When I mess something up, generally only a few people know about it.
When Barack Obama messes up the oath of office, pretty much the entire civilized world sees it on live TV.
So in the big picture, I guess my goofs aren’t really all that important. And hopefully any further mistakes from either of us will be just as inconsequential and just as quickly forgotten.
Category Archives: Assorted Ramblings
Acronym Soup
I need to mail a package in the next couple days. Doing some running around tomorrow morning, I’ll be passing near a Post Office, so that seems like an ideal opportunity. The only catch is, all federal offices in the DC area will be closed tomorrow in order to help reduce the number of people heading into the city on what’s projected to be the largest-ever event on the National Mall. (As Dave points out, 7,000 porta-potties at an average width of 3.5 feet works out to more than 4.5 miles.) This applies not only to the District of Columbia, but also to Fairfax County, Virginia; Prince George’s County, Maryland; and Montgomery County, Maryland.
This raises an obvious question: If I stop at the Post Office, will it be open?
Fortunately, the Post Office web site includes a “National Mail Service Updates” page. Under the heading of “Washington, DC — Inauguration Day 2009,” I found this very helpful notice:
Washington, DC– the following service changes are in effect for Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2009.
All P&DCs, SCFs and BMCs in the region will be open during the Inauguration.
Well that certainly clears it up.
The Obama Stimulus Package
A month or so back, some of the predictions for Tuesday’s Presidential Inauguration had as many as 5 million people crowding onto the National Mall to watch the swearing in followed by the inaugural parade. Various officials have since imposed a number of security restrictions, closed a number of bridges that empty onto the mall (starting sometime between now and Tuesday morning, it will become impossible to enter DC from Virginia, you’ll have to go into Maryland first) and so on with the final result that it won’t be possible to attend the inauguration unless you actually live along the parade route.
OK, maybe it’s not quite that severe, but the news reports in recent weeks really have been filled with a growing number of road closures and quite a few area residents have decided to avoid DC altogether until Wednesday. Now officials are concerned they may have scared people away from the area and the latest estimates for crowd size are “only” 2.5 million. (For comparison, the previous record crowd size on the National Mall was 1 million in 1976 for the Bicentennial celebration.)
One side effect of all this activity is a bit of economic stimulus for the DC-area economy. Not just the surge in hotel occupancy, sales of Obama bobblehead dolls, and various inaugural memorabilia, but also some less obvious money makers.
The Washington Post reports that local companies are benefiting from the need to construct “The Great Wall of Privies” with 7,000 porta-potties on the National Mall.
One result of all the security restrictions is that there aren’t many places to park. The Washington Nationals are offering parking spots at Nationals Park for $20/day ($35 if you leave the car overnight).
Not to be left out, The Washington Post is offering you the chance to place a personal message to President Obama in the Inauguration Day edition of the paper. (Your guess is as good as mine as to whether he’ll read them.)
Likewise, if you’re a Washington Post subscriber (and possibly if you’re not), you can also pre-order the special commemorative edition of the paper, buy a special commemorative picture book, or if you’re really into newspaper memorabilia, you can even buy a replica of the press plate for printing the commemorative edition of the paper.
And finally, in a move that seems to have folks around here evenly divided over whether to laugh or cry, the District of Calamity’s City Council decided to cash in on the influx of visitors by passing emergency legislation to allow bars to continue serving until 4:00 AM.
Nice and Toasty
I’m a little concerned about jinxing it, but it would appear that I’ve survived into the second week of January.
The furnace guy was here again today, and this time he had the part to fix my furnace. So now, for the first time in several years, I have a programmable thermostat that actually follows its program and for the first time this winter, the furnace is actually able to keep up with the program. The house is once again toasty warm.
The past eight days have also been a mini job fair:
Emergency Locksmith: $55 to come out; $185 to open the door. All told, less than 30 minutes work. The downside of course being, it’s really cold at 2:30 AM on New Year’s Day.
Furnace Repair: $85 to come out (includes the first 30 minutes); $45 for each additional 15 minutes.
I’m in the wrong line of work.
Yet Another Bailout
I did a definite doubletake when I spotted this headline on the CNN web site a little while ago:
Porn industry seeks federal bailout
So then, the idea is that the government would be paying people to keep their clothes on? (I thought the National Endowment for the Arts was responsible for that sort of thing.) It can’t be any less effective than some of the other programs that have been tried lately.
OK, all kidding aside, I can’t help thinking the “request” for a bailout is meant more as a statement about the way bailouts are suddenly being thrown all wily-nilly. But I definitely got a laugh out of it.
Starting Off With A Bang!
My wish for one and all is that so far your year has been better than mine, and that the rest of it be at least as good as I expect mine to be. And in the immortal words of Dave Barry, I swear, I am not making any of this up.
Today is January 6th. It is the sixth day of 2009. So far this year, I have…
- …snapped the key off in the lock (with me on the wrong side of the door) at 2 AM New Year’s Day.
- …replaced a broken thermostat.
- …woken up shivering the following morning because the furnace was also having problems.
- …stayed the following night with friends because the house was still too cold.
- …had my Christmas cold return.
- …spent two hours sitting at the car dealership only to learn that they’re not sure whether they’ve fixed the problem.
- …had the problem with the furnace turn out to be easy to fix, except they don’t have the part in stock!
My take on all of this is that I’m getting the entire year’s worth of crap out of the way at the very beginning. Once I get past this, look out! The rest of this year is going to be fantastic!!!!!
Assuming, of course, that I survive January.
Further Randomness
As any good geologist will tell you, sometimes schist just happens.
I’ve been sick recently (I think my misadventure on New Year’s Eve may have come back to haunt me), so I made a conscious effort to get to bed at a semi-reasonable time. It’s nearly 5:00 AM and I’m still awake.
This bites.
Do you suppose Jeff Foxworthy is smarter than a fifth grader?
If you asked him, he’d probably immediately respond “No.” Then he’d come up with some reasons why he isn’t. He could probably then turn around and write a bestselling book of ways you can tell whether you’re not as smart as a fifth grader.
Then again, Bill Engvall has this pretty well covered already.
Back in 2006, I wrote about the events leading up to the proto-story Murder, She Caused. (I say “proto-story” because although there are a few paragraphs of dialogue, most of it’s just a summary of the idea for a story.)
One of the missing pieces of the story behind the story (would that be a meta-story?) is just how bizarre the conversation was that led to the idea of Mulder and Scully investigating Jessica Fletcher.
I have no idea how it progressed to a dead FBI agent (who eventually evolved into Fox Mulder), but the original conversation involved Kzinti roaming Cabot Cove. Come to think of it, I have no idea how or why the conversation started with the Kzinti; the need for an FBI investigation in Cabot Cove would be the more logical starting point. But no, the conversation started with Kzinti and ended with the FBI.
As I said, it was a bizarre conversation.
Because New Year’s Day was on a Thursday, lots of people took Friday off as well. My office was fairly empty on Friday; probably less than 20 of us on the entire floor. Likewise, there was pretty minimal traffic. (More than on Wednesday, but still, I managed to get to the office by 8:30.)
Monday’s gonna suck.
It’s now close to 6:00 AM (It took a while to find that video, you should watch it.) I’m still not sleepy. Perhaps I’ve had too much sleep the past few weeks?
This is why I part of why I don’t go to bed at what most folks would consider a normal hour.
One of the categories for this post is “Pointless Posts.” This may very well be the most definitively pointless post not only on my site, but on the entire Internet.
Happy New Year!
I miss my niece Evangaline.
Don’t get me wrong, I love all of my nieces and nephews very much, but in the wee hours of this morning, it was Evangline who was foremost in my thoughts.
My New Year’s Eve activities went pretty much according to plan, attending a dance where the quite awesome Tom Cunningham Orchestra was performing. At the stroke of midnight, I was dancing with a complete stranger who happened to agree with me that it would be a shame to let a perfectly good dance song go to waste. The balloons dropped, the band switched to Auld Lang Syne, and everything was good.
The dance ended shortly after 1:00AM when the band played an encore number on the condition that everyone take home some of the left over cider. Another complete stranger (I think her name was “Marta” — they kind of run together after a while) agreed with me that we shouldn’t let this song go to waste either and that was the perfect ending to my evening at the Spanish Ballroom.
I pulled into the driveway about 1:45, gathered up my stuff and went to open the door. That’s about when Evangline entered my thoughts. As I put the key into the deadbolt, it snapped off at the base.
While I waited for the locksmith to arrive, I kept thinking about the story of how at age eight Evangline picked a lock at her school using no tools other than her father’s driver’s license.
Some people complain that there’s never a cop around when you need one. I’ve rarely had that problem. The only time I urgently needed a police officer (after a hit and run 12 years ago), I found several of them a block away at the 7-11. But if Evangline had been visiting this week, she could have saved me $200 and most of an hour.
So aside from that little glitch, my 2009 is off to a good start. And I’m taking the view that the problem with the broken key simply means I’m getting all the problems out of the way up front. Nothing but up from here, y’know?
May 2009 be the best year of your life so far with the best yet to come.
So what did you do on New Year’s Eve?
Spellcheck
Writing an email for work this afternoon, I discovered that Firefox’s built in spellcheck1 doesn’t recognize the name of Microsoft’s Visio product.
One of the suggested “corrections” is Visigoth. Given my experiences with Viso so far, I don’t find this correction to be entirely incorrect.
1Firefox also fails to recognize the word “spellcheck”, yet it suggests “spellchecker” as a correction. (I can agree that spellcheck shouldn’t be a word, but if that’s the case, then certainly spellchecker — one who spellchecks — is also ineligible.)
Summer Solstice
Today is the Winter Solstice. That means there are only six months to go until the Summer Solstice. More importantly, after today, the day starts getting longer again.
I miss sunlight.