Courtesy of one of the coolest websites ever, InternetBumperStickers (and I don’t say that just because they listed me in their sticky sites a long time ago), I found a few more to add to the Fair Notice Advisories list of shirts I should probably wear on dates with new people. (Or I suppose I could just refer them to this blog…but isn’t that too easy?)

I’m not a founding member of this society, but I play one on the Internet:

And of course, the all-purpose warning:

(Oh yeah, and congratulate me on my 700th blog entry. Or berate me for spending too much time at the keyboard. Whichever.)

Let’s walk down memory lane. Just over a year ago, my youngest had to have expensive dental work, which cost a metric butt-ton of cash even after the insurance paid for part of it.

My beloved Geoffrey lost a couple of fillings recently. My beloved Geoffrey doesn’t have dental insurance. Today he was informed that the estimate on his urgently-needed dental work (a root canal & crown) will hit the 4-figure mark. Hmm, maybe I should consider dentistry in my career options; while it’s not as sexy a concept as “highwayman”, it clearly amounts to the same thing.

[pause whilst I run through every swear word I know, invent a few new ones, and chew a little glass just for good measure…and never mind about the very rude & evil thoughts that run parallel to the swearing]

And now that my train-of-thought resembles something vaguely rational, I’m going to explore all the options before I blow a gasket. (I was going to make a joke about financing this dental thievery through “having a choice between selling one of my kids to the white slave trade or eating tuna casserole for months on end” but isn’t that just tasteless? You bet it is. See, that’s why I spared my dear readers - all 6 of you - because I’m just that sensitive & caring.)

I got my youngest, Anxiety, an .mp3 player for Yule. Of course the stores were all sold out of iPods, so I went ahead and got a Sony Walkman Bean, which is supposed to have 512MB of storage, and according to the label, that means it can hold 345 songs (and in small print, it says “calculated based on 4 minutes per song in ATRAC3plus @ 48 kbps”).

First of all, we filled up her storage with 126 songs, so obviously there’s a file size discrepancy here. I’m sure it’s some sort of technical thing about the .mp3 files on our computer being a lot larger than the calculation they used. Second, the Sony interface - SonicStage - on the computer, that you have to use to put files on the player, is crap. It’s not user-friendly, it only sorts by album names (hello, we don’t have album names on a lot of these .mp3 files!), and it’s excrutiatingly slow. I can probably load at least 5 times as many files onto my iPod mini with the iTunes program in the same time it takes to load this Sony Bean with the SonicStage program…and the iTunes program automatically skips duplicate files which are already on your iPod if you tell it to load your entire library of songs. The Sony program & player doesn’t, so make damned sure you aren’t filling up the limited space with duplicate songs you already loaded.

And to put the icing on the cake, if you try to go to the Sony website, but you aren’t using Internet Exploder, you get a webpage that says, “We appreciate your interest in the Connect music store, but our store currently only works with Internet Explorer 5.5 and above. You don’t seem to be using that particular browser at the moment, so, unfortunately, we’ll have to part ways until we support the browser you’re currently using or you upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer.” Isn’t that just fuq’ing lovely?! (Is Sony owned by Microsoft?)

I think this particular product is only useful if you don’t mind taking the ridiculous amount of time to load it completely with a batch of songs that you will never, ever change. It’s taken me 3 hours to do this much. This was less fun and more time-consuming than when Anxiety was 2 and I had to put together the 213 pink-and-white plastic parts for the 3-story, nearly 5-foot tall Barbie Dream Townhouse with working elevator that her grandmother gave her.

If I buy another .mp3 player again in the future, it might not necessarily be another iPod, but it sure as hell won’t be another Sony.

Once again, I am caving into the consumerism frenzy, and shopping on December 24th. Clearly I am a great big dork. *sigh* But a well-meaning dork who wants to at least attempt to get people pressies they will like.

Maybe next year I will have my holiday shopping done by December 10th, or some such ludicrously-early date…but I fear I will suffer the late-shopping curse of the holidays every year until I fully embrace my Inner Grinch and cancel Christmas altogether in my household. Especially since Xmas 2006 falls on a MONDAY, and I already hate those with a burning passion!

Most people know I’m something of a grinch when it comes to the Xmas holiday. That’s why (even though I detest Seinfeld) I think Festivus is such a fantastic idea. Besides, any celebration that includes “Airing of Grievances” is pretty cool.

(I won’t be airing any grievances publicly this year. If you know me in person & want me to air any grievances, feel free to thwap me upside the head with a fruitcake.)

A really cute vaguely punk-rock girl named Katie lives two doors down from us. She’s fun, and just a few years older than Angst, so of course Katie’s apartment is where Angst hangs out when she’s not home or next door. The other day, Angst was telling me how cool Katie is, because she made a Christmas tree angel out of beer cans. I laughed, and said I’d like to have one of those. I was mostly joking.

The next day, Katie presented me with this:

Ohmigawd, isn’t that the cutest thing ever?! Yes, those are little wings on the back, and isn’t the halo darling?!

I laughed myself silly, and giggle whenever I think of it, and definitely have to keep it for future Yule trees. Maybe for my Irish friends, Katie could make them out of Guinness cans!

The longest night of the year! Best wishes to all, and have a…

And a…

And don’t forget to tell your uptight neighbors that…

*giggle*

Unless something interesting happens between now & then, my last day at SplatCo will be on Friday. In recognition of how corporate America can be a bad thing (not necessarily…but all too often), Molly sent me this delightful goody, which did indeed strike me as being frightfully true —

The tribal wisdom of the Lakota Sioux, passed on from generation to generation, says: “When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.”

However, in government, education, and in corporate America, more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
4. Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses.
5. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
6. Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired.
7. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
8. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
9. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase dead horse’s performance.
10. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance.
11. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, costs less, has lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do other horses.
12. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.

And of course….

13. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

Sure, this list has a couple of dated reference, but the rest of it is funny enough to make up for it. My personal favorite is number 8. Totally.

14> O Little Town of Birmingham

13> I Don’t Fear What You Fear

12> Oh, Krispy Kreme

11> Angels I Have Heard While High

10> Grandma Got Run Over By a Train, Dear

9> Oh Come *On*, All Ye Faithful!

8> Silent Night. Total F**king Silence.

7> Hark! The Victoria’s Secret Angels Jiggle

6> We Kiss You a Mahir Christmas

5> Livin’ La Vida Loca — not that it has anything to do with atheism, but that Ricky Martin is HOT!

4> Whose Kid is This?

3> O Stoli Night

2> Amway — I’m a Manager

1> Got Breasts, Ye Merry Gentlemen?

Four years ago today, I started journalling online with my original Note Of The Day journal, over at Diary-X. When I realized that, a couple of thoughts sprung to mind. First, four years is a lot longer than I usually think it is. And second, I’m so very much happier now than I was then!

Snow hit us today for the first time this season. It usually doesn’t snow in Portland, as the city is more-or-less in a valley, much of the city is at sea level (the elevation at my house is perhaps a few hundred feet, and the highest elevation in city limits is well under 2,000 feet), and the Willamette River cuts right through downtown. We have the Cascade mountains on the east and the Coast Range mountains on the west.

Not that we got a whole lot of snow, by any means! It started this morning with freezing rain, then driving sleet, then a gentle powder snow, and currently (mid-afternoon) we’re just starting to see some nice big fat flakes. (I really hope it sticks, since if it does, they might close my work building and give everyone a day off with pay!) Here’s a picture I took at 3 pm: