Happy Halloween

Here's wishing everyone a very scary Friday!

Posting has been sparse around here since I've been lucky enough to have the very scary week. Fabtech always manages to put the office in a tizzy and this year is no exception. Put it on top of an already fairly hectic workload and you could knock most of us over with a feather. Here's to next week...

Glad to be over 30...

I suppose it's a fairly irrational fear, but I still feel relieved that I made it to "over 30" without developing schizophrenia. It just seems like the most frightening of all the mental illnesses -- to suddenly get so sick. I don't suspect I'm completely out of the woods for all mental illnesses, but I can be pretty sure I won't start hearing voices in my head. I'll take it.

Fall in the townhouse...

I wouldn't really say that all kinds of things are "happening" this fall in the townhouse, because nothing has really "happened" at all. It's more about experiencing a new season in a new place, and it's got Tim and I approaching things differently.

I think that we'll actually get trick-or-treaters this year. In the condo, we decorated our door one year and got candy, since there were kids in the building, but no one came. This year, we know that there are kids in the neighborhood and we're hoping they stop by. We've got a skelly and some bone lights and pumpkins to try to entice them to our door. Then we'll pelt them with Snickers bars!

I raked leaves a couple of weeks ago, during which time, several of my neighbors came up to say "you know, we pay someone to do that" which may* be true, but they hadn't done anything the past couple of weeks that they'd been by and they certainly wouldn't have used Punkin' Bags. Still, I haven't raked since.

And the coup de gras last night was that Tim and I had a fire in the fireplace. Okay, it was a presto log, but it was still fun. It was pretty nice to sit in front of the fire and read magazines.

So far, Fall is good. Winter? Shoveling/cold/long walk to the bus stop? We'll see...

For Dave, From the Onion

Alderman Has That Zoning Dream Again

AMES, IA—Fourth District Alderman Frank Pelson, 47, awoke with a start Monday night, interrupting his recurring zoning dream. "It was the third night in a row," Pelson said. "I'm sitting at my desk, drafting my proposal for the construction of a municipal pool near Franklin Park, when my inbox is besieged with angry petitions from residents who object to the traffic that the public recreational facility would generate." Pelson said the dream always ends the same way, with him experiencing the sensation of falling out of his office chair into a 60 percent business, 40 percent residential abyss.

You know, a coffee shop with eggs

This morning a fellow on the street asked me for directions of sort downtown. I must look fairly friendly outside of the office because this happens pretty often. Anyway, he wanted to know where he could find a coffee shop. I must have seemed puzzled as I looked behind him at the uh, coffee shop (Au Bon Pain) because he felt compelled to add "You know, a real coffee shop, with eggs."

Oh, well, why didn't you say so? There's the Hamline Cafe and Keys Cafe on Nicollet, Peters Grill on 8th, and if you're feeling avante guarde (which, if you're looking for you know, a real coffee shop) there's Hell's Kitchen on 10th.

I was kind of surprised when I thought about it more -- the coffee shop has changed a lot in 20 years. I'm not so sure that imported roasted beans and stale scones is better than truck drivers and greasy eggs.

Thoughts?

Curses!

Well, I've been trying to figure out how to make this whole process more erotic. Eroticism is really the only reason the Internet exists. Okay, eroticism; buying shit from Amazon so you don't actually have to leave your house to get a wedding present for someone you hate; and stealing music.

But porn drives the whole thing.

To try and make this more interesting, I have been trying to masturbate while I write these things so I can describe the sensation to our reader(s). (Usually, "pretty good.")

In an apparent attempt to foil this process, Stephanie has posted, over to your left, a photograph of Ari Hoptman. Now, Ari is one of the funniest people I have ever met, but as Stephanie is surely aware, he is far from my romantic ideal. Or, as Liz Jubera, a girl I had a crush on once put it, "Ew."

To summarize:

1. Stephanie -- Against artistic experimentation.
2. Ari Hoptman -- Funny, sexually unappealing.
3. Me -- Not masturbating.

Blog?

I am trying to figure out the difference between just writing shit and putting it on a website, and "blogging."

So far, the main difference I can see is that there is less porn involved in blogging. But maybe I just haven't seen the right blogs yet.

Vagina. Did that make you hot? Nope, me either. Maybe if I blog, and then go to a strip club...

Dreams & Development

Last night I drempt that I was in my car trying to drive through huge piles of snow without getting stuck. It was important that I didn't get out of the car to push it because there were polar bears outside waiting to maul me. Dee Snyder was in the car with me.

In less surreal news, Skyway News is again writing about riverfront development in Riverfront development: how tall is too tall? Mostly, they're talking about a development on the downtown side called Bridge
Place that seems to have some sort of unspecified exemption from the height rule. If they'd been a bit more investigative, maybe we'd know why.

Fighting with Mom

For the first time in a long time, I'm fighting with my mother. Although, if I say that we're fighting over the holidays, people will roll their eyes and say "you do that every year." But while on the surface, it looks like we're fighting about the holidays, the real argument is me saying "give it a rest" and mom saying "back off" about a whole number of things -- her relationship with my father's family, her feelings towards living and working in St. Louis, and I think the bottom line... my mom living up to my expectations.

Which is kind of an ironic twist, if you ask me. When I think back to the way I was raised, I of course have always known that my family loves me. But like the song says "it's a strange way to tell me you love me" because it wasn't a mushy cuddly type of youth. If you wanted to be loved and respected (which of course you did) the way to do that was to prove yourself to be stubbornly independent and capable. Being out of control was the second worst crime next to lying. Every action you took in your life had consequences, good or bad.

So when I feel like my mom is playing helpless I'm alternately confused (mom has never, in my experience, been helpless over anything) and angry. She's got a lot of nerve saying that she gets to blame other things in her life for her troubles (of which I think she's making a mountain out of a molehill) when the whole premise of our youth was that we caused our own destiny. But everything I say to her skirts around that because I somehow can't bring myself to tell her that she caused her own trials and that she raised a mean kid.

Because through this I feel like maybe I'm just a hard bitch and I should just lay off. If I do that, I've been manipulated by mom because she gets to be above the rules she's set -- I'm angry again and we're back at a stalemate and she doesn't even know I've been thinking about it.

Testing, 1-2-3! Testing!

I'm back to trying to figure out whether or not I can use a blogging program for at least part of the site. The advantages? Well, I'd like to encourage Tim to post more and I'd be kind of interested in making at least some elements of the site interactive.