I'm eating eggsalad on a bagel for dinner. I had difficulty spreading the medium with any real efficacy. Littlestar made the eggsalad yesterday. Some robot in a factory barfed up the bagel. So, really, my part in the whole enterprise was quite minimal -- and yet it's me who does the eating.
Red wine and eggsalad do not go. I'm not a connaisseur -- I'm just saying, is all. Eu.
If I were the kind of person who would actually waste hard-earned money on repainting a car, I'd paint my car brown. I know that's not monumental or anything, but I've been mulling it over and I definitely come to the conclusion that a nice, awful, babyshit brown would suit me best.
The car is currently yellow.
My children have finally simmered down. One is afflicted with fever and one is afflicted with being a hyperactive nine-month-old juggernaut of destruction and accelerated time digestion. They're upstairs. I'm listening in on the baby monitor. I think the dog just farted.
Littlestar's chair is pretty uncomfortable. Now that we've re-amalgated office spaces remind me to substitute this ass-prop for my chair, currently standing disused in the nursery. There's nothing at all wrong with it apart from the way the cats have shredded the leather on top.
Have I ever told you the story of how I got that chair?
One of my step-father's toy private health care concerns ate up a network of smaller private health concerns and after the consolidation of resources they decided to trim the fat, and so my step-father had a warehouse stuffed to the gills with the kipple of a downsized corporation. There were rooms filled to the ceiling with computer desks, rooms filled with filing cabinets, rooms filled with printers and hat-racks and teleconferencing hub hardware. Though I never saw it I was sure that just around the next corner would be a room chocked full of receptionists or controllers or telephone sanitizers. "Take your pick," said my step-father.
So I scored a high-falutin' adjustable red leather office chair, which my cats confused for a scratching post. Which brings us right back up to the present again. Hello!
I'm in the room in the schoolhouse formerly known as the laboratorium but now redubbed the studio by Littlestar because she records in here. I am only slightly disgruntled, and mostly that's on account of the fact that I already have a "the studio" and it's the place I sit in when I'm at work.
The lava lamp in here is on the fritz. I have to slap it to make it see the light.
We were cleaning up in here today. It's been a NO BABY ZONE since Baby Yam happened, but now we've green lighted it for crawling exploration now that all the cables are simplified and smartified and tied up with little ties so there's nothing for monster babies to grab and destroy. We're now pretty much exclusively accessing the photo/music server through VNC on our laptops so I got rid of a couple of CRTs todays. The comparative lack of clutter is nice.
I'm drunk, so I should probably rant about something, right? Lemme see.
Okay, I'm somewhat stressed about a current project at work. I'm stressed because it's my baby: I should the business in, and I'm directing the thing. I'm stressed because certain budgetary shortcomings mean the thing has now been winnowed down to a shadow of its proposed self, but I'm still expecting to achieve a comparable end result.
Monday morning's the second and final shoot day. Things went very smoothly (supernaturally smoothly) on the first shoot day, but not all of the material we captured is what I'd classify as stunning or even, say, good. Things went smoothly in the sense that everybody did what they said they would do, did it on time, and did it without any personality conflicts. My authority wasn't questioned by the seasoned veteran broadcaster on set, and the make-up girl worked wonders with errant hairs in due conscientiousness of greenscreen necessities. Nevertheless the talent was lacking in some areas.
Due to the fact that my corporate love envelope hasn't yet sprung for the 3D software my department needs to function, we will have to determine some way of faking dozens of the effects we inititally proposed using other means. Let us pray to the spirit of MacGyver.
My boss' boss, the President of the United States of Paycheques, has been reluctant to untether the studio budget ever since he was privy to a demonstration of 3D holoprojection technology. Now convinced that such presentations are the literal and immediate future of communications, he wants to make triply certain any moves we make in terms of production infrastructure are compatible with the possibe delivery of holographic content down the road.
For the record, I think he's fucking mental.
At the office we also have a Vice President of Very Important Things, and she's very little and she dresses fancy. The thing is, she's been getting smaller. It is my working theory that someone has put a sort of voodoo curse on her in the form of a wasting disease. This is why she takes so much time off -- she's seeing voodoo specialists who pour chicken blood over her and shit.
I can see no other explanation. She doesn't smoke tobacco or shoot up, and I'm pretty sure she doesn't have a vagina so it's not like she's broken up over a boyfriend or something.
Voodoo.
At the office we also have a Vice President of Getting Shit Done, and daycare for her kid costs so much it makes me wonder why she just doesn't quit and stay at home. Does that make me a Mormon? Seriously: she pours an enormous amount of effort into getting all our shit done, and all she has to show for it is enough money to cover her while she's gone. Why not just stay home? Spare the bother, enjoy her kid's kidness. It's not like she'd get bored: her award-winning ethnically diverse architect husband is always going to art openings and swank events and the like -- stuff she can seldom go to now because she's too mired in getting shit done.
(Granted, one could argue that her husband could just as easily quit his job and stay at home leaving the Vice President of Getting Shit Done free to make her mark by getting shit done. It's true. But I don't know him personally so I can't relate as easily to the vicarious desire to not have to go to work the way I can hers.)
We also have a Vice President of Fitness who offered everybody really generous free memberships at a nearby health club and is now fining them $50 per violation for failing to meet their fitness quotas. I did not sign up. I am desperately out of shape, but I did not sign up. I don't have that particular $50.
Unit B goes to the health club. He has calculated how much he saves each month on his hot water bill by showering exclusively at the health club. He also views this as an added incestive to meet his commitments, and thus has not been fined $50.
Sisko, the Captain of the Exciting Division, has never gone to the health club at all. He is a thin man who wears brightly coloured jogging suits with white iPod wires poking out of them from surprising places. He has definitely had to pay $50. He uses words so urban I have to Google them. I am illustrating the cover of his book.
Unit A just joined the health club. He likes to go when nobody else goes. I believe his goal is to maintain his current heroic weekly intake of beer while not becoming discernably heavier. I wish him luck, and I hope he doesn't have to pay $50. So far he is being an Eager Beaver (obscure reference level gamma: q.v. Joseph Heller's "Catch-22", lost chapter of).
I'm eager for some beaver. Where's my wife? Oh yeah -- out on the town with 256.
(I should be asleep already. I'm going to sleep soon.)
Sadly, at the office there is no Cheeseburger Brown equivalent of Christopher Robin Was Murdered's Robin. We have a receptionist with a bad back. We have a network administrator whom Unit B is convinced is actually from Middle Earth. There's Lady Producer and Girl Wonder Production Assistant, but they're competent and therefore boring.
We have a cranky curmudgeon, but he's not cranky about anything that's shocking. He's not a crank cranky curmudgeon, he's just a bit cranky. He's bitterly funny. He rides a motorcyle that looks like the internal combustion version of the bicycle from Pee-wee's Big Adventure. He's twice divorced. When I met him the first thought in my head was, "This guy smells like ti dave."
Unit B believes in some kind of theory involving confluences of coincidences having meaning. He likes to gently mock me for my inclination toward Richard Dawkins and being sensible. Unit B is not reconciled with his own materialist tide. His older brother is a new Christian who makes intelligent missiles to blow up the Taliban.
Ask HuSi: what are the best examples, object lessons or mnemonics you've used or would consider using for communicating the mechanism of natural selection to a preschool child?
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