rock rock on

or something like that. i got a(n) ukulele for myself because i have had a rough month and decided it was an appropriate thing to do. it was very inexpensive which was cool, except it had two significant problems. one was a dead fret, which sucks. the other was a re-entrant G string. that sounds funny. anyway, that's when the low-toned strings are raised up an octave, which was weird. at first i though it could get past that re-entrant string, but i decided it wasn't cool. so i got a lower string at the music store and tried to put it on, with Tony's help. we discovered that it wouldn't fit, but tried to file it. Tony gave up after a long while trying to get it to work, and said i should take it back. the dead fret was reason enough, and that it wasn't really what i wanted (because of the re-entrant string). everything else about it i did like though, a whole lot. so i spent a few more minutes filing down the notch that holds the bottom of the string and a few more minutes on that fret and got the string in. the fret hasn't been a problem for me all day either, so i think i got it to a reasonable height. it wasn't much work today, and now i have exactly the uke i wanted. so i'm happy. it's good. then i made gumbo, and it's one of the best batches ever. i have enough for lunches for several days. mmmm.. gumbo. except Cat looked up gumbo on wikipedia or something and it said you weren't supposed to thicken with file, roux, and okra... i use all three. what's so wrong with using all three? it's not like pudding... i don't get it.

more or less exactly

i listened to the hitch hiker's guide to the galaxy book on cd recently. a couple of times in the book the phrase "more or less exactly" appears. one of them is right at the beginning, the phrase appears in the sentence "the house more or less exactly fails to please the eye." i think this sentence sums up the reason i like Douglas Adams writing. when you use 11 words to say 'the house is ugly' with 4 of those words adding absolutely nothing to the meaning it can't be bad. i just had to share that with the group.

zlub.

procrastinating

i must really not feel like going to sleep if i'm to the point where i'll write something for my blog. i took a whole bunch of surveys about cars. it was actually kind of funny the way they write questions. one of the surveys was clearly about saturn, the car company, not the planet. they spent several questions asking what i knew about who was the parent company of all kinds of different makes of car.. i don't think i did well.. i had some ideas on those questions but i mostly checked the box that said "i don't know".. didn't realize jaguar was owned by ford, or infinity was owned by nissan, or GM owned saab... i mean, i thought saabs were still from sweden.. maybe they still are, but GM owns the factory... i don't know. anyway.. that was interesting. i should really get to sleep though. alright.. goodnight.

'm. si.

I haven't been posting much. I've been a little too busy. not that i've got too much to do, but when i'm a certain amount of busy i get really selfish with my time. I find that i'm unwilling to play scrabble moves, unwilling to post, unwilling to call people back, and so on. It's kind of like the way people behave when there isn't enough food to eat. they get pissed off. desperate. with time, it's a little less desperate, since i have plenty left (knocking on wood for some reason) and food just seems more basic than time. after all, we don't really spend our lives under the shadow of impending doom, do we? wait, i think that should be a period, not a question mark. We just watched 'Stranger than Fiction' tonight. It was charming. Entertaining. got me a little choked up. I liked it. I was putting off watching it, because i wasn't in the mood for a story that ends. I like to watch serial shows because i have a comfort that they won't end any time soon, not without ample time to get to know everyone. Perhaps it's my unconscious avoidance of that shadow of knowledge of my eventual end that makes me want to see serial installments rather than a story end to end on work nights. Or perhaps it's my anxiety about watching movies i've never seen before. they always make me a little nervous - did i explain this ever? here's the short of it: i have a long history of horrible experiences at movie theaters. I don't think i consciously knew i didn't like going to a darkened theater to see a movie i didn't know until i was about 6 or 7 when i saw adventures in babysitting. maybe i was 8, it doesn't matter. I was terrified to see that movie. it turned out harmless, but my experience with other movies had built an expectation of a horrible twist or shock keeping me up at night.. ET, Cocoon, V, (alien trend?) Project X, return of the Jedi, and eventually Beetlejuice scared me.. and i didn't sleep much between the ages of 5 and 9. eventually i discovered inane tv could relax me and i'd pass out, but not until i was 9.. it sucked. so it continued all through my life, certain movies had stuff that just freaked me out. and reinforced the (less and less) irrational fear that the movie would betray me and i resorted increasingly to watching things i'd seen before over and over. I wonder if this is a common characteristic among anxious people... anyway.

whichever the reason is, i don't usually like to watch things on work nights.. or other nights.. but especially nights when i have to go to sleep. and the real point is, this movie, stranger than fiction, didn't mess me up.

now i'm going to go to sleep.