April 2003 Archives

Basically every free waking moment I've had for the last several weeks has been devoted to getting the house ready to move in to and then most recently the actual moving. It was by and large fairly boring and monotonous work, however there were a few highlights. For example:

Ripping out my shower (it's leaky) started out as painstakingly chipping the tile off of the sheet rock in a vain (and failed) effort to save the rock behind it. After about a day of that I discovered it was much more efficient (and fun) to simply wail at the wall with a 22 ounce framing hammer, smashing through both tile and sheetrock, to carve a trench down the wall then reach in and peel of whole sheets of tile at a time. Very satisfying on a primal level. All fun and games until I did that to the ceiling and had not only tile shards rain down on me but 40 year old black loose insulation as well.

Just this weekend we moved all of our stuff from the old house to the new one. We made good progress and got everyone's posessions to the new house then went back to clean out all of the storage areas. It appears we have an equal volume of stuff people have kept for no discernable reason and don't want to admit is theirs. Included in this list are

• a 4 foot fake christmas tree
• 4 cases of bottled beer - some opened and consumed
• 2 boxes of kitchen utensiles, toasters, glasses and what appears to be a very wide, flat fondu pot.
• 3 bankers boxes full of underwear.

And I thought the fight club house was bad. We're still not completely done.

Finally, just today I came to work and found my access card didn't let me in the building. It wasn't that I'd had my access removed, it just didn't even see it as a valid card. Apparently the interal circuitry of the card had been cooked somehow. Possibly related to playing with the electical wiring of our house on friday? nah. Happy Mike lent me the 1000 volt golves again though.

More people need to read Bill Bryson. He's a travel author I found out about recently with a keen eye and an appropriately twisted sense of humor. While reading several of his books I've noticed a propensity to use the same couple of words but it's nothing too jaring, I think he just likes them (like I like the word "propensity" :) ). Anyway, a small snippet I read the other night (context is irrelivent):

To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They are harmless, they look nice, they don't need a box to crap in, they keep the grass down, and they are so trusting and stupid that you can't help but lose your heart to them. Where I live in Yorkshire, there's a herd of cows down the lane. You can stand by the wall at any hour of the day or night, and after a minute the cows will all waddle over and stand with you, much too stupid to know what to do next, but happy just to be with you. They will stand there all day, as far as I can tell, possibly till the end of time. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill them and eat them. Perfect.

I saw a bit of the Dave Chapelle show a few weeks ago and it was pretty darn funny. They had a bit in it for the "Playah Hater awards" that was pretty funny (they had some good digs at Kelly Osborne, so who wouldn't like it) but there was a great skit with Chapelle as the main character in Grand Theft Auto. Today BBSpot happend to have a link to someone's capture of it. I shouldn't be surprised that this exists, it's geek targeted and funny so of course someone's going to take the time to capture it. It's actually kind of surprising that I didn't :) Anyway, converted the original MPEG to Windows Media since it's about 20% of the size.

gta4real.wmv

Enjoy, I laughed my ass off.