Now what?

Ok, so it's just turned over Monday. Woo for JHud and Helen Mirren at Oscars. I so want to vomit. I'm just not feeling good. And now I'm worried someone stole Mother's purse. Or, well, the last purse she used. A bright red purse I picked out. I thought it was on her dining chair in the apt with her red sweater. But when I was cleaning up for kitty I didn't see it. I looked about the apt. and don't see it. I guess it's possible it's at the house but brain is fighting me, screaming out only bad vibes. Can't go up to the house because of oven triage. If I had a sidearm I'd want to blow my head off to escape the annoyance of life. I'll have cereal instead. :(

Freaking HELL!

Well, I was finally forced to "convert" to the new Blogger. I had to create a new Google account. Evidently they aren't smart enough to just grandfather their Blogger accounts automatically to Google ones. I tried to post and the browser locked up. So we'll see if this works. (It didn't, Safari locked up again when I was ready to post.) Oh, and maybe the stupid blogging widget won't be such crap and will work. Sure. Right.

An hour ago I remembered I had unused cookie dough in the fridge that I was going to bake up fo rmy brithday and wondered if it was past use by date. One is. Do I care? Not really. I turned the oven on to pre-heat. The range and oven here are natural gas-powered, not electric as I'd alway sused. While I was putting the dough on the baking paper, I saw what I thought was puffs of smoke from the oven. Suddenly I have THREE smoke alarms screaming at me. Jeebus. Needless to say, the cat was not imperssed and hid under the covers while I resolved the issue. I opened the doors, a window and put on the ceiling fans while turning off the oven. Look, seriously, rent is just under 2K per month. That's almost like real money. Since I moved in I've battled a toilet, had the apartment exterior painted twice, been drowned by a kitchen sprayer that doesn't always turn off, had to replace two of three smoke alrm batteries, a thermostat battery, had a garage door latch stick... avoided a garage break-in... now discover the oven is evil. UGH. I haven't used the dish washer. I don't dare! All this I'm still not all moved in with stuff from the house that Brother's sending over! *smacks head on edge of desk*

Update

Well, it was coming. One fish has passed on. The red one, the beta Mother picked out, was on the bottom of its tank when I was at the house today. It was sad but not surprising. It seemed to have been partially paralyzed for more than a month.

The blue one got a cleaned tank. It's still going. I will probably bring it to the apt since brother is not interested in it.

Peanut Butter Recall: Salmonella Alert

Some jars of "Peter Pan Peanut Butter" (and some Great Value brand) with product codes starting 2111 have been known to cause illness from salmonella. All jars starting with that code are under recall. Here's what maker ConAgra says:

"If consumers have this product, they should discard it, but save the product lid. For a full refund, consumers must return the Peter Pan Peanut Butter or Great Value Peanut Butter product lid along with their name and mailing address to ConAgra Foods, P.O. Box 3768, Omaha, NE 68103." Recall info.

I have two jars with this code. One I've already been using. Yay me.

Shameless Plug

An online pal has a streaming station, PrideRadio. A mix of 80's, R&B and Rock. Asked about ads for the station he said, "Group of music fanatics seeks listeners to exploit our bandwidth?"

Listen. Enjoy? There's a forum at the link above where you can make requests.

Points Off, Symbiotic Three-way

Points off on this managed community. The battery in the thermostat died the first week I was in the new apt. This afternoon, I got the first piercing chirp from one of the smoke detectors, warning of low battery. The cat napping in my lap was not amused.

Discovering strange biological bedfellows talks of a clever three-way symbiotic situation.

I need to go up to the house but I'm resisting. I hate going back there. I'm not that thrilled with the walk either I guess. From what I could determine from email, Brother's busy until Thursday which is when he wants to go see the lawyer as she requested to finish estate paperwork.

Freaky Fish! And Other Things.

Frill Shark

In other news there's a local trial of a woman having murdered her husband. Her defense lawyer her flashing breasts at a party was part of her grieving process.

I am still moving out. Sort of. I'm at the house sorting. I slept on the floor.

(Congratulations to Jen Hudson on her Oscar nomination.)

Golden Globes

Congratulations, Helen Mirren. Won "Best Actress" both for "Elizabeth I" and "The Queen."



Jennifer Hudson, from American Idol 3, adds a another trophy for her role in "Dreamgirls." She won the film critic's award and now adds a "Golden Globe."

iPhone vs. neonode N1m

The N1m is a three-in-one device like iPhone. It too has no physical keypad, does web browsing, phone and media playback.

N1m is not elegant. The virtual keypad is the usual phone style 3 x 4 number-letter layout while iPhone uses QWERTY like a regular keyboard.

Neonode's N1m is smaller in height, width and weight but far thicker at 21 mm vs 11.6 mm. That smaller height and width also mean it has a smaller screen (176 x 220 pixels) compared to iPhone (320 x 480 pixels).

The 1GB N1m supports more media types because you can play DiVX, WMV, MPEG while the 4 or 8 GB iPhones only seems to support iPod-ready video. The built-in cam of N1m is listed as 1 megapixel, Apple iPhone's is 2 megapixels.

What about cost? The N1m is €532,00 (approx US$692.55) while iPhone US$499 for the 4GB version, US$599 for 8GB.

So, looking at the most near true analog to the iPhone, the Apple product is bigger where it matters in storage, screen & cam resolutions yet less expensive!

I won't be buying either one, since they are far more than I need in a cell phone and iPhone comes with that nasty "2 yr contract" attached. That said, iPhone is a tremendously exciting product demo which suggests great technology trickling down to common disposable devices over the next five years. I suspect the OS X used by iPhone is the coming 10.5 Leopard, not 10.4 Tiger, since Leopard will have scalable user interface elements and Core Animation, a technology mentioned as part of iPhone in the keynote address.

iPhone specs
neonode N1m specs

Blog Running Behind...

I found a place, I can move this weekend. I have detailed entries being worked on in the 'drafts'.

Same Crud, Different Year?

Nice to see online communities still have tin horn dictators. Must be the nature of the species. Oh well.

I had planned to do some "serious" blogging but I had a headache and felt more than a little 'off' so I delayed. I'm doing a bit better now, with some food ingested. Let me hand out sick-bags just in case. Basically I was thinking over my youthful dreams and breeding and so forth.

When I was in high school, I was interested in adopting a "hard to place" older child. Sure, in grade school as adolescence was just getting underway I fantasized about procreating. Yes, seriously. Not simply a copulating act but with purpose of actual impregnation. Later as I great through puberty and so forth I never really had an impulse to marry. And interest in siring my own flesh and blood dissipated.

I'm about twice as old now, or rapidly shall be. It's only natural I suppose I'd revisit such topics. Now's a good time especially with the radical difference my day to day life will have this year. Other than myself, it'll all be different. (Heaven help me!)

OK, back to the parental thing. I heard a call on Dr. Laura from a 13 yr old asking how he can make his estranged father love him. Of course, he can't because the sperm donor is a distant, disinterested person. She advised the boy to focus on the love around him from mom, step-dad, etc. and feel bad for his bio-dad for what he's missing and may one day regret. Anyway, the call was gut wrenching. I felt very paternal and compassionate, while silently cursing guys like his bio-dad. Anyway, it rekindled old passions of a desire to mentor, do foster care, adopt or something.

In recent weeks I'd wrestled with the absence of biological grandkids. Of course, with my parents now gone, they couldn't meet their hypothetical biological grandkids. So much pressure would be off if Brother had married a healthy, fertile woman. In the ten-plus months since Mother passed I've been thinking over different things she said, trying to put together the puzzle pieces. I had decided to talk to her about these things but put it off as I figured I had all year long and could wait till she got over the pneumonia she'd been diagnosed with.

My conclusion is that despite what I'd said, Mother was convinced I'm gay. I might draw that out later how I conclude this but it's not important to this entry. So with that conclusion I've wondered if maybe it is correct. Well, as I considered my passed fanciful desires, it ultimately it doesn't matter since it really didn't involve anything in the way of a relationship regardless of gender. It really only had a cornerstone of single parenthood.

By now you know the SIL and Brother have adopted three kids. Two are final and have been for a few years. The infant, whom Mother met days before she passed on, hasn't been finalized. That was a key motivator to the change in housing arrangements. They needed four bedrooms and I, the cat and her fish need considerably fewer.

OK, I'm wandering all over a bit. I'm tired. The cat is waiting for me to come to bed, it's almost 7:30am. Focusing a bit... I'm less interested in "solving" any kind of sexuality question than I am in addressing the running theme of having no life partner in my past visions of a future. I might have an answer. I'm not ready to blog about it yet, however. And, no, it has little to do with commitment concerns. I'd commit to almost anything. I'm silly that way. I have seen, objectively, that I'd benefit from having someone to help me avoid certain pitfalls like being too nice, overly generous, or too free with spotting others some funds.

So, anyway, on levels that matter to me I feel that one person seems like a potential keeper. I'm intrigued. Sure it's a guy but really I haven't had meaningful contact with anything else in years. I could be in a partnership arrangement if it's with someone I trust, with whom I know I'll have a mutual relationship of looking out for one another. When it gets down to it, what else is there? If you have to be suspicious, forget it. I've been there. I thought I had something like that with my uni girlfriend but that wasn't true leading me to regret the ongoing nature of our intimate physical relationship and ultimately cease it and deciding to cut bait.

Last week I heard the end of an hour of Dr. Laura where a wife was calling to say she'd been wedded 17 years and when she wasn't sure the marriage would last early on, she aborted their first child. It was a child she didn't tell her husband they were expecting. She had lately decided to be "totally honest" with him and told her husband. She was upset at his horror and was calling for advice (Dr. Laura said never, ever speak of it again). Things like that scare the hell out of me. It's actually a scenario (a potential spouse aborting child secretly) I'd wondered about through the years. I'm nuts like that.

So, ok. I'll just leave this entry as is. I'm sure it'll stir something. I hope. Maybe? No guests invading today means plenty of rest. Sunday we hunt for new accommodations.

Here We Go Again!

It's likely been more than a year but I got another wrong delivery of... Yes, dear... it's HAY!



The O.C. is canceled, finale plays Feb 22. in the States. Show was good in season one and became unwatchable with its constant return to clichés of Ryan using his fists and swirling around the drain that was Mischa Barton's character.

Ramblings

First off, I've recently seen Elephant a film by Gus Van Sant. It's good, obviously strongly 'inspired' by the Columbine high school shooting in the U.S. in the '90s. I had no idea what it was about when I watched it. Anyway, it was unlike another Gus film, "My Own Private Idaho," which I saw maybe last year (or '05?) about 10-15 years after friends suggested I'd "get something out of it." Well I thought MOPI was a piece of pretentious wank. There's probably a blog entry. So out of three films from that director I've liked "Good Will Hunting" and "Elephant." I think I'll stop while I'm ahead.

It's a bit like Ang Lee. "Ice Storm" was intriguing. I stopped and watched it one day flipping around and saw Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline, then Elijah Wood so I was thinking, "Ok, what is this film?" When it was time for him to do "Hulk" I was excited. That film was a total disaster. Then I'm hearing about "Brokeback Mountain" and grudgingly watched it. I hated it; there wasn't any romance in my mind. It maddeningly pissed me off--I saw the first "encounter" as rape with all else coloured by that reaction. Bored and trying to fall asleep I rewatched it this week and it didn't piss me off like the first time but the sheep are still the best part of the film. The cinematography still makes me want to move to Wyom... err Canada. I still haven't unwrapped the shrink-wrap on Crouching Tiger. I can't say I trust Ang Lee as a director.

My candy bar wrapper smelled like cigars. :( That's probably why it was on sale for 60 cents (from 89). I got those stupid corn cereals again. I argued with myself in the store but decided food was food. Well, I've had two bowls maybe three or four. Well, I don't know. Doesn't matter. I'm annoyed. Wasn't what I wanted but it was what the store had. Or fake Cheerios. I got those too along with chili, peanut butter and raviolis. I'm hooked on the raviolis. I did not feel good on my walk. Not sure why. I felt out of shape which is a bit ridiculous considering it isn't any further than gammaneighbor's new place. I think I felt better walking back with a backpack full of canned goods. I did get annoyed with those loitering outside the stores smoking like chimneys. Ugh!

I slept just 2 hrs after a 22 waking period and don't get why.

Well, the series *was* set in the 21st century.



Read about the "dolphin boat" at the Daily Mail.

Word of the Day

nebbish - a person, esp. a man, who is regarded as pitifully ineffectual, timid, or submissive.

late 19th century from Yiddish nebekh 'poor thing'

Do you Firefox?

If you use Firefox and want to save YouTube clips (or clips from many sites) you should try this free plug-in, Download Helper.

Firefox had an update this past week. It's now at 2.0.0.1. No, that isn't a typo. :P

The guy who originally played Lionel Jefferson on "The Jeffersons" passed away at 57 (throat cancer).

I got a Christmas card from my uncle. I had successfully stalked him online to find his new address since neither I nor my brother had heard from him since he left the state in August. Jeebus! His house still hasn't sold!

Mother got a certificate that she has paid off the mortgage. Yay Mother! Too bad you're dead and can't enjoy it. :/ What else? Hmm. Phone rang again. It is stupid "Unknown Name" at a toll-free number. I see from online that it's a company trying to get me to pay for longer appliance coverage. They never leave a message but I still have to clear the call from the machine. How annoying. :P

My bank has told me they are changing my account type. It will now have a $6 monthly fee! Those bastards! Doesn't start until Feb tho so now I'll be looking for other account types and maybe another bank. Been their customer for like 15 years and never had fee. Grr.

12 Days of '06

It's funny!

The 12 Days of 2006

Cast your vote!

Cunning Dental Group dental makeover (frightful images ahead)

Chocolate-Pork-Pancake Update!

I found them at grocery. They were SEVEN ($7) for a box! I didn't buy. :/

Ultimate Piggy Food?

Should I buy?