You ever want to stop and ask some random stranger, what the hell are you talking about? Some overheard snippet of conversation, some phrase, something. And you just gotta hear more.

I heard a woman’s voice say, as I walked through cube-land today, “It’s like I had a charley-horse in my vagina.”

And I just walked away trying not to bust up, and wanting to go back and say, ok, now, tell em more, because that’s gotta be an interesting conversation.

I don’t know that anyone else cares about this, but you know, I’m a geek.

Finally, after all these years, they got pictures of Architeuthis, the giant squid.

Researchers have been trying to do that forever – they’ve seen dead ones, and young ones, but this is the first time anyone has ever gotten pictures of them, mature and moving. Scientists have even hitched cameras to sperm whales to get footage of Architeuthis, to no avail.

Hey. You know, I have a cephalopod tattooed on my arm. I’m into this shit.

This just in – the doctor tells me I’m sick. That’ll be a hundred simoleons, please.

Thanks, doc.

At least it’s not a sinus infection. The downside is, no pass-go-collect-two-hundred-dollars pills. The upside is, I don’t have to take antibiotics, which is always a good thing.

His prescription? Sleep.

Thanks, doc, I’ll get right on that.

Some days it feels like nothing is working.

I had the classic three am wakeup again. What the fuck is it with three am? It’s the fucking worrying hour. I wake up at three am, every goddamned bad thing in the universe comes to camp out behind my left ear. Everything I have to do, everything I’m ignoring, everything I want but can’t get, everything I’ve done wrong or fucked up or wish I’d done differently. It all comes up in forced perspective and looms over me like fucking dementors and ring-wraiths, and no mental game I play makes them seem any smaller. Every fantasy becomes an object of sadness and desire, every day-dream becomes a nightmare.

I managed to claw my way back to sleep a little before six, just in time to be woken by the get-the-kids-to-school alarm and the garbage truck.

Fine – sleep is over-rated.

And then there’s this sore throat I’ve been ignoring for a week, and the feeling of things-not-right that no amount of coffee or whisky seems to ease. I give in. I write this in my doctor’s waiting room, where I’m pirating wireless from the office next door.

And then there’s the fucking web project I’m supposed to be doing, for which I simply cannot figure out the css. I don’t know why css makes my brain hurt this way, when I can program in three or four languages (ok, badly, I admit, but it gets the shit done). Some reason, css kicks my ass, and I can’t seem to find a decent example to go with.

And then there’s the new VPN secure id cards they just issued, which work great at work but seem completely dysfunctional elsewhere; I’m trying to get some shit done while I wait for the doc, but I can only get to the internet, not work.

Ignore me. I’ve been in a foul mood all day. Look to the right-hand column and click on someone over there. I’ll just pound my fist through a wall until I feel better, or until something breaks.

My weekend.

Went to a surprise 40th birthday party for a friend; a social group I don’t see much anymore, from a school my kids used to go to. The birthday girl was surprised in a bad way, but seemed to make up for this with a lotta margaritas. Her husband is one of those guys I really like for no reason I can put a finger on; he’s just a warm-hearted, loving guy. He’s the one I picked up ‘my love‘ from, so if you’ve ever heard me say that, it’s courtesy of Benjamin. And I never use it when I don’t mean it.

I can’t exactly tell why this couple is together; he’s one of us, us dirty-minded womanizing types, where his wife is such a barbie doll that I think she’s all smooth molded plastic between the legs. But they have a great home, a sweet little girl who’s growing up much less shallow than I expected. I like them, even if I don’t really need to seem them more than a couple times a year.

So I wound up at this party, drinking those cheap slurpy-margaritas from a machine, which I began spiking with extra cheap tequila ’til they were pretty much all tequila. I sort of lost count how many I had. I then switched to some cheap merlot in big-ass tumblers. There were some party games, the ones where you pass an object clenched between chin and neck. The kinda games that are purely an excuse for groping. Too bad there’s no hot tub at this house.

The night gets blurry after that, though I seem to have bruises on my knuckles. I’m wondering how that happened.

Sunday dawned with an awesome hangover, which continued to get worse rather than better; eventually it became obvious I had some sort of food poisoning as well as the after-effects of way too much bad booze. Though there was a high point; the series finale of Six Feet Under which, all thinks considered, was a good wrap-up for this show. Like the show itself, it was inspired but uneven, incredibly well acted, and thought-provoking. The closing montage was fabulous.

I need a lot more sleep though. I think I got maybe six hours over the entire weekend. I’m thinking I’ll spend Tuesday completely unconscious.

I’m having one of those weekends where I just can’t seem to focus on anything. I had a bunch of stuff I wanted to blog about – some stuff about stories I’ve been working on, maybe some harry potter, a bit about rebuilding a bbq and about mediating wars over polly pocket dolls.

But I’m sunburned and tired, and I’ve been struggling all weekend with trying to get a perforce tree copied over with rsync (don’t worry if you don’t understand that, it’s not important) so I could do a maintenance task I thought I could do over the weekend. I’m frustrated and would rather be someplace else doing something else.

The stuff I wanted to do this weekend seems to have fallen by the way-side.

Maybe sunday will get better. I have a fine cup ‘o peets sumtra, and I gave up on rsync and am using tar instead. If I can get that to fucking finish before sunset, and if I drink a couple more mugs of this fine coffee this morning, maybe I’ll feel a little less pissed off.

But I still wish I was someplace else.

[made with ecto]

This is just fucking creepy:

“I can’t begin to convey how creepy this is. It looks innocent enough – an amateur Photoshopping contest for making headshots of women and girls look more angelic. But once you start scrolling down, the aesthetic really starts to squick you out…”

From BoingBoing, as usual.

[made with ecto]

…You’ll buy me this poster:

And if you know why this connects to my domain name, I love you even more than I do now.

(remind me not to blog when I’ve drunk way too much sake)

[made with ecto]

The cost of the three day weekend – the monday-on-tuesday, where everything we put off last week because of the weekend is now urgent and behind schedule.

I’d like to say I spent my weekend writing. I’d like that to be true. Instead I spent saturday doing not a fucking thing, just recovering from a long week. I meant to go out and see a band but never made it out. Sunday, I decided to do a few things to get my backyard ready for a BBQ and then wound up deciding to undertake a major landscaping project, emptying out a very large number of planters and containers for re-planting. I wound the day up sweaty, grubby, making several trips to the local garden center for plants and dirt.

I later rewarded myself with some very good margaritas.

Sunday I put on a BBQ, for about three times as many people as I expected. Which was fine, because there was beer, and other consumable substances which enhanced my mood. And by pure luck, my BBQ was broken (ok, I knew it was broken, the luck was in having the parts out of stock everywhere in town), which means that instead of cooking, we ordered.

…and a good time was had by most.

I have a lot of snippets of things to write about, but no time today. The scripts I thought I fixed last week are broken again, the docs I meant to work on over the weekend, I ignored, and I now have a web-slave intern to train.

I need a vacation. It’s been almost a year since my last trip, to Fiji, and I am slowly going out of my mind.

[made with ecto]