Saturday, January 5, 2002
Google Bait
One of the nice things about having a brand new journal domain is that you don't get any Google pollution. People visit it who want to visit a blog or journal, not because they're seeking out their perverted search requests.
This is a selection of some of the latest and whackiest culled from a review of my former Eyeblog's stats: ..::more::..
Posted by Ann @ 06:59 PM CST ..::Link::..
DREAM
Dream last night had something to do with being at my grandmother's with my mom. My mom was going to leave for a trip somewhere and I was supposed to stay at my grandmother's. At the last moment I told her I wanted to go with her, and she said we'd have to share a bed. I didn't like the thought of her snoring the whole night, but I didn't want to stay at my grandmother's either. It's weird how I'm having so many dreams that seem like something out of 20-30 years ago.
Posted by Ann @ 02:00 PM CST ..::Link::..
Black and White and Bloody
The upstairs of my house (which is just art studio, my computer area, crappy carpets, dog bedroom) looks like a crime scene. Blood everywhere. I have blood on my shirt. It was dog nail clipping day. I hate it when the nails get so long that you can't help but cut to the quick. They were pretty well-behaved today, even Hieronymus, who usually turns into a head-spinning demon when we do the trim. We usually give them treats afterword, and put them upstairs so they don't get any blood on anything downstairs. Hieronymus is chewing on a half a Dentabone (which he needs badly), and Plato is trying to get his, even though he already has the other half. Dentabones are the only thing Hieronymus likes. He doesn't like anything else, not rawhides, not toys, nothing. I wonder what they put in those things to make him go so insane. He's a weird pug.
We're doing taxes today...there's nothing I hate more. See the thing is, I'm actually really good with numbers and I like numbers. I was really good at low math, and I loved geometry. I don't hate math, I hate *accounting*. See math is pure, it's beautiful in its order and simplicity. It's the conceptual thing with accounting...what goes where, putting things in boxes, in categories, classifying this and that as that and this...I hate that. It's black and white thinking, and whenever I have talked to someone at the Department of Revenue, or an accountant, and have asked them questions about my business, I confuse the heck out of them. I have a really hard time seeing things as black and white. Nothing is pure black, nothing is pure white. If there was such a color, like pure black, it would suck every living ounce of life out of us. If something was pure white, it would blind us. Something might fit into a category to an accountant, but I also see it as going under a different classification. I guess it takes a certain type to want to be in that line of work and to have to decide what goes in a white box and what goes in a black box. I'd rather play with color.
Posted by Ann @ 12:31 PM CST ..::Link::..
Friday, January 4, 2002
First sad celebrity death of the year
Posted by Ann @ 07:02 PM CST ..::Link::..
Blonde turning greyer
After much frustration, I finally got two working tablets. In 1998 I got an ADB Intuos on my G3, but when I got the G4 I couldn't use it any more because new Macs are only USB. I have a USB Graphire for my iBook. I bought an iMate which is like an ADB to USB adapter. After much frustration (I guess I said that already) I figured out that switching the Graphire to the G4 (so that it'll run under OS 10.1) and using the Intuos on the iBook works so now I can be continuously tableted, and don't have to run OS 9 on the G4 just to use a tablet. This was, of course, after I put two emails in to Wacom about various problems, but because they haven't answered yet and I was able to find the solutions by myself, (that's always embarrassing when you find a solution after you already write customer support) I'm pretty proud of myself for figuring it out. I'm getting better at this...saved my dog's life AND connected my old Intuos all in the same week!
Posted by Ann @ 05:15 PM CST ..::Link::..
Thursday, January 3, 2002
SQUARE jPEGS
...and gifs too.
Just say "no" to rectangles.
Posted by Ann @ 06:18 PM CST ..::Link::..
Music to Plumb By
I hate it when I can't remember my dreams, even though I know there was a plethora of them swirling around in my brain. Maybe there were too many and they got their identities confused and convoluted, hence diluting their impact. Yeah, that's it.
Well, I'm starting to recover from New Year's Eve--no...I didn't get drunk...I had one gin and tonic around 8 pm and drank tea for the rest of the night...I didn't even go OUT. I was still so shaken over what happened to Plato, that I just wanted to stay home and snuggle with him. We had Tim over and watched Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars video, but I don't think Tim was really into it...he was depressed about his condo problems. Tim was the one who got drunk.
Well, welcome to the club, Tim...life bites.
I don't know how many times my life has been turned upside down by water leakage in a home or rental. Tim's worry is is that the insurance won't cover it, and the water heater and furnace are new. Well, water heaters, comparatively speaking, are CHEAP. We installed one ourselves a couple years ago...it was outrageously and happily surprisingly inexpensive...I'll have to ask Stan but it couldn't have been more than $200...if even THAT.
The worst time was when we were living on Mulberry Street, the first place Stan and I lived together (picture above...taken 2001 on our trip back out to Colorado...no, that's not our car!). This was back in the winter of 1984/85. The apartment we dubbed "Bohler's Hole," named after Mrs. Bohler, the elderly landlady. We had been living there for about a year at the time. Yes, it was a pit, but it was better than the tiny firetrap evenmoreso-pit that Stan had been living in before, and it was better than living with my parents. We had graduated from college about six months before that, and by that winter, our jobs at the university were running out. You could stay on with your student status job after you graduated for only six months, then you were out on the streets. The jobs weren't great, but $6.00/hour for us at the time was as good as it got, and much better for anything else we would have for a long while after that. Let me reiterate...this was Colorado. In the mid 80s. Double Digit Unemployment. Bust economy. Reaganomics. Bachelor of Fine Art Graduates. Get the picture? $6.00/hour job GOOD. (Hey, I started at even LESS when I moved to Madison! And when it comes right down to it, that sort of equates yearly to what I make now with my feast and famine irregular artist type work...) OK, so I admit we spent most of it on vinyl (ah, the good old days), so we thought we had the greatest deal renting an apartment for $235/month all utilities included (you can pick your chin up off the floor now). Lots of money left over for our record collection. Until our student jobs ran out.
We were the punks living downstairs. The deadheads lived upstairs. I'm not exactly sure of the roommate permutations that went on up there...There was JD...he was a Bohler's Hole institution. He probably still lives there. Then there was this little trust fund brat who had fights with her no-good coked-up boyfriend who threw things at eachother all the time...Then there were various and sundry people who crashed there often during their late night 4 am poker parties (hell...it was complete hell...especially since we had jobs to go to the next day), and then there was this bloke we dubbed "The Decrodipated Hippie." He looked like he was literally falling apart. Each time we saw him, different appendages were bandaged up. It was creepy. I'm glad we moved. The water event was what stimulated the move.
The building was originally built as a duplex/townhouse. The east side of the building had the up and downstairs, and our west side of the building had the same. At some time a landlord decided to divide it into four living units instead of two, so the people in the downstairs units got the nicer kitchen, the people upstairs got the nicer bathroom. (You don't even want to know what sort of hideous bathroom we had to deal with...that's in another story...but let's just say it froze up every winter).
Then, during the final winter of our stay there, during a time when our jobs were running out and I was having to scramble to find anything (unemployment compensation does not cover you if you were a student), the deadhead's bathroom upstairs started to leak. And it leaked over our kitchen. This was at a time when we couldn't exactly afford to eat OUT...we sort of depended on our kitchen for survival, you know? Mrs. Bohler called one of her handymen/plumber to come fix the problem. The guy showed up right when we were fixing a bowl of macaroni and cheese. This was our meal of the day. And he shows up having to fix the leak that instant. We couldn't even complete fixing our meal. We decided to go out anyway, and left him to his work. We had been playing music, and for some reason Stan put on Fripp & Eno's "No Pussyfooting" and left it on one of the sides and fixed the stereo so that it would keep repeating. (I'm not sure if it was the Heavenly Music Corporation side or the Swasticka Girls side...it was before I liked Eno...in fact I saw Eno as an enemy of all things I held dear at the time, drawing derogatory little cartoons of snobby artistes with "Eno is God" t-shirts...funny how we change). But we had a chuckle over that..."music to plumb by."
When we returned to the house later that day, the problem had been fixed...no more deadhead dribble in our kitchen. But Mr. Plumber had gathered up all our towels to absorb any water! All our towels (which weren't many, but they were the only towels we had) were now filled with deadhead bacteria! Not only was it unhealthy to our constitution as supposedly you can't even bleach that crap out, but it was unhealthy to our punk karma! We threw all the towels out. I don't know how we got more towels, if my parents took pity on me and gave me some of their old ones, or if we went out and bought some. See, this is how credit card debt gets started...you don't have a job, some deadhead's bathroom explodes above your kitchen, unprepared plumber uses your towels to clean up his and their mess...yet I digress.
And as I recall, the year just got worse after that. Sorry, Tim.
Posted by Ann @ 10:54 AM CST ..::Link::..
Wednesday, January 2, 2002
The Last Day of the Rest of My Life...an entry with an ending.
I was really busy this holiday season, both on Christmas Day, New Year's Eve and New Years Day burning a bunch of my graphic CD-Roms. On New Year's Eve I wanted to get as much done as possible so I could go out with Tim and Stan later that night. I was eating a chocolate bar...from one of those "Save the Rainforest" type candy companies...dark chocolate with blueberries. I never complete a whole chocolate bar; I always save some for later. I had about half of the bar left and layed it in its wrapper on my worktable/coffee table in the living room while I ran upstairs to check on a graphic CD-Rom I was recording. Then I noticed the mailman came, so I went downstairs to get the mail. Then as I was opening the mail, the phone rang, so I went to the bedroom, the closest room with a phone, to pick it up. It was Tim. As we talked, I remembered that I needed to put the candy bar away in the refrigerator. We discussed our potential plans for the night, as well as the fact that 2001 was such a crappy year, thank goodness it was over, and what more could go wrong before it was done?
What more could go wrong?
As I hung up the phone, I headed to the living room to get the candy bar. The worst possible scenario was taking place before my eyes. PLATO HAD THE CHOCOLATE BAR ON THE FLOOR, WOLFING IT DOWN. I am in absolute panic...chocolate is lethal to dogs in a large amount. I pulled the last remaining slobbery bit of chocolate out of his mouth. I gave him bread, hoping that will dilute the effects of the chocolate and make him poop; I gave him lettuce and rice and took him out to poop. I called Tim back and told him what happened. I tried to call Stan, but he was at work and couldn't come to the phone. I called the vet--they told me to give him bread soaked in hydrogen peroxide. I didn't have any HP, so I had to run to the store (fortunately Stan fixed the car so I could do this, otherwise I'd have to literally RUN to the store...had it been a week earlier I wouldn't have had a car that worked). In the Kohl's store I couldn't find hydrogen peroxide. I was frantically looking up and down the medicine aisle. I finally found some in a panic, almost as I was about to give up and drive on to Walgreens. I found an empty checkout lane with an older lady cleaning the conveyor belt. I ask her if she was open--she said "yes" and kept cleaning the belt, ignoring me. I mumbled some obscenity and found another line, bought my HP and got out of there ASAP. Once home, I tried the bread soaked with HP, but Plato wouldn't eat it. I called the vet back and told them he wouldn't take it, but they said it's really best to get it into him any way possible as they're concerned the amount he ate might be bad (it could have been as much as 1.5 oz of dark chocolate, which isn't good). I fumbled around in the "pet cabinet" and found an eyedropper, grabbed Plato by the collar and squeezed small amounts at a time with the eyedropper into his mouth. He hated every drop of it. Finally, after several sessions and many barfs later that were chocolate colored and chocolate scented, his barf was getting down to the morning's breakfast dog kibble chunks, so I stopped with the HP. Naturally, he can't barf on the vinyl kitchen floor or even the wood floor...he has to barf on our only rug, a little faux Oriental rug on the living room floor. That's the only place he ever barfs. I wiped up all this nasty, foaming billowing bread/chocolate scented vomit off the living room rug...it was so gross. But you know, I'm one to barf myself at the smell of puke, and I especially felt like barfing as this was all unfolding as I just got so upset, but once he barfed I actually felt so much better. I called Stan to tell him what happened and he thanked me for noticing that he got ahold of the chocolate, and said I saved his life, but I still feel so bad and stupid for putting the chocllate bar on the coffee table in the first place instead of putting it away, even though I purposely put it in the center of the table so Plato *wouldn't* be able to knock if off. Who knew he was such a determined climber?
So I almost killed my dog and I also saved his life on the same day.
What a way to end the year. It was almost like a test, one final test the gods had to throw at me after all I've been through, after all the world has been through this year. And all I can do is stick my flying birdlike finger up at one of them, the one that has an anus where his face should be, and proudly and defiantly say, "YOU did not win."
Posted by Ann @ 11:19 AM CST ..::Link::..
An incomplete life
Lately, I've had a problem of not being able to finish anything I write down for my journal (except my dreams because they are relatively short). As soon as I begin to write down a recount of the day or a story or whatever, I get interrupted and by the time I get any time to complete the entry, I've lost the passion. Take my most recent attempt on December 30th: ..::more::..
Posted by Ann @ 10:30 AM CST ..::Link::..
DREAM
Strange dream, sort of difficult to recall now. I was on an airplane eating sushi, but somehow that scenario also got confused with being in a car repair garage shop place. I wish I could recall more, as I think it was a pretty whacky dream.
Posted by Ann @ 09:05 AM CST ..::Link::..
Tuesday, January 1, 2002
I told you, but you wouldn't listen.
Take the Which Beatle Are You? Quiz.
Quiz Says: "Although you were shot to death by SATAN HIMSELF in 1980, you still live on in the hearts of millions and in Kate's closet. (and mine) You like making fun of stupid people, drinking whiskey, writing the best songs in the world, and men."
Posted by Ann @ 10:30 PM CST ..::Link::..
DREAM addendum
I forgot to mention an integral part of my dream in my previous entry. This former jr. high friend asked me if I still lived in town, meaning Fort Collins. I told her that I lived at 529 S. Grant Street, which was indeed my last address in Ft. Collins. Then I said that we just moved and now we live over by City Park. This is weird...I don't still live in Fort Collins, I live in Madison. Why didn't I say I lived in Madison? Most odd....it's almost like I'm living a parallel life somewhere in Fort Collins. You know when you think about choices you make in life, it's like a road branching. You can take one road or another. Doesn't mean the other road isn't there, it's just not the one travelled. My house near City Park in Fort Collins is the untravelled road.
Posted by Ann @ 12:27 PM CST ..::Link::..
DREAM
I dreamt I was on the Colorado State campus. It was winter and snowing, grey and late in the afternoon. I was walking up some steps in platform shoes and was afraid I'd slip. I had been in some classroom with a former friend from junior high (not someone I'd rather know now). I didn't know if she recognized me, but she did keep staring at me, but then again, she always was a starer. A group of people, including me, went into another room where a lot of Stan's relatives on his adopted mom's side of the family were. We sat down on chairs or ledges at the edge of the room. The former friend sat down next to me, still staring. I think I spoke first, introducing myself to her, asking if she remembered me. She looked at me more, and said she did remember me and said I didn't look a day over 42-60! I didn't know whether to take that as an insult or if she was just kidding. (IRL, when we were both about 12-13, she always said I had the body of an 8 year old and a face of a 24 year old...but then again, that was during my heroin chic days. She had little room to talk...she looked like F. Murray Abraham.) Then we were presented with this strange box of lucite cubes. They were like playing cards, but dimensional, arranged like chocolate candy in the box. Each lucite cube had writing in them, sometimes astrological symbols, as well as what looked like gems. It looked like art I would make, like my tarot deck, but different, more transparent. We were asked by Stan's aunt to select a cube. When I pulled a cube out of the box, one with a green gem, the gem turned to amber. It was most magical. That all turned to disillusionment because when I selected the cube, Stan's aunt started reading some sort of Biblical thing, like a modern-day Bible translation. I then realized I had accidentally gotten into some Christian Bible Study. But wait, it got worse! When asked to pick another cube, she then told me that she needed $20 to go on further! I didn't have that kind of money to spend for something I didn't want to do anyway. I started reading the small print on the cubes and somehow found out that that course or study or whatever even got into pornography. Last Testament Porn. Jesus Porn. It was hideous. What the heck was I doing there?
Posted by Ann @ 10:04 AM CST ..::Link::..
Monday, December 31, 2001
DREAM
I can't remember much of my dream last night other than I was writing lyrics and music to a punk song. It sounded good, but of course I can never remember these things once I wake up.
Posted by Ann @ 09:56 AM CST ..::Link::..
Sunday, December 30, 2001
DREAM
Last night I dreamt I was in the basement of the house Stan and I rented for our last four years in Fort Collins, Colorado, (picture above...taken 2001 on our trip back out to Colorado) yet it was sort of like our current basement too. The ceiling was low, but it was much bigger than either basement. The floor was very clean...no cat litter or crumbling sand from our (current) sandstone basement walls. There was also not much stored there...no jars or hibernating plants or tools. There was also a slope that led up to this other part of the basement where one could see straight up to the ceiling, straight up to what would be the attic. There was a window to the outside that let in light that one could not see from the main part of the house. It was like a secret eye to the house. I wanted to climb up there, so I tried. It was like this window was some sort of solar heating system, because the wood structures around that area were very warm. I was trying to figure out where on the house that "three story basement" was.
I also dreamt I had a new molar growing that pushed one of my other molars out, roots and all.