Thirty days hath September
What comes next, I don't remember
Accustomed was I to the state
Of being aged 38
A status with which I was fine
Till this day made me 39.

Yay, it's my birthday!  *wags happily*

Once upon a time there was an LJ user named Goldilocks, who had a lot of friends on LiveJournal.  One day Goldilocks was reading her friends page and discovered that many of her friends were participating in a meme in which, without naming any names, they told the whole world just how many people on their LJ friends list they'd done various intimate things with, with gradations varying from the perfectly nice to the very, very naughty.

"How interesting!", thought Goldilocks, in a prurient sort of way, and she began to read them.

The first friend who spilled the beans about his bedtime adventures had 396 LiveJournal friends, of whom he'd met 58.59%.

"That's ... 232!", Goldilocks deduced with the aid of a pocket calculator.  "He must get out a lot.  I seem to meet people only three at a time, and they're always bears."

Then Goldilocks looked all the way to the bottom of the meme, to that level of pleasant private activity that would get her kicked out of most libraries if she described it in any detail.  Her friend had ... ahem! ... with 0.51% of his friends list.

Her fingers flashed over the calculator keys.  "That's just two!", she exclaimed.  "This friend is too cold!", she determined, taking a spoonful of the porridge she was eating for breakfast.

Her second friend had 116 LiveJournal friends, of whom he'd met an impressive 87.07% and hugged 84.48%.  "Wow, he must be very friendly!", she thought, contemplating the joy of 98 hugs.  Then she cast her eyes down to the line at the bottom, and saw a red line there that was much, much longer than her first friend had had.  "Twenty-five percent ... let's see ... that's ... 29?!  Good heavens, very friendly indeed!  This friend is too hot!"

Her porridge suddenly seemed so much more tepid in comparison.

Not to be dissuaded, she continued to the LJ of a third friend, who had also clicked on the link that promised to tell everyone how much of a slut he was.  He had 236 friends, and the red line at the bottom was longer than the line that her first friend had had, but wasn't nearly as bold and demonstrative as her second friend's protestation of his propensity for naughtiness.  "Ahhhhhhhhhhh," she sighed as she finished up her porridge, "there.  This friend is just right."

Then she hacked the website that sponsored that meme, stole all the data about who had clicked on which boxes about whom, and proceeded to blackmail all her friends.

I just had a telephone call from our realtor, which momentarily got my hopes up ... but he was calling actually to tell us that he had received a call from a teacher at the school down the street to let us know that we had a beehive in the tree in our front yard that was creating swarms of thousands of bees, and that she was going to advise her students to walk on the other side of the street while we took care of it.

She had telephoned our realtor because, well, his sign with his phone number on it is in front of the house, so it seemed as good a number to call as any, which is reasonable enough.  She said she would've left a note on our door, except she was afraid to go into our front yard to do so.

I walk through the front yard all the time when I get home from work, go to get the mail, etc.  I've never seen a single bee.

It could just be a time of day thing (maybe they're quiet in the evenings), or perhaps this teacher is deathly afraid of bees and magnified a bee or two into "thousands" ... but I'm sure she's not totally making this up.  Although if tonight you hear a loud scream from our neck of the woods, that means that I looked up into the tree and found the DeathStar Beehive just as it was loosing its TIE Fighters on me ...

There are some sorts of music that I like better than other sorts, but I don't believe there's a single genre of music where I've heard nothing that's ever struck my fancy.  Within any genre of music, there's the good and the bad:

Bad rap is an exercise in f*cking mothers, bitches, and humanity in general, and celebrates colossal egos that honestly don't want celebrating.  Good rap is percussion with words as the drumheads, opening a window to a world that I, as a white suburban kinda guy, would otherwise never know.

Good country music can take a slice of ordinary life, dress it up in lyrics that are meaningful, touching, and funny, and present it in a way that hits you right in the heart.  Bad country music is like suicide by cheap beer.

Bad techno is like having someone stand next to you and bang on a trash can lid incessantly for the entire length of a mix CD.  Good techno ...

For a left-brain guy like me, good techno is a drug.  All those layers of up-tempo sound, blending together yet still working separately, engage my brain in a way that country music, love ballads, and other sorts of music can't really reach.  If a love song is a glass of wine and a country croon is a pitcher of beer, good techno is a cup of strong coffee.

I've really got to stop drinking techno right before bed.

The cool thing about "unrealised appreciation" (i.e. paper profits) is that, if it goes away, it wasn't really any loss, unless you're one to succumb to wouldacouldashoulda-itis.  Those share options you were given that might be worth something in two years if the share price is at least $30 that turn out to be garbage because the share price is only $22 ... well, you didn't pay for them.  Nothing in, nothing out, broke even.  Was the share price $45 one year into your two year waiting period?  Oh well, couldn't have realised it, anyway.

The bad thing about paper profits is that we like to spend them in our minds before we actually realise them, so we're inclined to view a share that we bought at $10 and sold at $20 as a "loss" if, during the interim, it peaked at $25.  That's a 20% loss!  No, it's not ... it's a 100% gain ... but durnit, it still feels a bit like a loss, because we like to pretend that we could've obtained the ideal instead of acknowledging that we almost certainly didn't sell at $25 for darn good reasons ... even if that reason was just that we optimistically figured it'd hit $30.

I say this because we have now had twenty people look at our house, and the number of offers we have received is precisely zero.  That means we're overpriced if nobody is willing even to try to lowball us.  We priced our house conservatively based on comps from a month ago ... but according to what's been selling and what the asking prices are in our postal code right now, the median price in our area is down about 5% in the past month.  The last thing we want to do is ride the market all the way down, overpriced all the way, soooooooooo ... we're about to hack $40,000 off the asking price.

Looks as though the price plunge that started to attack the "far-suburban future slums" last year has reached our neck of the woods as the foreclosures start to pile up on better quality loans.

Oh well!  It was just paper profits.

If I needed any proof that the modern office and my job are highly computer dependent, coming into work this morning and finding my hard drive's suicide note:

A fatal I/O disk read error has occurred.
Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart the machine.

... followed by several screens worth of messages that were tantamount to "Go cry to your Help Desk while I slit my digital wrists, emo user", would be it.

Six hours ... warming a chair ... staring at a vacant monitor ... nothing to do but drink more coffee ...

*phone ringing, caller ID says "Desktop Support"*  Yippee!  It's the computer doctor!

"We're sorry, Sir ... we did everything we could ... did you have your data backed up?"

"DON'T ASK ME QUESTIONS LIKE THAT WHILE I'M IN MOURNING!!"

"I'll take that to be a no ..."

"Ummmmmmmm ... all but the last month's worth of personally-stored E-mails, I think, actually ..."

"OK, Sir, we'll have your computer back to you with a new hard drive in about an hour."

"I'm guessing you were able to recover nothing off the old drive, like ... oh ... all my custom software installations?"

"No, Sir, we tried putting it into two other machines, and nothing could read it."

Well, blah.  I know what I'm doing for the next two days.  Meanwhile ... one more hour ... more coffee ...

This morning I had an appointment scheduled for an eye exam at my optometrist ... nothing serious, just a routine checkup.  Maybe it's because in school I was trained to think of exams as something tremendously critical, as doing poorly on one would mean a black mark on one's Permanent Record ... but I found myself sitting in the optometrist's waiting room feeling all nervous.

What, as though I might sit an eye exam and fail it?

Why is it, when someone at the office makes some microwave popcorn, people can't help but say, "I smell popcorn"?  Sure, it's a distinctive scent, but I don't hear people saying, "I smell Chinese food!" when someone comes back with some orange chicken, which is every bit as distinctive.

Three people have walked past my desk in the last five minutes and said those exact three words to me: "I smell popcorn."  I did not prompt this at all, and it's not my popcorn.  I need to come up with an equally pointless rejoinder, like "I'm sitting on my arse."

Perhaps the artificial butter-y scent molecules manage to worm their way directly into the brain's language centre, I don't know ...

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Firefox 2 stores your windows and tabs in a "session" file that it saves when you close the last browser window ("You are about to close 6 tabs. Are you sure?").  Then when you start the application again, if you have it set to do so, it reads that session file and puts all your tabs and windows back again.

Except ... I have discovered ... if you close all your browser windows but leave the downloads window open with a download going, and then relaunch the browser window, it doesn't read your session back in again.  Instead, it creates a new empty session and overwrites your existing session with no warning.  Apparently it checks for an existing session file only when the application is started from scratch.

So merf, now I get to try to recover all those tabs and windows and their history from Google Desktop ... I knew it was taking up several gigabytes of my hard drive for something.  :)

This morning's headlines included the story that President Bush made a speech in which he complained that Congress was responsible for high petrol prices by, more or less, not giving him what he wants.

I look at the Bush Administration, packed full of advisors (and a vice president) who hail from the era of Richard Nixon's "Imperial Presidency" and who have never ceased to be enamoured of the idea that the President should be able to do pretty much anything he wants, that checks and balances are an impediment to good government and not a source of it, that Congress can and should simply be bypassed or misled if it might say no to things like torture and the like if it found out about them.

Then I listen to this speech.

And I laugh.

There is an order to things.  Dust, then vacuum ... otherwise you're just brushing dust onto your freshly-cleaned carpets.  Put your socks on, then your shoes.  Wash your car from the top down, so you don't get dirty water from the hood all down the nice clean sides.

Get your hair cut first, then go to the DMV to have your new driving licence photo taken.

I seem to have forgot that last one, as I hadn't had a haircut since I had it coloured for MFF ... and I went to the DMV to get my new photo taken anyway.

California redoes your driving licence photo every twelve years, so the last one I had taken before this was in 1996.  It was actually a darn good photo: I was smiling nicely, my hair was neat, and I had had a business appointment earlier in the morning, so I was wearing a suit and tie.  I would show people the photo, and they'd say things like, "Dang, I've never seen a driving licence photo that good!"

My 2008 photo has just made up for that.

My hair is long, ballooning around my head like some overgrown keratin tumour ... the last few outer inches of it a long-faded red that had turned to sort of a pale orangey-blond, as though I'd tried to bleach it myself and failed.  The back is all curled up, as it's wont to do when it gets long, which makes me look as though I'm trying to recapture the bad 1970s haircut that I would have had when I was ten.  For some reason, I am looking up toward the ceiling instead of at the camera.  My smile looks stoned.  And I was wearing a brown sweater that's very nearly the same colour as my skin ... so under the influence of the camera's overpowering flash, I look as though I showed up at the DMV stark naked.

This is how I will look to the world, the most official of my official photographs, until the year 2020, or until I leave the state.

I hear Virginia is very nice this time of year ...

I'd love to scan the photo and show it here, except driving licences have all kinds of security measures over the photo to make sure you can't do that.  But trust me, next time you see me, ask to see it.  It's a peach.

Last week my employer sent me for a week-long course in introductory .NET programming ... which, while the class was certainly informative, involved a long-ass commute that left me, by the end of the week, exhausted and seriously appreciating that the only good commute is a short one.  There's only so much you can do when you get home from work with just enough time to eat dinner and then tumble into bed for eight hours of sleep before getting up and doing it all over again.

But I did learn many things, and I was absorbed enough in the material that by Friday, when the conversation turned to purchasing new laptop computers, the first thing that popped into my head was, "Dim laptop as New Laptop" ... at which point I chuckled and then forcibly suppressed that before I ended up sounding like Dover Cheetah.

One unfortunate side effect of last week's schedule is that I was very nearly caught up on my friends page, and now I'm not, because I couldn't touch LJ for a week.  This bothers me (and thanks to everyone who commented on the previous post but whom I didn't have any time to acknowledge).  But really, that's just the tip of the iceberg of why I feel the way I do right now.

Kay has moved to the Bay Area.  This is hitting me harder than I want to admit, even to myself ... because there's just something about 400 miles of distance between us that I can't dismiss with some rationalisation like, "Well, it's not as though I saw him all that often even when he was here, what with his school and our work and all."  It's still 400 miles.  And he's moved most of his possessions that were even remotely portable, so now the walls have blank spaces where art used to be ... the office is mostly empty ... and my sole purpose still here seems to be to open the door for contractors and realtors, and to clean the place almost maniacally to keep it presentable for prospective buyers.  It really really doesn't feel like home any more.  But all I can do is wait.

I feel like the caretaker of a museum, dusting the antiquities and hoping someone will show up to look at them.

It's depressing having your life put on hold.  My principle purpose at the moment is to sell the house, a process that could get a jump start tomorrow or could go nowhere for months.  I have been putting off making any real plans because I had no idea where I'd be living or what I'd be doing ... but there's only so long you can do that before it begins to gnaw.  I have made no plans to attend CaliFur, because at the time I should have been making those plans I had no way to know if I could attend.  I suppose I'll be here in Los Angeles still in two weeks ... but still, oddly, I feel no motivation.  I'm in the same boat concerning AnthroCon: wouldn't mind at all going, but buy the plane tickets from which city?  Hotel rooms are all long sold ... maybe I could sleep at the diner down the street that sells the T-shirts ...

I want to go visit him up north, but he has no permanent work schedule, so I could easily go up there and then find he's working the entire time I'm there.  He will eventually have a permanent schedule, but ... I'll have to wait for it, and he doesn't know when he'll know it.

An inability to plan feels, in a way, like senility: locked into the present, without direction, without motivation, just existing solely for the purpose of continued existence.  I know this will end, that my days as a caretaker are numbered ... but what is the number?  When do I get my future back?  When do I get to pursue life again instead of waiting for it to come to me, a housecleaner who collects business cards from realtors and invoices from roofers and handymen and gardeners?

I need to snap out of this feeling, although I know that saying that is about as effective as trying to compel yourself to sleep by concentrating on sleeping.  I need the catharsis of tears, but I can't compel them to come, either.  I can sit in the middle of the spotless kitchen floor and try to cry, and marvel that it's actually stayed spotless for a few days ... but only because Kay isn't here, and the dogs aren't here, and the snake of despair nibbles at my big toe while I listen to the hold music repeating, over and over again.

Sartre was wrong.  Hell isn't other people.

Oh, no, wait ... there's a spot.  I'd better clean that.

One of the things our realtor recommended to help sell the house was to freshen it up a bit ... by which he meant, "Your house smells like dogs."

While a part of me wants to reply, "Well no sh*t, Sherlock", I can see his point.  Even after vacuuming, there's still undoubtedly a subtle scent of canine hanging about the place, which I don't notice because the brain tends to ignore any signal inputs that never change.  But to an outsider coming by for a careful inspection of the place, it may very well be the first thing they notice when they come in the door.  And if they're not terribly fond of dogs ...

So our realtor's suggestion was to go buy a couple of air fresheners and put them around the place.  Now I don't know about you, but I have a pretty low tolerance for artificial scents, mostly because most of them have all the subtlety of a brick to the groin and don't even smell much like what they're supposed to be emulating.  The delicate smell of an apple is pleasant, although it's a bit tricky to fill a whole house with it to the extent that it will cover up dog-smell, and after a while it'll be replaced by the scent of rotting apple if you're not careful.  But the overpowering aroma of an "apple blossom" air freshener makes me want to take an axe to the artificial tree that's ostensibly emitting this lovely eye-watering fragrance.  And "spring breeze" is more like a hurricane.

But hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained ... and I'm sure I can put up with a runaway artificial apple tree in the house for a while if it means someone will write us a cheque.  So today I went to Target and got two plug-in air fresheners, both "clean linen" scent, which sounded nice.

I'm not sure what the entire house reeks of now that those things have been installed and operating for about four hours, but clean linen isn't it.

Perhaps tomorrow I'm going to have to go back to Target and see if they have any replacement inserts with a more appropriate scent.  I'm thinking, oh ... "dog".  Then it'll smell like home again.

At my office, we have a company store.  Most of the stuff that my employer makes is pretty cheap (not like getting an employee discount on a car or anything like that), but still, can't argue with getting things at just a little over cost.  The store is tucked away in a corner of the parking garage, and there's nothing on the street to indicate that it's there.

So today I went down to the company store to pick up a few things I needed, and was not amused to find myself in the queue for the cashier directly behind a woman who had a ton of random stuff: coffee mugs, pencils, a frozen pizza (yes, if you're going to be working late, you can buy your dinner at the company store as well), a couple of stuffed toys, just piles and piles of stuff filling the whole conveyor belt, and almost no two items the same.  Almost none of them has a price tag on it, so she's asking the cashier to get her a price check on ... pretty much all of it.

And in her hand she's clasping three $100 notes.  Since none of these items should cost more than about $10, that'll give you some idea just how much crap she had.  And she's paying cash?  What is she doing, stocking up her tax-evading business here?

It takes almost ten minutes to run all the price checks, and for her to set aside the items that she felt were too expensive ... but finally we're ready to start scanning her merchandise.

Cashier:  "Could you run your badge over the scanner for me?"

Customer:  *waves her employee badge near the RFID reader ... and nothing happens*  "It must be broken."

Cashier:  "Here, let me see it."

The lady's employee badge is white, says EMPLOYEE across the top of it, and has her name and picture.  It's a lovely employee badge.  It's just not one of ours.  But heck, maybe it's from our UK office or something.

Cashier:  "Do you have a business card, by any chance?"

The lady rummages in her purse for far too long, then produces one.

Cashier:  "Ummmmmmm ... ma'am, you have to be an employee of this company to buy things here."

Customer:  "It doesn't say that on the door."

Cashier:  "The sign says [name of company] EMPLOYEES AND CONTRACTORS ONLY, ma'am."

Customer:  "But ..."

Cashier:  *cutting her off*  "That doesn't mean employees of someplace else."

Customer:  "So I can't shop here?  You have things I need, and your prices are really good."

Cashier:  "No, ma'am, but you can buy many of these things at Costco or other stores."

Me:  *standing here watching this whole thing trying not to look too incredulous*

Customer:  "Oh, OK ... but you know your prices are really good.  Costco costs more."

And off she went, leaving the cashier to put away all the stuff still on the conveyor belt.

Cashier:  "Hello, Sir."

Me:  "Hi there ... ummmmmmmmmmmmmm ... I just have this one simple thing, and I don't need a price check."  *beep from the badge scanner*

Cashier:  "That'll be $1.75."

To the lady who just won today's Unclear On The Concept Award, I say, "Boot to the head!  And give me those ten minutes of my life back!"

I took Friday off work, both because I had vacation time that was "use it or lose it" that I figured I might as well use; and because the open house in our effort to sell our house was on Sunday.  An open house is like having a hundred total strangers that you want to impress coming over to your place for a party ... except that you won't be impressing them with your taste in wine and cheese.  You'll be impressing them (hopefully) with your skill in making your house so clean and pretty and organised that it will have achieved Housing Nirvana: a state of perfection that belies the fact that the house is actually ... well, lived in.

So Friday I cleaned and organised.  Do I really need this old Easter basket that my Mom got me as a surprise nostalgia gift back in 1995 or something, and that I kept because I thought the gesture was really sweet?  No, not really.  I can photograph it to preserve the memory that it represents, and then discard the space-wasting original.  How about all these con badges that are in a little pile on the corner of my desk?  Hmmmmmmm ... kinda want to keep those.  Into a little bit of spare space in the fursuit container they go.

Saturday I ... organised, one step ahead of the professional cleaner our realtor hired to make sure everything was Grade A Clean.  You think housecleaning is hard?  Try taking a house that's in mid-move in terms of "possessions scattered everywhere" and getting it tidy enough so that a housecleaner can actually accomplish something other than throw up his hands in despair at how he'd love to clean the place if he could actually get to anything.  Kay was working this weekend.  I actually texted him at one point, "OMG, the housecleaner is catching up to me!  He's only one room over now!", as though the man with the vacuum cleaner were some kind of horror-movie stalker.

Sunday I spent the morning taking care of every last-minute imperfection I could find ... all the while reminding my perfectionist side that the goal here, if I couldn't make something perfect, was just to make it GOOD and move on.  Then all I had to do was open the blinds and windows to make the house "cheery and bright", and get out of the way.  I went over to a friend's house and watched the Lakers game.

(Los Angeles Lakers trivia: during the game it hit me that "Lakers" was a really stupid name for a team in Los Angeles, a city devoid of lakes.  It turns out they were originally the Minneapolis Lakers (Bingo!  Lakes!), who moved to L.A. in 1960.  Yay for mobile Internet!)

It was funny coming home afterwards to the Ideal House.  It was still spotless.  It was still cheery and bright, with a nice breeze coming through the windows to celebrate the beautiful sunny day.  With no further tasks to accomplish (Housing Nirvana had been attained!), I sat in the dining room for a while and just enjoyed the view and the breeze, reminding myself why kayotae and I had looked at this house nine years ago during our last house hunt and said, "This is the one."

There's just one thing missing.  Kay starts his new job in San Leandro tomorrow.  That means he's driving up to the Bay Area today.  For the sake of making the house easier to show and to prevent Housing Nirvana from being sullied by the presence of two large fluffy dogs who shed fur everywhere in spite of our commands not to ("Travis, don't shed!"), he's taking the dogs with him.  With the dogs gone and with just me in the house acting kind of like its caretaker until it sells, it'll be easy to show the place at a moment's notice without having to ask everyone who comes over, "By the way, are you comfortable with large dogs?".

This is true Housing Nirvana, the realtor's pipe dream, except ... for the first time since 1997, tonight I will come home to a house where I will be truly alone.  There's always been someone: my mate, a roommate, the dogs ... someone to say hello to, ask about their day, scritch behind the ears, whatever.  Tonight there will be nothing and no one but me.

That house is suddenly going to feel a lot bigger.

I know it's temporary.  I know Kay and I love each other and this isn't like a "divorce" or anything that means one of us is leaving permanently.  It's just a transition that we're managing by moving at different times to accomplish everything that needs to be accomplished as efficiently as possible.  Besides, we're only six hours apart.  It's more like just going back to a long-distance relationship for a short while, but one that's not so long-distance that we can't enjoy weekend visits until we are reunited.

This is a grand adventure, with many good things waiting at the end of it.  But still, tonight I will kiss Kay, pet the boys, and send them on their way to their new home, then walk back into a house empty of everyone but myself.

It feels like dying.

When I arrive at work in the mornings, there's always a pile of newspapers on the kitchen counter.  They belong to various subscribers who collect them when they arrive ... but people who aren't their rightful owners tend to give the front pages a look while they're getting their coffee.

So one of my co-workers was in there this morning glancing down at the Los Angeles Times; and for the sake of making conversation, I asked if there were any interesting news this morning.

"Oh, you know, the usual, it's all bad, nothing good.  There's never any good news," he replied.  This sunny outlook is one reason why I like him.

But I beg to differ.  The newspapers are full of good news.  It's just hidden in the white space between the words.

"The news" is what is unusual.  "Man Walking to Work Killed by Bus" is something you'd expect to see in the paper.  "Man Walks to Work, Arrives, Greets Co-Workers, Gets Coffee" is not, unless you're the Onion.

"Foreclosure Crisis Deepens" is a good headline.  "Couple's Mortgage Successfully Paid by Automatic Debit for the 105th Consecutive Time" is not.  "Freeway Blocked by Fatal Accident": that's news.  "Freeway Traffic Lighter Than Usual Tonight" isn't.

So you know what?  Give me all the bad news in the paper that you want.  It brightens my day.  Because if the papers are reporting lots of things that are bad, and the news is what doesn't happen to everybody every day, then most things, for most people, on most days, are probably basically decent.

When a bomb goes off in downtown Peoria, killing 80 people, and that's not on the front page, that's when I'll worry about how bad things are.

It was March 14th when kayotae got word that he was going to have a job in the San Francisco Bay Area starting on April 22nd.  Unless this was going to require an obscenely long commute, this was going to mean relocating.  I'm cool with that; the Bay Area is a nice place.

This is, of course, a Big Life Change, but all the steps required up to now have been fairly small.  Tell my boss I'm leaving.  Start working on my résumé.  Boss says that I'm at least somewhat indispensable and would like to talk about the possibility of my keeping my job and working from the Bay Area (and expresses relief that I'll be staying here in L.A. until the house sells).  Stop working on résumé until this gets settled.  Start slowly going through my worldly goods and taking stock of all those little projects at home that I was going to get around to.

Ponder what I'm going to do with all the books that I never read, but know I'll have trouble getting rid of, because one's library is such an extension of the self.

Nothing to make me feel especially nervous, though.  Besides, I know I'm dreadful about getting around to stuff at home, because after ten stressful hours at work, home is my sanctuary.  It's where I come to decompress and deliberately not accomplish things more complicated than having a glass of wine and watching Top Gear.  If I push hard at work and then come home and just keep right on working, I tend quickly to collapse from exhaustion.

Kay does not suffer this problem, or at least disguises it well, so he's been the one cracking the whip on me ... which I'll admit needs to be done.

Last night we met with the fellow who is now officially our realtor.  I was expecting a fairly gentle pace here as well ... but no.  We have a contract, we have an asking price, and he immediately gets to work: puts the sign on the front lawn, arranges a gardener to spruce up the landscaping a bit before he takes the official photographs for the MLS ... and he's already scheduled an open house for Sunday.

He wants his commission.  Perfectly understandable that he'd get down to business right away.  He does not work at the pace of Kaysho At Home.

Kay heads north this weekend.  I have until Sunday to get the house pretty.  Better start going through those worldly goods a little faster.  What do we do about our "guest dogs"?  Suddenly there's a real deadline.  It was the For Sale sign going up on the front lawn that did it for me: this is really happening, and now it's happening fast.

Of course, we may have the open house and then have everything slow to a crawl again ... so it could very well be "hurry up and wait".

But now, yeah, I'm nervous.

I went bowling this weekend; and my mischievous partner, knowing my Malamute-ly nature, entered my name into the overhead scoring system as "WOO WOO" while I was off washing my paws in the bathroom.  Anyone walking past and seeing the fierce competition between WOO WOO and PONY probably thought we were nuts.  This is fine with me.

First frame:  8 ... spare.

Second:  Strike!

Third:  Strike! (yay double!)

Fourth:  Strike! (gobble gobble gobble)

Fifth:  9 ... spare.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm ... this is going really really well for someone who normally bowls around a 120-130 game.

Sixth:  Strike!

Seventh:  Strike!

Eighth:  Strike! (two turkeys in one game!)

OMG, I'm bowling at a record-breaking pace!  It's time to ... get nervous and fall apart!

Ninth:  7 ... 2.

Tenth:  8 ... 0.

Final score: 212.  Second best game ever.

From now on, my official bowling name is WOO WOO.  Because every good sporting superstition has to get started somewhere.

Back on February 25th, I started a little experiment: I decided to try not eating any more red meat.

In case this comes as a surprise, this is because I didn't tell anyone I was doing it.  My primary reason, really, was the near-messianic fervour with which some people approach the topic of eating dead animals, which ranges from "If you do it at all you're evil" to "If you don't eat every kind of dead animal imaginable you're a pinko".  Since I didn't want anyone to think I was making any kind of political statement, or to have anyone of an extreme persuasion on the topic start going all Jehovah's Witnesses on me about it (it's just what I choose to eat, not a "cause"), I just went ahead and quietly did it.

Besides, that way if I didn't like the results of the experiment I wouldn't have to explain to anyone why I was quitting it.  :)

But I was thinking ... the meat of animals that used to walk around on four legs has pretty much one advantage going for it (it's tasty!) and a number of disadvantages compared to other ways that I could get my necessary protein.  Red meat is one of the least healthy protein sources out there ... you get more "bad fat" per gram of protein than you do from poultry or fish, never mind non-animal sources.  It's expensive.  Its production uses up more grain that people could otherwise be eating than poultry production does (most reasonable estimates put the pound-of-beef vs. pound-of-chicken grain usage ratio at about four to one).  And, of course, cows and pigs have much bigger brains than chicken or fish do ... so if one is concerned about the possibility of eating something that might be sentient enough that it might not want to be eaten, there's that, too.

It wasn't my desire to be extreme about it ("Get that hamburger away from me, ye Satan!"), so I've let a few exceptions go: I had a bite of sausage once, and last weekend at dinner I ordered a Kobe burger because ... well, come on, Kobe beef!  And I'd never had one.  But otherwise, it's all been poultry, fish, and soy.

For the most part it's been really easy.  Is the office cafeteria offering a chicken sandwich with lettuce, tomato, and bacon?  "Could you hold the bacon, please?", and we're good.  This morning's breakfast buffet offered waffles, bacon, and sausage.  Mmmmmmmm, waffles ... easy to pass on the bacon and sausage (and there's always turkey sausage!).  Even at a steakhouse one can usually get a swordfish "steak" or something like that.  Marinara sauce instead of meat sauce, a chicken breast with the spaghetti plate instead of an Italian sausage ... about the only time it would be an "issue" if I chose to make it one would be at a backyard BBQ.  And in that case, sure, I'll have a burger, because you were kind enough to offer one.

Is it actually accomplishing anything?  Well, it's difficult to measure a lot of the benefits, which would show up only in the long term if they show up at all, but I have noticed a few things.  I'm spending less on food, even with having a flier at some "meatless 'meat' strips" at Trader Joe's that are really tasty but that are priced for a captive audience.  My blood pressure seems to have dropped, judging by how much the veins on my hands stick out (alas, I've had "old people hands" since I was a kid).  I've been getting indigestion noticeably less often.  And I've lost three-quarters of an inch off my waist and 2% body fat (down from 16% to 14%) without making any particular effort to do so whatsoever ... in fact, if that trend continues I'm going to have to make a conscious effort to eat more.

About the only disadvantage is that I'm getting a touch bored with chicken.

Will I keep this up?  Well ... sure, why not?  It seems to be doing something; it's already pretty much a habit; and my reasons for having a go at it in the first place are still sound.  And as aforementioned, this isn't a "cause" for me or anything, so I will certainly not be advising anyone else what to eat or refusing to go out with you if you want to go to a steakhouse or anything rude like that.  If you did order the spaghetti plate with Italian sausage and you see me eyeing your sausage with something that seems like interest, don't think I'll be offended if you offer me a bite: I'll probably take it.  I have no intentions of "extending" this further and giving up meat altogether.  But otherwise, this has actually been something of a fun little challenge, and I think I'll stick with it.

But if three months from now you find me in a steakhouse with eight ounces of dead cow, don't send me to rehab.  :)