Sunday, March 14, 2010, 10:02 AM
Indigo Incarnates
This weekend has been a typical Maryland weekend. It started raining Friday night. It’s rained all day Saturday. It’s raining all day today. It’s likely to clear up just in time for me to have to drag my tired rear-end into work on Monday. It just doesn’t seem fair. To add insult to injury, I have one leaky window in the house. It doesn’t always leak, but when it does, it leaks badly. So yesterday morning, I cam downstairs to find the whole kitchen flooded. So I had to clean that up and put a bucket under the ceiling where the leaky window in the second floor dribbles into the first floor. So I hear “drop… drop… drop…” for 36 hours straight.
Of course, the sudden shift from 60/sunny to 40/rainy was pretty much crippling for me. It seems unfair that, under certain weather conditions, I can feel ever major injury that I’ve ever had. So, I basically hurt all day yesterday. It’s not as bad this morning, but it’s not great.
This weekend has really sucked.
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Tuesday, March 2, 2010, 01:22 PM
Indigo Incarnates
While government jobs are hardly the most lucrative endeavor on the planet, they do have the advantage of offering a reasonable amount of vacation time. So this week I have been visiting my friend Doris in South Carolina. It’s a very pleasant “do nothing” vacation (as opposed to the other vacation that I take with Doug which is a “do everything” vacation). It’s nice to just hang out with friends and watch movies.
Yesterday, Doris and I did a road trip to visit two of her children that are in college. I’m pretty impressed that they are both art school students. I think her son is in graphic design and her daughter is into ceramics. We were driving the Insight-II so we drove from Spartansburg to Greenwood (52 miles) on a single gallon of gasoline! Whoooo-hooo! On the way up to college, I was driving Doris nuts by keeping the car in battery mode too much and thus driving the car really slowly (I’m not a speed demon anyway, and owning this car encourages slow-pokeness).
Today, we visited Emerald Farm. It’s a sort of combination farm and petting zoo. This is Willow’s favorite place to visit when we come to Greenwood. Emerald Farm has goats, rabbits, roosters, hens, ducks, llamas, alpacas, peacocks, and one very old (28-year-old) horse. It’s also got a lake stocked full of huge catfish. It also has an adult-sized swing set. Very cool.
I have to drive home tomorrow. The 606-mile drive is about as long a drive as I can withstand. I can do it, but just barely. I have Thursday off so that I can recover from the Wednesday drive. On Friday, I go back to work, but all I will have to do is write court reports since Friday is not a reporting day for the junkie/flunkies. So, overall, this is a pretty cool week.
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Thursday, February 11, 2010, 09:17 PM
Indigo Incarnates
Lemme tell ya… this has got to be one of the most boring weeks that I have ever encountered. The courthouse has been closed the entire week, so I was unable to actually do any actual work. I am bored out of my skull.
I’m trying really hard to not get on Doug’s nerves. He has the patience of a saint. It’s hard to spend quality time with someone with a dissociative disorder on a good day. He has actually somehow put up with me 24/7 for six days straight. I am really lucky to have Doug.
Of course, one of the side effects of being totally snowed in is that I got a whole lot of exercise this week. For me to go anywhere, I’ve had to walk. This is good, since without the 4 miles per day I’ve been getting, I’d have gone stark, raving mad. I also shoveled a whole lot of snow. A huge amount of snow. Egads.
I hope the roads clear soon so things will go back to normal. I’m feeling kinda cranky. I find a lot of comfort in a daily routine, and this blizzard has totally derailed my routine for a week.
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Sunday, February 7, 2010, 01:06 PM
Indigo Incarnates
So… it snowed about 3’ in Baltimore. Some of the snow drifts are 6’ high. I can’t find the Accord. Seriously! The street in which I parked is mostly buried in a 4’ drift and all the cars on the street look like amorphous white dunes. I literally cannot tell which car is mine. Fortunately, Doug parked his Scion behind the house. Now, a Scion is a “B” size car, meaning that it belongs to the smallest category of vehicle that isn’t a Smart Car (which is an “A” size car). “B” cars aren’t known for being good off-road vehicles, har har. So that means that I’ve had to shovel a trench behind the car that extends down an alleyway so that we can drive to work tomorrow – a 100’ alleyway! The snow behind the house was waist-high. I feel like I have had sufficient exercise today.
For better or worse, I was only able to shovel the first 70’ of alley. The last 30’ isn’t snow, but rather slush. It was pretty heavy and my feet were on the verge of frostbite. Fortunately, the slushy part is only 6” high instead of 40” high, so even a tiny car like the Scion has enough ground clearance to roll over it tomorrow. It might be less than 6” by the end of the day, since we have full sunlight today.
Of course, the direct sunlight helped us out today too. A regular human would not have been able to shovel a 7’x70’ trench through 4’ snow continuously. But, being a changeling, I have superhuman endurance so long as Thistle and I have access to sunlight. We did today, so the high endurance was possible. It’s also how I’m able to do those 40-mile bike rides in the summer.
Hopefully the city authority will get a move on the plowing. A few of the main streets have been cleared, but most of the side streets have not. I wouldn’t mind getting my Accord back someday, har har.
Oh, speaking of the Accord… I went to the Kelley Blue Book website and got a ballpark estimate of the trade-in value of the Accord. It’s been in six accidents, has serious cosmetic damage, moderate mechanical problems (it needs bout $2,500 worth of repairs than I cannot afford), and 105,000 miles. The response from KBB was “Your car has no trade-in value”. Ha ha ha ha! That also tells me that I’m not going to sink $2,500 into the car either. Thanks to the utterly depressed economy, the Honda website has a whole lot of recently repossessed cars with under 30,000 miles for less than $15,000. Whenever the Accord dies, I will probably get one of those.
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Thursday, February 4, 2010, 07:06 PM
Indigo Incarnates
One of the things that is a real drag is when I discover that someone I think is a friend is really someone who only likes being liked by others. There’s a HUGE difference between the two. I got “defriended” by this friend over an incredibly trivial political disagreement (this person didn’t like the fact that I think Obama is a bad president). So I am “defriended”. Now, this is not the first time this person has done this to me. On two prior occasions, this “friend” drove a wedge at me for trivial reasons (so trivial, in fact, that I can’t remember what the incidents were about).
And yet, this person says crap like “But I don’t want you to feel offended”, and “I don’t want you to take it personally”. Yeah, how am I not supposed to take it personally?
Anyway, I forgave this person on two prior occasions, but there shall not be a third. This is a person for whom I occasionally must deal with (about twice each month). I can be courteous to this person, since I am actually a mature adult. But I am aware of the difference between “real friend” and “fake friend”.
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