Category: Blather

Stuff

I’m in a bit of a lull right now of New and Exciting things going on, gearing up for a busy October. My biggest decision of the month involved dropping the massive cable package I had because other than watching Project Runway, I was not watching television at all. Shannon was, but everything she was watching was on the lower channels. I finally decided it was ridiculous to pay for all that but not use it. So I’m now the proud owner of basic cable and everything I’m missing (like Project Runway on Bravo) can be downloaded online. Sometimes for just a small fee (like on iTunes.)

I did just finish watching all four seasons of Doogie Howser, M.D. on Hulu 🙂 That was a fun trip back to the late 80s/early 90s. Also funny to see a little, wiry Dr. Horrible 🙂

Anyway where was I… Oh yes, October. My baby sister is getting married. I can’t believe it’s nearly time. We’re flying out to Monterey for a cliffside wedding with the Big Blue Pacific Ocean in the background out at Big Sur. Here’s the spot they’ll get hitched:

Freaking gorgeous eh? Can’t wait. And a pre-wedding reception at the fabulous Gianni’s Pizza (a local legendary eatery) and several days hanging out with old friends and family. After the wedding I plan to spend a lot of time at the beach and soak up beachy atmo before coming back here to Landlockistan.

And THEN, on Halloween, my cousin is marrying his longtime girlfriend in Omaha and my sister and brother-in-law (squee!) are coming back for that. And we get to stay at the beautiful Cornerstone Mansion. It’s going to be lovely.

So, I need to warm up the camera, buy some bigger mem cards, get wedding pressies, and somehow hope I have enough dosh to make it through being in one of the most expensive places in the country for 6 days. Cross your fingers! 🙂

Anyway, running late for work now. Big meeting today with Omaha’s web guy to talk about the direction we want to go with our website. Wheeee!

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No credit

I just read a blurb on Lifehacker about a family that went “cash only” and saved money.

Well duh.

I don’t have credit cards. The last time I had a credit card was ten years ago when i lived in England, and Barclay bank just handed me one with my new account. I felt giddy. I promptly got all spendy and pretty much blew through my 500 pound limit on it.

No I use my debit card. If I don’t have the money in my account I can’t buy it. Plain and simple. Sucks when I want something shiny and gadget-like, but that gives me incentive to save for it, which is something I’m only now beginning to be able to do. The debit card works *like* a credit card of course, and I can do anything I need to with it that I would with a credit card (ie, shop online.) So why bother with a credit card that’s going to be impossible for someone in my income bracket to ever pay off (especially if I used it to pay a large debt, like a car repair or something impossible to pay for outright.)

Admittedly, the credit card *would* have been handy with the old $900 fuel pump replacement I had to do. But years of single parent-dom has taught me to be resourceful.

But aside from the freak occurrences, I’ve never needed a credit card. And I know myself, I’m dangerous with them. best to just avoid them altogether and live within my means. If it means I can’t jump on a plane and head to Europe whenever I want and worry about paying for it later, so be it. I’d rather be relatively debt-free than burdened and stressed over things I can’t afford.

I don’t carry cash either and that is something I probably should do. Even in this day and age, there are some things you just need Real Money to pay for. But I can’t remember the last time I had any cash on me. So maybe it’s not exactly vital.

Congratulations Jack!

My friend and coworker, Jack, has been training for the past three months to run in his first marathon, the Bill Seymour Half, which was this morning. He blogged his trials and tribulations for the paper and had a lot of people rooting for him, myself included. If you get a minute, check his blog out – he’s a great and funny writer. I don’t read many running blogs apart from my dad’s and Jack’s but Jack turned his into an irreverent look at what it’s like to be a novice runner preparing for your first Big Run.

Anyway, here he is at the finish. Way to go Jack, you made it! 🙂

Blather
Blather, Jack, Marathon

Gadget Slave

I admit it. I’m a sucker for gadgets. I cannot resist them. I. Am Geek.

Got a new cell phone this weekend. It’s pretty shiny too. Got a proper keyboard on it because even though I am Geek, I cannot text very well. The qwerty keyboard definitely helps with that and I love it. Yes, I would like an iPhone. Hell, I would LOVE an iPhone. I, however, can’t justify getting an iPhone. Not on my budget.

So I’m happy with my Kyocera Wild Card.

Shannon brought home portable speakers for her iPod that seem pretty cool. I was whinging about how long it takes to charge my iPod when it’s USB’d to the computer and she told me they make smaller iHomes now that would fit my nano. I looked at her and told her I think I might be gadgeted out for the moment. I didn’t think it was possible, but for now, I think I’m set for gadgets.

So I’ve had a lovely weekend of playing with new phone, adding obnoxious ringtones guaranteed to piss off coworkers (Spam Song FTW!), learning that I can txt internationally (woot!), I can tweet faster, and I can record little audio clips to send along with picture texts. I think there might be a corkscrew and salt and pepper shaker in this phone too. It rocks.

MacArthur Park goes Disco

This is a general complaint about the 70s on 7 on XM radio. Not that anyone will care much, but I just want it out there in cyberspace (does anyone use that term anymore?)

For the past few months, I’ve been enjoying time with the decade channels on my XM. I was on 50s for several weeks before switching to 60s, got way too tired of Chicken Man and Motormouth making his listeners proclaim their love for his show and really they should just call it the Beatles channel for as much as they focus on the Beatles there. (Not that they aren’t worthy mind you, I lo-o-o-ove the Beatles.)

And now I’m on the 70s, after much resistance. I’ve mentioned my aversion to the 70s before. The clothes, the music… My perception of the decade I was born in is not good, and so I associate 70s stuff with unpleasant memories. Until we started doing Music Madness when I discovered that a great many songs that I love actually came out in the 70s. Go freaking figure. Songs like ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Lights’ and ‘Don’t Bring me Down’ by ELO. I loved those songs and similar ones as well. Listening to the 70s channel has lengthened the list of songs I need to grab on iTunes from that decade. The problem is, the 70s channel neglects whole chunks of the music scene in that decade in favour of the more popular and expected disco shite and Foghat-type stuff.

Oh sure they play the occasional Bowie or Marc Bolan. But just the popular tunes. Bowie has his whole glam era in there that they ignore. Most Glam is ignored on the whole. Also the late 70s brought the birth of punk. Completely ignored. I realise that the channel is playing to your average person’s perception of the 70s (mine included really. Will the 70s ever NOT be associated with disco?) but I believe that if you’re going to tout yourself as a decade channel, you need to play all genres from that decade. Not just the popular stuff.

It doesn’t need to be sprinkled in throughout the day. It would just be weird to go from The Carpenters to The Sex Pistols. But you could totally put together a show dedicated to specific genres. Look how hugely popular Matt the Cat’s Harlem show is. A show dedicated to rhythm and soul music of the 50s. You won’t hear Buddy Holly in there. Why not have a show dedicated to some big music movements from the 70s? Glam and Punk? It wasn’t all about doing lines at 54 back then you know.

/end rant

Blather
70s, XM

A proper post

I’ve been preoccupied for the past few weeks so, blogging has been sparse. It’s a good thing though, nothing bad going on, knock on wood.

But a lot has been going on, both at work and at home. Music Madness is keeping me plenty busy, and is so much fun to handle, I’ll miss it when the tournament is over. Sometimes I can’t believe people pay me money to do the things I love to do. Seems too good to be true.

We’re losing our awesome video guy though, which kind of sucks. He’s going to go into the wild and wacky world of bar ownership, which I find odd, but somehow fitting for him. I guess it just seems weird to completely 180 on your career like that. But he seems really excited about it, so I wish him the best. This means the paper is hiring back our other videographer who was laid off recently. Luckily, he’s cool with coming back, and he’s also pretty good so that means we don’t have to spend time training someone new as we head into a busy sports season.

At home, the kid is finally just about done making Kelly’s veil. It’s turning out so pretty. Kelly will look beautiful in it. Also saw some pictures of the spot where they’re getting hitched and my god – it’s freaking gorgeous. It’s on a congressman’s property in Big Sur (he will also officiate) and is just at the edge of a beatiful cliff looking out over the Pacific. It’s stunning.

The wedding is coming up faster than I expected. My poor sister is subconsciously stressed about planning a big wedding on the other side of the country from her (she won’t admit it, but she beat the crap out of her laptop the other night, so I’m thinking, yeah, stress.) so I keep asking her if, as main of honour, I can do anything to help out and make things go smoothly but so far there’s nothing. I’m cracking the whip on the veil though.

Let’s see what else… Ah, my Swedish lessons continue. I’m loving it, but just when I think I’m doing really well, my underbara teacher lets loose with a huge conversational sentence and I just gape at him. Don’t think I’m going to master the language any time soon 🙂 But I can say things like, “Hur mycket kostar det?,” “Jag har gått vilse,” and “Kittla inte mina fötter,” which will come in handy if I’m ever lost and wondering how much it would cost to have someone stop tickling my feet.

Swedish is interesting to me because when you look at a simple sentence, it looks completely, well, foreign. But sometimes, when you say it out loud, the sounds are very similar to English, as if you’re speaking English with a bizarre accent. I love it. I’m told I’m picking it up pretty quick so that’s good. Love languages and always wanted to learn others apart from French. I know a smattering of Spanish, a titch of German and a few Russian words, but learning/becoming fluent in more languages is on my Do Before You Die list.

For the past 2 days I’ve been listening to the 70s channel on XM. I finally got tired of Fred on 44 which played Bauhaus’ ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ just one time too many and switched to the 50s channel. But other than Matt’s show each night, I’m not fond of the other DJs or their shows. So I switched to 60s which was cool. Listened to that for quite a while before I decided I couldn’t take one more episode of “Chicken Man” and so now I’m the 70s. This one’s a little harder to take. There is a ton of 70s music I could go the rest of my life without ever hearing again. But as I’ve discovered doing Music Madness, there is actually a lot of 70s stuff I always loved but never realized it was from that decade. Go figure. So I’m enjoying it for the most part, and tuning out when something crappy comes on.

Well, totally meant to go to bed early for once, and blew that with a rambling-about-nothing bedtime blog 🙂

50 1-Hit Wonders

Ok I don’t often post links to this sort of stuff – or maybe I do, I don’t know, I’ve had a lot of caffeine today and the brain’s gone kerflooey. But this list of 50 one-hit wonders, complete with audio, is just about the coolest link I’ve come across in weeks.

A random sampling of my spastic tweets and IMs to Kelly:

Somehow I knew tainted love would be in this
Omg THAT’S what soft cell dudes look like?
Do the HUSTLE!
Ohhh yeah, Taco’s Puttin’ on the Ritz is the best song ever. Gene Wilder’s version excepted.

Go, enjoy. Get your nostalgia on.

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