i went to san francisco macworld today, just the exhibit hall since i had a freebie pass. on the escalators the guy one step down from me unselfconciously picked his nose the entire ride. he was really rooting around up there, i feared he was going to touch his own brain. we made eye contact and he kept ramming his finger into his sinuses the entire time. must have been a programmer.
the new imacs are alright, the base is bigger than i expected. several reviewers have mentioned it is "slightly larger than an half-cantalope" but i guess they are familiar with larger cantalope than i see on a regular basis: it looked more like half a honeydew or half a seedless watermelon. something is deeply weird when fruit are used to describe consumer electronics. the design really begs for the screen to be touch-sensitive, its odd to have to push around a mouse to use it. otherwise, it looks a lot like those 1x/5x make-up mirrors one sees bolted to the vanity in nicer hotels.
this show wasn't as depressing as the 1997 show but it was a moderately close second.
so last year i got the census form and filled it out--the long form, 12 pages of questions, many of them redundant. Filled it out, sent it back. A few months later i got a follow up to the long form, a shorter set of the same questions. Answered the questions, sent it back. About a year later, i got a 'Census 2000 Quality Assurance' form. This time the document said it was a survey about the census process. but, it didnt ask any questions about the actual process but instead again asked the same damn questions covered in the first two forms. I filled that one out and sent it back. About a month ago, some guy from the census shows up in person to do a follow up to the quality assurance form I mailed in. He asks the same questions I've answered in the previous 3 forms, and i answer and off he goes. Just this evening I get a phone call from someone claiming to represent the Census, and he's performing a "quality assurance survey to the quality assurance survey." I ask him if he is aware that I've filled out 4 forms as well as met with a Census Bureau worker in person and I was tired of all of this. He blew that off and then said he has some questions to ask me and it will take about 10 minutes and my participation in the census was required by federal law. I repeated that I had already participated in the census and asked how was an internal audit part of the census. He doesnt have an answer for that, started asking the typical census questions and i hung up on him.
if this was a company trying to get my business, i could have demanded to be put on their 'do not call' list well before this. I'm amazed that the gov is spending this kind of effort to ensure >1< person's answers are accurate when there's a documented significant undercount among certain segments of the population. I didn't mind filling out the first form, but dammit that's enough already. at this point i'm beginning to wonder if "Census 2000" refers not to the year but to the number of times I'm expected to fill out that fucking form.
i woke up this morning to a sharp stabbing pain in my lower right abdomen. i had been feeling distemperate the previous few days but not like this. the pain ramped up incredibly fast, within a half-hour i was curled in a ball on the floor.
at the ER they repeatedly asked if i was allergic to any medicines, hooked me up to an IV, and gave me a shot of morphine. i wondered if various past misadventures rendered the morphine less effective since it didnt make a dent on the pain at all. another nurse came by with another type of painkiller called garble blah blah and all was much better.
so a bunch of tests later, they think i have a kidney stone. initially they thought it was a ruptured appendix. i'm back home w/ instructions to drink gallons of water and an script for vicodan, which isnt doing diddly for the pain. i'm supposed to follow up w/ my regular dr this week, maybe he can give me a script for garble blah blah.
i got an email from my ex-fiance, apologizing for the way he summarily dumped me 2 years ago. While i appreciate the email, I cant fathom why he would email me now--i mean, its been two freaking years--his people dont speak to my people, we dont even live in the same state, etc so its not like we keep having to avoid each other in the dairy aisle at the grocery store
oddly the effect of the email was to rip the wounds back open again since i had achieved quasi-success by investing heavily in some of the nations finest pharmaceutical products to forget about it all.
there's this hellacious Stench in the backyard. after the 4th day i reluctantly accepted that it was not originating from the next door neighbor's recent application of fish emulsion to her rose garden. my acceptance came only after a turkey vulture started to circle the backyard, flying in so low that it barely avoided colliding with the loquat trees. vultures are a lot bigger than you'd expect, close up.
i encouraged the dog, hoping that it might have a hidden talent for cadaver search, but she only peed on the lawn and flopped down in the shade under the patio table. I then assumed the role of cadaver dog, sniffing out the origin of the Stench, poking gingerly at the underbrush with a pair of bamboo stakes. the Stench was strongest near to the fence, coming through the gaps in the wood slats. I briefly entertained the idea that the next door neighbor murdered her husband--or perhaps other family members--and buried them among the roses. oddly, that idea was easier to accept than the concept of fish emulsion. turns out the fence in that section of the yard is doubled up: there's another fence installed just ~4" behind it, paralleling its run for 16'. within the gap lies the very puffy, very dead, and very stinky remains of a possum.
so here's my first killoggs post: how am I going to get rid of the Stench in the backyard? the fence(s) are not of a style that's easily dismantled... the remains appear to be of too unstable composition to fish out from above... i thought about covering it with quicklime, but several websites warned "quicklime is not flammable but on contact with water may generate sufficient heat to ignite surrounding materials" which would make it not-such-a-GoodThing to pour between two wooden fences. anyone have any experience w/ dead body odor control?
