I've been told to stop posting about so-called "pocket lint," ie, things that one finds in one's pockets. I posted about the slip of paper I picked up in Cancun with a warning against swimming with dolphins. I posted about the receipt from The Flying Saucer (which, mind you, helped Mark from Atlanta find a cool pub to visit).

But just so that the person accusing me of blog misuse understands the person with whom he's dealing, I should mention that this blog has seen posts about dishwashers, thin walls, shower curtains, and broken power transformers. I think I have the right to post about pocket lint. When reading this blog, I think my readers have come to expect a sufficiently minimal amount of intellectual content to consider posts about pocket lint standard fare.

If I wasn't so comfortably sitting in my bed with my laptop, I'd get up and take an actual picture of pocket lint. But that would take too much work, so please imagine some pocket lint. Or stick your hands in your pockets and take a look at your own. We all have it. Pocket lint is the universal clothing accessory.

Now that I think about it, I may add a new post category: pocket lint.

I'm off to Austin this weekend to see the kiddos, aka M&M aka Max and Maya aka my niece and nephew. It will be a good trip. I need a break. Work has been rough the past couple weeks. I inherited a monstrous case and it was my turn for it to overwhelm me, and overwhelmed I was. I might take my bike to ride around the beautiful hills around my sister's house. Outside is calling me. Clarity is calling me. I need to clear my head. There's a lot of crud in there and I'm hoping a change of scenery will help. I feel kind of broken. Maybe Austin can fix me.

Oh yeah, it snowed here in Dallas yesterday. I woke up and found an inch or two of snow on my car. Fun.

Happy weekend.

I'm back home from Austin. It was a good trip. Max and Maya are the cutest and funniest kids I've ever seen. Maya likes to dance to radio stations on cable TV - especially KISS and Tears For Fears. Max likes to repeat whatever the adults say. My brother-in-law was feeding Max some macaroni when Max spontaneously announced: "No More Attitude." I guess it's something my sister and brother-in-law tell his older sister when she gets saucy.

Otherwise, I hung out and chilled with the fam. On Saturday afternoon, I did a fun thing I like to call "hill repeats." Find yourself one hill, or a set of hills, and ride your bike up and down until your lungs seize up and your legs fall off. Going 37 miles per hour down a hill is pretty thrilling, and kind of scary. Cranking back up the hill at four miles per hour, with no end in sight - not so thrilling. Regardless, it's a form of self-torture I find cleansing.

On Saturday night, my friend and his fiance made dinner for the three of us at their house and we drank wine and caught up. After his fiance went to bed, my friend and I watched a Bugatti race a fighter jet on You Tube. It was a nice and relaxing evening. Not to mention they gave me a bottle of wine - that they made and bottled themselves.

WTF
My mother is on
facebook and we are friends now.
I think its wierd.

Happy St. Patrick's day. My blog automatically qualifies as St. Paddy's day-friendly because it has green on it. All of the time. Every day. This was not planned.

I spent yesterday at the Greenville (no pun intended) Parade. Greenville is a street that runs north-south through Dallas. The city closes off a mile or so of Greenville every St. Patrick's day Saturday and holds a parade. There is also a concert. This year, Ghostland Observatory was the main act. I bought two tickets a few weeks but thereafter decided not to go. I just didn't feel like it. But my band's guitar player had also bought a ticket, and I really needed the fresh air, so I invited my singer and the three of us had band-bonding-day out in the sun.

Off we went traipsing through a sea of drunk green-clad partiers. The three of us were completely sober the whole time, so we got to laugh at all the drunkies falling all over the place. For some reason, there is something about me that compels strangers to ask me for directions, or advice, or guidance, on what the hell they should do and where they should be going. I'm certainly happy to oblige, but I get the feeling I'm always the guy people ask, "Hey, is this the right way to __________?"

The concert was good and we were all sufficiently sunburned. Especially me. It's mostly my face. When I wrinkle my forehead, it hurts. When I smile, it hurts. It's not pleasant.

I ended the night drinking Guinness with Evil I. I couldn't go through St. Paddy's day without having at least one pint of Guinness, so I figured three was a nice round number. Evil I and I talked about tables, music, engineering, lawyering, paint, traveling, sinks, and home-ownership. You shoulda been there.

Now that St. Paddy's is over, I don't want to see another green shirt for the rest of my life. Please. No more green. Anything that is green kind of annoys me now. The little Skype icon in my computer's tray is green. It annoys me. The forward and back buttons in Firefox are green. They annoy me. My website is kinda green. It annoys me. I think I just OD'd on green. Give me some time. I'll get over it.

Since I don't like Microsoft, and I don't want to pay stupid sums of money for Office, I downloaded OpenOffice, free of charge, from their webite and have been running it for about six months. I'm happy to report it doesn't suck. It's actually pretty good, especially considering how much I paid for it. No, it's not a flashy as Office 2007, or even Office 2003, but it gets the job done. Its version of Excel handles formulas just the same as Microsoft's version, and the documents are all cross-compatible. Just be sure you save your "Word" doc as .doc so Microsoft can open it on someone else's computer.

In other news, I'm buying a plane ticket to NYC to my friend over the July 4th weekend. I'm psyched. I'm also pondering a trip to London or Israel, depending entirely on scheduling and flight prices. What was once an $1100 ticket to Israel is now $1700. Bummer. Even England is over a grand now. I remember when flights to London could be had for under $500, and I'm not talking about the "Go to London for Three Days, Starting Tomorrow" deals.

I've been on an 80's music binge lately. Tears For Fears, The Smithereens, and XTC. I've decided that Mad World, Blood and Roses, and Making Plans For Nigel are each pop perfections in their own way. One spooky, one rocking, one goofy. Blood and Roses seems like three and a half minutes of songwriting perfection. The pieces of that song fit together so well.

All the necessary food groups in one convenient, tasty package. Cheese: protein. Crackers: carbs. Wine: alcohol.