i'm back, and i'm not too happy about it. E and i had a fantastic time in chicago. i met tons of her friends and she showed me a great time. a proper write-up and pictures - along with the austin pictures - are forthcoming (paging E, come in E, where are those austin pictures, heh?)

One of my favorite classmates who shall remain unnamed placed this wonderful note on my car during finals. Kelso was our Contracts teacher this past semester. He was a jolly fellow, though a little on the odd side. Said classmate thought it might be funny to write me a note saying, “Kelso can hear your tears” because he knew studying for Kelso’s exam is more or less equivalent to poking one’s eyes out. I returned the favor with a slightly modified message, as seen in Exhibit A.

EXHIBIT A

I'm off to Chicago this weekend with E. Bye till next week, and have a great Memorial Day.

I bought this bass when I was a junior in college (circa 1967). I took it to the Monterey Pop Festival and jammed out with Pete Townshend. He was really impressed. After the set, he ripped the bass from my hands and threw it at his amplifiers as Keith Moon played his drums so hard he put a hole in them. I’m not sure if Pete did that to my bass because he was so impressed or because he wanted to destroy my bass. Either way, I noticed it started experiencing a minor problem.

Above, you will see the headstock of the bass and its four tuning keys. None of them are original. When I got the bass, only one of them was original (had “Fender” etched into the back) - the other three had been replaced sometime before I bought it. The only tuning key that had any problems, ironically, was the original one. It was really hard to turn part of the way and really easy the rest of the way. What this basically means is that the shaft was bent. Pete must have bent my shaft when he threw it against the amplifiers.

This is a family site, you perv. Quit laughing.

Anyway, I was too lazy to replace the injured tuning key because it still worked, albeit poorly, and I figured it wasn’t worth buying a whole new set of four tuning keys. Well, yesterday, 38 years later, I finally caved in. I went to Rockin’ Robin Guitars and showed the repair guy the stubborn tuning key. He went to the back of the shop and rummaged around in what must have been his bin-o-parts and emerged with tuning key in hand. I inspected it and noted it look a lot like the tuning keys from Fender’s 1960s era basses. The stars must have been aligned yesterday, because a proper tuning key found its way back to my bass. The repair guy was even kind enough to install the new tuning key, which took some drilling because the holes didn’t line up for the new tuning key.

Nevermind that I wasn’t around in 1967 and that the bass was made in 1989 and acquired by me some 12 years later. What really matters is that when I asked the repair guy how much I owed him, he said, “Nothing man, equal trade. I got your tuner, you got this one. I can always use parts.” When I got home though, I noticed the new tuner wasn’t exactly perfect either. It turned just fine, but the metal plate was slightly concave, so that it rises up of the wood just a little bit.

In closing, some of the facts in this post are obviously pure fabrication, but you can’t exactly complain because this site is brought to you free of charge, and free is a pretty damn good deal as I found out yesterday, even if it means you trade a defective tuning key for another defective tuning key. In the end, it all evens out, because the new defective tuning key is defective in a way that doesn’t really matter. And, I think, that is probably the best kind of defection there is.

E’s sister lives in Austin (smart girl) and throws an annual crawfish boil boat party. She and a bunch of friends rent the equivalent of a floating platform with an engine, invite tons of people, buy tons of beer, and spend the day floating around Lake Travis eating crawfish. I was probably the only person on the boat that didn’t eat the crawfish and didn’t drink the beer – I don’t like crawfish and I brought my own beer (see the 6-pack of Blue Star below).

Eating crawfish is an entirely uneconomical activity. You stand around a table of crawfish (which, by the way, aren’t even fish) and pull these creatures apart, covering your hands in their intestines and various bodily excretions in order to get to a small morsel of meat. Why all that work? Yeah yeah, supposedly it’s fun and facilitates “hanging out,” though I’d rather forgo the crawfish eating, which would fail any basic cost-benefit analysis test, and hang out while eating chicken or beef. So, I brought my own chicken and grilled it on the on-board BBQ grill. After I had a piece, it became all the rage, and the rest of the chicken disappeared in minutes flat. Go figure.

The water in the lake was pretty much perfect. Lots of people went for a swim, jumped off the top level – oh yeah, this was a double-decker boat – and / or slid down the slide.

Some important info about this slide.

The slide was deceptively wet. Before one attempts to slide down the slide, one should ensure it is sufficiently wetted so as not to burn one’s hips or tuchus on the way down. E (poor thing) was the first person to attempt the slide, and did so quite valiantly. However, she was also the first (and last) person to get their hips burnt. I was in the water during the unfortunate event and it sounded like a car coming to a screeching halt. It sounded like it hurt. A lot. The resulting red mark looks no less painful than the initial injury. We should all send waves of sympathy her way.

Please commence waves of sympathy now. Thank you.

And as for all those people jumping off the boat, I also neglected to mention they jumped right after I took my shirt off. I’m not saying there’s necessarily a causal connection there, but I’m not ruling it out either.

OK, maybe I’m exaggerating. They didn’t all jump off when my shirt came off. Just lots of them.

Dinner Saturday night was spent at Z Tejas on Lake Austin Blvd. E and I relaxed and took a walk around the block afterwards, noting the Amy’s Ice Cream down the street and the homeless guy mumbling things I couldn’t understand. We fulfilled our official Austin duty and had ice cream there on Sunday.

My dad happens to be a fan of Kerbey Lane’s pancakes, so I took the cash he gave me and presented it to the hostess: “Hi, I need to get as many bags of gingerbread pancake mix that $50 will buy.” She looked at me like I was an alien. My dad was ecstatic when I gave him the eight bags of pancake mix. That should hold him for a while.

Pictures from the weekend are forthcoming.

[via chris]

Dinner last night, Italian restaurant: garlic bread, caesar salad (no carbs there), seafood w/ linguine, some of my mom’s tortellini, and a corona.

Dessert when I got home: Breyer’s Cookies and Cream ice cream.

Breakfast this morning: Honey Bunches of Oats w/ strawberries.

Lunch: two (2) turkey sandwiches, pretzels, and cookies.

Dinner tonight (estimated): something with carbs.

Passover be gone - I can eat normally again.

It’s time for a brief hiatus. My first final is Monday and the last is next Tuesday. No posts till then. I’m much too busy studying and worrying about studying, though I’m better at the worrying part. In fact, I’ll be happy to worry for you for tests you plan on taking. Or, if you have no tests planned, I can retroactively worry for tests you’ve taken in the past but perhaps didn’t worry enough for. I prefer non-mathematical tests, but I’m flexible. Let me know in advance if calculators are allowed during the exam. I also don’t do Taylor Series. Sorry.

So with that, bye. You probably won’t hear from me till after the 17th. That is, unless you see a headline on CNN, BBC, or a similarly large news site with the headline:

DUMBASS LAW STUDENT FINISHES FIRST YEAR OF LAW SCHOOL, GOES APESHIT, EMBARRASSES SELF AND OTHERS

late-night breaking news: my site apparently got hacked. (fuckin A). nothing bad happens in Firefox, but in IE, a prompt to download software shows up. spyware attacked sam's computer and he's still dealing with it (sorry sam). the people who host my site told me delete the offending page (this one) and upload a fresh copy, and that solved the problem for me. let me know if it's still buggy for you.

One of my posts has inadvertently influenced another blogger. Ironically, it’s a “something that annoys me” kind of post, which makes it all the more gratifying. I like knowing that my simple expression of something or someone that annoys me causes someone else to sit back and think, “You know, that thing/person annoys me too. I think I’ll formulate a list of similar things/people that annoy me.”

And so I present Steve’s List of Annoying Actresses, Part One.

But wait, it gets better. Here’s his accompanying List of Annoying Actors.

And to round things out, his List of Non-Annoying Actors/Actresses.

Or, make it easier on yourself and just go to his blog and do some scrolling.

anything to keep me from having to study more Contracts.

drugs are bad. i saw Ray last night. great movie, great man (aside from all the cheating), scary lifestyle.

i'm going to austin this weekend with E, and after that, next week is my first week of work. that's right, i get to play lawyer for three months at a small law firm here in h-town. pretty exciting stuff. unfortunately, i don't plan to post about it at all for confidentiality reasons, and because i don't want to risk putting my foot in my mouth (please reference: my entire life).

one thing's for sure - i have some serious shopping to do. i have about four good ties, and most of my dress shirts worked well for a computer-y/IT work environment but are not of law-firm caliber. i need to look a little snazzier. so i did the smart thing and enlisted the help of someone who knows how to dress me.

my mom.

just kidding.*

E. we're gonna hit the mall in austin on sunday. hopefully it won't take too long because 1) i'm kind of impatient when shopping for clothes and 2) malls make me nauseous.

* but you would have believed it, wouldn't you have? actually, i don't blame you. my mom bought me a great shirt/tie combo a couple months ago, and i didn't even have to go with her.

i raided Central Market. my fridge feels complete again.

just in time for my last final, i developed a stye on my left lower eyelid. it was only partially annoying as i probably wouldn't have done any better even if my eye didn't feel like a toothpick was stuck in it. at either rate, i didn't pull a repeat of last semester after the final. i'm saving that for the school-wide party tomorrow night. let's hope i make it past 11:30 this time around.