My spam-box runneth over

My email has recently been flooded with messages warning me about this (ostensibly) sex video making the rounds online featuring me and some attractive gal. I have been warned that my mother, father, wife, girlfriend, pastor, neighbors, and mayor will disown and/or kill me if they ever see this video.

(I’ve been sweating bullets about this video all day.)

I have also been asked where I hid the camera, where I found this girl, and if I would be interested in Meg.a D I K.

These all (save the last) then include a YouTube-looking address with an actual URL that’s some spammy IP address. I was disappointed to learn that the YouTube URLs are fake.

If I were going to spam, I’d at least do it with some class.

The problem with Ikea (the store)

Ikea doesn’t respect its customers’ time. I’ve never been so pissed off as a result of visiting a store.

It usually takes a lot to piss me off.

The Ikea store experience, for those who have never been, is akin to that of a hedge maze. You wander around this predetermined path (helpfully marked with arrows) that twists and turns wildly; around the path are myriad sample setups of rooms filled with Ikea furniture. (There is practically nothing in the store that is not made by Ikea; even the batteries they sell by the checkout are Ikea-brand.) The store (really, the path) is divided into a handful of themes—kitchen, bedroom, etc. Most items are tagged with aisle and bin numbers; you write these down, and then pick your purchases up in the self-serve warehouse located just before checkout.

There are also a ton of people around you. I was surprised to see families gathering around fake kitchens as if they were in their own home… and secretly suspected that they didn’t even gather like that at home.

I’m sure the layout is great for the Bed, Bath and Beyond crowd, who have fun just wandering and poking around the store. But I wanted to buy a coffee table. I wanted to look at a side-by-side comparison of all the coffee tables they had, find one that fit my needs, grab it and go.

Im-fucking-possible.

Moving from entrance to checkout involves following the entire preordained path; there are a handful of “shortcut” paths, but they’re poorly marked and utterly useless unless you already know the store’s layout. While you might find a cluster of coffee tables (say) somewhere, other coffee tables can only be found in one of of the demo setups. You can’t know that you’ve seen every possible coffee table until you’ve looked through the entire living room area. Other items that don’t fit cleanly into one of Ikea’s themes—like bookcases—are worse; you can’t know that you’ve seen all the bookcases until you’ve looked through the entire store.

If the Ikea store was a person, I’d punch him(/her) in the face. Hard. The furniture’s a decent value, but I’m not sure it’s worth the aggravation of the store.

Not quite myself

Today I was an ADHD monkey on crack. This bizarre change in my demeanor was fortuitous, as it allowed me to handle an unexpected surge of work with aplomb.

I’ve spent the last month feeling rather horribly out-of-sorts: lethargic, exhausted by even the most minor physical labor, irritable, on and on. (Pop quiz: how long does Brent have to feel sick before he actually goes to see a doctor? beats me) Today shouldn’t have been any different; I can tell that I’m still sick.

Yet today I’m… affected. I’m normally rather calm and slow-moving; when I’m nervous I’ll bite at my fingertips. Today I’m hyper and jittery—and gnawing on my lower lip.

Also: my lower lip can’t take anywhere near as much abuse as my fingers can. Yowch.

Brent vs. Nature 2: Nature’s Revenge

I’ve been lucky inasmuch as my house hasn’t been invaded by insects. My folks’ house featured a good number of silverfish, which wasn’t much fun back in the day—I don’t like bugs, but I don’t like killing them, either.

I haven’t been lucky in that my house has become a battleground between me and motherfucking spiders. Not tiny or wispy ones—behemoths. Horrifyingly large, mean-looking spiders. I can’t let them live, because they would surely kill me in my sleep, but the process of killing them costs me years off my life. (None have been quite as large as this one, but they’ve been ~75% of his size.)

I’ve been encountering one every other day, on average. That would be a pleasant rate to encounter slimes in the Alefgard countryside, but this is more like having surprise encounters with a Red Dragon with every step I take. It’s been bad enough that I’ve begun classifying these invaders as angels… though my poor memory has prevented me from both numbering them properly (since I don’t recall how many I’ve faced) and referring to them by name (since I could never remember the angels’ names, anyway).

Who needs sleep?

I’m never gonna get it. Especially since I keep having bright ideas like “let’s tweak the sidebar layout a bit, so the links aren’t just hanging in space.”

And then it was “well, I’ve been meaning to put new pictures into the sidebar rotation for a year. Might as well do that, too.”

And then it was 3:45 am.

Catching up

I’ve been behind in just about everything for the last, oh, four months now. Time- and money-critical tasks got done (e.g. paying the rent), but that was about it.

So how have I decided to turn my sorry ship around? By applying a modification of the broken windows theory. An incredibly stupid modification.

See, my anime blog RSS feeds are one of the things I’ve neglected for-fricking-ever. The dumb things spiraled out of control months ago, and have been silently growing larger and more imposing in one of the many dark, neglected corners of my life.

So yesterday I started cleaning those suckers out. I have not declared RSS bankruptcy, instead opting for catching up through hard work and guts. Well, as much hard work and guts as is required to sit on my ass and read up on Gurren Lagann. (Actually, the hard part is keeping all the names and stories straight. Oh, and continuing to focus my eyes.)

Results so far? I now have some 300 posts to wade through, down from over 1,000 at the start. Woo.

Future targets? My finances (I caught up on them once, only to ignore them for another couple months), and taking out a nasty, nasty bunch of blackberry plants that intend to make my home their home. Also about ten other things that I can’t think of at the moment, but that still weigh my psyche down.

*sob*

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