Look, ma, I have a search function!

I liked this movie. Subject matter was interesting, Clooney did a good job directing, and hats off to the friendships solidly established as the Ocean’s 11 crew.
Sam Rockwell, who I’ve liked since Galaxy Quest, and Drew Barrymore, who seems to like kissing him in all their movies together (I believe the count is just two, which may not be indicated by the word ‘all’), make for good chemistry.
Makes me want to go buy his book.
Also makes me realize that no matter what people say about reality TV being the downfall of civilized television, this movie pretty much claims that television was never civilized to begin with. This should not be a surprise to anyone.

link

Time to go to bed. I just uploaded a whole bunch of old stories that seemed… appropriate as a fair representation of the verbiage that’s come from my brain. As a whole, pretty damn impressive in bulk, pretty damn pathetic in content. But that’s how it goes.

One thing’s for sure… I do get better over the years.

Whew.

Seeing as I’ve decided to get back to writing every now and then, I couldn’t put off finishing the site logic for the stories section. Boring story short: stories section is automated. I am free to upload new stories via my login without doing any manual database work.

Wheee. You’re so impressed.

Shall we begin?

link

So T.J. had a birthday barbecue then dad had a birthday dinner and then I came home.

Hehehe.

Nothing like condensing an entire day into one sentence, eh?

I cancelled my digital cable service today, changing it to a network channels only service. I just couldn’t justify spending fifty bucks a month on something I barely used. Now eight bucks a month to watch network TV, that’ll work… until I find the perfect set of rabbit ears that can conquer the static that thrives in the Los Angeles Basin (read: NEVER).

So the armrest button broke over the weekend, which was a bit of a pisser. Then I went to the dealership last night and they didn’t have one that was the right color, which was a little more of a pisser.

The parts guy looks inside my trunk at the interior code and thinks, “”ZD? What the hell is that?”"

Well it’s obviously cream, since that’s my interior. But there’s no ZD that he can find in the system. He gives me the part number minus the color code, and I do some internet searching at a VW parts site for the word ‘cream.’ I find another code, 08H, called cream-beige. The picture was of an autodimming rearview mirror, but it looked a lot like the interior of my car. So I call the dealership again and ask them to search for the button’s partnumber with the suffix 08H. They find one, the guy warns me it may not be right, I tell him ZD doesn’t exist and he goes, “”Oh, wait, there’s a note here saying ZD… yeah I guess this is the right color.”"

Bueno.

And how much for a tiny plastic button and spring? $15.

Man.

I feel soooo ripped off. I’ll feel even moreso when I pick it up on Tuesday.

The Blue Beetle recovers!

Repairs and adjustments have been made, the new exhaust is fully, and I mean fully operational. I’ll be conducting a shakedown test for the next couple of weeks to see how things go, then pitch it back for some tweaking.

It’s alive! It’s alive!

Many thanks go to Ed and Manny and Paula, we had a good time underneath the car, cracking jokes and shooting the wind while tinkering around with my fancy-schmancy custom exhaust system.

Caught a double feature today. Comments below on that.

I had a nice afternoon to myself today, having a late lunch at Cafe Lulu’s next to the theater, then browsing in a used bookstore for bedside material.

Found some possibilities, but nothing I was willing to purchase at the moment. I wanted to reread Dickens, but could not find an unabridged edition of the books I wanted to reread. I wanted to reread Dumas, but couldn’t find anything by him at all. I considered going Russian with Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, but didn’t know which English translation was considered the best (if any could be called that) — plus I may just not be in the mood for a despairing, cynical view of things anyhow; even if my curiousity was piqued from simply talking about these novels with Jenny last night.

Then I though, maybe Melville, or an old sci-fi rag of some sort. But before I could explore further it was time to see Casablanca, and I abruptly ended my book browsing and headed for the theater.

Amusingly enough, they showed a Bugs Bunny short before the film began. I hadn’t seen that one since I was a child. The one where Bugs and Sam are in a Cooper-esque western. I know that doesn’t help, but it’s the one where the bullets are flying, stop at a signal as an opposing traffic of bullets fly by, then go again when it’s green. That one.

After the double feature I came out and found night waiting for me. Had dinner with Han and ended up watching G.I. Joe on Cartoon Network. Realizing I was watching cartoons from 1985 would have been a bit sobering were it not for the Finlandia cherry and 7Up in my system — that made it nostalgic and fun.

Anyhow, tomorrow I hope my car gets fixed. I came home and found an email from Ed… looks like he thought I was coming in today. Hmm… hope he’s able to do it tomorrow, the day I had thought we scheduled the repair to take place. I’ll call him in the morning and see. Hope so, though, my car’s burning gas like crazy with that O2 sensor unplugged, and I’m worried the catalytic converter will melt if I go another week.