Walking in to the office today, I noticed that the flag was flying at half-staff, and I couldn’t come up with a reason why right away. I immediately started running through the names of the living presidents and which of them might be on death’s door, though there was nothing mentioned on the news this morning, and you’d think that something like that would be worth mentioning.

It’s truly embarassing to me, someone allegedly qualified to teach history to America’s high school students, that I didn’t immediately recall that today is Pearl Harbor Day.

Excuse me while I go turn in my history degree.

<intentionaljoketag>generic blurb about how I have nothing to report</intentionaljoketag>

Anyone who’s watching the mileage tick up on the left side of this web page has probably figured out that my five-to-six days a week workout has become habit, and if I don’t get it, I just don’t feel entirely right, mostly because I’m getting to that point where I’m actually seeing real, positive results, and don’t want to lose them. During most weeks, this isn’t a problem – I’m a regular at the hotel gym between work and dinner, and until recently, on the weekends I took my usual rides throught the neighborhood or to the library or wherever.

However, I came to realize that this weekend, it was just too damned cold to take the bike out, and was likely to stay that way for a while. This bothered me, because after this week and next, I’ve got a nice stretch of time off the road, and won’t have hotel equipment to use for a while.

So, I solved that particular bother by buying a cheap-ass stationary bike this weekend. So far it seems to work, especially after I spent an hour on Sunday fiddling with the belt after it jumped the track after something like 25 miles’ use. Hopefully that won’t become a regular part of the workout; I’m assuming, for the moment, it just wasn’t dialed in properly at the factory.

Of course, fixing one source of anxiety knocked loose another one – I’m mostly done with my holiday shopping, and had much of it done before Thanksgiving. However, over the last two weekends I’ve ended up spending a fair amount of money to finish up, and started to feel nervous about it – mostly vestigial nerves from when I made a hell of a lot less – the values we’re talking about here are well within my budget, but I’m still a cheap bastard at heart, so it tripped that particular circuit. And buying the bike didn’t help.

I guess I can call the bike an investment in my (and my wife’s) cardiovascular health, though, so there’s that. Not the best job at satisfying the urge to do something irresponsible I tweeted about the other day, but I guess it will do for now.

Maybe the irresponsibility was the “Retro Burger” at the Galaxy diner this weekend (which is one of my favorite places in Richmond these days) – a fresh-grilled hamburger topped with mashed potatoes and gravy, served with a deep-fried dill pickle spear on the side by aloof hipster girls in a fifties-style sci-fi diner with alien invasion movie posters on the wall and lights shaped like flying saucers over the booths.

I sense, dear reader, you are not surprised by my affection for this establishment.

In other news, I can take heart that after a couple of hiccups (including an exploding heater), the post-angelfish life of my secondary fish tank is settling in nicely. Fishwise, it’s a handful of various danios (including a couple of genetically engineered, patented glofish) and a small fleet of panda corydoras who are very cute. What makes me like the tank so much,though, is that it’s got lots of interesting non-fish things in it.

Things like a big zebra nerite snail and several of her pea-sized offspring. Best algae cleaners you’ll find, and pretty brown striped shells that look like expensive parquet hardwood flooring.

Also, the local big box pet store had cherry shrimp (which I’ve been looking for for years now) in over the weekend, so I bought a bunch, figuring I’ll never see them in retail ever again. They’re cool, and should happily breed in there, meaning I’ll never have to buy them ever again, and will soon have more than I could possibly need.

The centerpiece of the tank, though, is the bamboo shrimp, who is the size of my pinky finger and hangs out on the plants filtering food out of the water with his little fan claws. He’s totally harmless, but looks like something out of Starship Troopers, especially after he moulted this weekend and left a slightly smaller, translucent copy of himself lying on the bottom of the tank.

So yeah, it’s really a shrimp tank with some fish in it, but it makes me happy, and is often more fun to watch that television.

And, since I’ve been blathering on long enough, here’s the …and finally:

I’m not entirely happy with the little story in the previosu post, but I but let out into the world anyway. The idea had actually been brewing since Black Friday, but I hadn’t done anything with it. However, it seemed like something to amuse myself with for forty minutes or so this evening after braving the cold, wind, and holiday shopping traffic here in Northern Virgina to pick up a couple of necessities and maybe, just maybe, one or two gifts.

That’s really about it. Please forgive my near total lack of transitions.

A tiny piece of fiction inspired by a brief real-life feeling and all the David Sedaris I’ve been reading lately:

Although the rational, date-keeping part of my brain must have known, the rest of me had almost totally managed to not realize what time of year it was. It’s not hard to do when you live largely in one of those parallel subcultures apart from “mainstream” America; it’s like I was one of those fresh-faced Evangelical teens, only instead of wholesome “Jesus is My Boyfriend” pop music, treacly films that continue to keep Kirk Cameron in banana money, and a total trust a glorious afterlife, I have national public radio, indie film, and comfortably questioning agnosticism to keep me warm at night.

Sure, it leads to my making oblique references to This American Life in casual conversation with co-workers that go completely over everyone else’s head, but I consider the occasional social faux-pas a fair trade for the near total lack of commercial breaks interrupting my life.

However, the very lack of those commercials prevented me from anticipating conditions on the ground as I approached the doorway to the local grocery store to buy a bag of apples and a loaf of bread.

I heard the ringing bell, and momentarily froze with anxiety and fear.

I braced myself behind the armor of my “You read my t-shirt, that’s enough social interaction for one day” t-shirt, and pressed on, walking briskly, hands in pockets with a determined look, fixed on something, anything twenty yards behind the bucket and ringing bell, intent on avoiding eye contact with the ringer in the red and green smock.

Now, I’m not against charitable giving; quite the contrary (the stacks of solicitation mailings I receive from environmental and equal rights organizations are a testiment to how many mailing lists I’ve gotten on by writing checks to the Sierra Club and Amnesty International). It’s just that I find it sort of meaningless when society only seems to enforce the impulse to help a brotha out for six weeks a year, and insists on doing it while also wearing a jaunty Santa cap and glaring at anyone not wearing a cheery holiday grin and humming Rudolph the Red-Nosed Frakking Reindeer.

Mostly though, it’s the fact that I’m such an introvert that I hate having the extra interaction with strangers asking for spare change in front of the supermarket door. And really, it’s not just this time of year. I try not to go out on Memorial Day weekend because the firemen and their empty boots have all the parking lots staked out.

I push forward, keeping my steely glare into middle distance and maintaining my rapid pace while effortlessly dodging a woman juggling a wayward grocery cart. I’m nearly there, it’s as if I can feel myself brushing the invisible frontier of the motion detector, which, when crossed, will open the sliding doors and offer me admission to the bounty of the produce department.

Suddenly – SMACK! The world goes momentarily black, and I find myself on the cool concrete. It seems that in my laser-like focus on my goal to avoid the holiday panhandlers, I managed to not notice the electric scooter being carelessly driven against the right-of-way by an overweight elderly woman in a gaudy holiday sweater that managed to collide with the back of my knee.

As I begin to regain my bearings, I notice that I wasn’t the only casualty; the driver’s carelessness has managed to knock over a row of dry, crumbling cut Christmas trees stacked to one side of the store entrance, which startles a small child into gawping sobs, drawing everyone’s attention, including the bell ringer.

Recognizing a diversion when I saw it, I quickly right myself and dart stealthily into the store to retrieve my needed supplies, and merely have to contend with piped in-pop Christmas carols, which I can usually manage to ignore.

As I approach the till, items in hand, I silently give thanks for the invention of automated self check-out lanes and their proximity to the largely unused secondary door near the pharmacy, which I notice, perhaps belatedly, is ringer-free. I’ve had quite enough of the holiday cheer of human contact already.

Yeah, feeling bah humbuggy today. Deal with it.

snow.

Woke up to find this outside this morning. It’ll be gone in an hour…here just long enough to rile up the kids.

(yep, real lyric)

Why didn’t I realize that what this song really needed was accordions and clarinets?

You’d think Weird Al would have had it before this guy, but then, this guy made Talyor Swift much more interesting as well, even if she still looks like a gelfling:

A totally METAL gelfling:

m/

I expect a lot of people get weary of my regular crowing about how much I like the webcomic xkcd, but I keep on doing it because it speaks to me, and when a piece of art or music or whatever does that, I like to share it. I always check it out m/w/f first thing when it comes out, but if you don’t want to do that, you can always check out this handy resource first.

Anyway, today’s entry, #828: Positive Attitude, struck me as particularly entertaining, and, perhaps, resonating to my own life.

Here’s a hotlink, though it’s probably too small to read. click to make legible:

It’s a nice little response to all those people who constantly flog you when you’re feeling down about the total, redeeming power of a positive attitude, as if that’s the only thing that’s going to fix the often very real problems in your life. To me, it says that just because you’re not covering up your depression, pain, fear, or sadness with a forced rictus grin doesn’t mean that you’re not working through your problems in a way that works for your situation.

Thanksgiving and Black Friday have now passed. Today we enter that time of year when compulsory merriment is the order of the day, and more and more people manage to make the phrase “Merry Christmas” sound a lot more like “F**K YOU!” than anything else.

<sarcasm>This, my friends, is my favorite time of year.</sarcasm>

As for me, I went to the grocery store and took the kids to the zoo yesterday, both mostly empty, which was nice. While seemingly everyone else in the world braved death by trampling over cut rate 720p HTDVs, I refilled the freezer, petted a giraffe, and watched the cavorting of a couple of five month old baby tigers.

I’d say that I had the better day.

I will admit that I spent $39.99 on a Black Friday deal, though I did it from my desk chair and a couple of mouse clicks. I win again.

Today, though, I’m mostly worried about whether it’s safe to head over to Target, because I need cat food, and they have the best price on the shampoo I like.

…courtesy of author Philip K. Dick:

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

Just a little thing to remember when you’re drunk on tryptophan or standing outside Walmart at 3am freezing your ass off.

I don’t really have anything of particular note to report. That is, other than my compulsion to continue to add new prose to this space at least every few days.

That isn’t to say that I haven’t been busy. It’s just that I’ve been busy with things like work and family and NaNoWriMo and reading through my pile of books from the library before they’re due back.

I suppose I should make mention of the fact that the home improvement project I mentioned briefly a few weeks ago has been completed. I am now the proud owner of nine new high-quality vinyl custom replacement windows, installed last week by Capital Remodeling. They look quite nice; certainly better than the old, drafty wooden single pane windows with ratty screens they replaced. With luck, they’ll reduce my heating bills a bit, and qualify for an energy efficiency tax credit.

Otherwise, there’s not much to report. I spent a little more time with the new computer, which is, thus far, earning its keep (although a couple of my old games don’t seem to be compatible with Windows 7 – that’s okay, I bought some new games), and made a pretty tasty meatloaf the other day.

This weekend, I think I’m going to swing by the VA Comicon for an hour or two, if only to have celebrated Marvel artist Herb Trimpe sign my copy of GI:Joe #1; I might as well have the penciller’s signature as well as the writer’s – I had the honor of procuring Larry Hama’s signature on the cover last year.

Oh well, I guess that’s a couple of things to report.

The new desktop PC arrived in the arms of the cheerful FedEx guy on Thursday afternoon. I’ve been playing with it a little bit, trying to get it to my liking…most specifically, getting a comfortable dual-boot environment going between Windows 7 (for games) and Ubuntu Linux (for just about everything else).

After several hours worth of tinkering (the kind of Windows-specific headaches which, to be honest, I’ve actually kind of missed since we went Linux primary), involving several aborted installs, a complete wipe and rebuild of the hard disk partition tables, and a bit of temporary monitor swapping (ATI Radeon drivers can be a bitch sometimes), I have a complete, non-Dell branded clean Win 7 install living happily next to a (so far) fully functional install of Ubuntu 10.4 (the latest LTS version – I may hop up to 10.10 in a few weeks, once the kinks are worked out).

Anyway, I am content – for the moment, things are right with my world*. Now, I believe it’s safe to go to bed.

_________

* – especially right today, since I had a very good report from the doctor today – I honestly had no idea I’d dropped almost 25 pounds in the last six months!