First In Flight

My mom called last week to tell me that my first childhood friend had passed away. We didn't necessarily stay close after my family moved away, but we were lucky enough to cross paths from time to time as we became adults. One time getting reintroduced to each other in college by members of the University of Washington crew team who were looking for shrimpy guys like us to sit in the coxswain seat.

College was the last time I saw him. And seeing him in the obituary page in the hometown paper really made me look at my own mortality. He was born about 2 weeks before me. He had a daughter about the same age as my son. And my mom said that he was like a son to her. At least when we were around 5 years old. Rest in peace, buddy.

Hurts So Good

You may or may not have had the luxury of hearing me tell the neverending story of my gum surgery. Either way, it's something you don't want to ever experience.

Thanks to my mom and dad, I have gums that don't seal to the teeth too well. So no matter how much I follow mom and dad's strict teachings to brush and floss every night, their genes don't allow me to adequately clean whatever gets way down in there and attacks the roots of my teeth.

And so I had to find this out from a periodontist 20 years after I left home for college. And this periodontist was required to surgically open up the gum tissue surrounding my molars, clean up the bad stuff, and sew up the gums tighter than mom and dad's DNA ever did.

The result has been laborious in terms of me not being able to chew food on whichever side of the mouth that the periodontist decided to work on this month. Two weeks ago it was the lower left quadrant. He took the stitches out last week and gave me an "A+" on my recovery so far.

In the past couple days I've been able to start chewing soft things like pasta on that side. But the thing that seems to be taking the longest to get over is the cold sensitivity. It ain't no joke. Try chewing on a piece of aluminum foil, and that begins to give you an idea of what I go through even when I drink water that's room temperature. But as I found out with LLMB Reader #1 this week, the one cold beverage that doesn't put the deep freeze on my teeth? You guessed it: A frosty beer. Must be the alcohol. So you know what I'll be drinking until this winter in my mouth is over. Let it snow.

Travelling Without Moving

A couple weeks ago I wrote about my TV. My lack of a TV. Well despite my efforts to remedy my lack of a TV, I continue to buy a TV on what seems like a bi-weekly basis. Artificially propping up the US economy is what I'm really doing.

After the whole Sears-returning-the-first-TV ordeal, I ordered a Philips TV from Dell. Two weeks ago in this space I described the liar Dell salesman. I canceled the order. I then ordered the same Philips TV, the one that's called the EcoTV because it uses far less power than regular TVs and enables me to hug a tree by sitting on my ass watching SportsCenter on a daily basis, from Amazon.

I didn't realize this before I bought this sorta big-ticket item from an online retailer, but Amazon actually farms out that type of order to a storefront who can take care of it directly after the money has been spent. Being that I was missing all this great HDTV resolution by having to cancel with liars at Dell, I paid extra for expedited shipping: 3x as much as regular shipping to get it in 3-5 days.

The storefront vendor is ANTOnline, based in Atlanta, GA. I get an e-mail from them updating me on where my TV is. The e-mail links to their website which says "Shipment moved from regional warehouse to local". Great. It's so close now I can smell the High-Definition.

But then a day later, the web message changes to "No information available at this time", and stays that way for the remainder of my 3-5 day expedited shipping process. 5 days turns into 6 and then the jig is up. I call ANTOnline and ask them what the holdup is. The nice lady on the phone tells me she'll find out and call me right back. And when she calls me right back, she tells me that they made an error, I needed to pay another $150 to ship this TV, they don't really have expedited shipping, and I'd receive it in another 7-10 days. After another round of customer service hold sessions, I cancel the order.

The next TV vendor turns out to be Buy.com. Buy.com is based just south of Los Angeles. Close enough to walk the TV over in a few days. I order the same Philips EcoTV, I check my shipping status online during the 5-7 day period, and the end of the 7 days comes and goes. And on day 8, the shipping message changes to "Estimated Delivery Date: May 23". I can only venture a guess what my e-mail asking why they say 5-7 days when they really mean 18 days will get. Canceled.

How to Disappear Completely

Because I like to waste a lot of time managing my music in iTunes, I've found yet another way to focus even more of my attention on that application. I wanted to listen to all the music I have at least once, so I created a smart playlist that holds every song whose playcount is zero. After the song is played, it then has a playcount of one, and it disappears out of the playlist.

Essentially this playlist left me with mostly songs that I really didn't care to listen to. And it turned out to be around 10 gigs worth of music. So it's been a grueling couple of weeks as I listen to the likes of Janet Jackson, The Dandy Warhols, and a metal band called My Dying Bride that co-worker-bee Brady likes to call "church-burners". And Johnny Cash pops up from beyond the grave in chunks of about 7 songs to not only sing in Folsom Prison, but also to take on covers of songs from bands like Soundgarden, Nine Inch Nails, and Depeche Mode.

But in listening to this Underplayedlist, how did I not ever listen a song on Kid A? And how the hell did I acquire every Squarepusher album? Anyhow, I've managed to get the list down to around 2 gigs, and under 400 songs left. But if I have to endure one more Elton John ballad, there won't be anything to read here next week.

Bad

Last week was grueling. I spoke with around 12 customer service reps from Sears when I wanted to return the replacement for my TV of 10 years. The new TV had an amazing picture, but the vertical line running through the middle of the screen didn't look so great. In trying to get Sears to pick up this faulty set, they referred me to delivery, who referred me to the national customer service line, who forwarded me to repair, who sent me to delivery, who forwarded me to the store where I bought my TV, who told me to call delivery, who sent me back to the store. I went into the store with receipt in hand and the Sears employee told me I had to call delivery. He probably saw the steam starting to emanate from my ears, so he called delivery himself and told them to head over to my house to pick the damn thing up.

Later in the week I spent probably a total of 3 hours on the phone with Dell for the replacement for that replacement, after I found out the sales rep had lied to me about how long it would take to deliver the TV. He said it would be the next day. The e-mail said it wouldn't even be shipped for another three. I canceled on the sheer principle that I don't wanna give money to liars.

And the capper of this stellar week was FedEx on Friday. A director friend of mine was shipping a firewire drive that had footage for a music video. Unfortunately for me, the FedEx way is to try to deliver to workplaces before most workplaces are open. I tracked the package and found out that they attempted delivery at 7:40 am, but they would re-deliver by 3 pm. 3 pm comes and goes. No package. 4 pm comes and goes. I was losing a whole day of editing on a music vid that was due on Monday. Sweet. I called FedEx and discovered that the package was still sitting at the facility and there would be no other attempt to deliver that day. Needless to say, it was a fun conversation that ended in me putting on my FedEx hat and driving to the facility and wasting more time there while they attempted to locate the box. Then I got to work all weekend and avoid the nice weather everybody else enjoyed down here.

Not such a great week, eh? I thought so until the IT guy at my work came in with a cast on his right wrist & hand. He had just had surgery on his wrist the day before. Apparently he had to walk to his surgery appointment in the morning because his neighbor had his car towed for blocking his driveway. And he probably won't be getting his car back soon, because he has a bunch of unpaid parking tickets, and he'll have to part with a good chunk of his cash if he wants it back. Oh, and on the walk to his surgery appointment he stepped in dogshit and had brushed some on his pant leg while strolling. But he didn't notice the dogshit until he arrived at his doctor. I'm sure the surgery wasn't much fun either. In light of that, my week was a cakewalk.

Freedom

On Monday I got a chance to see what it was probably like in Mayberry back in the Andy Griffith days. A town hall meeting with the mayor of Culver City and 4 council-persons was to decide whether our street could be closed off to make it a cul-de-sac. One of the councilmen said that in his eight years service he hadn't received as many letters, phone calls and e-mails as he had surrounding this issue.

The main reason for the potential street closure is the fact that in our neighborhood, our street is the only one with a traffic light at the end of it. And that light leads to a road that eventually takes you to the 405 freeway. Our street was never intended to be a collector road, and its narrowness has caused several sideswipes, car wrecks and lawn-driving maneuvers by agrro motorists driving at speeds up to 70 mph. This on a residential street where the speed limit is more like 25 mph. Add to that the fact that there are around 25 kids on this street, many who are skateboarding age and they like to ride their skateboards in the street. A street two blocks away is the logical collector road for this traffic but there's only a stop sign where that road ends, and motorists tend to choose the street that they have the best chance of blowing through - ours.

On moving to our new neighborhood, we were introduced to many of our new neighbors through visits from them asking us to send in a ballot card to say "yes, we'd like our street closed!" Who the heck wouldn't want that? So I checked the yes boxes and sent it in. Soon afterward the proposition passed, but the Culver City council thought it might be good to hear from all sides first. And our neighbors on the surrounding streets weren't too happy about this possibility of inheriting our traffic, as was evidenced by their numbers in attendance for the town hall meeting.

It's interesting to go to a town hall meeting and experience politics on such a small scale. It's politics that you actually have a voice in. In fact, there were 30 or so voices going up to the podium for three minutes each and speaking their minds about the street closure. There were the neighbors on my street telling the council that they've been dealing with the traffic and working over seven years to get to this point. There were the neighbors on the surrounding streets telling the council that they don't want our problem. And there were the five elected representatives stuck in the middle. The discussion on this topic had started at 8:25 pm and it ended at 12:15 am.

At one point it seemed as if the council was going to do nothing. The mayor, who was set to finish his term in two weeks, piped up and said "Well, it's approaching midnight and we're all tired here." At which point we knew that our street closure wasn't going to happen. Then he continued, "Except I can't leave office knowing that some kid might get killed on that street if we don't do something". The neighbors from the surrounding streets were probably letting out an inner "fok", knowing that we were gonna be there much longer and much later. One member of the council came up with a new plan that wasn't exactly closing the street, but it was a good compromise. And the mayor threw in to the proposal adding more traffic cops in our neighborhood to crack down on speeding.

It came to a vote, which required a simple majority. And when the voting lights in front of each council-person came on, we had won: 3 yes, 2 no. But one of the council-persons mentioned that her vote was incorrect, that it showed yes when she had voted no. Boos from the crowd. Re-vote came up 2 yes, 3 no. More boos from the crowd, until another member of the council felt the heat and asked the crowd, "who on the neighboring streets are in favor of this new plan?" There was a surprising amount of applause. The councilman requested to do a re-vote. 3 yes, 2 no. The crowd erupted in applause, and everybody left City Hall shaking hands and smiling. That is, everybody but the city council, who still had a few more items to discuss.

The next day, I spoke with several of my neighbors and they all felt happy about the decision, but they didn't believe it would really be implemented. And the following day Lily said she saw at least seven cars pulled over by cops giving tickets. Either that's progress, or I'm getting old. Maybe both.

World of Entertainment (W.O.E. is Me)

So I'm on the plane back from Sea-Tac, on a relatively new Virgin America airplane, and I sit down in my comfy black seat with the uber-hip white panel in front of me containing their Audio-Visual system called Red. Not shortly after reaching our cruising altitude of 36 thousand feet, the crew came through with the drink cart to offer refreshments.

After ordering, the three gentlemen in the row directly in front of us - who seemed not to know each other - all started asking questions about the capability of Red to do what they needed to do on this 2.5 hour flight.

Man #1: "Do you offer broadband?"
Crew member: "Sorry, we don't offer broadband yet, but it's coming. In like 6 months or so. But that's not soon enough for you, yes?"

Man #2 (To Man #1): "But you can chat on the plane if you want"
Crew member: "Oh yeah, you can chat with the other passengers"

Man #2 (repeatedly pressing his Red touch screen): "My chat isn't working"
Crew member: "Would you like me to restart you?"
Man #2 (still pressing the screen): "Yes please."

Man #3 (repeatedly pressing his Red touch screen): "How come these TV channels don't work?"
Crew member: "Sometimes we lose reception up here"
Man #3 (repeatedly pressing his Red touch screen): "Well CNN comes in, why don't the other channels?"
Crew member: "Would you like me to restart you?"

What the fuck, people. Two of the three of these men had their laptop computers open. Is that not enough? Do we need somebody to come over and perform magic tricks for them as well? Just be like Lily and play 50 games of Mahjongg. That'll keep you occupied for a couple hours.

You Think I Ain't Worth a Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire

In my recent attempts to save every penny possible, I've located the most obvious place, and that's at the Extra Space Storage facility in Marina Del Rey. Now that we have enough room in our house to store all those boxes of useful junk, I can nix the $77 that we were paying.

And due to an oversight in their accounting department, I was credited an amount equal to the 2 months rent I would have paid for breaking my lease early. So those extra pennies will help out with the increased cost of housing, the new TV I'll have to buy because my old one blew out, the cost of flying the family up to Seattle for a funeral, etc etc. But I get to keep an extra 77 bucks a month? Somebody up there likes me.

Stardust

I take no credit for the creation of anything in this post.

Three Car Jam

1. As I careened out of the Target parking lot on a Sunday morning, apparently I went through a red light. I didn't realize it at the time, but the authorities were kind enough to send several pictures at different angles of me and my car taking a left through the intersection while the light was clearly red. Luckily I wasn't doing anything incriminating like picking my nose, or like the episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry is photographed going through a red light while looking at his passengers ass, which was up in the air because she was reaching into the back seat. The little series of pictures will only cost me $380 plus another $50 for the privilege of spending some time at traffic school.

2. About two weeks later on my way to our new abode, I had the sensation that the car wasn't handling well - like it had a flat tire. I got out of the car at the nearest intersection to inspect the situation and unfortunately I was right about the tire. Torn sidewall. Fortunately I was close enough to our old abode to change the tire in our driveway. To get at the spare tire, I removed all the crap out of the car trunk: Bottles for recycling, grocery bags, a skimboard.

The resident homeless guy that we like to call Burnout - because he can spend days reclining in the sun, and his black clothes and hair appear burnt - came up to me and asked if I had seen a guy he described as looking exactly like me. The guy apparently took a grocery bag (which Burnout said looked like a grocery bag that was sitting next to my car with the flat tire) that was full of money. Burnout would have used this grocery bag full of bills to go somewhere around Christmas. Burnout repeatedly asked me if I saw the guy around anywhere, and I repeatedly told him I hadn't seen anybody (who looks just like me).

I put on the spare, and lowered the car with the jack, only to find that the spare was flat. I figured that the spare isn't much bigger than a mountain bike tire, so I grabbed my bike pump and got to work. My triceps hadn't seen a workout like that in months. That afternoon I went to Big O Tires and spent $380 for 4 new tires because the 3 working tires probably didn't have much longer to live.

3. Last weekend we went to the nearby Sherwin-Williams paint store to buy one more can of white semi-gloss for the interior of our new abode. Because Lily had been choosing all the paint to this point, she went into the store while Judah and I waited in the car. It was hot, so I pressed the buttons to roll down the windows. The rear driver side window had some trouble going down, but it eventually made it all the way down. When Lily came back I rolled all the windows up. That is, all but the rear drivers side window, which didn't come all the way back up. It sounded like it wanted to close, but the crunching noise led me to believe that it wasn't gonna. I still haven't taken it in to the shop for that one, but my guess is that it's probably going to cost $380.

It's like that, and that's the way it is

Moving on Monday, taxes on Saturday, clients in all week. See you next Thursday.

Third Eye

Walking back from the Third Street Promenade, I approached the intersection at the post office and I noticed a blind woman with a cane. She tapped the white cane around the edge of the sidewalk, seemingly unsure which direction she wanted to go. She looked flustered. She did a 180, then stopped and did another 180, and she seemed on the verge of a panic attack. Several people walked by without offering any assistance.

I walked up to her and asked "do you need help?" She took a deep breath and said yes, thank you. She said "I need to find 5th street". I looked up at the sign at the intersection and it said 5th Street. I told her she was on 5th Street & Arizona. Then she told me "Can you point me in the direcction of 4th Street?" I turned her in the direction of 4th Street and told her "now you're facing toward 4th Street, toward the beach."

She said "Thanks so much" and tapped her way toward 4th Street. As I turned and continued on my way, I realized that probably nothing going on in my little world was as bad as what she just went through.

Pac-Man Fever

On Monday night a work project fell into my lap at around 5:45 pm. The project was the video component of one of those newfangled rides where you're sitting in a movie theater in a small group of theater seats that move in relation to what you're seeing on screen. Luckily for me, I was stoked to work on the project because it features a character from a TV show who says "Doh!" starring in it.

The "Doh!" part was about as good as it was gonna get. Because then the real work began. Taking a series of still frame rough animation files and putting them together isn't really what I consider "editing", but it falls under editor duties and thus falls into my lap at 5:45 pm on a Monday night.

I was to take a sequence of still images and compile them into a 5 minute movie, and then attach the existing sound bed so that it was in sync. Sounds simple, right? Too simple? Too simple. It wasn't in sync, and the production manager and I spent the next three hours trying to figure out why.

We slipped the audio this way and that until it was about in sync as it was going to be for this stage of the animation, so that the sound designer/mix people could do their job and then the whole thing could move forward again. At 9pm we were laying off to tape and I assumed I was done. And I was, until the next day at noon.

One of our production coordinators walked into the editing suite at noon and told me that a two-minute chunk of the sequence with revised animation was being sent over the network. All I had to do was import the sequence, cut it over the existing sequence and lay it off to tape. The Executive Producer of the TV show that this "ride" is based on with the character who says "Doh!" would be waiting for this tape on the studio lot at 3 pm. Sounds simple, right? Too simple? Too simple.

I import the new animation into the edit system (Avid) at around 1 pm. I line up the spot where the new animation goes over the old stuff, and I quickly realize there's a problem: The new piece goes way longer than the old piece. And then I quickly discover that every 5th frame is a repeat of the 4th frame.

So I call our producer for this "ride" and tell him what's up. We talk tech mumbo-jumbo (different than this tech mumbo-jumbo) for 10 minutes before he decides to get off the phone to see what he can do on his end. The clock is rapidly ticking toward 3 pm, so I start trying different compression techniques to see if that'll work. The producer calls me back about 45 minutes later only to tell me that it will take 2 hours to recreate the animation correctly. Hm. Two hours plus 1: 55 pm equals pissed off Executive Producer of a ride and TV show with character who says "Doh!" DOH!

I tell the producer that I'll take care of it, and we hang up. If you know anything about how editing works, then you know that there are a few very basic commands: Mark In, Mark Out, and Cut. And probably the last remaining thing that Avid has going over Final Cut Pro is a little routine where you can punch in plus or minus then a number on the keypad then Enter (i.e. +5 Enter), and you'll go that number of frames ahead or back. Then every time you just press Enter it'll go that same distance. Every 5th frame a duplicate? No problem.

I remap my keyboard so that it'll be Mark In, Mark Out, Cut - using the ring finger, middle finger, index finger (in that order) on my left hand. After that left handed sequence I'm pressing Enter (for the +5 frame advance) with my right index finger. Repeat ad nauseum. I knew playing all those video games back in the day would pay off.

I'm cruising through this little 5 frame edit exercise (and I'm amazed at how the Avid can keep up with this insane tapping), and I get the slightest tinge of carpal tunnel. Every now and then I take a break to check the frame numbers to make sure I haven't gone astray, and every now and then I have gone astray, so I stop to fix it. After a few minutes of speed metal finger tapping, I'm grimacing and letting out the occasional scream because nobody is supposed to edit like this. But I'll be damned if that deadline is missed.

My fingers thoroughly fatigued, I finally get the cutting done and I'm ready to lay off to tape. But some stupid Golf commercial is using the tape deck I need to lay off to. Looks like Mr. Executive Producer of the TV show with a character who says "Doh!" in it would have to wait. At least he wouldn't be waiting because of me. DOH!

Independent Worm Saloon

After a semi-tough day at work and a completely tough drive home in the rain, I walked in the back door to our apartment and saw the usual sight of Lily reading a book to Judah as he attempted to finish his dinner. A stack of children's books about 12 high stood on the counter next to them. I took off my backpack and set it on the floor, and I had removed one of my loafers when Lily said "Could you return these books to the library?"

As any good husband and father would, I pulled on my recently removed shoe, grabbed the stack of books and headed out the door. The Abbot-Kinney Library is right across the street from our driveway. It's also the place where, in the rain or in any other kind of weather, a group of homeless folk call their home. And being that it had just rained, a group of 6 or 8 homeless guys were standing off to the side of the entrance to said library.

And as I crossed the street toward the library, one of the smoking homeless guys stared me down. I returned the stare as I made my way toward the entrance carrying the armful off books. As I passed the guy, he shrugged his shoulders, looked back toward his buddies and muttered "bookworm". The group erupted in laughter. Great. Like I wanna be made fun of by a group of homeless guys. Actually, it was a good one. Bookworm. I'm gonna keep that one for a rainy day.

Run To The Hills

At the risk of pigeon-holing myself as a closet metal nerd, I need to get this off my chest. I've been to a lot of concerts. A ton of concerts. So many concerts that when I turned 21 (many moons ago) I decided that I wasn't gonna go to concerts anymore. That didn't last long.

I still go to plenty of concerts. Especially now that I live in a place where every single band comes through. But the one concert I didn't go to, if I could go to one concert that happened in my lifetime? Iron Maiden - Powerslave tour - 1984-85.

If you've ever seen pictures from this tour, then you know that the stage setup was a spectacle of the Spinal Tap variety. You don't have to like heavy metal to appreciate monstrous stage setups with fog machines, flamethrowers, fireworks, and a huge animatronic Eddie.

That concert eluded me, and I'd been trying to go to an Iron Maiden concert ever since. I came close in 2003, but the realities of a tight work schedule nixed my drive down to Shoreline Amphitheater. It looked like a live Eddie sighting wasn't in the cards. Until this year.

Iron Maiden at the Forum in Inglewood. Perfect. The parking lot was like a scene from 1984: muscle cars and jean jackets. The Forum looked like 1984. When we walked in, I imagined Magic Johnson no-look-passing to Kareem for a Showtime slam dunk. Kobe Bryant would never play here. Jack Nicholson probably wouldn't be caught dead here now. The Forum stinks and after you get 10,000 Iron Maiden fans spilling beer everywhere, it's treacherous. No lights on the slippery soaked stairways tells the whole story.

So after the obligatory horrible opening band, Iron Maiden came on and played mostly songs from around 1984. Rocked the house. Everybody looked a little older, but after the 10 foot tall animatronic Eddie walked around the stage with a laser gun, nobody noticed anymore. And now I can cross "See Iron Maiden Live" off my to do list.

These go to eleven

In plowing through my ever-expanding music collection, I've discovered some songs that aren't really songs. They're silence. They're tracks on albums which, on vinyl or cassette or 8-track or CD, might go unnoticed. But in digital music file format, they're bona fide "songs" which take up space on my hard drive.

And in researching some of the new albums I have, I've noticed that digital music stores such as Amazon & iTunes sell these silent tracks. You can buy them as part of an album or as individual tracks. "(Silence)" by Ciccone Youth: Only 99 cents at the digital store of your choice. "One Minute of Silence" by Soundgarden: Same price. "(Silence)" by Juno: Again, just 99 cents.

And they really are just that. Silence. So here's my plan. For a mere 50 cents - that's 49 cents cheaper than any digital music store - I'll sell you a track of silence! 50 cents! Can't beat that.

Stealing People's Mail

In my possession is an e-mail account that must be worth some money. I say that because I get a lot of inadvertent mail because so-and-so told their friends "hey, my e-mail is blah@blah.com" but their friends heard something more simplified than that.

For instance, my dream e-mail address would probably be "lee@mac.com" because it's short and sweet and easy to remember, but somebody who's even more ahead of the curve and more cutting edge than even I am got there before me and stole it from its rightful owner. So instead, I have an e-mail address that's a little harder to remember than that, but people may assume, under drunken circumstances probably, that I said "lee@mac.com".

So basically I receive inadvertent e-mails from all over the place because drunk people thought somebody told them an e-mail address, but it wasn't what they vaguely remember. And here are some of the results of that drunkenness:

Louise

All detail of the offer below. I was a little inaccurate on the car allowance so it is just £400 short of current basic if you choose to take the car allowance. There is the option to take a car. Of course they pay all your business mileage/petrol when used on business.

The sooner you can come back the better.

Tom

Tom was offering Louise a job, but apparently either Louise or Tom was at a 3 martini lunch and one of them (probably Tom) got Louise's e-mail address mixed up with mine. Too bad. Louise would have gotten a pretty sweet gig complete with 5 weeks "holiday" (this is in the UK), and 4 weeks company sick pay. Apparently I'm working in the wrong country.

Here's another. Somebody named David sent these pics, and all it says is "here ya go":

Fun



Regular




And this mistakenly sent e-mail might have caused eternal damnation:

Lindsey,

Would you mind printing these for mass today. I thought "We bring the sacrifice of praise" for the opening, "Change My Heart" for the preparation and "Shine Jesus Shine" for the last one. Thanks.

Tyler

There were no attachments. Somebody's gonna burn in hell.

Good Morning, Captain

Well I had planned on spending this morning putting some letters together into words in this space, but instead I spent the morning trying to keep Judah one step away from complete meltdown.

It goes like this:

(Judah throws soccer ball repeatedly)
Me: Judah, you can't do that right now because you'll wake up the neighbors downstairs.
Judah picks up ball and throws it again
Me: Judah, if you do that one more time, I'm going to have to take the ball away from you
Judah picks up ball and throws it again
Me: Okay, I'm taking the ball away now.
I put the ball on a high shelf where he can't reach it. Judah gets upset and does the standard tantrum-style fall on the floor face down, hands and feet pounding the floor. I go to the kitchen to get some juice. Judah comes running after me and sees the juice and wants something.
Me: You want some milk?
Judah: (sniffling) Yeah
I grab the jug of milk and put it on the counter. I grab a purple sippy cup out of the cupboard.
Judah: No! No! No!
Judah falls on the ground crying
Me: Do you want a different cup?
Judah: (sniffling) Yeah
I grab a pink plastic cup out of the cupboard.
Me: Do you want this one?
Judah: No! No! No!
Judah falls on the ground crying. I grab a yellow sippy cup.
Me: Do you want this one?
Judah: (sniffling) Yeah
I grab the lid to the sippy cup.
Judah: No! No! No! No top! No top!
I put the lid down and grab the milk jug.
Judah: No! No! No! No milk! No milk!
Me: Judah? You said you wanted milk. Do you want water.
Judah: (sniffling) No
Me: Do you want milk or water?
Judah: (sniffling) Milk
Me: Okay
I pour a little bit into the sippy cup
Judah: Big one! Big one!
Me: Judah? I'm only giving you this much because I don't want you to spill it.
Judah: Big one! Big one!
I hand him the cup that doesn't have "Big one" in it.
Judah: No! No! No!
Judah falls on the ground crying.
Me: Judah, please drink this and I'll give you some more
Judah gets up and grabs the cup which barely fits in his little grasp. He takes a tiny sip and puts it down. He runs off into the living room to play with his trains. I grab his cup and my juice and head into the living room. I put the cups down on the coffee table

After playing for a bit, Judah grabs his sippy cup and takes another tiny sip. He almost gets it down to the table, but he lets it go early enough for it to tip on its side and spill all over some important documents. At least he didn't spill it on my computer. And the moral of the story would be: Don't cry over spilled milk. Or not enough milk in your sippy cup either.

Futureworld

Being the good Los Angeles citizen that I am, I'm quickly abandoning any semblance of using modes of transportation other than my car. The bike rides have become less and less as the weeks go by. There's always some lame excuse: It's raining. It's too cold. I have clients in today and I don't wanna be all stinky. I don't wanna crash and destroy my laptop. Etc, etc. Seeing's how I've spent a good majority of my life as a licensed driver not owning a car, I figure I can drive a bit in this town.

So in order to combat the high cost of burning fossil fuels, I use this little widget called, appropriately: Gas. The Gas Widget tells me where I can get the cheapest gas within a specified radius. Except sometimes I go to the station that the Gas Widget points me to, and the gas isn't the same price as it said on the widget! Can't trust anybody. Or any little computerized thingy called widget.

But recently I noticed there's a button on the widget that says "Spot". I clicked on it and it told me how I could become a "spotter", which is basically how the widget gets the information about what the gas prices are. As the legion of spotters drives by whatever gas stations, they're gathering information and putting it onto a website where you can then see on a map what the prices are in a given area. That info is then related to the simple little Gas Widget.

Spotting is no easy task, especially in Los Angeles, where there are bazillions of gas stations on every street. At first I took spotting sorta lightly. I'd drive past a 76 station, look at the sign, and speak aloud the cents part of the cost. i.e. "29 39 49", which means "$3.29, $3.39, $3.49". But the saying it aloud thing didn't work too well with remembering, especially after passing about 3 gas stations. So I started writing them down on a piece of paper. While driving. Hell, half the people I see on the road are either holding a cell phone or texting, so scribbling some numbers on a piece of paper can't be all bad now can it? For the greater good of all gas consumers?

If that's not enough, The GasPriceWatch website even awards points for every updated price you enter into the system. And they keep a running tally of which users have the most points every month, and the high score overall. Needless to say, I want the high score. So I'll waste a bunch of gas driving around LA to find gas prices so I can win!

Freedom of Choice

The moment had finally arrived. The moment I'd been waiting for since July, when I shipped my iBook G4 off to the winning ebayer: Macworld. Not just Macworld, but the Macworld where they were rumored to be releasing the replacement for my iBook G4: The new and improved ultra-slim MacBook.

But then the dream died. Steve Jobs didn't deliver. Well, he delivered a stunningly beautiful new ultra-slim laptop. But he didn't deliver what I had in mind.

Instead of replacing the MacBook at its price point, he gave us the MacBook Air for (in computer terms) considerably more money. Instead of giving us the same functionality, he took out the optical drive and the ethernet port and firewire. And if I may geek out even more, he gave us a slower processor and slower drive rpm than the less expensive MacBook. I guess I wasn't the only one who felt old Stevie didn't deliver:



That eleven-hundred bucks was burning a hole in my wallet. Coincidentally, my car didn't pass smog, so on the same day as the Macworld announcement I took it in for repairs so it would pass smog. And on that little trip, they found out that my brakes were shot, the ignition was faulty, and the car had an oil leak and a few belts that needed replacing. Price tag: $1100.