Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Last Weekend

Last weekend I

-Went to the DC Auto Show
-Had to take a shit on the side of I-270, where I found what I thought were the remains of a human elbow
-Saw Pan's Labyrinth and was surprised to find the movie is in Spanish with English subtitles.

Thursday, January 18, 2007

Chilly

Yesterday morning I woke up to find the house at a crisp 55 degrees. Worried that my furnace was broken, I fooled around with the thermostat a little bit (turning it on and off basically), and the furnace fired right up, no problem. I came home last night after work and the house was a normal 70-ish degrees. Well, this morning we are back down to 58 degrees at the moment and no matter what I do to the thermostat, the furnace refuses to activate. There's a little red light on the furnace I've never noticed before which blinks red whenever I have the thermostat set to heat. Its blinking now. hmph.

Anyway, I've made the necessary call to a 24-hour furnace shop and they said they'll be sending somebody by this morning. Wish me luck. In a way this is kinda convenient because I have a new couch scheduled for delivery this morning as well. it will be busy around the old Racegate today.

Saturday, January 13, 2007

Thesis update

So fucking close. My thesis has been done and ready for submission since January 1, but I haven't submitted it yet for a variety of trivial reasons. First, one of my examiners seems to have lost some paperwork, which had to be re-filed and only just got re-filed yesterday. I was on the verge of shipping my thesis off but I smartly called the graduate school just to double-check that I had all the materials I needed. It turns out I can't pay the filing fee by credit card, only cash or check, and if by check, then it has to be from an institution that can issue payment in British pounds. So I figured out a way to get that done, but I won't have that check in my hand until Tuesday. So on Tuesday, barring any other barriers, I will ship off my thesis, schedule a date for my viva voce (latin term for a thesis defense), fly to England on that date (before March 31), and then if I successfully defend my thesis, I will file some more papers, and get a PhD diploma shortly thereafter.

Wish me luck.

Monday, January 08, 2007

Pr0n

I went to the local dog park Sunday morning with Ollie, so that he could get some play time in and not feel so neglected later in the day when I would be planted to the couch watching the wild-card playoff games. The dog park is located off of a fairly rural road and along the way, I spotted a magazine that had been discarded. I only had to glimpse its glossy, full-color pages to recognize it as some kind of porn mag. Amused, I pulled over and got out my car to pick it up. As I approached I realized I was right about it being a porn mag. As a nice bonus, it turned out to be one of the more raunchy brands, the current issue of "High Society".

My first thought was "Score!" And then I immediately realized how silly this was considering I could just buy my very own new copy whenever I liked. I was still pretty amused at this whole event though. It recalled those special few times when I found some porno mags discarded in the woods when I was 16 or 15. Such a find was like gold and those instincts are hard to break. Being reminded of those days made me feel a little bit like I was 15 or 16 again, so what the hell, I picked the mag up.

It was in decent shape, it hadn't been rained on and had only just been rolled up so the pages weren't even bent or creased. I imagine that some teenagers had bought it the previous night (or stolen it from their Dad's stash) while they were out cruising, or maybe on their way to a party or something. At some point one of them decided to throw the mag out the window for some reason (oh the shame!). A quick flip through the pages impressed me. It is easy to forget that the free internet porn (NSFW!) I am most familiar with *ahem* is much lower quality stuff than what you can buy.

Anyway, Later that night during the Giants - Eagles game I remembered that I had this copy of "High Society", so I mentioned it to Chris. "Hey honey, guess what I what I found on the side of the road on the way to the dog park?"

I don't need to finish the rest of that conversation. Let's just leave it at this - "Score!"