Damn The Torpedoes

Today was a long, busy day, full of scheduled and impromptu meetings and conference calls, and I was glad to see the end of it, particularly given that tomorrow is Friday.
On Wednesday my boss told me that I have to face the fact that I’m never going to get used to the whole five day work week thing. He has a point.
I mean, seriously, by Wednesday I’d put in three days: what more do they want from me?
What? Two more days? *Sigh* Okay…
After work today, on Kathleen’s invitation, I headed over to her bank, which was celebrating its grand opening in Leesburg today. The main draw? Free food.
When I got there, I found that that they were providing valet parking…and that Kathleen wasn’t there yet.
This was an issue because there were a lot of people – people I didn’t know – crowded into a very small space. So after getting my name tag and being greeted by the branch manager I went outside to call Kathleen and learned that she wasn’t too far away.
Back inside some guy saw me standing alone looking awkward and took pity on me, which was nice of him, but he wasn’t really the most dynamic conversationalist. Luckily Kathleen arrived shortly after that, and then proceeded to introduce me to a bunch of people who, while nice enough, clearly didn’t give two shits about who I was.
But whatever.
They had some sort of drawing in which people put their business cards in a bucket (Note to self: remember to talk to the admin about getting business cards), which Kathleen actually won. Apparently she’s been lucky in the “winning gift baskets” category of life lately, as she recently won a gift basket at one of her networking meetings.
Somewhere along the line the branch manager came and “borrowed” Kathleen to bring her to talk to some other people, and I went back to standing around awkwardly.
Eventually, after I’d taken out my cell phone to close some of the open applications, some other guy took pity on me and struck up a conversation based on the fact that we both had the same model of cell phone.
After he left, Kathleen made her way over and said that she wanted to do some more schmoozing, and I decided to head home.
And that was the day’s excitement.
(The Mayor of Leesburg was there. I had no idea that the Mayor was a woman, or really, any ideas about the Mayor at all, as I tend not to pay any attention to that sort of thing. I note that the Mayor was a woman not because I found it shocking, or that I fainted dead away after saying, “A woman Mayor? Now I’ve seen everything!” but rather because it brought to mind a line from the song God is in the House by Nick Cave: We have a pretty little square, we have a woman for a Mayor, our policy is firm but fair, now that God is in the house.)
In terms of the quality of the women in attendance at the event, feel it appropriate to quote the Sea Captain from The Simpsons: “Yarr, not a looker in the bunch.”
There was one woman there who was kind of sort of almost maybe attractive. She was definitely dressed to accentuate her best assets, or more appropriately, tittets, as she was wearing a very tight top that showcased her breasts, giving her these huge 1950’s style torpedo boobs. If I were any shorter she might have put one of my eyes out with those things.
However, while her top did wonders for that part of her, it also made her bulge in some unfortunate places.
I’m no good at guessing age, but I would estimate that she was at least a few years older than I am, and I think that I’d have to classify her as a cougar, a notion reinforced by a conversation I overheard her having with some other women who were encouraging her to pounce on some young prey she’s evidently been stalking.
Speaking of aging not-so gracefully, I realized that as of today my birthday is exactly a month away.
I wouldn’t normally care – it is a “pointless” age, after all, one of those in-between birthdays that isn’t any sort of milestone – but I’m a little more excited about my upcoming birthday, as this year my mom will be out for a visit. I’m looking forward to having her out here to see my house and meet my friends. I’d be even more excited if my dad were still around to come out with her, but I guess that’s just a birthday present that I’ll have to do without.
But speaking of birthday presents, if someone were of a mind to buy me something, I wouldn’t be averse to some of these, or maybe this, though of course, as always, I’m clearly not dropping birthday gift hints when I mention that Superman Family #171, the first comic book I remember ever looking at, is available for purchase at Mile High Comics (though the Very Fine copy is out of stock, which couldn’t possibly be because someone bought it for me thinking that I’ve been dropping hints to that effect), or that a case like this would be great to display it in.
In any case, the monstrosity that is the five day work week still needs to be completed, so bed time approaches, and I will bring this entry to a close.

Shredding Is Cool!

I needed to get a copy of a blank check over to H&R Block in order for them to have my refund deposited directly into my checking account, but I didn’t want to drive over there, as it was in the opposite direction of where I was going this morning, so I made a copy and was going to fax it from Staples, where I was going anyway to pick up that junk mail shredder (more on that in a bit).
When I got there, naturally, the fax machine wasn’t working. I told the lady working there, “I should apologize, as the only reason it’s not working is that I needed to use it.”
Still, I bought the shredder, then headed to Super Target to pick up Batman: Beyond Season 3 on DVD.
While I was at it I bought Justice League Unlimited Season 2, and would have bought Season 1 if they’d had it there.
(I’ll have to pick it up somewhere else.)
Once I got home I set up the shredder and became a crazy shredding fool.
That thing is cool!
It even shreds CDs and DVDs.
Now I understand why they were so fond of shredding stuff at Enron.
After I finished ripping apart every spare scrap of junk mail, used paper, and coaster-fied CDs and DVDs I could find, I ate lunch and then got to work on the problem of faxing the check.
I scanned the check in, dropped it into a Word document, and plugged Munin into the phone line…only to discover that I don’t have any kind of fax software. After tracking some down and installing it I faxed it off. Hopefully I should get a call tomorrow telling me that my taxes are done, I’ll go in and pay for them, and within a short period I’ll have a lot more money at my disposal (the majority of which I’ll put into savings).
In looking to pick up a copy of Captain America #25, Scott tracked down a local comic shop that I was thinking about visiting today. Scott and I are both toying with the notion of getting back into regular comic buying, at least to support some of our favorite creators like Gail Simone, Ed Brubaker, and Bill Willingham (but only when he’s writing Fables and Fables-related stuff. Most of his more mainstream work is pretty weak.).
I decided not to go today as Wednesday is new comics day, so I figured I might as well just wait.
(By the way, in all the years that I was buying comics, I don’t think I ever actually noticed that new comics arrive on Wednesday. I’d noticed that Tuesday was the day for new music and movies, but never picked up on the comic thing. Of course, it didn’t really matter, as I had a “pull list” at my local store, so when I went in, the most recent stuff that I wanted was already set aside for me, so I didn’t have to go in on any particular day.)
Of course, getting back into buying comics on even a semi-regular basis means that I finally have to get around to organizing my existing collection.
It’s a daunting task, especially since that means re-bagging and re-boarding hundreds upon hundreds of comics, which will require a lot of time and money.
I’ve been meaning to do it for years and actually started on it a while back, but soon gave up on it, One of the main things I want to do is either create my own database or, more likely, use an existing comic book cataloguing program to create a definitive list of what I have and what condition each book is in.
Towards that end, I hauled all of my comics in from the outside storage area and now have them taking up space on my floor.
I also did some searching for comic database programs and found this program.
I’ve downloaded the trial and it’s pretty cool.
Basically, you enter in the title of the series, it connects to an online database and gives you a list of all of the issues, complete with, in most cases, cover scans, and full info on writers, artists, editors, etc. You simply check off the issues you have, and boom, what you have is added to your own database.
Here’s a screenshot of my test database:



The trial limits you to 100 comics, and I went with the ones that I knew that I have off the top of my head, in particular limited series that I know I have every issue.
I’m definitely thinking about paying for the full version, but on the other hand, I do have a birthday coming up.
Just something to think about.