Boom! There She Was

One of the nicer surprises I received this Christmas was a copy of A Quiet Revolution: 30 Years Of Windham Hill. I'd been on a bit of a rediscovery kick with the old Windham Hill catalog lately, and this box has certainly helped fire up some old memories of listening to WNWV ("The Wave") off and on from 1987-1990. Outside of George Winston's ubiquitous December, I'd never owned much in the way of new age music, then again I was also twenty years younger than I am now and far more likely to seek temporary escape from life by cranking OU812, ...And Justice For All, or Delicate Sound Of Thunder rather than, say, In A Silent Way, Rubycon, or Thursday Afternoon. A lot of new age is pretty lame crystals-and-incense wallpaper, but the better examples of the form provide a nice, reflective break from the relentless fast-forward clatter of life (perhaps even moreso now than in the comparatively carefree 1980s).

Ironically, just as I received this box set in the mail (thanks again, nightscapemedia!), the news came down that The Wave would soon be no more. At noon today, WNWV flipped formats (though apparently not call letters) to the so-called "Adult Album Alternative" category and is now known as "Boom!" I'm not really enamoured with this new nick, but at least it's not some guy's name.

Charting the first six hours of their existence (you can listen online here), Boom! so far sounds exactly like a "greatest hits of AAA radio" with a generous helping of songs seemingly grabbed from my "Juke" mp3 folder. A playlist of these first few hours follows:

THIEVERY CORPORATION - Radio Retaliation
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN - Radio Nowhere
COLDPLAY - Clocks
SARAH McLACHLAN - Possession
TRAIN - Hey Soul Sister
U2 - Magnificent
MELISSA ETHERIDGE - Bring Me Some Water
OWL CITY - Fireflies
ROBERT PLANT & ALISON KRAUSS - Gone Gone Gone
STEELY DAN - Dirty Work
DAVID GRAY - Fugitive
EDDIE VEDDER - Hard Sun
LOREENA McKENNITT - The Mummer's Dance
BONNIE RAITT - Blender Blues
CHRIS ISAAK - Wicked Game
CHUCK PROPHET - Let Freedom Ring
TEARS FOR FEARS - Everybody Wants To Rule The World
DEPECHE MODE - People Are People
THE GRATEFUL DEAD - Touch Of Grey
COCO MONTOYA - Seven Desires
STING - If You Love Somebody, Set Them Free
NATALIE MERCHANT - Wonderland
EAGLE-EYE CHERRY - Save Tonight
JOHN MAYER - Heartbreak Warfare
DIRE STRAITS - So Far Away
BARENAKED LADIES - The Old Apartment
THE PRETENDERS - My City Was Gone
DAVID GRAY - Sail Away
JOSS STONE - Free Me
KINGS OF LEON - Use Somebody
MICHAEL STANLEY - Lover
PAULO NUTINI - Jenny Don't Be Nasty
PETER GABRIEL - Big Time
NORAH JONES - Come Away With Me
TOAD THE WET SPROCKET - Walk On The Ocean
BELL X1 - The Great Defector
THE FRAY - How To Save A Life
THE POLICE - Can't Stand Losing You
COLDPLAY - The Speed Of Sound
THE CRANBERRIES - Dreams
10,000 MANIACS - Because The Night (Live)
COLLECTIVE SOUL - Shine
DAVE MATTHEWS BAND - Tripping Billies
JAMES BROWN - It's A Man's Man's World (Live)
DURAN DURAN - Ordinary World
KAISER CHIEFS - Ruby
TALKING HEADS - Life During Wartime
GRACE POTTER & THE NOCTURNAL - Ah Mary
AMY WINEHOUSE - You Know I'm No Good
JOE COCKER - You Can Leave Your Hat On
SHERYL CROW - Out Of Our Heads
COUNTING CROWS - Mr. Jones
R.E.M. - Orange Crush
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN - 4th Of July, Asbury Park (Live)
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN - Tunnel Of Love
JOHNNY CASH - Hurt
JOHN MAYER - Gravity
OWL CITY - Fireflies
FIONA APPLE - Criminal
TRAIN - Hey Soul Sister
INGRID MICHAELSON - Be OK
ADELE - Who Wants To Be Right As Rain?
SPOON - The Underdog
DAVID BOWIE - Panic In Detroit
THE PSYCHEDELIC FURS - Love My Way
DAVID GRAY -Fugitive
PETER GABRIEL - Sledgehammer
MUDCRUTCH - Scare Easy
VAN MORRISON - Wild Night
WILCO - You Never Know
GREEN DAY - Wake Me Up When September Ends
LOVE AND ROCKETS - So Alive
MODERN ENGLISH - I Melt With You
NORAH JONES - Chasing Pirates
SHERYL CROW - Motivation
TIL TUESDAY - Voices Carry

So far, this list offers up a promising start and is reminiscent of the brief period in 1990 when The Wave flirted with a more rock-leaning sound before returning to the safe harbor of lite jazz. The only real criticism I have so far is that I'd like to hear a lot more currents and indie-leaning offerings; right now, too much of this list sounds like a gray-haried version of "The End." The real trick that WNWV will have to pull off to become interesting is to find and maintain a good mix while losing that unmistakeable tang of safe, major label dominated, Starbucks-friendly pop/rock that can all too easily make stations like these a predictable bore.

Since this is only the introduction and/or basically a statement of intent, we'll have to see how WNWV plays out as 2010 gets going and new format-friendly releases begin to arrive in stores. Even if this new format switch ultimately fails (or becomes as soul-killingly boring as the rest of terrestrial radio), Boom! has me actually listening to FM radio for the first time since the middle of 2001, so that has to be good for something, right?

Blue Cyber Monday

For about ten minutes, today was a really good day.

Things didn't start off very promising; I'd slept in past my intended target hour and was wondering as I checked e-mail if I was going to get any of the four things I needed to get accomplished that I'd listed out last night:

1. Mail dropoff at the Post Office
2. Fluid top-off/computer inquiry at Valvoline
3. Return/exchange at Borders
4. Cyber Monday orders (if applicable)

Cyber Monday was pretty good for the store this year, and by the time I'd generated the shipping labels for the stuff sold from the store account (and the couple that had sold from my own), it was already nearly 3:30 in the afternoon. Thus, I arrived at the Willowick Post Office at one of the worst times to visit any such place (the late afternoon), and true to form, I lost a half hour of my life waiting in a seven-person line that moved slower than a herd of turtles. Good lord, I hate these places. As I was mailing a couple of international packages for the store, I didn't have much of a choice in the matter and did my best to reach that inner state of Zen I seek whenever I find myself trapped in situations like these. I can't put into words how glad I am that I ponied up for that postal scale back in April and am able to do most of our shipping from work or home: it gets very easy to understand exactly how and why people "go postal" when you are the second person in line for fifteen of the thirty minutes you are in these horrible places.

Despite the clammy, frigid conditions and the barely detectable snow flurries that fell like tiny grains of sand from the slate gray sky, it felt positively wonderful to finally get the hell out of that post office and back on the road, even if it was Vine Street at 4 PM. I made Record Den my next stop, and spent an hour there packaging all of the Cyber Monday orders that had come in by then and ultimately managed to get them all of them ready for our typical 5 PM mail pickup. Two objectives down, two to go.

After spending an extra half hour attempting to wait out the worst of the evening rush hour, it was off to Borders to return a couple of bookends I'd purchased the night before. The traffic on Mentor Avenue was still pretty grating to deal with, but it was at my destination where the day suddenly took a surprising turn for the better.

A bit of background explanation: I am completely out of room for CDs in the office. All of the shelving units behind me are currently packed end to end with music, and there is no more room for any more shelving in here. While selling a few hundred pieces on Amazon had partially eased this problem for a while, but nearly all of my recent online listings had been coming from the boxes of CDs I have stashed in the closet (most of them banished here years before for the crime of only having one good song on them or whatever other reason I could come up with). As a temporary solution, I decided to take the box sets out of their alloted space and move them on top of these shelves for the time being, using bookends to keep them in place.

When we finally came across these bookends last night, I was a bit crestfallen to find out that that they were freaking expensive (at least the cool-looking ones, anyway). After some chin-stroking and frowning over the options, I selected a pair that were by some measure the cheapest models available. Problem was, they were also by some measure the smallest and lightest models available. Upon getting home, I quickly deduced that these little guys were not up to their intended task and opted to return them the next day and use the exchange credit towards a set of more expensive (and weighty) models.

After leaving my too-small set at the front counter with the same clerk who took care of the sale last night, I headed back to their "decor" section of the store to pick out the cheapest, heaviest set I could find. To my considerable surprise, the simple, elegant green marble "triangle" style that I had looked at the night before had magically been marked down thirty dollars over the last twenty four hours to $19.99 a pair. Fuckin' score! Elated, I grabbed two sets and wound up spending only ten bucks on top of my exchange credit.

A bit flush with success, I decided to stop over at Kohl's (as it was right down the plaza from where I was parked), hoping to find some slipper socks and lounge pants for my dad's Christmas gift. While hunting about for the above, I came across a winter hats sale (50% off, natch) and picked out a couple of new "beanie"-style caps for myself as well as a couple of convertible hat/mask thingies for my younger brothers.

From there, I had to make a bit of a mad dash clear across the county to fulfill my last objective: a monthly topping off of car fluids at Valvoline, hopefully along with a resetting of the Saturn's computer. A few days before, my SERVICE ENGINE SOON light had come on and had kindly provided some company for me to and from work over the holiday weekend. Touched by the gesture, I took the Saturn to Autozone on Sunday and had the problem diagnosed as the gas cap not sealing correctly. A problem very easily corrected! Hurray!! Since the Autozone tech could not reset the computer once I had replaced the cap, I took a chance that the Valvoline guys could do it and was pleased that they could and did. With all of my objectives completed, I grabbed some Chik Fil-A and headed home feeling a real sense of accomplishment and of things being in their right place. Hell, I even just beat the train signal on E 305 and didn't even get the red light at the South Marginal intersection. It was a truly wonderful ten minutes.

As I was coming home and maneuvering through the parking lot, I noticed the SERVICE ENGINE SOON light came on again. I was a bit surprised and irritated, but not really worried as the problem had been corrected. The tech at Valvoline had told me that if that light came on again, then I'd need to take the car to a shop to get it looked at, and it was that scenario that annoyed me more than anything else. After dinner, I drove the car to Autozone again just to be absolutely sure that the gas cap was (somehow) still the culprit here.

Great news! It wasn't!

Instead, I was presented with an all-new error message that read "GEAR 1 RATIO INCORRECT," which based on my research appears to be a kind of mechanical shorthand for "your transmission is having minor issues that are not going to go away and will likely become totally fucked at some point in the future."

So, yeah. Great. Wonderful. Coming right smack in the middle of my Christmas shopping (and just after a recent splurge purchase on my behalf on a couple of box sets), this may be my most impressively-timed bit of bad financial news since about August of 2006.

Bah. One of these years, I will enjoy an entire holiday season without once worrying at any point about future insolvency thanks to something inside of a car I own picking that particular point to cease working correctly. Believe me, when this happens, y'all will be the first to know.

NP: Devo Duty Now For The Future

(Twenty Years) Part 2: Into The Fire

November 30, 2007 marked 20 years to the day since I started at Record Den, which has inspired some thought and reminiscing on the person I was then, what the job was like as the years went by, and what has kept me around until now ...

Christmas 1987 at Record Den, like many that followed, was a nonstop blur of activity from the moment you clocked in until you finally staggered out the back door of the Newberry's pet department at a few minutes past ten (or eleven). You drove home feeling beaten, winded, and looking forward to nothing else but getting some sleep before getting up the next morning and starting all over again.

My only experience with this kind of retail craziness before this had been bagging groceries at Fazio's, and even a busy streak on a Saturday afternoon at the supermarket was nothing like the weekend before Christmas at the Great Lakes Mall. Hours tended to fly on by when you weren't paying attention, and it and the pace rarely slackened. A second cash-only register was set up on the opposite end of the counter from the main register that helped split the crowds into two, but it was still all you could do to keep up with the flow while ringing out and writing up sales one right after the other.

At first, I was mainly consigned to the floor with a couple of other co-workers, answering questions and helping direct the people jostling up and down the aisles (2/3 of which were still taken up by vinyl albums, incidentally) towards whatever items they were after. I am told that during even busier times (if such a thing can be imagined), we would have employees stationed near the entrance to the store who would simply relay requests from customers who didn't feel like braving the crush of humanity in that little hat box of a record store.

Even with this kind of teamwork happening, you could still only go so fast at the main register as any credit card or check transaction had to be phoned in to an authorization service (usually one person did this for most of the day), and every single piece of product sold had to have its stock number scribbled down on an old-school duplicate sales form: one for the customer as an itemized receipt, and the other for Beth (or Dave) who would do the subsequent inventory adjustment by hand.

At the time I was hired, there was still no computerized inventory system at the Den (that wouldn't get going until 1989, if memory serves), and every album cassette and CD we kept in regular stock thing was tracked in a large bin of stock tickets, each one roughly the same height as an old CD long box. These tickets, at times, dated back well over a decade, though records that had been cut-out or quickly dropped from inventory would often have their cards flipped around and re-used when the occasion warranted. During slow times, I'd sometimes idly flip through these cards (some perennial sellers had 3 or 4 tickets stapled together and recorded sales and orders going back what seemed like prehistoric times) and goggle at the days in the go-go 1970s when new releases were ordered (and then sold) in the hundreds, rather than the dozens I had became accustomed to. I wish these cards still existed, but they were all tossed out and lost forever when the company adopted the Telxon as our store inventory manager and moved towards a more centralized buying system ... but we'll come back to that later.

At the risk of sounding cocky, I felt pretty good at the time about my musical knowledge, though looking back from now, I barely knew my ass from a hole in the ground as far as rock music was concerned. Sure, I was comfortably fluent in the music of the years 1982-1987, but almost anything pre-dating that time (not counting Pink Floyd) might as well have been Bulgarian folk music for all I knew. Regardless, my mastery of contemporary pop music gave me a pretty good feeling of confidence to do this job and answer questions from customers, and I began to learn the older stuff through osmosis and an ever-growing respect and admiration for classic rock and pop over the years.

There had been no discussions or hints as to what would happen to my job once January 1 rolled around and, quite truthfully, I had not yet decided what I'd wanted to do, either (this was largely due to a certain person I worked with back then whom I did not get along with at all). With school off until the middle of January, I was able to commit to a 40+ hour schedule at the store over the holiday break, and it was long, breakneck slog, but it was also a hell of a lot of fun (even the days I worked with the person I had a problem with). One factor that was working in my favor was that Greg had given me a shot at learning and running the main register after a couple of weeks of getting acclimated to the job. Luckily, I'd picked up the hang of it quickly enough to "graduate" from a warm body on the floor to someone who could quickly help knock down a line of people at the counter. I figured that, if nothing else, this would be experience that could come in handy elsewhere.

Another hint that this might not be a temporary gig dropped on Christmas Eve. To my considerable surprise, I found myself offered a Christmas gift from Greg in the form of a 12" single and import CD single (though I had yet to even own a CD player) for Pink Floyd's current hit "On The Turning Away." There was a longstanding store tradition of a brief after-work gift exchange on the night before Christmas, and I discovered over the following years that being asked to work on Christmas Eve was usually a sign that you had been accepted into the Den crew. Though I didn't know it just yet, I had passed the audition and was about to be offered a regular job after the holidays were over. My temp job was going to be anything but.

Catching Up, Part 1: The End Of 2006

Unannounced posting sabbaticals are a bitch, especially when they are unannounced to me as well as anyone else out there in Internets Land who has been wondering where the hell I've vanished off to over the last five months.

To sum up, I'll start with The Short Version: life was actually Good (and thus largely unremarkable) until the very end of last year, at which point came The Return Of Drama. Goody goody. A few weeks later, here I am banging away on the keyboard at 2 AM, posting new missives into this forum for the first time in eons. Maybe I need some drama to get the writing glands working again, eh?

Anyway, a belated Happy 2007, everyone. It's been a while, so let's do some catching up on current events, eh? We'll start way back where we left off ...

DVD-RW/EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE(S)

Even considering the amount of data CD-Rs I keep behind me, I'd been battling with data storage issues for most of 2006. By the middle of summer, my copious use of various bit-torrent sites was beginning to outpace my ability to keep up with the backing up of data. This situation is made trickier by the fact that in order to keep a decent share ratio going (and thus your account) on said bit-torrent site, you have to let your downloaded goodies sit on the hard drive for a while (say, a week) so that others can nibble data off of you until you have given back roughly what you have taken. The problem here is that when you are starting to grab a lot of full-res DVDs (4+ gigs a shot), you start to run out of space on a 60 gig internal hard drive really damn fast.

It was while leafing through electronics circulars at my parents' house one weekend that a solution appeared before my eyes in the form of a Western Digital External Hard Drive. Sarah then gave me one as a birthday present a short while later, and suddenly I had what felt like a limitless ocean of 250 gigabytes in storage at my fingertips. Ahhh, much better.

Of course, time and circumstance rapidly changes that perception: I clearly remember a 5 gig hard drive on my computer at the end of 1998 felt like a hell of a lot of space, too. In order to keep things relatively open on this new external HD, I finally upgraded from a CD-RW to a DVD-RW drive, and promptly started planning on eventually shrinking down my collection of 700 burned data CD-Rs to about 100 or so DVD-RWs (which would also require a couple of additional external hard drives to amass the data before re-archiving and oh Christ what a colossal headache this is going to be ...).

NEW COMPUTER

For about a month and change, this new setup your read about above was fine and dandy (especially when combined with my new flat screen monitor ... I now hate CRTs and wonder why I waited so damn long to upgrade), but a few issues with the new DVD player started to bother me in short order. Firstly, the thing never seemed to play things back in suitable fashion, with audio and video jitters plaguing the experience right from the start. It was also very difficult to burn DVDs without errors while working on something else at the same time, and the amount of memory left on my computer while this rigorous task was going for an hour and change finally started me thinking seriously about a new computer.

It had been about 4-5 years (?) since my last upgrade and aside from the DVD issues, it was becoming clearer over the course of the last couple of years that it was time to play some catch-up ball. Making this decision a bit easier was that I was a bit flush with cash at the time (this was about a month in the wake of settling up my medical bills at the time), so I felt that a snazzy new gadget would be a nice way to celebrate Life being Good again.

It was on the last Monday in September that I made the trek down Route 91 to the MicroCenter location in Mayfield Heights on the advice of Dave M., a longtime friend, ex co-worker, and local computer guru (he built the first two PCs I ever called my own). If you've never been to one of these stores, I certainly recommend stopping by, though you might want to leave your credit cards at home as a preventative measure: it's hard for me to imagine a more drool-inducing toy store for grownups.

Walking into MicroCenter that night was kind of like what walking into Toys R Us was like when I was a kid. Temptation was everywhere and it never looked so good. But, I was on a mission, and I had a couple of predetermined machines to check out and compare and ultimately make a decision on. After a half hour of thinking and looking each choice over carefully, I opted for the guy you see above and to the right: a PowerSpec 6650: Pentium 4 HT processor, 1 GB of memory, 200 GB internal hard drive, and a dual layer DVD-R/RW drive (which immediately relegated my recently purchased Sony to storage).

A couple of days followed in which everything of vital importance on my old PC was copied over to the external HD for installation into the PowerSpec, and it took two full installs to work out the tics/"bugs" in the new system and get used to the way this thing worked in comparison to the old PC (whose dessicated husk was unceremoniously junked a week or so later). Since then, save for the usual perplexing behavioral quirks that PCs develop when running various programs in tandem from a dozen different designers and companies, it's been smooth sailing.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA

Brian has been onto me for about two years to get with the program and watch Sci-Fi Network's Battlestar Galactica show, and I had been fiercely resistant to the idea, largely out of the considerable sentiment I have for the original 1979 ABC TV series. I won't lie and say I was never interested: when the idea was first announced, I wondered if this was the long-talked-about return of the show initiated by original series lead Richard Hatch back in the mid 1990s. When I found out instead that the Sci-Fi Network's new series had nothing to do with Hatch's continuation of the original series and was instead a completely "reloaded" take on the concept, I was pretty taken aback. Things weren't helped when I learned of the switching of my favorite character on the old series (Lt. Starbuck) from a man to a woman role and that the new Cylons looked like they walked off the cover of last month's Cosmopolitan, I lost interest in a hurry and let the show pass me by.

Brian kept up the attack on me to just give the show a chance anyway, and it wasn't until a copy of Season One landed in the used bin at work that I decided to do just that. I finally got around to watching it around the middle of last month for the first time and was immediately drawn into the show, to my considerable surprise. (I might even say that I was blown off my feet, except that I was sitting in this very chair watching all of it, heh heh)

Christmas intervened with my introduction, and I am still midway through Season One as of this writing. I'm feeling the massive temptation to start it over again and have Sarah watch the miniseries premiere at least and see if she wants to continue onwards, though she has her hands full staying caught up with House, Rome and Good Eats (hosted by Beaker's loquacious offspring Alton Brown). So, with or without accompaniment, I will likely re-view the first half of Season 1, and then move onwards (I have all of season 2 awaiting me on DVD and what has been broadcast of season 3 so far sitting on an external hard drive). More discussion to come later.

Q4

Considering this was quite possibly the lamest release slate in the music industry in the last two
decades (during this Christmas season, it seemed like every "hot" item was a repackage or re-imagining of something previously available), we managed to nail our numbers at the store and finished off 2006 with a flourish: the best December in our current location to date, not to mention 2 or 3 new best one-day sales totals, best yearly total, et cetera. Good times.

MORE FUN WITH INSPECTOR SCENE

If there is one thing I have come to dread with the onset of fall, it's our annual dealings with the City Of Willowick and their insanely exacting Buildings Code. Unlike last year's tag-team blitzkreig inspection that was over in about 1 minute, this year's was a much more leisurely poking around by a lone Inspector Scene that wound up injecting the first tiny amount of drama back into my existence (if you count nearly a dozen minor building "issues" to be dealt with as "drama," anyway).

In a fit of pique, we had delayed dealing with any of these "issues" until the last couple of weeks (i.e., when he'd finally had enough of waiting around and called the landlord to ask what the hell was taking so long). The landlord came by Monday evening and we managed to get the entire list taken care of, though apparently not to Inspector Scene's satisfaction: the reinspection this past Thursday left a couple of "issues" still unresolved: one I can probably fix with a single half-twist of a freakin' wrench, the other with a visit from an electrician and some new bathroom tile.

CHRISTMAS

Judging from the media coverage of Christmas at the retail level this past season, I'm pretty sure that I was not the only person who wasn't in the mood for it this year.

Mostly thanks to the incredibly and unseasonably warm weather which parked over Northeast Ohio around early December (and lasted until about two weeks ago), it just didn't ever feel like Christmas this year. As a result I didn't even start my shopping in earnest until the middle of the month as far as online goes, and on the 19th as far as actually walking-into-stores was concerned.

Making matters even weirder was that this was by some stretch the easiest Chistmas season I have ever worked. In effect, the entire pre-Christmas surge as we used to know it was compressed into about 3, maybe 4 days before the holiday (a couple of Saturdays early on, and then the last Friday and Saturday before the holiday itself). The rest of the time (including Christmas Eve), it felt almost like any other month of work in a business sense, though what made the difference is that everyone in the store was actually buying something instead of poking around and leaving empty-handed.

With this weird non-frenzy that characterized most of December at work combined with my late start shopping, I remember quite clearly feeling like this Christmas had just flown on by while I wasn't looking. I'm not saying this was a crappy Christmas by any stretch, because it wasn't ... but it certainly wasn't my ideal kind of holiday season, you know?

All of the above also meant that I could barely be arsed to put up lights this year, yet alone wage my dreaded annual battle for Christmas Tree supremacy with Moe. I think it was on December 20 that I finally gave in and set up the tree, while picking up a couple of new fiber-optic light fixtures (on clearance sale, too ... sometimes it's good to wait 'til the last second, eh?) for Sarah to put in the front window in lieu of standing the tree in front of it as has been our custom in year's past.

The reason for these new fixtures was strategic: I had a plan to keep Moe from getting into the damned tree this year, and for the first time since he joined this household, I can claim total victory in this department. Instead of filling the bay window with holiday cheer, the tree was placed in the corner of the living room and the entire underside was blocked off with a couple of overlapping Scat Mats. The curtains next to the tree were then pinned to the wall to block off any access from the window ledge, and what do you know: these two moves actually kept Moe out of the tree for the entirety of the season! Yeee-ha! Victory at last!

Due to the work schedules of the second-tier store staff (and the inexorable bouncing of the holiday into regular week days), Christmas was not the same two-day holiday I'd enjoyed in 2005 and 2006, but a sole island of relaxation in a long and busy work schedule. Ah well, those were nice while they lasted. This was also a very green yule, right smack in the middle of what felt like was going to be a green winter. Aside from the incredibly glum outdoor setting, it was still a very relaxing holiday, which saw me carting home some new pairs of my favorite wool socks ever, some gift cards, new books and DVDs, and a couple of supposedly-reversible fleece crewneck sweaters from justsweatshirts.com (which are remarkably warm, whether the tags come off or not).

I clearly remember one point during that afternoon sitting in my parents' kitchen, doing some residual Amazon.com shopping on my mom's laptop while the rest of the house napped, exhausted from previous late nights and today's early morning. I was filling in some blanks, basically, cleaning up the wish list a bit and picking up a few items on sale and a few others that had been on my list for a couple of years that I'd decided to move on before they vanished. It was a very pleasant time: quiet and thoughtful and now tinged with a bit of regret as this kind of carefree indulgence is something I currently wish I hadn't done (though the amount I spent wouldn't have made much of a difference in the end, anyway). We'll tackle why in my next post ...


NP Various Artists The Complete Stax/Volt Singles, Volume 1

Yule Wrap-Up

Please pardon the unintentional pun in the title: once again the hour groweth late and sleep beckons ...

All things considered, this was a nice enough Christmas this year, though the dull gray sky, rainy conditions and residual exhaustion from the last eight days (and these stupid extra keys on my brother's keyboard which keep tripping my hands up) made for a small damper on the day spiritually.

It was pretty hard dragging myself out of bed and into the shower this morning, holiday or not. We got to my parents' house just before 11 A.M. since my mom had to work in the afternoon, and thus we had our gift exchange at a relatively early hour for us (mine is the family that tends to do these things hours after most people seem to, on average).

Some highlights of the day's haul: Sarah gave me some gift cards to Borders and Kohls for books and clothes (yay!) which I will be utilizing in short order. I also scored some cool geek stuff from my boss in the form of Japanese editions of a few Pink Floyd CDs that I've been coveting for months. A real nice surprise from my friend Dave was a 2-DVD-R set of the entire run of Johnny Sokko And His Flying Robot. I also recieved some books that have been on my amazon wishlist for a while including The New York Times Guide To Essential Knowledge: A Desk Reference For The Curious Mind (hey, sounds like me!), Ben Fong-Torres' The Hits Just Keep On Coming: The History Of Top 40 Radio, and Wide Angle (a book of National Geographic photography).

Most of my wishlist this year was composed of DVD's, and I turned up a nice handful in the form of Field Of Dreams, The Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol. 3, the seventh season of The Simpsons, and the two-DVD edition of Monty Python And The Holy Grail.

Lastly, I got another bundle of white socks. Rawk. It's kind of funny now to think that when I was a kid, opening boxes containing socks and clothes on Christmas morning was usually a drag, yet as an adult, these very things make me as happy as getting new Star Wars action figures did twenty-five years ago.

The big Christmas lesson to be learned for next year: I must go to greater lengths to avoid doubling up on things, perhaps even creating separate wishlists for different people. It wasn't a disaster: I was only given a couple of doubled-up DVDs from different people that I'll have to figure out a way to trade in without reciepts (I think I might re-gift one to a couple of friends, come to think of it), and I wound up doubling up on a gift for my mom with my sister since she bought the same item from my mother's amazon wishlist that I did from work. Ooops.

One double gift that did work out, however, falls into the super geek realm as I received the same making of The Dark Side Of The Moon book from my brother as my next-doo neighbor Steve, though in differing editions (one hardcover and one advance review copy of some kind in softcover), which is just ducky with me since I collect this kind of stuff (I do, after all, have all three editions of the Storm Thorgerson Floyd artwork collection Mind Over Matter).

Alright, my next goal is to head to bed and sleep for about, oh, ten hours or so, which is something I haven't been able to do in a couple of weeks now. Happy boxing day.


NP Various Artists The Narada Nutcracker

Merry Christmas!

At last, the day that makes the last few weeks (if not months) worth the slog.

I am so tired right now that when scanning the news headlines a few moments ago, I seriously thought for a surreal moment that the new Pope had just asked the world to be "Pacemakers" instead of "Peacemakers." If nothing else, that made for a seriously cool "HUH??" moment.

Anyway, just taking a moment to wish all who look in here a wonderful Christmas. Despite the utter lack of snow on thr ground, I'm off to a pretty good start, and I get two days off in a row (including the dreaded Day After! yaaaaay!) thanks to an intense -- if rather blurry and indistinct -- week at work. We kicked some serious ass this week on the sales front ever since last weekend, and Friday was the biggest sales day we've had in our current location to date. I've also worked 81.5 hours since last Thursday and am currently feeling like seriously burnt toast, so I'll leave this post at that and get some sleep since we need to be at the 'rents in about 9 hours for the family gift exchange followed by a loooong day of lounging around. I'd have it no other way.

More on this day later on. I crash now.


NP A.D. & The M.T.'s - "The 8 Days Of Hanukah" (an irreverent little gem from a locally-released holiday compilation that is pretty much utter crap otherwise)

This Post Has Nothing Whatsoever To Do With Canada

It feels weird noting that today is the first day of winter when we've had one of the snowiest Decembers in recent memory thus far. Then again, it's either feast or famine that way in this part of the U.S., it seems.

A few topics to cover before I head downstairs to watch a DVD with a bowl of chicken soup and some saltines ...

OK, I think it's official: David Gilmour hates me ... or maybe he thinks I smell.

See, it's not enough that my hero's first freakin' solo tour in 22 years does a nice looooong wide arc around my environs (and plays in venues so small in size that even if I were insane enough to truck off to Chicago to see him play, I would get cornholed on the tickets themselves), it also appears that he is terrified of somehow competing with himself, which is about the only reason that comes to mind for the news I heard at work today.

Hopeless fanboys like me nearly wet ourselves with joy a couple of months ago when Pink Floyd's eternally-delayed DVD release of Pulse was finally slated for release on December 20. Well, that news was too good to be true, we learned a few weeks ago, when the street date was pushed back to January 17, 2006.

Well, I found out earlier today that the January 17 date was also too good to be true, since the fucking thing has now been shoved into distribution Limbo once again: one source tells me that the title has been outright "cancelled," while amazon.com now lists a release date on January 1, 2010 (I'm not sure which is worse). AARRRGH!!

--

I'm nearly finished Christmas shopping ... just need to take care of some work friends and my siblings before I'm finally done. While scoping out some ideas, I bought a set of multi-colored "icicle lights" for the office, though I need to stop at the store sometime to pick up some nails and an extension cord so I can put them up as thumbtacks and reinforced packing tape didn't hold them up very long.

--

The Christmas tree went up on Sunday (along with a few lights in the window), and I'm now wondering if I'm going to bother with this again next year as Moe has been a complete butthead ever since. Almost immediately, he was attempting to climb/eat the tree while hidden underneath it, necessitating the placement of two Scat Mats on top of the tree skirt.

Moe quickly figured out a way to move these mats aside without shocking himself, of course, so I am at a loss as to how to proceed from there. Worse, it looks like he's also attempting to scale the tree from the outside, judging by the flattened bottom branches and a couple of bowed-downwards metal tree limbs. Grrrr.

--

The dry and cold conditions Weather Underground had been calling for last weekend never materialized, as we've been snowed on quite a bit instead. Here's hoping that they also called this weekend's forecast wrong as well: temperatures in the low 40s and rain! On Christmas! UGGGH!

--

Finally, some far happier news: after a slow start, we've been kicking some ass lately at the store. We finally reached the pace of sales we've been worried about all month long on Monday, and started padding our lead with a very good day today. Our increased pace should start getting noticeably more intense tomorrow night, followed by all-out mayhem on Thursday, Friday and Saturday morning.

Alright, time to relax a bit before facing the hordes again tomorrow. 'Night!

Whoop-Dee-Doo And Dickory Dock

It's been raining more than snowing the last 24 hours, and the combination of all the re-frozen, half-melted snow and the roiling gray sky reminds me more of yucky mid-January than mid-December. Despite the blah conditions, though, it is with some trepidation that I have observed this evening that things are looking the tiniest bit up lately.

If there has been one overriding theme in my personal posts to this blog over the last six months, it seems to be that "planning is pointless": it seems that every time I have announced plans or forecasts for work/money/the car/et cetera, things have spiralled out of control quickly afterwards. Thus, I feel slightly foolish and maybe even a bit ballsy tonight since I am writing about feeling well and being in a pretty good mood, all things considered.

Now, don't get me wrong: life is far from a bowl of cherries here, but it really does feel somehow like the worst of 2005 is finally past as even the bad news seems tempered with a ray or two of sunshine. Firstly, Sarah's bank account woes remain unresolved as I type this, though she has managed to get another account going and is in the process of getting all of this crap behind her. I'm still winding my way through finally catching up with my debts, and am really fucking tired of running in place financially as a result, yet the light is now truly visible at the end of the tunnel in that department at last. Lastly, we seem to be in for a rather damp squib of a December at work as we have fallen nearly 20% off-pace from last December's figures as of today, though starting tomorrow anything goes as our sales should finally start to break out.

About the only thing that has me a bit pissy right now is 100% my own fault: I've relapsed into smoking over the last week or two. I'll of course blame this on a combination of my latest car troubles, my ongoing 2005 fiscal crisis, and the lingering discomfort of my wisdom tooth extraction, but it really boils down to me being a weak little dweeb when things were bleak. A week later, I have a car that works fine, an extraction site nearly fully healed over, I can eat whatever I want in a normal fashion, I am getting close to not being behind on my finances ... and I have to quit cigarattes all over again. Fuckin' duhhh ...

All that aside, my own mood has also been lifted immeasurably the past few days by the realization that I will be able to do Christmas shopping this year after all. I've been pretty upset about this over the last few weeks, particularly as things seemed to be accelerating downhill towards the end of November. But I found to my surprise last weekend that I would actually be able to pull off a limited Christmas shopping spree, and I was knocked off about half of my shopping list in one-fell swoop late last night (all hail amazon.com). The next step in me getting as absurdly Christmassy as I always get will be stringing up some lights and dragging out the tree this weekend (followed by keeping Moe out of the damn thing for the two weeks or so it takes before I get fed up with his mischief and take it down for another year, heh heh).


NP Various Artists Merry Mixmas: Christmas Classics Remixed

From Contentedness To Heartburn (or: The Return Of Inspector Scene)

Damn, has it really been over a week since I've actually written anything here? Well, let's get to it...

We'll start on a pleasant note: Christmas Day 2004 went just about as good as Christmas Eve did, with Sarah and I returning home from the 'rents late that night well-fed and loaded down with new clothes (including a new trenchcoat - my first in a decade, yaaay) DVDs, books, socks and even a giant ol' frosty mug. Even better yet, having the dreaded Day After Christmas off as well was like the cherry on the proverbial sundae for me. One of the biggest problems I've always had with the Christmas season is that a one-day layoff from retail insanity is never really enough for me to get my head together, relax, and return to the fray recharged and ready to deal with people again. The way this works traditionally is that you spend the week before Christmas getting busier and busier, building up the intensity to a fever pitch ... and then comes one precious day of relative peace and quiet before jumping right back into the frying pan, as busy as you were before (if not moreso). For this reason, I've been jokingly calling upon our nation's leaders for a two-day Christmas holiday for a couple of years now, and to get one this year from Greg was a very unexpected treat.

Following that incredible weekend off, it was pretty much back to work as usual. Post-holiday sales were humming along at a brisk clip that week ... so brisk, in fact, that we have since been able to come out of our snowstorm-induced pre-Christmas tailspin and exceed our December target. Rawkin'. Adding to this ever-growing mountain of happy news, my co-worker Brian called up and asked for some extra hours of work that week (he is presently unemployed save for Sundays at the store), and I was more than happy to set him up.

With another holiday weekend approaching that already had me guaranteed off for two days in a row, I was damn near ecstatic to grab a couple of additonal days off as well. Suddenly, I was on a mini-vacation -- four full days in a row off (including a very relaxing New Year's Eve spent with our dear friend Kris out in the sticks). Amazing! Life couldn't have been any better ... save for The Return Of Inspector Scene.

Yes, our long-awaited re-inspection took place early last week just before I'd set up my little New Year's break, and it did not go as well as we'd hoped for.

Nearly all of our November "violations" to Willowick's apparently-hyper-tightassed city code had been taken care of in the month and change since our first encounter with The Man. Going into the re-inspection, three minor issues remained unresolved, the first of which was of our own making. Being new to upkeep and refurbishing of dwellings, I didn't consider that showering in a bathtub that had been re-caulked just the night before might not be the greatest idea ever. Oops. By the time Inspector Scene took a gander at the tub, a few sections of the caulk had managed to come undone from the excess moisture. Yes, this is very easily repaired, but damn ... stupid mistake.

The second problem - the half-bathroom ceiling fan being too loud (there is actually a fucking city code dealing with this?!) - actually turned out not to be a problem at all. In our lone victory against the City Of Willowick this time around, Inspector Sean switched our cleaned-out-but-still-rather-loud bathroom fan on and off ... but he did it in a small enough timeframe that it didn't have time to rev up to it's full un-muffled muscle car roar. Woohoo! Sherry Bobbins would have been proud.

The third problem, however, was where the fun really started. Despite a whole lot of backbreaking work planing the shit out of the half-bathroom door, the best I could do was get it to fit into its off-kilter frame, but the damned thing simply would not latch. The night before the inspection, as I was desperately trying to make the door work, I noticed for the first time that I wasn't so much pushing the door into the frame as I was moving the frame itself (and the wall behind it) the tiniest bit to allow the door to close. Apparently, the wall at that point in the condo had separated just enough from the floor to allow this to happen, and when Inspector Scene realized the same thing I did during the re-inspection, he not only complained that the door closing-but-not-latching wasn't good enough, but that the wall would have to be fixed as well. Suddenly, three problems had become four ... and it wasn't over yet.

Weeks before, Sarah had done some work to the catch on the back door to the condominium and had succeeded in getting it to close correctly as long as you gave it a bit of an extra push while doing so (the same way we get the front door deadbolt to work). Well, that "as long as you give it a bit of an extra push" qualifier was not good enough for Inspector Scene, who then squawked importantly that according to the all powerful Willowick City Code, this door must be able to close with any effort at all. Wonderful. For the first time, I angrily started to wonder if this pedantic little prick was making this shit up as he went along.

To say the least, my landlord was less than pleased at this turn of events, but hardly shocked. From what I understand, the annual city inspections had been going fine for years until this annoying little turdfly landed in the ointment. It's one thing to flag problems that are structural or safety-oriented, in fact I welcome such alerts to important things that need attention, and despite my bitching, I honestly don't like the idea of violating anyone's city codes. However, when I'm getting constantly being zinged for idiotic, minor shit that somehow violates what must be the most intrusive building codes in the state, I start to get as snarky as my landlord was that afternoon.

What really makes these wall/doorframe issues infuriating is that any repairs we would make to correct the code violations would be useless (and probably a hindrance) once the building is raised the inch or so it has sunk into it's concrete foundation over the years. Rightfully, my landlord asked how was he expected to prop up a wall when the Condominium Association had no plans to fix the building itself? After a tense bordering-on-combative phone conversation between the two of them in which my landlord found some wonderfully subtle (and non subtle) ways to tweak Inspector Scene here and there, plans were set in motion to take care of the major new problem of stabilizing the downstairs wall and seeing what could be done with the doors afterward.

On New Year's Day, with a bit of ingenuity (and some small wooden shims hammered stealthily into place), the landlord's brother managed to stabilize the wall and allow the door to close unimpeded without having to rip the baseboards apart and nail a bunch of new boards into the existing stud framework (this was the suggested method with which we were to accomplish this repair). A subsequent bit of chipping and sanding away at the doorframe (along with cheating the doorstop back a half-inch or so) allowed us to move the door catch just a bit higher up and then the half-bathroom door closed with a *click* for the first time in God knows how long.

Oh man, I need to savor this.

THE HALF BATHROOM DOOR FINALLY CLOSES AND LATCHES. HOLY FUCKIN' SHIT.

Goat, that felt good.

Anyway, the back door to the condo was done a few minutes later: some small adjustments made to the sweep attachment on the bottom freed it up just enough to make it close and latch with hopefully enough ease to please Inspector Scene and the goddamned City Of Willowick.

And so here is where we stand at this moment in time: shy of re-caulking the bathroom tub lining (which we are going to do the evening before the next and ostensibly final re-inspection), our mandated repairs are now complete. Assuming all goes well, Sarah and I will finally be off the hook at last ... at least until this coming November.

Winding Down On Christmas Eve

I'm getting ready to head to sleep in a few minutes in very high spirits indeed. I hope I'm not jinxing the rest of the day to come, but at just about four hours into Christmas Day 2004, it's already been an absolutely wonderful holiday.

Funnily enough, it's not like anything was radically different about this Christmas Eve than years past: it was a long, busy day at work followed by an hour of chatting, eating too much junk food and exchanging gifts with my co-workers. From there, Sarah and I took a leisurely drive around Mentor to look at the lights before winding up at my parents' house to exchange gifts with my niece (who will not be around for tomorrow's family gift exchange), talk to my sister (who is in town from her home in Indianapolis), and watch National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (not to mention chunks of A Christmas Story before and afterward). Afterwards, Sarah and I returned home to do our gift exchange by the Christmas tree, relax, and play with the cats.

All of the above is time-honored tradition for us (save for the plural form of "cat"), and yet something has made this past day about as near-perfect a Christmas Eve as I can remember. Maybe it's the thick and sparkling white blanket on the ground from Wednesday's daylong Snow-And-Frozen-Rain-And-Then-More-Snow Storm From Hell, the beautiful additional dusting that was coming down in tiny amounts here and there on the drive home from Mentor, the weirdly-cleansing dry chill in the air, the way my amazon.com wishlist has suddenly shrunken considerably, or maybe the fact that I somehow scored the entire weekend off from work (including the hellish Day After Christmas for only the second time I can remember). Whatever the difference has been, I'm about as happy right now as I've felt in years, and I hope the same goes for everyone reading this right now.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

NP Various Artists The Narada Nutcracker

Winter Wonderland

Well, it's not quite that wonderlandish around here yet, but according to the fine folks at Weatherunderground, our second blast of true Northeast Ohio winter weather is on the way tonight, tomorrow and Monday. As I write this, it's been fitfully drizzling rain for a few of hours in temperatures that feel a bit too mild for the kind of snow we're slated to be getting...so I guess I'm in for a hell of a surprise when I open the curtains Sunday morning.

Now, there is some good news to the forthcoming crappy driving conditions and evil wind chill factors -- according to the current long-range forecast, we're in for an early and lasting white Christmas (not one of those last-second midnight-on-Christmas-Eve arrivals like we've had the past two years), which raises my currently drained spirits quite a bit. Hopefully, this will also finally be the kick in the ass that drives people into the store at last (we seem to have derailed in our early seasonal momentum the last five days or so) and gets us the rawkin' year-end figure we've been busting our asses all year for.

With the weather going bone-chillingly horrible tomorrow, I'm looking forward to an at-least-partially relaxing day off punctuated with some more mandatory home refurbishments (which I am getting as sick of writing about as you must be reading about them). This week's work will consist of planing down the door to the downstairs bathroom so that it actually fits into it's bent frame and latches correctly, followed by the installing of new screens into the computer room windows. I'm not looking very forward to either of these tasks right now, since I am probably dangerous with running power tools in my hand when it comes to door-planing, and I haven't the slightest goddamned idea how these new screens are going to fit into the window frames when I had a hell of a time getting the old and busted up frames out last week.

I should mention that in our ongoing quest to make Inspector Scene happy with our condo, a tip of the hat is very much due to Sarah, who has really been outdoing herself on the home improvement/fix-it tip. Thanks to her work over the last week during an impromptu work vacation, the front door is now insulated and doesn't leak heat to the outside (while letting in invisible jets of cold air), the back door now latches when closed, the crack in the wall above the staircase is nearly entirely invisible behind layers of fill-in goop, and the cracked kitchen tiles around the outlet are repaired and looking dandy.

While we're talking home improvement, it's been a while since the last time we last talked holiday decorations. After an iffy start, Moe appears to have adapted pretty well to having a string of brilliant green lights all the way around the bay window. He did so well with them, in fact, that I finally decided to put up a Christmas tree. Going one step further, said tree is a brand new pre-lit model. My initial financial second-thoughts to this entire idea were put to rest in short order last weekend when we found some very nice models at the local K-Mart for 25% off, thus putting them well into my financial range (which is currently being stretched by the recent start of my Christmas shopping).



Not bad, eh?

Round Three of Moe vs. The Christmas Decorations had only just begun when our little boy came out of the corner swinging: we weren't even finished getting all of the pieces of our new tree out of the box before Moe had decided to take a few exploratory munches on the wires and branches. Thus, out came the water bottles and the Bitter Apple and the battle was joined. With the bottom of the tree now unfit for feline palates, the cats seemed to find it a cool new hangout instead of a 7 foot tall snack bar. Sarah and I thus ultimately claimed victory. People 3, Cats 0.



As it turns out, there was also to be a Round Four. Satisfied after a couple of days that Moe wasn't going to electrocute himself chewing on any of the lighting cords, Sarah decided to put up a few ornaments up on Wednesday. Bad idea. Apparently, Moe was up on two legs in no time batting away at the lowest ornaments in his reach. Not entirely surprised by this, Sarah moved the ornaments farther on up the tree, figuring that would solve the problem, but it only succeeded in getting Moe's diabolical little mind working on a solution. Apparently, Moe thought of one: when she returned home from a shopping trip that afternoon, Sarah found four ornaments scattered about the living room and into the kitchen. I personally have no idea how in the hell Moe managed this stunt (did Ghidorah suddenly turn mischeivous and give him an alley oop or something?), but after this episode and a situation later that night where Moe attempted to reach another shiny bauble and settled for jumping directly into the structure of the tree itself (much to my dismay), the ornaments came off and were packed away. People 3, Cats 1.

A parting thought before I wind down and head to bed: I'll give this much to dear ol' Martha Stewart, while I find her at best condescending and at worst outright fucking annoying when I see her foofy little show on T.V., her company sure knows how to put together a strong fake Christmas tree -- Moe's little escape gambit the other day didn't even budge it an inch, which was surprising to me considering how little I paid for the thing. Yay.

It's Almost Beginning To Kinda Look A Little Bit Like...

Thanks to some considerately-unannounced sewer work being done in the complex last Monday, I woke up that morning and found myself without any running water whatsoever -- never a great way to start the day. So, in order to make myself presentable to the record-buying public, I was forced to zip over to my parents' house for a pre-work shower. While washing up, I decided out of sheer curiosity to try out some of my brother's Old Spice body wash. I haven't worn any kind of cologne in years (I was once a big proponent of Fahrenheit and Drakkar), and I think that using this nice-smelling goop that morning awakened a bit of nostalgia for those days, because I decided to pick up some of my own the next time I stopped at Walgreen's.

Well, said "next time" turned out to be earlier this evening, and while I was wandering aimlessly about the densely-stocked aisles at Walgreen's, I came across their Christmas Decorations display. Now, despite Sarah and I both being pretty big on Christmas decorations, we hadn't put up any this year -- largely because of the Clown Prince Of Wanton Chaos that is Moe, the younger of our two cats.

Last Christmas was my first with a cat in the house, and Ghidorah (an otherwise perfectly-behaved angel of a pet) simply could not resist attempting to eat or subtly redecorate our Christmas tree on a near-daily basis (and we were finding stray ornaments under furniture for weeks after we took the tree down). Now, if even Ghidorah was unable to resist temptation with a Christmas tree, I reasoned with Sarah months ago, it's a near certainty that Moe will fancy himself the Sir Edmund Hillary of cats the instant I turn my back on him. Thus, in order to spare myself a lot of frustration and oh-my-God-I'm-gonna-fucking-kill-this-cat moments this holiday season, I decided that we'd skip on setting up and trimming a Christmas tree this year.

I don't think Sarah was ever happy with this course of inaction -- if anything, she is even more into the Christmas season than I am -- but I think she at least felt the same way I did in regards to waging a daily battle with Moe and gravity.

It wasn't until this past Sunday night when we were driving home from a visit to Mentor, that I started to have a change of heart. As Sarah drove us home, I found myself staring at nearly every house we passed, looking to see how many people had trees up and lit in their front windows, checking out the lights, and wishing there was a little bit of snow down to really make the drive "perfect." For the first time, I thought of us exchanging gifts on Christmas Eve with no tree or soft colored lights and started to feel a bit sad about it.

While walking up and down the Christmas aisle at Walgreen's 24 hours later, staring at the strands of lights, the wreaths, the holiday candies, the colored light bulbs, the ornaments, the holiday movies, and the aluminum icicle decorations (a favorite pet delicacy), I felt my resolve weakening a bit further. OK, I thought to myself after a few minutes of looking, we can get a couple of colored light bulbs for the front door fixture, maybe one for our neighbor Steve as well, and a couple of strands of green lights for the front bay window. We'll consider this a test -- if Moe leaves these alone, then maybe...just maybe...I'll consider putting up a tree this year.

With a bit of the old sentimental Yule cheer beginning to surge in me at last (when did I start getting like this about the holiday season? I can't recall ever being interested in this end of the deal when I was a teenager), I thumb-tacked up two new strands of green lights around the inside of the bay window shortly after I got home, then stuck a red lightbulb in the fixture outside. It's not exactly as spectacular as I'd hoped (particularly with the curtains closed), but it did raise my murky-foggy-miserable- early-December spirits a bit and I'm pretty sure it did for Sarah, too.

Ghidorah, true to character, didn't seem at all enthused with this intrusion into her favorite resting area (she spends hours in the bay window watching the world go by on a daily basis), while Moe was just bursting with his usual breakneck curiosity. In no time at all, Moe was batting tentatively at the lights, then sniffing them, and, finally, attempting to eat them. Sigh. Sarah then broke out our trusty bottle of Bitter Apple and spritzed away at all of the cords and lights in Moe's reach. After a subsequent attempt at light bulb ingestion a few minutes later, he appears to have figured out (for now) that hey, light strands actually taste terrible, man, blech uch agh, et cetera. Note -- I would have thought he'd learned the lesson of what happens when you chew on electrical cords earlier this fall when he apparently used up one of his nine lives chewing on a power cord behind the entertainment center...but that's Moe for you.

Now comes the waiting-and-seeing game. It's safe at this point to say that we win Round One. Round Two will be played out over the next few days, and we'll consider Round Three this weekend after doing a few more of our mandated home repairs. I'm still not at all certain that I want to risk a few hours of tree work on the possibility that maybe Dr. Destructo has finally learned a lesson. To help combat this dilemma, Sarah wants to look into buying a pre-lit Christmas tree. While I certainly don't relish the process of stringing lights onto our current fake tannenbaum, pre-lit trees are, in my experience, rather expensive for our finances right now. What makes this possibility at least worthy of a second look, however, is that there are apparently some cheaper models being made available (if we're lucky, these more affordable options don't look like utter ass cheese), so I'm at least open to the idea.

Whether or not this particular idea pans out, I'd like very much to add something to the bay window since it looks so damn empty to me right now. A Christmas tree (pre-lit or otherwise) would certainly do the trick of filling the empty space, but there are also a few other possibilities we can look into in case Moe decides to make a spirited battle out of Round Two. My bills will all be out the way tomorrow, so Sarah and I should be free and clear to take a look around a few places this Sunday and make our decoration decision at last. In the meantime, I'm quite sure Moe will be waiting...and scheming.

NP: Various Artists The Reindeer Room: Christmas Chillout Vol II

Life Update

Well, it's been a week since I last wrote anything of substance relating to The Story Of Me, so let's do some quick catching up.

As mentioned before, our new best buddy in the whole wide world Inspector Scene did his inspection of the premises a couple weeks ago, and we now have our work cut out for us. After a breathless wait, his list of our evil building violations arrived over the weekend, and to my complete lack of surprise, the front and back doors were listed on there as needing "replacing or repairing" along with a myriad of nitpicky caulking, painting and patching issues.

At first, this was pretty bad news, since the front and back doors were a real worry for me since we had been told by a locksmith back in September that there would be no way to fix them cheaply. Instead, they'd have to be replaced and the door frames possibly repaired as well. Luckily, a bit of moving around of the latch plate -- as far inwards as it could go in it's frankly-quite-large latch hole -- was all it took to get Mr. Front Door to close properly (or at least properly enough to make Inspector Scene happy, I hope). Mr. Back Door awaits similar treatment as well, likely this Sunday, and after that is completed, everything else should be relatively inexpensive busy work. Even better, some of this work will have me walking about the condo with a loaded caulking gun. Oh dear.

Thanksgiving was exactly what I needed it to be -- a nice, relaxing, largely uneventful holiday spent mostly on my butt (the evening of which was spent at my parent's place in Mentor where I played some 'net checkers and watched Finding Nemo and Shrek 2 after dinner with my niece). The turkey was absolutely wonderful, I am happy to report, as were the fixins and Sarah's homemade pineapple-coconut-frosting-explosion cake.

The next day started off the always-hectic and nerve-wracking Christmas selling season at work. With that in mind, I'll now take this opportunity to once again thank Zeus that we no longer have to work in the fucking Great Lakes Mall. Sure, I will admit that there were some fun times during the holiday season there, where it was a total blast working with a big crew of guys and getting a bit punchy in the homestretch from December 21st onwards, but some of those days were just awful - a 12-hour crush of unrelenting, mewling insanity that just sucked the soul and health right out of you.


At the new location, we strip-mall hermits have a different experience this time of the year. Yes, the so-called "Black Friday" was a surprisingly busy day for us considering the price-war idiocy running rampant at the Big Box store level, but what normally follows this one-day spike (evidenced again by our sales in the days since) is a weirdly disorienting two weeks of what feels like an especially boring, below-average month of business. This dullness is exacerbated by the total lack of any new releases of real consequence (unless you closely follow rap music, in which case it'z a weekly bonanza, yo).

Once December 10 comes around, however, you can feel the business starting to ramp up a bit as the days and nights gradually become more busier than you are accustomed to. By the 15th or so, there is no looking back, and the gradual increase suddenly pegs sharply upwards and stays there. But even then, the busiest day of the year (either Saturday the 18th or Thursday the 23rd this year), while hectic and relentless, is nowhere near as shattering as it was in the Mall back in the day. It's a different level of busy here -- one that at least enables me to keep on top of the ordering and receiving without getting overwhelmed.

Lastly, being the first of December, I've started listening to some of the recent Christmas releases and have already come to the conclusion that the Chris Isaak Christmas album is, surprisingly, a bust. I can't pin why I dislike the album on any specific factor musically, but it might have something to do with hearing this guy so upbeat and jolly when I'm so used to him sounding unrelentingly miserable on past classics like Heart Shaped World and Forever Blue. I guess, therefore, I'd have the exact same gut reaction if Trent Reznor ever released a Christmas album...so, uh, Trent? Don't.

Band Aid 20's new take on "Do They Know It's Christmas," on the other hand, looked pretty horrid on paper but so far seems to come off alright in execution, though I admit that the original is still the better version of the two (I'm kindly forgetting that godawful second Band Aid single from 1989, as apparently everyone else did as well). The melody and lyrics of the original are unchanged (sans that ill-advised rap bit in the middle), but the new production by Nigel Godrich is much more organic in feel, with guitars replacing the widescreen tres-Ultravox synths of the original.

Much more on Christmas music (and otherwise) later ... I still have a lot to go through here.

Peace.