Arctangential

I’m such a bad person. A spendthrift, loose with my money, time and energy. It’s horrible.

So I get up early this morning. I was going to drive a friend of mine to a gun show, and we wanted to get there early, so I get up around 7:30, after only having gotten to sleep around 4, so I’m pretty tired. Around 9am, I’m ready to go, but I call him before I leave, to make sure he’s ready. No answer. I figure he’s in the shower or something, so I leave a message telling him to call when he’s ready. I sit down to watch a little bit of The Trial, which incidentally isn’t very good.

An hour passes. Another. I’m tired and cranky, and the movie sucks, so I decide to just go. I need to drive a little ways out of town to go to a special Radio Shack in order to pick up some components for my blinkenlights project (which I’m sure you’ll hear about later), and I decide to just forget about the gun show and do that instead. I find the radio shack with surprisingly little trouble, but it sucks in many more ways than I had anticipated, and doesn’t have even a single thing that I need. So now I’m tired, cranky and unfulfilled, and I’m starting to get hungry. The radio shack is in a largeish strip mall, and there’s an Eat N’ Park right next door, so I decide to go have some food.

After one typical Eat N’ Park breakfast (fat, grease and cholesterol, all fried, with a side of starch & sugar), I’m now feeling tired, cranky, unfulfilled, and gassy. But wait! There’s a FuncoLand in this mall too! I’ll go in, buy a used DVD, I’ll feel a little better. 45 minutes and $300 later, I walk out with a new XBox, a copy of Halo, and the special edition of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I’m supposed to be saving money, dammit. I don’t feel unfulfilled any more, but I’m still a little gassy.

At least now I can play Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball.

I never thought I’d be able to say this, but: I helped an old lady across the street today.

As those of you living in the northeast of the US will probably know, we had a bit of weather here last night. I slept through most of it, but it looked like snow, followed by freezing rain, followed by some melting, followed by re-freezing, followed by snow. This left a really nice slick ice/snow melange all over everything. This happened early in the day, and by the time I went out to run my errands (on foot), things were beginning to melt, and most of the sidewalks/roads had been shoveled/driven clear.

So, as I was walking from the Pep Boys, where I picked up a 1/4″ alan bit for my ratchet, to my PO Box to pick my amazon.com, I was approaching a street crossing which was still covered with ice, snow and slush. I was thinking to myself as I approached it, “That’s going be fun to cross”, even. When I got there, this woman, maybe 70 or 75, is standing at the corner, with a cane, looking out across the slurried expanse with a kind of worried expression on her face. I stopped, she looked at me, I looked at her, she looked at me again… I said, “Do you need a hand?” She said, looking relieved, “Yes, please”. So, we waited for the light to turn green, she took my arm, and we set out verrrrry slowly across the tundra. The light turned red before we got all the way across both lanes, but luckily there weren’t many cars driving on that road (which is why it was still so icy, of course), and we made it across just fine.

I feel so good about myself. I feel like a Good American. I want a tax break, or something. Maybe some pie.

In other news: You can now buy bags of dirt on eBay, for the low low price of $20! Get yours while they’re still fresh!

One of my new friends, who is very cool, has gotten me thinking more and more about art. I can’t actually make art of my own, and this should be enough proof for anybody. Due to this lack of creative talent, but still spurred to do something, I decided to make a new web page. Have fun.

Yipee, I got my art! I bought it off of eBay recently in a fit of consumerist pique, and it’s awesome! Have a look.

In other news: I love hot glue guns.