70s.  As such, I’ve been exploring some of the different musical avenues I’ve been exposed to, but never really looked into.  Clannad &Enya are the usual starting points for this sort of stuff, and this compilation album of other artists in the genre is a good next step.

2.2  “Moving to the Ghetto October 31, 1940” – The Pianist.  I’ve never heard this song before tonight.  It’s a selection from the movie soundtrack.  I’m a member of one of those cd clubs and I didn’t send the “No I Don’t Want This” card back soon enough before they sent out the featured selection, and then I forgot to send the damn thing back before the trial period was up.  So, I have the soundtrack to a movie I never saw, and probably won’t ever see.  This track was boring, and thankfully only about a minute long.

3.2  “Homeward Bound” – Simon & Garfunkle on a “Greatest Hits” album.  One of their old favorites of course, recorded live here.  I’ve listened to S & G songs ever since I was a kid.  I’ve listened to these albums too many times though.  I need a 15 – 20 year break from some of these songs before I can really like them again.

4.2  “The Sounds of Silence” – ditto above.  Wow – out of all the songs the iPod could have “randomly” selected it picked anotherS & G song from the same album.  I have doubts about the true randomness of the iPod “Shuffle” feature.

5.2  “Sunday Girl” – Blondie on “The Platinum Collection”.  It’s a nice song, remenescent of The Seeker’s “Georgie Girl”.  I remember my first introduction to Blondie – Heart of Glass was big on the radio during a road trip to Florida from Maryland for vacation in when I was a kid.  That song came out in ’79, but I remember hearing Juice Newton’s Queen of Hearts being played by the pool at the hotel we were staying at so the year was probably 1981.

6.2  “Linger” – The Cranberries.  One of their two hits from the ’90s.  I haven’t really followed this band, actually.  I borrowed “To the Faithful Departed” album from a guy at work and didn’t really care for it.  This song and “Dreams” I got from iTunes.

7.2  “Elephantoplasty” – Monty Python, “The Instant Record Collection”.  Several classic Monty Python skits in audio form.  Here, an overly opportunistic plastic surgeon describes the results of how he put an elephant’s nose and feet on an ususpecting passer-by, etc.  Some of you purists might object that this isn’t a song either.

7.3  “Hocus Pocus” – by Focus on “Moving Waves”.  Hard rockin’ and yodelling.  You don’t know “Hocus Pocus”?   Of course you do.  I iTunesed the whole album on the off chance that there was something else amazing here.  There wasn’t.

8.3  “Los Peces En El Rio” – Manheim Steamroller on “Christmas Live”.  It’s a good song.  I borrowed a bunch of cd’s from my parents and ported them into my iPod – they like Manheim Steamroller and their christmas songs particularly.  I like them too.

9.3  “Waiting For You” – Seal on “Best 1991 – 2004”.  I borrowed this album from the same guy at work who had the Cranberries album.  I like this one better. 

10.1  “I’ll do you for that!” – Monty Python, “Quest for the Holy Grail”  Movie quote, not actually a song.

10.3  “Nocturnes – Nuages”  Leonard Bernstein conducting – “Leonard Berstein – A Total Embrace”.  A double album of L.B.’s conducting of several famous classical pieces.  Most of the album is pretty good – this particular passage is rather boring.

There ya go. 

Home, Home Again March 16, 2007

We hit town early this afternoon and I got dropped off at my home.  It’s still here! 

I have a vivid imagination and it never fails to offer up all sorts of awful scenarios of domestic devastation while I’m gone.  Happily, I’ve never encountered the still-smoking fire ravaged pit, or burgler-plundered disaster I half-expect everytime I come back from a trip.  No, everything is exactly where it was when I left. 

I took a deep smell when I came in.  You know how everybody’s home has it’s own distinctive smell to it, but you’re mostly blind to your own?  You know how sometimes those other homes’ smell = stink?  Do you ever wonder if your own home’s smell = stink? for other people?  Since everyone is generally scent-blind to their own homes I took the opportunity to “new-sniff” my own place on arrival.  It’s been over a week sinced I’ve been here – what kind of bouquet would I get?  I was very interested in the result of the experience – is this similar to what other visitors to Casa Yorl experience?  Is this bad or good?  I didn’t know.

Sniiiiiiiiiffffff!!

Hm.  Eu de Elderly Glade du Plug In.  That is to say, fading room scenters – nothing more or less than that really.  No strong cooking, or pet smells at any rate.  It’s actually about where you want you house to be day-to-day, really.  No heavy new perfumes covering offensive stuff, just the lingering scent of old ones + ordinary.  

Well, other things ensue – updates later.

Have a great weekend!