Geek Life
The Battle Continues?
What ever happened to Battle of the Planets?
That’s what was going through my head this morning as I found myself humming the theme song I last heard maybe 20 years ago. I remember how much I loved that stupid show, with its horrible dubbed voice-work and convoluted storyline that made no sense at all, not even for kids. I also clearly recall being infatuated with the only female on the series, Princess. Not because I liked her, but because every episode there would be some silly, contrived reason for her to do a flip or other acrobatic move that would flash her nicely animated panties.
Yeah, I was a Geek even then.
After a quick look around the net imagine my surprise when I discovered that there just might be a movie based on the original Japanese cartoon coming out next year. I mean, the thought of once again seeing Mark, Jason, Tiny, Princess and that annoying bastard Keeyop in all their bird-based spandex glory is nearly enough to cause me to dance in glee. As it is, I’ve spent about an hour digging through some old boxes of junk searching for my 7-Zark-7 and 1-Rover-1 figurines. And yes, I know they’re not really part of the original series and were just added to the American version by the distributor to make the violent show more “kid-friendly.” But still, I don’t care.
Now, if only I could remember where my bird-cape and giant “G” belt were stored…
Inked Up
So, I got a tattoo.
Oh sure, I’ve thought about getting them in the past just like almost everyone else. I wanted to impress people with my coolness by having a geeky-yet-dangerous Pac-Man with devil horns etched into my right arm. Or a cool Atari symbol, or a space invader alien, maybe.
Man, the girls would have been all over me.
But this weekend, while I was in San Diego, I finally did it. I got a tattoo. And while it may not be as cool as having a 1/8th scale Master Chief on my back, or anything, I still think it’s cool to show it off to everyone. There was a bit of pain, and a drop or two of blood, but nothing a real man like me couldn’t handle by tearing up and nearly retching all over the floor.
But if you’re thinking of getting a tattoo yourself, I do have a bit of advice for you.
When you’re alone, in the dark and using a felt-tip, metal-sheathed sharpie pen, always make sure that the pen cap is securely connected to the pen before you try to jam it closed with the palm of your hand or you might, you just might, wind up stabbing yourself in the palm of your hand with the business end of a permanent black magic marker causing, not only excruciating pain as it punctures your skin and goes almost a quarter of an inch into your hand, but also leaving you with a semi-permanent tattoo to help remind you of your stupidity.
So, who wants to see my “Big, Black Dot” tattoo?
Recovery
Can’t talk, drowning in pink death.
Baby girl stuff… frightening. Little dresses, cuteness overload. Tiny hats, itty-bitty socks, smaller-than-small shoes… So. Damn. Cute. I will melt. I’m going to be like putty, like jello, in her hands. She will “pwn” me and I will be her willing slave. “Daddy, buy me a pony!” “Anything you want, princess.” No! No! I must resist the adorabulessness of the Mighty Baby. I must be stern. Strong. Unbending. And the first thing I must do is play Halo to regain my manliness.
The second thing is I need to do is stop crying when folding little, pink shirts.
My Wet Baby Day
Or, Baby Shower Weekend.
We’re holding our baby shower this weekend and in order to keep costs down we decided to throw the party in our apartment. Of course, we’re really looking at this shindig as more of a housewarming party because it will mark the first time we’ve had a party in our place since the renovations were completed, but the bonus is that we also get gifts for the baby. Unfortunately, this means that we need to unpack and clean our apartment, two things that we haven’t been able to do for the last eight months. And let me just say right now that if you’ve never lived through construction in your own home then you don’t have any idea how fricking awesome it feels to wake up in the morning NOT covered in white construction dust.
I actually cried when I woke that first morning.
Another downside of throwing the party in our home is that, since some of the guests will be bringing their small children with them, we’ll need to “baby-proof” our apartment which is something that we just don’t comprehend how to do. For one thing, we have stairs without a baby gate, and no plans to install one even after our child is born. Although the lovely HoBiscuit is iffy on my reasoning, I don’t believe that one is necessary if we just take care as parents to teach our child that the stairs are dangerous and she should be careful or she’ll get hurt. I grew up without stair gates, so I figure our kids can, too.
But, I ask you, why stop there?
You see, I also plan on burning her fingers with a hot pan to teach her not to play with hot things. Letting her stick her wet finger in a wall socket so she learns about the pitfalls of electricity. I’ll slam her fingers in a car door so she’ll always remember to keep her hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times, and I’ll even let her eat rat poison so she can thank me later on in life for teaching her not to eat things unless she knows what they are. This way she’ll learn all of life’s little safety lessons as a child living at home where I can protect her and then I’ll write a book about how everyone should do these things to raise perfect and happy kids and the world will praise me because of my superior parenting skills.
What? Why are you looking at me like I’m a monster?
Anywaste, babyproofing the apartment is tough for us because we don’t even understand what might be dangerous for a kid. Having never been in contact with children under the age of 7, I’m completely clueless about what they might find “fun” to play with, but I’m pretty sure I’ll need to hide the neon orange box cutters we have laying on the kitchen table. And I’ll probably need to put away all the day-glo colored bottles of household cleaners that I have in a box in the living room with, “Yummy Kandy” written on it. Two things I do know for sure is that someone will need to guard the stairs and we’ll need to put little socket-blocks in all the wall sockets to stop curious fingers. Hey, come on now, you didn’t really think I’d let kids hurt themselves, did you?
Really? Wow. That hurts… wow. Just… wow.
Geekgasm 360
I still got it.
Right now, I’m listening to music that resides on my networked attached storage device which is being piped through my home network to my home theater system. Some of you might not think this is such a big deal, and to you people I say, “You just don’t know.” This is SUCH a big deal, and not only because I’ve got the music playing over the network. No, that wouldn’t be very exciting since most people nowadays listen to their music through their computers, so of course my doing it is not big news.
Unless, of course, you take into account that I’m not using a computer.
Yeah, that’s right. No computer necessary for my music listening pleasure. I finally figured out how to directly stream music from my “server” (the aforementioned NAS) to my home theater sans computer. Why is playing music (soon to include picture slideshows and even movies) without needing a computer so important to me? One reason is that my NAS is always on but my computer isn’t. In fact, my computer has to travel with me when I go on the road for work which means if I’m not home then poor HoBiscuit wouldn’t be able to play ripped music or watch recorded movies until I returned.
And that would be bad.
Also, streaming directly from the NAS means that my computer is free to do other things, like photo editing, without having the added overhead of processing and streaming the music. And let me tell you, the less strain on my computer while I’m working on 500GB image files, the better. Now, if only I could figure out how to get the movies to stream without needing a computer to do the heavy lifting of on-the-fly transcoding, I’ll be in Geek heaven. The mere thought of watching all my… ahem, ‘free’ anime on the home theater’s 106″ screen has my mouth watering in anticipation.
And ohmygod, larger than life Pr0n!!!11
Marauding Rugrats
GeekHaus Child Infiltration Test Alpha — Passed
This weekend marked the first time we, and our home, has had children under three over for a visit and although the apartment survived without any damage, the same can’t be said for HoBiscuit and I. In fact, the looks of terror on our faces as the small children ran rampant throughout our house was enough for the parents of said children to fall to the floor in fits of uncontrollable laughter.
They even pointed. And did spit-takes.
Saturday was our baby-test, where our friends with a nine-month-old baby came over to visit. Before I get into details, let me say that this little girl is very, very cute. So cute that I find myself questioning whether there might have been a mix-up at the hospital leading to my friends taking home the wrong baby. I mean, my friends aren’t Quasimodo and Medusa, but still… for them to have such an adorable baby must be some sort of crazy cosmic joke on me. I swear, if my baby is ugly I’m going to find a way to suck some of the cuteness out of their baby and inject it into mine. Heck, I might just do it anyway to give my little girl a leg up on the cute baby competitions at the playground. And I’m telling you, those playground mothers are fiercely competitive!
They scare me.
So, this nine-month-old bundle of cuteness comes over on Saturday and HoBiscuit and I are so frightened of her that we can barely bring ourselves to sit down near her. At one point, her parents needed to change her diaper and offered to allow HoBiscuit or me do it as ‘practice’. I jumped and ran away so fast that there was a whistling noise as the air rushed to fill the space I had occupied in the room. Later, after they had gone home, I felt the need to hose down my leather couch to remove all the drool she had left behind as a memento of her visit.
Yeah, I’m a little bit of a neatnick.
On Sunday some other friends came over with their 18-month old and two and a half year old boys. The main difference between these two boys and my other friends’ little girl, aside from the plumbing, is that the boys are what they call ‘toddlers’. That means they can stand up and walk under their own power.
O. M. G.
I never knew children were so fast! I honestly believe these boys were planning trouble before they arrived at the apartment. They had to have had a plan of attack that they worked out beforehand, with PowerPoint slides and topography maps and everything, because they almost instinctively knew where to go to make every adult in the room jump up after them shouting, “No! No! No!”
I think that was their favorite game.
And, I now know that one day the human race will definitely find a way of traveling faster than the speed of light, or perhaps inventing some sort of instantaneous transporter, because these two kids could get from point A to point B so fast I had to learn how to blink without letting my eyelids meet. They would literally be sitting down on the rug at our feet, happily playing with some cars or something and the very next millisecond they would be across the room trying to lick a power outlet. Meanwhile, mom and dad are doubled over laughing so hard at the scared-out-of-our-minds look on both HoBiscuit and my faces that they can’t even manage to stop the 18 month-old boy from grounding goldfish snacks into the carpet and then eating the powdery residue off the floor. Why didn’t I ever notice how horrible children were before HoBiscuit got pregnant?
Holy crap, what am I going to do when I’m a father?
Stage 27,925: Complete
I can almost taste victory.
We bought our current apartment over a year ago and moved into it back in January and we have yet to unpack. You might wonder why we’ve been living out of boxes for the last 7 months, but really, it’s no big mystery.
You see, we’ve been doing renovations.
Of course, this is where most of our friends and family throw up their hands in frustration and disbelief. Not because we’re doing renovations, but because we’re doing renovations on what was a completely brand new apartment in a new construction building. Yes, you read that right. We are the very first people to live in this apartment, and the building in which we live was constructed less than three years ago. Nothing was used, everything was brand new. So why did we do “renovations” when it sounds like nothing needed to be renovated?
Well, because as it was the apartment sucked.
The layout was all wrong, with doors everywhere they shouldn’t be, hallways that used up space that should have been better utilized, no usable closet space and a kitchen that was worse than useless. The developer had simply built a building fast and cheap without thinking about how people would actually live in the spaces he was creating. Luckily, HoBiscuit and I are very good at seeing past that kind of stuff, so we ignored the horrible layout and saw that the actual space was wonderful. A duplex apartment with three full bathrooms in New York is almost unheard of! So, looking past its cosmetic flaws we thought we could make it into something beautiful for us to live in. Transforming the apartment from the ugly caterpillar it currently was into the beautiful butterfly we imagined it could be. All it needed was a little work, and some money.
And holycrapyoucannotbeserious amounts of time.
Oh my lord, did we underestimate how long this project would take. We originally thought three months would be sufficient to complete the entire project, but we quickly came to realize that we were so very, very naive. From construction permits, to ordering materials, to unexpected surprises, nothing happened on time or on schedule. It was as if we were cursed by the construction gods and had to atone for our sins by being forever covered in white construction dust. Some of our daily rituals included making the bed every morning by covering it with a plastic tarp, eating every meal (every fricking meal!) at local restaurants because we didn’t have a kitchen for four months, and always wearing some kind of foot covering just in case a stray nail or screw was lying around looking for a foot to penetrate for giggles.
Damn you, 8 penny nail. Damn you to hell.
We had done renovations before, but never like this. And we hope to never do it again. But now, finally, we are nearing the end. This week is the last of the finishing touches on the work already done. And in one month, around the time that the Mighty Baby will be joining us, we should have a brand new stair railing as well. And that will finally end this whole saga and maybe, just maybe, I can stop using this craptastic laptop as my business machine, set up my home office properly and start blogging on a regular basis again.
Won’t that be nice?
Chili Bomb
Last night I made chili for the first time.
It was delicious and tasty and spicy, with meat and beans and peppers. Oh, my. I had two giant bowls of it and loved every spoonful that I shoved into my mouth. The lovely HoBiscuit even made cornbread so we would have the proper side dish for the chili. And let me tell you, HoBiscuit makes some nice cornbread. And, do you know what else goes really well with chili?
Cheese and sour cream.
Oh, the bliss that is spicy chili covered in shredded cheese and sour cream! All that spice! All that sour cream and cheese! They go so well together that I couldn’t stop myself from piling on spoonful after spoonful of sour cream on my chili, and at least a fistful of shredded cheese on top of each… bowl…
Hey, there’s something I’m supposed to remember about me and cheese…
Wait, sour cream too.
…
I don’t recall…
Huh, something about milk products, I think. Huh, me and milk. Milk and me. Milk, milk, milk. Yeah, it’s coming in clearer now. Didn’t I find out something about me and milk about three months ago? Something important? I think I discovered that I wasn’t going to tolerate something anymore. Not tolerate something because it upset me? Huh? what’s that? You think I might be lactose intolerant? And that means, what? No! So, you’re saying that I shouldn’t have eaten all that cheese? What about the sour cream? Really? Made with milk, you say? No, no. I think I get it now. This knowledge would certainly help explain the screaming, small explosions and smell of burning hair in the bathroom this morning.
I wish I could sit down.
Geek Luck
Even when I’m lucky, I’m unlucky.
I went to Orlando this weekend and not because I wanted to, but because I had to for work. The work itself was easy and uneventful, so I won’t bore you with the details. However, I would like to take a moment to tell you a little bit about my flight out to Ratland so that those of you who might be thinking of flying there this summer might have a little warning about what to expect.
The kids are Kuh-RAZY!
First, I knew where I was going so I knew that the plane would be filled with kids, so don’t think I was taken unawares by all the children in the waiting area. However, I just wasn’t totally prepared for the massive amount of tween and teenager girls from, of all places, Brazil! They were all wearing their green shirts and skin-tight black pants and the group leader actually had a little tour-guide-like flag which she held aloft so the entire group of kids could follow her everywhere.
And the talking!
I used to think that girls talked a lot and that they couldn’t possibly get any more annoying with their yapping to each other, or gossiping about something, or discussing the latest hair styles, or whispering about someone they don’t like… or openly pointing at me and laughing…
Damn you 8th grade. Damn you to hell.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that girls yapping away in a language I didn’t understand was even more annoying than when I do understand what they’re talking about! The fact that they kept looking my way and giggling didn’t improve my mood at all, so when an announcement was made asking for volunteers for exit row seating (where children aren’t allowed to sit) I literally jumped up as the first volunteer. I believed I had gotten lucky until, 10 minutes before boarding, my name was called. The ticketing agent explained to me that the flight was full and asked if I might be willing to give up my exit row seat in exchange for a first class seat with a free meal and extra miles for my mileage card?
Holding back tears of joy, I nodded my approval.
I couldn’t believe my good fortune. From being stuck with the Brazilian Gossip Girls to having an exit row seat guaranteed to be children-free to being in first class! It was my lucky day! I boarded the plane with the first group and even managed to find room for my carry-on bag without having to elbow an old lady in the face for the overhead bin. The flight attendants gave me a welcome aboard drink and some hot cashews in a petri dish, I took out my magazines and settled in to my leather-clad, reclining seat. Everything seemed to be set for a perfect two and a half hour flight down to Florida.
Until my seatmate arrived.
To say this guy smelled worse than an onion eating monkey afflicted with leprosy with a dead skunk stuck in its anal orifice would be vastly insulting to the monkey. I had major trouble just sitting there trying to breath without vomiting and every time he moved a wave of nausea inducing air would wash over me like a tidal wave of death. The flight attendants, who had been so nice to me when I first arrived, avoided my row like the plague. In fact, I believe they thought my seatmate had the plague. The free meal I was offered was refused because I couldn’t bring myself to eat anything for fear of becoming violently ill in the process. Plus, two seconds after liftoff the guy fell asleep and he SNORED like a bear chewing on a running lawnmower. All in all, my ‘luck’ in being upgraded turned into one of the worst flights I’ve ever taken and all because of the seatmate from hell.
In other news, Orlando is humid.