Ridiculous Thoughts

I have this overwhelming feeling like I’m forgetting to do something. It’s oppressive and bothering the hell out of me. I got a boatload of work done today and my task list is almost cleared so it can’t be that. I talked to the Gs about a duplex near GISH but it was out of my price range. We got the ball rolling on sorting and packing so it’s not move-related. I still need a photo for today, maybe that’s it… Nah.

Argh. Oh well maybe it wasn’t important. And if it was, then I guess I’ll find out soon enough 🙂

I forgot how good “Election” is. I randomly decided to watch it tonight when I gave up the battle with my memory. Hey maybe that’s what I forgot…

After an absolutely rotten day at work (not going into details – blogging about issues at work = bad) I’m relieved to be at home. Been a long time since I’ve been that angry. Oh and normally, the smell of chili cooking is lovely. Ten or eleven crockpots cooking chili all morning with the heavy, meaty, spicy, pungent aroma drifting around you for hours on end – not so nice. Right now I could go the rest of the year without having to smell that again.

Ok shutting up about work. My bathtub’s done – yay! After two weeks of yicky baths I’m finally able to take showers again. I took the longest one ever the other night and it felt goooood.

What else is going on… I’m finding it a challenge to take an interesting photo every day. It’s difficult because frankly, my life is a lot of routine dull stuff. Nothing that makes for dramatic daily pix. Ah well. I guess those of you checking that blog will have to put up with more shots of my laptop, my groceries and my cute kid and cat.

Going to be moving soon as well I hope. I’m on the prowl for a small house or duplex closer to the kid’s school. I can’t go much higher in rent so I doubt where we end up will be a dream home or anything, but hopefully it will be better than where we are now. It was fine when I came back from England, but it’s just too small now and too far away from the school, the rellies and other things. So far the pickings are slim so this may take some time.

Oh and I chickened out of doing NaNoWriMo. Ah well.

So just for fun we decided to “spend the night” in some haunted place and hope for some kind of pranormal experience to happen to us. We did it for the Halloween edition of IndyKnow and there were five of us (Mike, Scott, Shannon, Tonya and me) and we chose to spend the night in the Grand Theater downtown. It’s a 100 year old moviehouse and well, I’ve talked about it before. That’s where we held the concert.

Anyway the people who care for The Grand are supercool and when we asked if we could stay the night and explore the place they didn’t hesitate. So last Monday we went in armed with a video camera, a digital recorder and a flashlight and proceeded to peek into every nook and cranny. We did everything in the dark and I have to say it was pretty creepy. There was no sense of any kind of ghostly presence I’m afraid, but then again we couldn’t actually stay the night. We all had to get up for work the next day. So we stayed a few hours.

But in the basement… next to what’s known as “The Void” (a bricked off area, it’s purpose is unknown) – it gave me goose bumps.

Anyway you can check out our little video and some audio clips/pics etc. over on IndyKnow 🙂

Thursday morning I woke up with a mixed feeling of dread and excitement. After weeks of planning, much confoundment, a band dropping out very last minute, and a healthy dose of fear, today was the day of our big show. Those of us who built GetIndyKnow.com were putting on a concert to launch the print side which was to debut the day after the concert.

None of us involved in putting it together had much – if any – experience with this sort of thing and I wouldn’t be surprised if at any given time one of us wasn’t wondering what the hell we’d gotten ourselves into. We secured a venue – a 100 year-old downtown moviehouse called The Grand – and scoured MySpace and other contacts to come up with three bands who would play for gas money and pizza. I think our largest hurdle apart from getting the newspaper to squeeze out a little bit of funding was figuring out how to provide sound for the bands.

For some reason none of us could find someone who could do it for a reasonable (and by reasonable I mean for free or dead cheap) fee. Eventually that was solved though and we got our funding which meant it was time to order tshirts for us and some to give a way, and begin promoting this free concert.

As the days ticked by and we found ourselves 6 days out – one of our bands (the headline one as a matter of fact) dropped out. It was irksome to say the least to find ourselves with only 2 bands after promising three. But with some scrambling we managed to get another one very very last minute.

So cut to the big event. We were at the Grand early to wait for the sound guy and the bands. The guy who looks after the place (it’s run by volunteers) gave us a cool tour of the basement and stuff. I spent about a half an hour there all alone waiting. Felt cool.

Sound guy was late but he finally showed. I picked up Shannon who was going to help out. Gave her her tshirt. Pizza came, we all ate, the opening band came and ate then began setting up. Somehow I found myself being the one to let the people in and count them to make sure we didn’t violate fire codes. Doing this meant I didn’t get to see much of the first two bands which was fine. But I really wanted to have a look at the last band because I’d been listening to their stuff online and I liked it. They were called Straight Outta Junior High – stupid music for smart people.

We definitely weren’t going to hit a full house by then but I thought our turnout of around 130 people on a school night was pretty damn good. I got to watch the band’s set and they rocked. Shannon had a blast (literally, I’m sure she did some damage to her ears that night having glued herself to the front of the stage.) But she had a brilliant time at her first proper gig (She saw Depeche Mode when she was 10 but she didn’t really dig it like she would if she saw them at 14.)

Anyway despite our last-minute band showing up late, the show went well and the feedback we’re getting has been pretty good. I don’t think IndyKnow came off looking like novices (even though we were) and I just gave away the last IndyKnow tshirt.

We had a lot of fun, a lot of stress, and the bands and the people were great, even though the poor kids couldn’t mosh which sucked for them.

I’ve got to wind this post up but I may yak about the concert more later. Shannon’s going to her first Homecoming dance tonight and I have to help her get ready 🙂 Here are some pix from the gig. The band on stage is Straight Outta Junior High.

As soon as I came home from work I popped off the drain flippy switch thingie, rattled stuff around in the innards, and voila, tub is fixed 😀

I feel powerful.

Isn’t it weird how something as mundane as a clogged bathtub can make a girl fall completely apart?

I don’t quite know what happened. One minute I’m working the plunger, the next I’m sobbing like a girl.

I mean really, what the fuck? The bathtub drain was working just fine only this morning when I took a shower. Tonight, after Shannon takes her bath suddenly it won’t drain and the only thing keeping it from flooding everywhere is the little – I guess it’s a backup – hole under the little flippy thing you shift up or down to hold the water in. There’s a foot of water in the tub, it’s cold because of course my faucet never shuts completely off no matter how hard I twist the knobs, and I can’t for the life of me figure out how to get it to drain. AND when I lean forward and push slightly on the wall tiles to get a better angle for the plunger, three goddamned tiles cave inwards to reveal a natty inner wall.

So I stand back and look at my horrible bathroom and I lost it. I had a good cry. I hate this apartment so much but I can’t afford to move. I hate the bathroom and it’s putrid yellow tiles on ALL the walls. I don’t fucking know how to do caulking! What were they thinking when they designed this shit? I hate the Brady wallpaper out in the stairwell. I hate grocery shopping and basing what I buy on what we can carry up three flights of steps. I hate that I can’t see if my car’s being ripped off because I can’t see my car full stop.

And right now, I hate the damn non-draining bathtub.

And yeah, I’m whinging about it in a blog instead of trying to fix it. But I’m tired, frustrated, angry – angry with the tub, with life, with just everything that’s bugging me right now. I figured I should stop trying to fix it before I really break something. And yeah I’ll probably have to call the landlord – the same landlord I’m still waiting on to fix the glass in my shower doors that split over a year ago when Shannon slipped in the tub and fell against them.

I’m going to bed. If I drown during the night, then so be it.

I’ve done it. Sod waiting for the new year, I want to do it now. The photo-a-day thing I mentioned in a previous post, well I started doing it on Saturday when we went to the Harvest of Harmony parade. I figured, what the hell.

So for a photo a day from my little life, you can visit 365 Snaps. Only a couple of days done so far, but I think it’s going to be a lot of fun 🙂

Saw Serenity Friday night. God it was bloody brilliant. I can’t heap enough praise on this little sci-fi flick. Of course, I saw it as a fan of the show so of course I went into the cinny a bit biased but who cares. It was a fantastic f’ing ride and worth the 40 mile drive and dent in my bank account to see it. I can’t do it again though unless it comes to GI (sodding Jessica Alba’s tits came here instead.) But it was worth the drive. SO worth it. Go see it even if you aren’t a fan of the defunct show. It works for those people too.

This was a fun weekend 🙂