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Tuesday, September 27, 2005

welcome guest blogger Pinchy O'Whinepants

Expanding the shit list: the chicks we have as upstairs neighbors. You know the ones, the ones who get home from their bar jobs at 2:30 a.m. and bring their friends over for screechy drunken laughter, some activity that sounds like bowling, and eventually excessively loud sex. [Which we have mostly graded as somewhat insincere-sounding. Crank it down a couple of notches if you're going for realism, you know?] Anyway, this is especially problematic for people who prefer to be asleep 2:30 a.m., and not experiencing a disco-rama through the ceiling.

[non sequitur warning]

I went to a meditation group this morning; it's run by my spiritual director, and for the rest of the year we're focusing on compassion and lovingkindness. Which, based on my reaction to current annoyances, is probably something I could work on.

In further news, my husband has been cooking for us a lot more lately and it's making me extremely happy. We're trying to change our diet pretty radically (which I'm sure has NO RELATIONSHIP to my current mental state) and it's easy when the food is this good. We have good cheap produce stands and ethnic markets around us (I love getting frozen naan with the Pilsbury Doughboy on the package) and our new kitchen has a ceiling and everything.

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Monday, September 26, 2005

monday? you're soaking in it!

My shit list's current population: the kid who decided to screw around with the youth minister's computer at youth group last night.

Because what I really, really needed to do today was to get past the new password he set and restore the youth minister's user account. Because I have NOTHING ELSE TO FUCKING DO TODAY, and wasn't already hyperventilating before I got to work because I have eleventy million things going on.

Grrrrrrr. I am really not the serene vessel of light and compassion that I play on TV. Because this is just pissing me right off.

BUT! Happy Birthday, Ryan!

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Thursday, September 22, 2005

Taste the whiskey on your breath; It's as much as I can drink these days

Thing I am apparently too old to do: go to a show in San Francisco until not even all that late, and then get up the next morning with any kind of functional brain cells.

We saw Jerry Joseph & the Jackmormons at the Independent last night. Great show, but we left around midnight and he was still in the first set. And today I am still wrecked.

It was fun going out with Dennis, though. He goes to a couple of shows a week, but usually by himself or with another music geek, because one of the things we worked out a little way into the relationship is that I am a Buzz Kill Extraordinaire with regard to live music. The last thing you want when you are doing the thing that is Your Thing is to have someone tethered to you who is only going along with it because she wants to be a good girlfriend.

So, I don't go to shows and Dennis doesn't watch MST3K marathons and go to garage sales or the other things I do that make no sense to him, and everyone remains happy. It was great to see him in his natural habitat last night, though. I did a little dance, drank a little diet coke, and got ever so slightly down.

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Thursday, September 15, 2005

the dream of the #000099 font

I've been setting up a new website for a diocesan ministry all week. It's using Mambo as the backend, so almost everything is controlled with stylesheets. This project has taken up most of my waking hours...fine, whatever...but this morning I woke up from a dream about editing stylesheets, and that is just not right, people.

Godly Play started last Sunday, and I'm back to teaching again this year. Long-time readers may remember that I taught the oldest class, the one which was almost entirely 10-year-old boys, the first year we were doing Godly Play, with decidely mixed results. I mean, no one caught fire (given how often I was working with live flames, this means something) but the whole experience was pretty rough.

I'm still with the 4th and 5th graders, but two years of indoctrination into our little Montessori-style program has done amazing things. The kids know the drill now and I was able to tell the story of the church year with minimal interruptions. It was slightly freaky, to tell you the truth.

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Tuesday, September 13, 2005

I found God in the men's room

I'm all for creative evangelism, but I think this might be taking it a bit too far:



See, you get these custom-printed urinal screens (I have no idea what those do) and put them in men's rooms all over town! And then, uh, people pee on it. Yah.

I guess the hope is that, the next time someone starts thinking about God, they remember the name of that church from the urinal.

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Thursday, September 08, 2005

the reflex is a lonely child

Hey, there are teeny little 1" wtfwjd? buttons in the store now. Yay! The old ones were kind of big-n-clunky and disappointing.

When I was in 7th grade, I was all about the tiny buttons. Except mine had Duran Duran on them and I had like 25 of them on my jean jacket. And the most tragic perm ever.

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Wednesday, September 07, 2005

sexton goes up, sexton goes down



We got the lift to finish the painting today, so here's Sexton Dennis trying to get the thing through the door of the hall. Apparently, it's got all the maneuverability of a broken shopping cart rolling through tar. But it makes a nifty backing up noise.

We know about the backing up noise because right after it was delivered and the guy gave Dennis his driving lesson, Dennis got it into the courtyard and then stopped off in the men's room. While there, he heard the sound of it backing up.

Yup, once TheRev saw the Shiny New Toy sitting there unattended, he was on it in a flash. Eventually Dennis got him off it and we managed to get the thing into the hall. I say 'we' as though I made any contribution other than telling him that he was clear half a second before he ran into the door. Note to self: touch up paint on door.

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Saturday, September 03, 2005

painty goodness

Painting went pretty well today; a bunch of people showed up to help, including a three-month-old baby boy whose job was to provide our USRDA of cuteness and big-cheeked toothless smiles from his command center in the exersaucer.

We didn't get our lift because of a screwup on the part of the rental company that we found out about last night. And you can't just call and rent stuff the day before a holiday weekend. GRRRRR! I was filled with RAGE!

We managed reasonably well and just have a chunk of the top of the wall to do whenever we can get the machine to get us up there. We're not really going for perfect here, fortunately. It does look a lot brighter and cleaner in there now, and will continue to for roughly a month before the facility overuse-related scuffing shows up. I really want to sell t-shirts that say St. Ned's: No One Comes Here for the Architecture.

Oh, and you know those ugly beige wall panels that I bitched about in my wedding recap? Turns out they come right off the wall if you lift them about six inches.

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Friday, September 02, 2005

random catch-up. random ketchup? random catsup?

I've been working on a slideshow of photos from Katrina this week, to be shown in church on Sunday. So, in case you're wondering, yes I'm very depressed. And I feel like just signing my whole paycheck over to Episcopal Relief and Development.

Other than that, things are pretty good right now. Parts of the apartment (the kitchen) are in reasonably good shape, and others are less together (the zone of randomness that is the bedroom), but it's definitely feeling like home.

I'm getting by on giving the Beetle a tank of gas per week, which kicks ass, considering that it was more like three tanks a week when I was commuting. The Beetle is sort of pathetic right now. We have some charmingly retro juvenile delinquents in our neighborhood, the kind who steal car emblems and hubcaps, so I'm missing one of my hubcaps. And I still haven't gotten the bodywork done from the accident in July, so it's hoopty-licious.

I've been pricing hubcaps online, and I'm considering going into the hubcap-stealing business myself at this point.

We're painting the church hall this weekend. Sexton Dennis is in charge, and right now it kind of feels like he and I will be doing most of the work ourselves, but I'm sure people will come through and show up tomorrow. We're renting a lift to do the top of the walls. The hall was the original church building, so it has a really high ceiling. Fortunately, the ceiling is wood and isn't getting painted. The lift has a platform that holds two people, so I asked Dennis if he wanted to join the Twenty Feet High Club, but he said no. We'll just be painting up there.

I have a kickass new computer at work, but I haven't had time to set it up yet, so it's just sitting in its box, mocking me with its speed and swankiness and flat-panel glory.

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earthlings only

This was printed on the bag around the swanky new computer...I think it means I'm not supposed to let people in spacesuits, or worse yet, their alien offspring in their little space-helmets, use the computer.



I'm sure there are other, more accurate interpretations, but that's the one I'm going with. So if you're wearing a space helmet, stay the hell off my computer, dammit.

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