Disappointed

Have you ever been excited about something, something you've really been looking forward to? And you've had a hard week and that thing is the light at the end of the tunnel? Then that thing doesn't happen, or doesn't happen as planned? Well, that's where I'm at. I feel silly because it's really bothering me. I feel let down. Maybe I'm a little more sensitive at the moment because I've had a long week, I'm tired and I wasn't home for the holiday. I don't know. It really is no big thing, but it bothered me. I can't expect others to make plans around me, but nonetheless I am disappointed. I feel left behind.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Hi everyone! Happy Turkey Day. Thank you to each of you for your friendship and love. I love and appreciate you. THANK YOU! I hope you all had a wonderdful day, and I hope someone saved me some turkey. I am currently in San Juan, Puerto Rico and was in Guayaquil, Ecuador last night, and Miami the night before that. I am finally heading home tomorrow, Friday, where I can't wait to see Dytz! Hooray! He's here.

Enjoy the rest of your day, and HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

And Tango Makes Three

Have you heard of the children's story And Tango Makes Three? If you haven't heard of it before, you have now. And you're likely to hear more about in the news as the book is making headlines. First, the Chicago Tribune says And Tango Makes Three is an "illustrated children's book based on a true story of two male penguins -- Roy and Silo -- in New York City's Central Park Zoo who adopted a fertilized egg and raised the chick as their own." Cute. Very Cute.

Of course, uber-conservative middle America has isssues about two male penguins raising a baby chick. Oh, I see. They must be gay! "Parents in Metro East community [in southern Illisnois] want gay penguin book blocked," or so the headline of the Chicago Tribune article says. We don't know that they're gay, and who cares if they are? The story is edible.

Parents at a local elementary school are trying to have the book moved to a restricted shelf within the school's library requiring parent permission to check it out. That's because they claim the book deals with "mature" issues. Fortunately, the local superintendent refuses to move the book saying, "My feeling is that a library is to serve an entire population. It means you represent different families in a society -- different religions, different beliefs. That's the role of a school library." Bingo.

Good for her. You can read the article here. You can buy the book here. You can bet SpyC will be adding it to her school library in the next few days.

Me too!

Um, congratulations?

Cliche?

With some training in journalism and newspaper writing, I am surprised the LA Times would allow the following headline and paragraph. I think the writer thought they were being funny... maybe even creative.

"Frozen pigs hog the road after truck, big rig collide

"Traffic squealed to a halt Monday evening in the truck lanes of the Golden State Freeway when a truck collided with a big rig, spilling dozens of frozen pig carcasses across 80 feet of pavement, authorities said."

Interesting story? Certainly. Hog and squealing?

So where do you stand, uh, sit?

Ever think of bathroom statistics -- stupid bathroom statistics? For whatever reason, I had this thought this morning while stumbling to the bathroom at 5:30. I guess I had too much water before I went to bed.

54% of Americans fold their paper neatly while 35% wad it into a ball. I fold it.
60% of Americans prefer the paper over the top, 29% under. The rest don’t care. I prefer it over and, in fact, will change it if I find it otherwise.
50/50: Americans who wipe front to back or back to front. It does have something to do with whether you have inner parts or outer parts (woman or man). Most men wipe back to front, whereas women wipe front to back. I wipe back to front.

Also, how you wipe may also depend on whether you wipe standing up or sitting down. Standing up? I can’t imagine, but I guess a lot of people do it. Because I wipe sitting down, that may be why I wipe back to front.

Other things to consider: do you examine the contents of the toilet before flushing? Do you put toilet paper in the toilet first to prevent splashing? Do you use toilet seat covers while in public restrooms? Take the Bathroom Survey to answer these and other questions about bathroom habits.

How smart are you? Apparently we can tell by whether you read while on the toilet or not. More than two thirds of those with graduate degrees read while on the can, 56% with a bachelor’s do the same. Only one in two with high school degrees read while relaxing on the throne. I read, sometimes.

And did you know this? A lot of men sit to pee. I do this only when I awake from sleep to go pee. I am generally too tired to aim or it’s too dark to aim and I don’t want to turn the light on.

So there you have it. More than you ever wanted to know about my bathroom habits, and maybe more thought to your own than you ever thought you’d give. Nonetheless, it makes you think, and if you’ve read this far, you probably learned something new. See, it was worth it after all.

Maybe not so bad

I called Dell again yesterday to see if talking to someone different might net me different results with my dead computer. We tried a couple of things, and sure enough, it's fried. However, Archie, my tech, told me the failure code my computer was spitting out was sufficient enough for him to order a new hard drive for me and have someone come to the house and install it. (Horray for in home service contracts!). Before I was going to have the computer inspected by someone to see if my files could be extracted, then have the sysop restored or my hard drive repaired. Now I can have the new hard drive installed and take the old one, sans the rest of the PC, to be inspected. A lot easier to handle. It still sux the damn thing took a shitter, especially since it's really not that old, but hey, it could be worse... I could be paying for the whole thing.

In other news...

Trader Joe's is opening November 27 in Cary! Can't wait for that. The new Costco is now open. That's exciting too! Yesterday was my last day of vacation... I'm heading off to London tonight and won't be back until Saturday morning. It was nice to have the last two weeks off. I went to Sacramento to spend time with my brother, his wife and their beautiful baby girl. It was great to spend time with all three of them. The last day I was there my parents joined us, so that was nice. I've been able to spend a lot of time with SpyC laltey, and that's been nice too. We've been trying to cook more at home and that's been going well. We just got tired of eating out so much, not to mention the money we can save by eating at home. Rachel Ray's 30-minute meals are keeping us pretty happy. We've also been making some of our old favorites like tortilla soup, corn chowder and carrot-raisin-nut bread.

I'll be back home Saturday morning and will leave again Wednesday, Nov 22, to go back to London. That means I'll be spending Thanksgiving there, but that's ok. I'll be home Friday afternoon and can't wait for that. Dytz is coming to town Thursday morning. It'll be nice to see him, especially here in Raleigh so he can check out the digs. We might not let him leave! SpyC and I are VERY excited about him coming. Dytz... are you as excited as we are?

God bless Mark Foley...

And Tom Delay, Donald Rumsfeld and most of all, Jorge Bush. Thanks to these colossal dorks, Democrats are in power of both the House and the Senate. It's a beautiful day not only in American politics, but for Americans themselves. Finally we might be able to dig ourselves out of the dozens of wholes the elephants buried us in over the past six years. My only question now is, why couldn't this happen two years ago? Why is Bush still in office? Oh well, by gones. Now we can look forward to the future where we might start to make progress and move this country forward instead of moving it back a century.

In addition to the national scene, I am happy to know both the state House and Senate in North Carolina are in control of the Democrats. I don't know if this is a shift from before, but I was surprised to read moments ago that Democrats have a handy majority in both Houses. Maybe North Carolina can finally move beyond the Civil War and realize wow, we're in the 21st century. I'm sure it will take a while.

And speaking of states, I was saddened to learn Nevada, my previous home state and birthplace, fell victim to the Republicans, again. Which is strange but also no surprise because two years ago the Democrats outnumbered the Republicans by a 51% to 49% majority, yet Bush still won the state. This year, a new Republican was elected governor. That's sad because Jim Gibbons, the winner, is a colossal dork too. We're talking short bus. I know that's not nice but it's true. They also kept the same dorks in Washington -- Ensign and Porter. Ugh. Glad to be out of there.

At least on the national scene and where real politics happen the country has shed themselves of a lot of fat elephants. There will soon be a mass exodus of colossal dorks from Washington and I could be none the happier. I might even volunteer, don my little orange vest and guide them out of town.

Computer hell!

I recently set up my computer, finally, after moving. I needed to get an account number off a document so I was forced to pull it out and set it up. About time, too, as I was getting anxious to plug the 'ol iPod in and get her charged up. I haven't used it since we moved. The set-up of the computer went fine, I found what I needed and printed it out. Then I left the computer. I didn't turn it off, didn't put it to sleep, just walked away.

I went back to the computer yesterday to finish setting it up and get it hooked up to the internet. Surprise! On the computer screen it says something along the lines of, "Windows could not be started because there is a corrupt or missing file in: WINDOWS/SYSTEM32/CONFIG/SYSTEM. Oh shit. It then says to insert the original system CD to attempt a repair. Well, I pulled out the CD and called Dell for tech support. After spending about an hour on the phone with the guy the bad news came: the only option is to perform a PC restore, which takes my computer back to its factory settings and I lose everything on it. All my documents. The good news there isn't much on there I would really want, except all my iTunes. I am hoping my iPod wasn't without juice for too long that it lost that info. At least it would be there and I could add it back to the desktop. The iPod is charging off the laptop now, so I hope it works in the morning. We'll see.

My computer is currently running some exam thing it isn't even supposed to do, the Dell tech support guy couldn't figure out why and we tried to get around it three times. For any in the know, we were attempting to access the restore consul when this stupid exam thing popped up. And it just keeps going and going. Tech support said when I hit 'r' for the restore consul, it should take me to a prompt to enter some information. Nope, doesn't do that. After three attempts and many, many minutes later, it is suggested that I perform a PC restore. Ugh. I couldn't bring myself to do it and decided to see where this "examining" thing gets us overnight.

Dell Tech Support also gave me the phone number for a group called Drive Savers or something like that. He suggested I call them before I perform the restore to attempt to recover my files. I don't know if it'll be worth it. So how does this happen? I walk away from my computer one day, everything working fine, only to come back and find it fucked up. Nobody touched it/used it. Why did it reboot anyway? No one was there to ask it to. The whole thing is weird. Just more proof you should back up your files no matter what. And tech suppport couldn't come up with an answer either, other than to repeatedly ask if I installed any new software or hardware. Nope, but I wished I had if it gave us something to go by.

So this is what it means when your computer "crashes." Well, it sucks, and I'd rather not deal with this again. I told the guy at tech support that when he told me to perform a restore, I said that was like asking me to put one of my animals down. I just couldn't do it. Thank goodness I have two laptops to get by with. I'd be dead lost if I couldn't access the internet.

Shopping heaven!

For food that is. When we first moved here to North Carolina, one of the drawbacks we knew of right away was that there are no Trader Joe's in the area. In fact, the closest one is in Newport News, Virginia, about five hours drive from here. We had heard rumblings that there was a TJ's coming to Cary, one of the suberbs of Raleigh, but TJ's wouldn't confirm it... until now. There is no opening date, but the location they are moving to has been under construction for several months. Maybe that means Trader Joe's will be open within six more. That'd be nice. At any rate, we can't wait!
Now if only Costco would get on it. If you can believe it, there are nearly two million people that live in the Triangle area, and there's only one Costco, more than an hour from here! Yes, yes, they are opening a second one this month (more than six months late) that is only 45 minutes from here, but still. Vegas has four Costcos with another on the way and they have the same population, only it's not nearly as spread out as here. What's a well trained consumer to do?

They're not just for safety

We all know about the safety briefing cards on airplanes. Well, here's a modified version:
Hmm... me thinks if this was the info on those cards more people would read them and not just use them for a place to stick their gum. There is an entire guide to inflight sex here, seems to me they should sell these on glossy card stock like the real deal. They'd make loads! Um... money that is.

International Disadvantaged People's Day

To all my friends!

Today is International Disadvantaged People's Day. I don't care if you lick windows, interfere with farm animals, vote conservative or occassionally shit yourself. You hang in there Sunshine, you're fucking special!

Westminster by gaslight

On my last trip to London I got to do something I've wanted to do for quite some time: a walking tour. There are numerous walking tours around London, I've heard about them for the past five years, but have never been on one. This time it worked out. Several members of the crew and I decided to take the Westminster by gaslight tour, which started at 7pm.

For those that don't know (I certainly didn't before travelling to London) Parliament and Westminster Abbey are not in London. In fact, Westminster is its own city in the heart of London. Where Parliament is housed, and Big Ben, is not in the city of London. Westminster itself is very small, maybe a square mile, but alas, it is a different city. So we toured it, at night, while the streets were lit with old world gas lamps, the like of which have been there for centuries. And touring it at night was absolutely spectacular.

At the completion of the tour we headed into Parliament to see the MPs (members of Parliament) in action. Unlike our own Congress, the MPs are often in session until 11pm or later. This was out lucky night as they were in session at the completion of our tour. First off, the inside of Parliament, the little that we got to see, was amazing. The building is absoulutely beautiful inside and out. When we first entered we past this huge hall where the Queen Mum and Winston Churchill, among others, laid in state before their burials. The Queen Mum was the most recent, in 2002.

We went to both the House of Commons and the House of Lords to watch the MPs in action. Unlike our congress, the Houses are set up true debates, where the varying parties face one another and square off on the issues. The night we were there, the House of Lords was having a lively debate over private religious schools. The short time we were there we couldn't quite gather what the issue was, but it was interesting nonetheless to see how the English government works.

Back to the walking tours. There are numerous tours everyday covering all kinds of subjects. One of the most famous walks follows the trail left by Jack the Ripper. Of course, that tour happens at night to add to the mysteriousness and spookiness of the topic. There are many ghost tours at night, many of them involving stopping at several pubs (but of course!). The two tours I am most interested in (but I have to be there on the right days, as some tours are only offered one or two days a week) will be no surprise to you: a tour covering Harry Potter and real "magical" areas of London and another that covers the turf Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu pounded while searching for the Holy Grail in the da Vinci Code. Can't wait to give those two a try.

If you are interested in learning more about the walking tours, go here.