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Time just won’t let me go. This was a bittersweet three-day weekend complete with its very own compliment of ups and downs. Which colors to dab from the palette of my infant senility first? Excellent question. As I’m sure there were thousands, likely millions, of other birthdays that transpired over the last three days, two of them happened to belong to friends of mine. When I landed in Houston after my brief stay in Louisiana over the last two workdays of the week, I was so exhausted that no matter how badly I wanted to stay up and visit with my mother (still in town from sitting the grandkids), I needed to sleep. I never seem to sleep very long these days, but Saturday I must have been completely out until nearly one in the afternoon. My mom was tired of waiting for the pieces of me to gather themselves to consciousness, so she headed home early after feeding the pitter patter paws in the house… no doubt contributing to my uninterrupted slumber. I don’t remember much of Saturday between coming out of the coma and heading to Ted and Jenny’s for her thirtieth birthday bash. They had been preparing trays upon trays of jello shots all day along with snacky food to go with the catered sandwich trays and general party necessities… beer, booze, wine, and lots of it. Most of the guest list by volume consisted of Jenny’s coworkers who, although outwardly pleasant, were at times a bit pretentious. I never intend to pick up on stuff like that because I don’t want to be judgmental, but it was like an arthritic joint before a big storm… little tells. The point where I actually laughed was when there was a small group arguing over who could bill the most per hour. I had reality television unfolding before my very eyes. Although they made up the largest numbers, the longevity award goes to the non-work friends that seemed to linger through the evening after the others faded into the sunset. Ted, bless his heart, burned out fast like a dynamite fuse… I think he found a soft place to lay down and was dead to the world by 9:30. Miranda and I pitched in and bought Jen a Wii. It was sorta an inside joke because every time they would all get together and play Mario Kart on the old Nintendo system while drinking, Jenny would lean into every turn to the point of almost falling over. Given the Wii encourages this sort of flailing about, it seems obvious. I think I left around 1:30 or so for the house. Sunday came too quickly as I was hoping to drag the 3 days into at least 5. No such luck. Anyhoo, the Houston premier of SPAMalot was where I spent my early afternoon. It was fantastic… so much fun. I should get out to more theater. After the play, I had an evening of options and none of them happened the way I wanted. There is a story there, but not for today. I had standing invites to meet Barrett, Jennifer, and Georgia for movies and drinks or meet up at in the aftermath of Jen’s party and break in the new Wii with her, Ted, and Miranda. In retrospect, although my evening was… interesting, I should have just gone home early and gone to sleep. Even after a full day of doing much of nothing on Monday, I am still tired. I miss the gym, but I’ve just not been motivated to do anything. My father-in-law called me yesterday to catch up and discuss my thoughts on running a spot in the local paper in EL’s home town on her birthday (which is only a couple of weeks away). It was a good conversation, but deeply heart wrenching. The pain is just as intense, but I layer so much shit around it that I avoid thinking about it most of the time. Situations like that are like peeling back the dressing and pouring alcohol on the wound. After I hung up, I just sat and cried until there was no other option but to get up and do something else. I think most of my evening was spent playing video games because I could shut my mind off completely. Netherwing faction quests. Rinse and repeat. I have been battling this flea problem even still. I am going to have to order some special IGR (insect growth inhibitor) for the yard since the over the counter stuff doesn’t seem to effect these mutant bastards. When I finally could relax enough to attempt sleep, I tossed and turned most of the night and dragged myself to work feeling like I just landed Friday evening. It is the curse of the weekend, no? I have a laundry list of schtuff to accomplish this morning.

Random thoughts as I sip my coffee: The new White Stripes tune, Icky Thump, is nifty… as is Supermassive Black Hole by Muse. I wish I had a toasted wheat bagel with some cream cheese and smoked salmon right now. I like to take naps in the warmth of the sun, but burn entrely too easily for that to be realistic. Heath Ledger is looking like a wicked Joker in the new Batman installment. 

Recently, it seems, all I think about is a drift place to lay down and drift out of consciousness. I’m so tired. Nights with little, interrupted, or poor sleep are accumulating and I’m near a breaking point. So getting up to speed here… Sean’s visit was great. I don’t want to say it was uneventful just because we didn’t accomplish anything spectacular… like a casino heist or solving a Rubik’s Cube blindfolded in under a minute… but it was just right. We hit a few of the yummy tummy spots around town for menu grazing, we took in a fabulous Deftones show (the way Chino and the gang are supposed to be absorbed… up close and personal), we played a lot of video games whilst consuming copious quantities of Diet Dr. Pepper, we stayed up late like little kids and paid for it the next day like grown ups… as federal inmate #55170-054 would say, “It’s a good thing.” Spanning the duration of Sean’s extended weekend here, I have been generally lazy and irresponsible when it comes to gym attendance and moderation of consumables. I feel out of whack. My plan was to jump back in the flowing river when he boarded the plane to fly back to L.A., but I had to fly to LA (think mudbugs, not botox) to work yesterday morning (and consequently, am still there now) for work. “The road is fuckin’ hard, the road is fuckin’ tough, yeah.” . Life on the road is not conducive to dietary goodness when schedules are tight. The stretch of an excuse for a hotel I’m staying in is not close to anything… well, anything but an Applebee’s. That’s great if you happen to be dining with Ricky Bobby, but not in almost any other case. I always feel so lonely when I travel. I think it’s the big ass beds and all that room for another person. My late lunch was so unsettling that I skipped dinner. I slept about 3 hours. “You know I’m talking about the road.” My mother is in town babysitting the grandkids. I’ve had this recent outbreak of fleas in my backyard. My pets have never had fleas other than the occasional one or two when we travel somewhere new that has a population, but they were assaulted a week or two ago. I think it is the squirrels bringing them in like troop carriers. I’ve had to flea bath the dogs every day or two, buy flea-a-cide for the yard, acquire flea collars for all the pets (which none have ever worn before), and even still the troops advance. It’s terrible. Ted and Jenny are throwing a birthday bash this weekend for Jenny’s big three ohhhhhhh. Other than that, I plan on not planning anything. I wanted to drive to the coast and visit friends and family from the hometown, but I need to recharge. There will be couch time… and with any luck, I can get back on the gym schedule tomorrow so I can regain some much needed energy. I am feeling my age. 

I am so tired. Beyond tired. Saturday morning around six in the aye emm, I was finally able to gather Sean from the airport. He had been travelling all night and I was also without much rest. The day was a blur, but there wasn’t sleep. Sunday wasn’t much better with regard to getting some down time. I think I went to bed after four this morning and had to be up for work at 7:00. I have meetings and calls pretty much throughout the day and the Deftones concert tonight. Ugg. WTB nap - PST.

sorta like this:

“what do you call a man that doesn’t want to die, yet has no will to live…

without name, feeling bereft… lost, with seemingly no more love to give

the depth of his cut beyond reach of soft vowels and sharp consonants

distant and low, the lull of their words destined to fall short of their mark.

what does one say to that very him… he half a we, never to be again…

rare and without intent, some eyes know through their own knowing

some breath trembles in the quiver of its own experience

cold, bare feet and darkened heart once blooming in rays of heavenly sunshine

collapse within reach of drug and paramour… never satisfied with less or more

numb to shallow pleasure, love gifted, or new pain

how does one speak to this once man… standing alone, in his rain”

The week coming to an end is a welcomed milestone in my survival. The last 5 days have been, for lack of a better descriptor, hectic. My brutha-from-a-different-mutha (a.k.a. best friend), Sean, was to fly into Bush Intercontinental tonight around 11:30-ish. Like most fucked up things in L.A., LAX was full flowing amidst a security menstrual cycle and he was not authorized to check in for his flight despite being on premise and on time. Long story short, this simple trip has now become midnight standby crapshoot that puts wheels down in H-town sometime around six tomorrow morning. I don’t care about the difference in pick-up time… I care about the inconvenience he is having to go through just to get to me. I had dinner with Ted and Jenny tonight at the newly opened Dosey Doe. Everything has been done before, but this is basically a redux of finding historic architecture destine for demolition and saving it in the name of capitalism. The owner had a 150-year-old barn in Kentucky disassembled, transported to The Woodlands, TX, and put back together with enough structural integrity to roast his own green coffee beans, present gourmet entrees and desert, and all the while managing to find live music Thursday through Sunday nights to shimmy in the door (Thursday is jazz by the way). The meal was fantastic. The music act over dinner wasn’t bad either… man plus woman plus guitar times two in a pseudo-acoustic presentation of country and classics. After the meal, we found our way back to my house for wine and some BluRay movie action. Somewhere around this stage of the evening is when I received the Californication call. Now, here nearing bedtime, I am reflecting in my wine buzz. On a side note… I like to eat and drink. With regard to drink, I can drink it all… but at the end of the day, it’s a delicious, sexy glass of wine that is most satisfying when leaving sobriety. Looking back at the over-five years of blogging here, I don’t dare speculate the percentage of posts that were made under the influence of some sort of distilled spirit or fermented fruit. I would wager the number to be north of my wildest guess. Should my sister ever have children, they can read the archives and laugh over how silly old Uncle Clayton was… is… whatever. Grape juice. Anyhoo, the most controversial part of my day was losing my DVD writer in my new PC. [begin rant] Windows Vista hotpatch a booboo without saying shit to me about it. Said hotpatch placed filters (high and low) in the registry that blocked access from the OS to the device controller for the CD/DVD drive… ie. the OS was preventing itself from loading drivers to initialize the device as a security precaution. Bottom line - Vista is a hypochondriac… just like the commercials. I had to find the secret sauce on TechNet, find the appropriate registry key, delete it with RegEdit, and reload the system. Viola! DVD drive is back. I hate you Microsoft. [end rant] I bought Nero 7 to try out my new Lightscribe drive. It’s nifty, but that’s about it. I can count the number of DVD’s I burn a year on one hand and have enough fingers left over to pick my nose in stereo. Ironically, I have a spindle of blanks sitting here as a dust catcher. Mmmmkay… I think that about does it for me. I’m fading fast. Bon nuit, mes amis.

“Unfiltered coffee contains cafestol, a natural chemical that can increase your bad cholesterol levels. Coffee filters significantly reduce the amount of cafestol that ends up in your cup, so all you have to do to avoid this food mistake is to make sure you drink filtered coffee. That means lay off of excessive amounts of espresso, or drinks made from espresso — like cappuccino. You should also avoid Turkish coffee, and those French press coffee makers.”

Why?!!?

“Photoshop CS3 is a 32-bit application. When it runs on a 32-bit operating system, such as Windows XP Professional and some versions of Windows Vista, it can access the first 2 GB of RAM on the computer.The operating system uses some of this RAM, so the Photoshop Memory Usage preference displays only a maximum of 1.6 or 1.7 GB of total available RAM. If you are running Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2, you can set the 3 GB switch in the boot.ini file, which allows Photoshop to use up to 3 GB of RAM.

Important: The 3 GB switch is a Microsoft switch and may not work with all computers. Contact Microsoft for instructions before you set the 3 GB switch, and for troubleshooting the switch. You can search on the Microsoft support page for 3gb for information on this switch.

When you run Photoshop CS3 on a computer with a 64-bit processor (such as a, Intel Xeon processor with EM64T, AMD Athlon 64, or Opteron processor) running a 64-bit version of the operating system (Windows XP Professional x64 Edition or Windows Vista 64-bit) and with 4 GB or more of RAM, Photoshop will use 3 GB for it’s image data. You can see the actual amount of RAM Photoshop can use in the Let Photoshop Use number when you set the Let Photoshop Use slider in the Performance preference to 100%. The RAM above the 100% used by Photoshop, which is from approximately 3 GB to 3.7 GB, can be used directly by Photoshop plug-ins (some plug-ins need large chunks of contiguous RAM), filters, or actions. If you have more than 4 GB (to 6 GB), then the RAM above 4 GB is used by the operating system as a cache for the Photoshop scratch disk data. Data that previously was written directly to the hard disk by Photoshop is now cached in this high RAM before being written to the hard disk by the operating system. If you are working with files large enough to take advantage of these extra 2 GB of RAM, the RAM cache can speed performance of Photoshop. Additionally, in Windows Vista 64-bit, processing very large images is much faster if your computer has large amounts of RAM (6-8 GB).”

WTF? Only the most incredibly bodacious display of software engineering floating within the human collective today… Oh, Photoshop, how I love thee. Why can’t Adobe compile a 64-bit version of this already? Geez. My new home base of operation is terrific and making me itch to edit/develop photos on it, but nooooo… still 32-bit, still unable to allocate the 8 GB of RAM begging to make my workflow faster, and still shackled by the chains of legacy Windows.

I’m not getting on a soapbox today. I’m just frustrated.

This is why I lurv Linux (and just about any flavor of true *nix for that matter). I have an account in town that has a slew of these puppies crunching away at seismic geophysical data. These systems have up to 128 multi-core processors and half a terabyte of RAM… per unit… all addressable. It makes my itty bitty request seem so reasonable when you think about it.

I said hep cats, sinners, brats…
suck on this for sunshine...

Much to my amazement, I seem to be in pretty good health for my age. You would think more degradation would be present given the decadent diet I’ve enjoyed for the last year since losing care for my wellbeing. I am, as of this morning, the proud owner of a fresh-off-the-presses Class II Airman Medical Certificate. I think my last medical certificate was issued in 1998 or so and it was a Class III. I needed the Class II for my Instrument/Commercial rating and to apply for veteran’s benefits for supplemental towards FAA Part 141 flight school attendance. Now, it’s just paperwork. Outside of that, I’ve been working my ass off. I have a lot going on with several of my accounts at the moment. I’m ready for some time off to be honest. I am getting that feeling like the little things are slipping through the cracks and I can’t catch up… odds and ends around the house like laundry, trimming my hedges, cleaning my office. Where is the time? I did have a couple hours last night, but I chose to make like broccoli on the couch and watch my DVR’d House instead. Good stuff. I spent a few minutes trying to get my head around the 7 modes… Ionian (W-W-H-W-W-W-H), Dorian (W-H-W-W-W-H-W), Phrygian (H-W-W-W-H-W-W), Lydian (W-W-W-H-W-W-H), Mixolydian (W-W-H-W-W-H-W), Aeolian (W-H-W-W-H-W-W), and Locrian (H-W-W-H-W-W-W)… and how they relate to Key based on the relative starting note. It’s like doing long division… easy on paper, hard as fuck in the head. This is obviously going to take a little time. Anyhoo, my tummy is growling. I didn’t eat this morning because I didn’t know how detailed this exam would be… ie. would they need fasting blood sugar, etc. As it turns out, there wasn’t even a need for activity near the cash and prizes. Sooooo, I’m off to lunch.

Once upon a time, I was a little more international. I spent more time in Europe. My father-in-law was Parisian. My mother-in-law was from Mexico City. I spoke a little of both. I spent more time with people from other countries and less time with people from my own. So long ago it seems… like another life. I loved them both… love them both. I suppose time has its way of prioritizing consciousness. I suppose a tiny bit of it was distancing myself from their poison daughter, but mostly it was nearsightedness. I did miss them at times and thought of them periodically. It wasn’t until I spent a few moments with them early last week that I truly acknowledged just how much I would like them to be part of my life again. We made plans for dinner two Mondays later… this Monday… tonight. Unable to secure a table at Chez Nous (my first choice), we agreed to meet at the new Trulucks location on Westheimer. The service was satisfactory. The food was good. The company was great. My only complaint about the meal rings true for every place I’ve been out for a nice dining experience… the fucking grape juice is entirely too expensive. $60 for three glasses of wine is insane when I know what the bottle of that vintage costs. Serve me some mystery shit that I’ll never discover details of… shit grown in the Amazon basin by pygmies that swim with piranha and mash the grapes with severed monkey feet on stilt legs. Don’t tell me that, but serve it with that sort of mystery allure. Don’t pour a $22 bottle into four glasses and charge me almost as much per glass. You are an idiot because you know that I know that you know this affects my dining experience. After dinner, I met Jenny (Ted’s wife) for a Cabernet before heading north to the homestead. I’ve been wrestling a Yorkie for the last 20 minutes and am wet and pink with Yorkie spit and teethmarks. I think he’s ready for bed now. Sweet dreams peops.

Episode 1 - Poison

Episode 10 - Elm

Grrrr. This is not a good way to start the week.

The last few days have been a blur. I went out to eat dinner with Barrett and Jennifer on Friday evening after work. Andy and Georgia joined us at Cyclone Anaya’s Mexican Kitchen. The food wasn’t bad, but it was packed. We headed over to Warehouse Live, one of my favorite music venues in town, for the Bob Schneider show. Good times. I didn’t get home until late late late and Saturday morning brought a little jackhammer breaking concrete in my head. I think I mentioned a few times over the last couple of month the ongoing issue I have with my home PC and the video card, low drive space, etc. I have too much crap on that system. One of the problems is that I love playing video games when I need to simply not think about anything. I wanted to go buy a new computer to play games on and offload some poo from my home computer, but I’ve been procrastinating for a long time. Saturday, after some greasy fries to mend my constitution, I headed to Fry’s and did some serious damage. I hate the thought of spending money on a prebuilt system (like I did last time) when you can build one cheaper or better for the same ducats. It all spiraled down from there… seriously. Long story short, my new system rocks my socks. It’s over the top. Intel Core2 2.4GHz Quad-core proc with 8GB of DDR2, GeForce 8800GTX 768MB on an SLI ASUS mobo with lots of bells and whistles, 750GB SATA drive, Lightscribe CD/DVD burner, nifty new mouse and keyboard in a nifty new LED lit case with more fans than I probably needed and 550W PS. Everyone always tells me I should spoil myself with treats every now and then… so I did. The last litttle piece that I grabbed on the way out the door was the one thing that I’ve been blowing kisses at for years and just never had the balls to throw down the coin on it. The 30” Apple Cinema display. OMG. So anyhoo, all that being said, I spent a few hours yesterday afternoon putting all the pieces parts together only to be unable to get the system up last night. All my other PC’s are AGP based (because they are old) and this is a PCE-Express motherboard and I was having trouble with the video settings in the BIOS. I fixed all that this morning and installed Windows Vista Ultimate. My first Vista experience really. It’s neat, but there is nothing compelling to make me want to upgrade the other stuff I have to Vista. I haven’t been to the gym since Thursday, but plan on going back tonight. I cheated on the diet on Friday and Saturday a little. I have been in a really weird mood since Friday night. I don’t know if it was me actually getting out in a social scene getting hit on or just doing fun stuff that I know EL would like without her there, but I got all emotional and have been in a bit of a funk ever since. The weather is absolutely gorgeous outside right now. It’s a little hot… 88 degrees… but there is not a cloud in the sky. This is going to be a fairly busy week and Sean flies in on Friday night. I can’t wait.

Happy Mother’s Day!

List of chemical compounds with unusual names.

How can this only be half way? Holy shit. So, check this out. I like stuff like this… nifty. I’ve really been digging the new Chevelle album (Vena Sera). Actually, I like pretty much everything they have put out. I love the fact that I can listen to pretty much any flavor of music and enjoy it. There is always something on the radio in the unlikely event that XM, iPod, and CD’s fail me. It’s another too-beautiful-to-be-at-the-office day outside. I have to try to enjoy the weather now before the sidewalks and parking lots reach plasma breakover temperatures. Anyhoo, I didn’t have anything to share other than the neat-o link really. Have a good afternoon.