Hopefully This VD Won't Require Antibiotics

So we’ve got VD once again. Here’s hoping that everyone has a wonderful, romantic time, and that no one chokes on engagement rings hidden in champagne glasses, that the unfaithful manage to successfully double (or triple, or quadruple…) book themselves, and that no one thinks that “going to Jared” involves the guy who lost a bunch of weight eating Subway sandwiches.
As for me, it’s been a typical Saturday involving getting up, getting showered and dressed, heading to the comic shop, gassing up the car, and going grocery shopping and failing to get everything I needed because the human obstacle course was just too damned annoying.
Ah, romance…
Speaking of which, so far OK Cupid continues to be a terrible archer. Among its greatest misses have been a transgendered – but still functionally male – woman, a lesbian, a woman who lives more than 70 miles away, despite the fact that I limited the search to within 25, a lesbian, and a bisexual woman who states that potential matches should contact her only if they DO NOT (all caps hers) have a penis.
A blind, retarded, drunk howler monkey would probably be a better shot than OK Cupid.
But at least it’s free…
Yesterday found me spending too much damned time in front of the TV, catching up on the episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report sitting on my DVR, and actually watching some live TV, as last night saw the return of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
That was followed by the new series Dollhouse, which I’ve been kind of ambivalent about, but figured I might as well watch it once my ass was already planted in the recliner.
It was okay, and Eliza Dushku was as hot as always, so I figure I’ll probably give it another shot. It’s not like I have to worry about it being a long-term commitment; it’s a science fiction show on Fox. There’s almost no chance that it’ll survive.
Hell, moving The Sarah Connor Chronicles to Friday nights is essentially Fox moving it to death row, and the miracle that actually led the show to have a second season is bound to run out of steam.
In the promos for Dollhouse they mentioned that it was from “Joss Whedon, Creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Oddly enough, they didn’t add “and that other show that we stuck in a deadly Friday night time slot and then canceled right away.”
After Dollhouse I watched Numb3rs, and then it was time for Battlestar Galactica. I’m patient enough to let it record during Numb3rs so that I can watch it commercial-free, but not patient enough to not watch it immediately afterwards.
The same can’t be said for Heroes, which has been sitting unwatched on my DVR since Monday.
When I got home from my grocery shopping I thought about making some sort of lunch but decided to just eat some yogurt and then take a nap.
During my nap I dreamed that I was going to a party with actress Katherine Heigl, who was, for some reason, driving a very old, rusted, and trash-filled car – with, I think, Jack Black in the backseat – and she was complaining to me that I don’t draw pictures of her nearly as often as she thinks I ought to, and wouldn’t listen when I explained that most of the pictures I have of her are too much of a pain in the ass, involving entirely too much lace and complex transparency.
She kept changing her position on what it meant that we were going to this party together. Sometimes it was as friends, other times it was as something rather more, then it was as friends, but with an unspoken understanding that there was more to it than that, but which we weren’t going to discuss, and then it was just that she was giving me a ride and I’d better keep away from her during the party, but maybe she didn’t really mean it and she wanted me to figure that out on my own and this was all some sort of test.
The whole thing was utterly baffling, and shortly after we arrived at the party I woke up and thought, “That was weird,” and went back to sleep and started dreaming that it was the day after the party and I’d gone back to the house in search of something that I’d lost while I was at the party (I think it was my contact case, though why I’d bring that to a party is beyond me, but it makes about as much sense as anything else in the dreams).
Then I got up, watched Wednesday night’s Law & Order on my DVR, sat around for a while, and started writing this.
For the curious among you, the picture I posted yesterday is a drawing of Starro the Conqueror, an old Justice League of America villain. In fact, if I recall correctly, Starro was the first JLA villain, the one whose efforts to conquer the world brought the heroes together in their first team venture.
(Yep. Just actually looked at the Wikipedia entry.)
I typically don’t have a lot to do on Friday afternoons, so I took the opportunity to quickly draw a picture of Starro on the whiteboard in my cubicle. The whiteboard that other cube-dwellers use to keep track of projects and deadlines and whatnot, but which I decided would be put to better use by having a picture of an obscure (and utterly ridiculous) comic book character drawn on it.
It’s my intention to have Starro say something different every day, and it’s my hope that other people on my floor will join in the fun by writing their own communiqués from the Star Conqueror.
Over the years I’ve actually thought about getting a tattoo of Starro, and there’s a blog post that I’ve been planning to write for a while in which Starro will have a prominent role. So there’s that to – eventually – look forward to, or to dread. Whichever.

When You Care Enough To Send A Picture Of Someone Pretending To Blow His Brains Out

While sitting at my desk this morning the kid from the mailroom came by to deliver a package for me.
It was a gift from Kathleen that I was supposed to get last week on VD, or rather Singles Awareness Day, consisting of some ginormous cookies and a card featuring Jim from The Office pretending to blow his brains out.
As can be seen in the crappy cell phone picture below, the card now adorns one of the walls of my cube.



Apart from that, the day was largely uneventful. I did see the cute girl from the elevator in the hallway at one point, though we didn’t interact in any fashion.
Of course, immediately after that I discovered that my fly was totally unzipped.
*Sigh*
On a more upbeat note, and to pad/round out this entry, watch this video of a song about Alan Moore (found via Neil Gaiman’s blog):

Space Invaders Or What's The Buzz?

Yesterday evening I was on the phone with my mother when I heard an odd buzzing sound. It sounded rather like a drill that was losing torque as it bored into a hard material.
After looking around in confusion I spotted my cell phone on the bookshelf vibrating.
Today at work while writing up a document, there was an odd sensation coming from my left hip.
Once again it was my cell phone.
The latter call was my eye doctor’s office confirming my appointment on Tuesday.
The former was Stacy calling to let me know that they were in Ashburn and wanted to stop by so that they could pick up my old universal remote, which I’d promised to Scott, and to give me a card.
The card – along with a package of cookies – was a thank you from Vicki for my recent donation in support of her doing a “mathathon” to raise money for St. Jude’s.
I was also given a picture of Mike Wazowski from Monsters, Inc. which Scarlett had colored and decided to give to me, though I will say that she looked none too happy about turning her wishes into reality – that was one seriously grumpy face.


The items in question...except the cookies, which are long gone.

The fact that I am, by my own admission, reclusive and anti-social, often leads people to a misapprehension about me. Namely they think that they’re not welcome in my home, and that I view a visit as an invasion, making it a point to try to get in and out as quickly as possible.
It’s true; I don’t like people and I especially don’t like people invading my space.
But that’s people, not my friends. Sure, my friends actually are people, technically, but they’re not just any people, and I certainly don’t mind having company.
I mean, it’s not like it was some Mormons or some-err, never mind.
As it was, I probably kept them longer than they actually wanted to stay, as I was trying to find some particular comics to lend to Scott and discovered that they were literally in the last place I would look for them, or at least, the last place I did look for them.
Speaking of having company, this afternoon as I was preparing to shut down my computer and make my way out the door to start my long weekend, my boss came by, presumably to talk to me about something, but then he noticed that my cube neighbor, Melissa, who was walking by wasn’t wearing glasses, as she’d just gotten contacts. So they talked about that, and then someone else came over and joined the conversation, so I had this small group clustered around my cube, making it the place to be and effectively preventing me from not being there while they had a conversation that I couldn’t actually join, as they were talking about people I’ve never met or even heard of prior to that conversation.
That was an instance in which I would have preferred not to have visitors, though that had less to do with being reclusive and anti-social than it did with me wanting to start my damn weekend already.
I’ve continued to be happy with Hugin – my main computer – and its performance, despite the fact that it’s nearly three years old and therefore, by technology standards, ridiculously out of date. After all, even with Windows Vista, which pretty much every article, blog post, and forum comment I’ve read – many of them written by people who have never actually used it – assures me is a performance dog, it’s got a fair amount of zip and performs pretty much everything I ask of it without any major hiccups or delays.
(Much of that is, no doubt, due to the fact that it has 4 GB of RAM.)
In any case, the point is that I haven’t had any real thoughts about replacing it with a newer model.
In fact, my focus in that regard has been on buying a Media Center system to be the heart of my home theater, with nary a thought towards replacing the system on which I perform most of my computing tasks.
Then I read a review of this new system from Gateway with a quad-core processor and combo Blu-Ray/HD DVD drive that was optimized for things like video and image editing, and that sent my mind wandering along that particular path.
I spent much of yesterday morning at various Web sites configuring potential systems. I even went so far as to open an account with Dell, but ultimately decided to hold off for a while.
Today, however, I did end up buying a new monitor, as working on that big picture over the weekend had me wishing that I had more available screen real estate, and that if I bought it now it would be one less thing to buy when I do inevitably buy a new system.
For the curious, I bought this one, a 24” LCD with a resolution of 1920x1200.
Consider it a belated VD* present to myself.
(*It amuses me to refer to Valentine’s Day as VD. I’m a child.)

Valentine's Day Greetings...

...from other blogs.

Still More Legion of Super-Heroes Valentines (Polite Dissent)

Spider-Man's Valentine's Day Cards...The Polite Dissent Way (Guess which blog?)

Romance Special: My (Allegedly) Funny Valentines 2008 (Chris Sims's Invincible Super-Blog)