Slip Sliding Away

Today I was supposed to head out to meet with Kathleen’s boss to talk about doing some part-time work.
I didn’t feel like sitting at home waiting for it to be time to go, so I decided that I’d head out a bit early and do some shopping.
While I was at one store, Kathleen called to tell me not to bother, as there had been a miscommunication and that her boss wouldn’t be in, but that if I wanted I could possibly meet her (Kathleen) for lunch and the she could show me the office, but that she’d have to call me back.
So I went on with my shopping.
Among the things I was thinking about buying were one of those paper shredders from Staples (the kind Kevin once used to make a salad on The Office), and a new chair mat for my desk, as I’d just thrown out the old one because it was all cracked and broken.
I decided against the paper shredder for now, and the most affordable chair mat was the exact same one I’d just thrown away, which I didn’t want to get because it moved around too much and didn’t last very long before breaking. The next cheapest was $40, which seemed a bit pricy to me, so I decided to do without the chair mat for a bit.
From there I went to Ross to look for a slipcover for my couch, which, in addition to having a design that doesn’t really fit in with the rest of my stuff, is all covered with lint balls that I just can’t get rid of.
I wanted the kind of slipcover that has separate parts for the couch itself and the cushions, as I really don’t like the look of the draped over one piece style. I found a couple of two piece covers, but the colors were less than ideal, and even though, in contrast to what you’d find elsewhere, they were dirt cheap, I couldn’t bring myself to settle.
So it was off to Super Target where I found the “ultimate” slip cover. It’s “ultimate” because it’s Scotchguarded and is designed to fit more snugly than other covers.
I found one in a nice chocolate color and bought it even though it was $60 more than the slipcovers at Ross and, in fact, at $99, actually cost me four times more than what I paid for the couch itself.
(At $25, it was a bargain, considering that it’s a sleeper. Of course, being a sleeper is what makes it so heavy, and its heaviness is what will lead Brian, who helped me move it in, to say, “Fuck that couch,” if I ever mention it in his presence.)
(I just learned that if you misspell “fuck,” Word will catch it, but will not offer “fuck” as a suggestion.)
Once I got home and was struggling with the slipcover, Kathleen called back t say that lunch wasn’t going to be happening today, and I rescheduled the whole thing for tomorrow. I’m not foreseeing having to actually make a trip out there happening tomorrow.
Up until a couple of years ago, in addition to the merit increase, my company used to grant us stock options as part of the annual review process.
As a result, like many employees, I have a bunch of options that become exercisable at this time of year.
(Having exercised some in 2004 and 2005 is the reason I’ve been audited – pointlessly and inaccurately, as the profits of the sale are included as part of my total wages, and are, therefore, taxed as part of my wages, in addition to the taxes taken out at the time of sale – by the IRS for both years.)
Our company’s stock price had been making gains in recent months, so I was kind of holding onto the options to see how high the price would get. In the meantime, everyone else, seeing that we were at a four-year high, dumped their options immediately, which has led, like it does every year when this happens, to the price dropping like a stone.
*Sigh* I guess there’s always next year, and I probably would have just ended up getting audited again if I had exercised them.
(Just got a voicemail – not sure why the phone didn’t actually ring – from Kathleen telling me that the person I was going to meet with tomorrow won’t actually be in, and will, supposedly, be attempting to contact me to set up a time and/or explain the whole thing to me over the phone. Good thing I didn’t have my heart set on driving out there, I guess.)
In any case, I suppose I should do some work on a picture or something. I know that hardly anyone reads this with any regularity, but I also know that the occasional picture breaks up the monotony, so I feel like I should be posting pictures, but I just haven’t been cranking them out.
Every time I think about working on a picture, I get this “Do I have to?” feeling that’s very difficult to overcome.
But I guess I’ll try.
But do I have to?
*Sigh*

Same Shit, Different Year

I can’t say that I’ve often rung in the New Year with Dick Clark and his Rockin’ New Year’s Eve.
For one thing, it airs on ABC, and for much of my life at home with my family we couldn’t even get ABC with our antenna.
Then, when I got older and was out on my own and had more viewing options, I still didn’t watch it because I just didn’t care.
So I don’t have a lot of nostalgic feelings attached to the show, but last night I decided to tune in to ABC to watch the ball drop for the sheer hell of it.
Doing so turned out to be something of a mistake, and not just because it meant having to put up with Ryan Seacrest.
No, the real problem was Dick himself. While he looked rather spry, all things considered, the stroke he had has taken an obvious toll on him, particularly on his speech, which was slurred and slow and made him sound, quite frankly, like an old man. That just made me sad. I mean, he’s supposed to be the eternal teenager or something.
Oh well; eventually time kicks the living shit out of all of us, I guess.
After watching the ball drop I switched back to the Metalocalypse marathon on Cartoon Network and was up too late watching that.
Today doesn’t really hold much promise of exciting things to come in the new year. I figure on just staying in and doing pretty much the usual. Which is to say doing nothing in particular.
I hope you all had fun last night and that you aren’t too hung over.

OAQ (Occasionally Asked Questions) or Seek And Ye Shall NOT Find

I don’t intend this to come off as bragging, but I know a lot of stuff.
After all, I’ve been on this planet for over 34 years and throughout most of that time I’ve had a habit of collecting bits of abstract information and stuffing them into my brain. Sometimes actively and deliberately, other times passively and unintentionally.
Beyond all of the information I have “on hand,” I’m also pretty skilled at finding stuff out through a variety of methods, though I must admit that these days I seldom make use of methods that don’t involve the Internet.
So the point is that I know a lot of stuff and what I don’t know I can generally find out.
Of course, there is infinitely more stuff out there that I don’t know, and much of it is impossible to discover through the means available to me, and even more of it I simply do not care enough to try to find out.
This post is about some of that stuff.
As I’ve mentioned many times before, among other things the traffic counting software I use here allows me to see what search engines, if applicable, referred people here, and exactly what they were searching for.
I begin to notice certain trends pretty quickly, such as the people who come here looking for information on a certain shitty soft-core porn movie involving prehistory, and I become conscious of how people are wasting their time coming here, as I don’t have the information they’re looking for and in a lot of cases I don’t even know where they can find it.
Based on some of the top traffic generators, I thought I would compile a list of things I don’t know anything about that people come here looking to learn about in the hopes that the text stating that “I don’t know the answer to your question about this” will come up in the search results.
In some cases, though, I will at least try to point people in the right direction.
Okay, first up, naturally, is Bikini Cavegirl, which is also known as Teenage Cavegirl.
I do not know – or care – whether or not the people in the movie were actually having sex. I don’t know anything about the personal lives of any of the actors or actresses, there are no pictures of any of them here, and you cannot download the movie from this site. If you really need information about it, though I cannot imagine why you would, look it up on IMDb or Wikipedia. If you want to download the movie illegally, check out Usenet or any of the P2P stuff out there. If you want to buy the movie, go to a site that sells movies.
All of that being said, it’s not a good movie even by shitty soft-core porn movie standards. The women in it aren’t really that hot and the story and acting are sub-Ed Wood level. It’s just that bad and is not worth wasting your time trying to find information on it or to purchase or download it.
Okay, next up, I don’t know if Giada De Laurentis is pregnant. Months ago I made a reference to the fact that she appeared to be wearing a maternity outfit on one episode of Everyday Italian that I watched. That’s the extent of what I know. This is not a celebrity gossip blog; I’m not likely to have that sort of information here and I’m not going to try to find it for you.
In a similar vein, I do not know the bra sizes of any celebrity. I get a lot of hits from people looking for this. Most commonly – because I do mention her, though not her bra size, which I imagine is substantial, frequently – I get hits from people looking for Carla Gugino’s. As I stated, because I don’t know any celebrity’s, I don’t know what Carla Gugino’s bra size is.
Similarly, I don’t know what Monica Keena’s bra size is either.
Sometimes IMDb biographies will list them (citing Celebrity Sleuth as a source), but not often. I don’t know where you can find this information otherwise. There is a site that has a list of sizes, but it is, apparently (per the discussion on Digg), inaccurate, and like many things on the Web has not been updated since 1995 (it probably was created on a BBS or something and simply migrated to the Web unchanged) and does not, consequently, list anyone who came into prominence since then, so I’m not going to bother posting the URL.
I can’t see any reason why anyone would need to know this, therefore I have no idea what kind of salary beer spokesmodels make. I wouldn’t even know where to look for information like that. I can tell you where not to look, though: here.
Again, because I don’t do celebrity gossip – or New Age mysticism – I can’t even tell you why someone would do a search for “Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt and Cosmic Energy,“ let alone provide any information about it.
So in summary, all you need to know about Bikini Cavegirl is that it’s a shitty movie, I don’t have any celebrity gossip (or bra sizes), and I’m not a beer spokesmodel salary expert.
I don’t want you to think that I’m judging you based on the kind of stuff you’re searching for (even though I’m totally judging you based on the kind of stuff you’re searching for), but I do want to make it clear that for anything other than me spouting off about whatever comes to mind with no real guiding theme, or the occasional bit of artwork, you really need to search elsewhere to find it.

Krackle!

Along with following online tutorials, one of the things I've been doing to fill up my artistic bag of tricks has been to start building some custom brushes and patterns.
For example, last week I got wise and made a fishnet pattern, and I also created a "JP" brush to make adding my signature a little easier.
Today I made a new brush that amuses me greatly, and though there's exactly one person who reads this who will appreciate why it amuses me, I thought I'd share an example of some quick work done with my Kirby Krackle brush:




Being at the fire stations last night, and more specifically in the bays, reminded me of my time(however brief) as a garbageman, what with all of the exhaust fumes from the trucks. Add in some maggots and the always-present underlying smell of rot and it would have been like old home week.
Speaking of garbage, apart from following some tutorials and creating the above-mentioned brush, the only thing I've done today was haul out some garbage
I was going to do my standard Monday morning grocery shopping, but decided that could wait until Tuesday morning.
Oh yeah, I did do one other thing, inspired by one of the tutorials: I designed a new T-shirt and put it up on Zazzle.
Here's the image I designed for it:



As you can see, it's the perfect holiday stocking stuffer, so follow the link to Zazzle over on the right and buy a bunch of them.

There Will Be No Sexy Vacation Pictures

So I’m on vacation for the next two weekends, which means I don’t have to go back to work until December 14th.
I don’t really have much in the way of plans as, per usual, I’m just burning off excess vacation time.
As I was on my way out the door from work yesterday (it was slow so our boss said one of us could leave early, so I did, as Scott left early last week), Scott told me to enjoy my time off and added, “And DO something!”
I probably won’t listen, though I do have plans to wander around downtown Leesburg on Friday night with Kathleen for what’s called “First Friday.” On the first Friday of every month the various downtown businesses stay open later than usual to allow people to browse through them.
That’ll probably be the extent of the excitement for my 22 days off from work.
Last night Kathleen called me to let me know that she and Brian were at the bar they usually hang out at and that there was a band and that I was invited to join them.
I thought about it, but I was pretty tired (I was falling asleep on the couch as I switched back and forth between Flip That House on TLC and some show about the animals that populated the earth before the rise of dinosaurs on the Discovery Channel…I know how to party!) and I’d already been settled in for the evening since I’d gotten home at 4:30, so there was no chance of me going anywhere.
My Thanksgiving was marked by a very long, very slow day at work, though I spent the second half of it feeling completely stuffed as management provided us with a very good Thanksgiving feast.
Scott’s wife Stacy stopped in with the girls to join us for the meal, as the feast was open to the families of employees and even to employees who weren’t working that day.
In fact, one lady from our department who works weekday overnights came in with her family. There were so many of them that my first thoughts were of the “Orphanarium” on Futurama.
I was tempted to take advantage of some of the crazy Black Friday deals on HDTVs on Friday morning, but ultimately decided that I couldn’t justify the expense right now.
The thing that made the Friday “black” for me was just how goddamn long it took for the day to be over. It was insane. At one point I was convinced that it had to be like 3:00 in the afternoon. It wasn’t even 10 AM!
Even watching Brian fail in his attempts to fly his remote control helicopter (which we could periodically hear him flying around in the room he works in that day and the next) around in the lobby could do little to make the day pick up the pace.
Having three days in which no upper management types would be around instead of just one meant that I had a lot of time to get caught up on my comic book reading, though the time still moved excruciatingly slowly, so getting to leave early yesterday was a real bonus.
If things had gone according to plan I would have had my condo development’s holiday party coming up next Sunday, but it turns out that when we planned for that date we did so without knowing that the clubhouse wouldn’t be available then, so we had to move it to the 8th.
Turns out also that I wasted my time making up a flier, as the management company for our homeowners’ association was taking care of that. Oh well.
I’m not even sure I’m going to go, but I suppose that I should, though if I weren’t on vacation I’d be totally unlikely to, as it’s on a Friday night.
In any case, I think I’m going to do some laundry and get some cleaning done today. I may be back with more later.

Nothing To See Here

I got up late this morning, then proceeded to make up for lost time by sitting around doing nothing.
I've seriously done jack today, and am not really in the mood to do anything else, so check back tomorrow if you want to see an actual entry.