Archive for April 2005

Eric took this on April 11th while we were walking along the lakeshore here in Chicago.

Today at 6pm Apple will be releasing the new version of OS X; I’m backing up my shit now in preparation to upgrade my iBook.  I don’t know why I get so excited about these things, I guess I’m just easily entertained.  Because in truth it doesn’t sound like there are all that many new features I can’t live without.  Widgets?  Bah.  Spotlight?  Eh, I’m so used to Quicksilver it’s probably not going to change my life very much.  But I gotta have the latest and greatest OS, that’s what I’ve always done and will always do, so you better not stand in my way.

Just found out from a blog post at WFMU.  All the babes in heaven are fightin’ over him I’m sure.

My glasses are six years old so I finally broke down and ordered a new pair. They’ll be ready in 3-5 business days, I can’t wait! They’re more square-ish than the old ones and come with neat-o magnetic clip-on sunglasses. Just so I won’t lose it, my new prescription is as follows:

It’s pretty much the same as it always was: I’m still far-sighted, and my left eye’s perfect but the right one’s really fucked-up with astigmatism. Which is why my glasses usually tilt to the right and make me look like a tard.

At Sarah Gubbins’ 30th birthday party in Chicago

Published in the Austin American-Statesman on Monday…

Dan R. Toomey
Dec. 16, 1911 — April 17, 2005

Dan R. Toomey, who died Sunday in Austin at age 93, led a colorful life and leaves as his legacy a grove of pecan trees he helped plant off Barton Springs Road. A jack-of-all-trades, Dan was a machinist, truck driver, shrimp boat captain, dam builder, farmer and newspaper photographer. In World War II, he was a gunnery instructor in the Army Air Corps and recalled that his main task was training recruits to "shoot behind their planes and not in front of them."

Read the rest of this entry »

I was staying as a guest in somebody’s grand mansion, waiting for a conference to start.  I went to the conference and there were long lines of people waiting to check in and get their badges.  I walked past a looooong line of attendees and straight to one of the guests-of-honor VIP lines.  I stood behind and began talking to the old NYC mayor Ed Koch.  We were ruefully trading stories about waiting in lines at other conferences.  "You know when you get there on Wednesday but you don’t have time to actually register and get your badge until Thursday or Friday? And sometimes you know one of the guys who works the booth, and he spots you before you’ve registered and you have to tell him in a stage whisper, ‘I’M NOT HERE…’"

I finished demo’ing that new tune today.  Well… "finished" for now.  I let a few people hear it, John being one of them, and he dug it a lot — he used the word "Hot!" — but kindly pointed out its melodic similarity to a certain other very famous old song which I’m not going to name here.  I sure wasn’t intending to copy any other song — it’s not the same melody verbatim, but it’s a little too close for comfort especially since the similarity isn’t just in the verses but in the chorus too.  Yikes.  So I’m going to redo the demo, making slight alterations to that damn melody and hopefully once y’all hear it, you’ll never be able to name that tune.  :-) It is a good song otherwise though.  But like always when I finish a song, I’m all wrung out physically and emotionally.  Just exhausted.  It’s been a rough bunch of days for me and this song pretty much sums it all up: heaviness, confusion and the slight whiff of desperation, crossed with knowing that no matter what happens it’ll all work out okay ‘cuz it always does.  I’m wanting everything to be alright and for love to save the day in the end.  I don’t know for sure that it will but I might as well keep that attitude, better than being an ol’ grumpopotamus about it.  Things will either get better or they won’t, but either way, at least I got a few good songs out of the deal.  Heh.

Life is so complicated all the time, why can’t things be easier?  There are good things and bad things going on, always, and I just wish it would all be a little more… bloggable.  Certain pillars in my life are super important to me: my creativity, family, friends, matters of the heart… and whatever’s happening on All My Children, you know… important things.  Nothing I can really elaborate too much on here but yeah, some things have been moving forward quite nicely while others have been dragging me down quite a bit lately.  I wish things would automatically take care of themselves and everything would run a little more smoothly but it’s not always that simple.

Betsy has the right idea though.  Let’s all be crafty and make more stuff!  Me, I have a new song I’m about to demo, that’s always a good thing.  It’s very… personal and bittersweet.  What did you expect?  I’m so damn predictable!!  Music in general is definitely moving forward; I’m going to be recording my new album real soon.  Can’t talk about the particulars yet though.  Nope, nope, nope.  But when I can, you’ll know it.  Yessie yes!!

My great-uncle Dan Toomey died this morning in Austin.  I think he was 94 years old or thereabouts, and he was feeling real poorly the past few months so I guess it was time.  I’m glad I got to see him when I went down there last month.  He was a real character, we’ll all miss him.

Car shopper, 81, hits husband, salesman, car, tree, wall

Friday, April 15, 2005 Posted: 12:00 PM EDT (1600 GMT)

FORT MYERS, Florida (AP) — An 81-year-old woman preparing to take a test drive at a car dealership hit her husband, a salesman, a car and a tree before running into a wall.

"She must have panicked," said Joe Sica, sales manager at Honda of Fort Myers.

The new Honda Accord shot backward after Dorothy Byrum got behind the wheel and apparently stepped on the wrong pedal Wednesday.

The open car door hit her 88-year-old husband, Robert, and the salesman. Then the car struck the parked car, the tree and the wall. The air bag deployed, and Byrum was not injured.

Her husband was knocked down but was in good condition the following day. The salesman was released after treatment and is expected to be out of work for about a week, Sica said.

The car was written off.

(courtesy of AP / CNN)

I’ve been a very good girl this tax season; I thought I was going to owe lots of money but as it turns out I paid way WAY too much on my estimated’s, so I’m getting a big fat refund.  So with that in mind, I decided to splurge on something I’ve been wanting for awhile.  Got my hands on a used Playstation 2 today (=yesterday), and the only reason I got it was because I’ve been dying to play this one game called Katamari Damacy.  Really, that’s all I want to play; once I’m done with this game, that’s it, I won’t buy any more, I swear!!  (heheh!) But if I were to buy another one, I now know that GameStop is where it’s at, man.  Those nerdboys were so nice to me!  I needed a lot of schoolin’ too, ‘cuz the last gaming system I had was a Super Nintendo, circa 1992 or so.  I even got my mom addicted to that thing, back in the day.

• Deanna’s early birthday party at the Hungry Brain
• Palaxy Tracks and Zapruder Point at the Beat Kitchen
• The New Leaf Theatre Company’s production of As It Is In Heaven at the Lincoln Park Cultural Center
• The Live Action Cartoonists production of Performance of Sleep In One Long Act Without Intermission at the Athenaeum
• Reading The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem (I get mentioned on page 311)
• Walking around with Eric, sitting in Lincoln Square watching the kids running around, pigging out at the Flat Top, etc. etc.

I got my tickets to see Kraftwerk at the Riviera on June 4th… better hurry up if you want to go!  TicketBastard is charging fifty bucks with their fees and everything, but I still think it’s worth it.

Some pics I took the other night to post in the Happy Ham group on Flickr…