My weekend, in no kinda condensed large-print format for my elderly readers. Sorry, grampa.
Saturday, I got up and walked in a sore-ish manner. Since painful miles can be multiplied tenfold, I did 70! In an hour and a half! Yes. Somewhere in DMZ between Calhoun and Harriet, my dad called with his demands. He’d be at my place soon for concrete. I had a lot to look forward to. I spent the next couple hours mixing concrete and fixing my front steps with a tiny trowel. We do good work, though. You’d think two perfectionists would never actually finish anything, but we did. While patching a step, I managed to lean over and bang my collarbone into the metal railing. That… hurts. A lot. And impedes your ability to breathe. Yuck. I rushed off to lunch with Homie. We sat outside because the weather was Saturday-perfect. Then we wandered down Lyndale to a church basement to see the first Fringe Fest show, When Worlds Collide: Talking Dirty at Bobby and Steve’s Autoworld. We sat on couches. We laughed. The stories were good, but not very focused. Then we headed to the second show further on down Lyndale, This Love Train is Unstoppable and I Am the Conductor, which was completely awesome, and made me really miss Spalding Gray. Part of the reason I liked it so much was just relating so well: he talked about going to the Uptown Planned Parenthood and taking the bus to Southdale. Hometown pride. Which is maybe how we ended up discussing our big plans for Mpls-love and promotion later that night. Hmm. Anyway. We mosied further on down Lyndale Avenue to the Luce block party. It was kind of a drag, since you’re asking. Everyone there was so occupied with being cooler than everyone else, that nobody actually interacted at all. Also, there were several guys there who were completely naked except for diapers. Shiver. The band was good, but not good enough to make us want to drown ourselves in hipster kids. We went to dinner at Suzi’s instead. I know what you’re thinking, so shut the hell up. Afterwards, we went to the opening at Yuri’s gallery. The two biggest highlights, in order of importance: 1) seeing Yuri, and 2) seeing Venus. She was sporting a black vinyl corset, ass-revealing fishnets, and peacock feathers sprouting three feet long in four directions out of her hairdo. Dang. We were too early to find Nye’s enjoyable, so we wandered around St. Anthony and decided it’s the most bizarre place in Minneapolis. Where the hell do those people come from? Are they all tourists? Or just from Chaska? I felt like I was out of town. We were uncomfortable. And then… Nye’s kinda sucked. I told Billy at the door that I hadn’t been there in a while. He said, ‘Oh, it was about three weeks ago last time.’ Holy shit! That’s weird. Downstairs, there was some suburban high school reunion. The girls in the bathroom were just like any other girls I encounter in bar bathrooms, meaning I have to exercise massive restraint in not slapping the shit out of them. Thankfully, I only act on about .05% of my violent impulses. Today was the open house, from noon until four. With the open house, you have an even greater obligation to make your house look like a place where nobody really lives, because humans cannot occupy a place without disturbing the objects within in some way. Seriously, I found myself vacuuming in a backwards-fashion so as not to set foot on that section of carpet again. I spent the morning mightily pissed at realizing the volume of things left undone by other occupants of the residence, which required a lot more work than expected. But I did it, and then I made things smell really good, April and I swept almost the entire neighborhood with a giant pushbroom, I opened all the windows, I put out orange lilies in a huge glass vase on a printed-silk wrap on the dining room table. You know, shit real people don’t do. I shoved the cats in carriers and sustained a few minor injuries. Since there are three cats and two carriers, the younger, feistier, faster ones were caged, and Chloe got to ride shotgun. Apparently, she doesn’t get the concept. She spent most of the ride on my lap, which meant I had to pull my seat back from the steering wheel. She’s quite a substantial animal. The other part of the drive, she tried to figure out how to stand on the dashboard. Denied. Rounding an exit-ramp, my car told me it was out of gas in a chugging manner. I switched off the air and coasted a good portion of the next mile to the exit. Chico told me he had 16 miles left in the tank, but that’s only when driving in a flat-surface fashion. You go around curves, and you’re screwed. At the parents’ house, I deployed the animals and hung out for a while. Stephanie and I went to a movie, if by ‘went to a movie’ you mean ‘decided to shop at Target instead, and go to a movie tomorrow because I was too damn tired.’ At ten to four, I started stalking my cats, to lure them back to their cages. They’re way too smart for me. 20 minutes later, my arms and legs were scratched to hell, and my (thankfully crappy) tshirt had holes in it. I shoved the carriers and the fat cat back in the car and drove home with blood trickling down the back of my calf. When I got home, I searched for evidence of strangers en la casa. I found a million huge footprints in the carpet, and the bathroom cabinets were slightly ajar. By this evidence, I deduce that the abominable snowman is in the market for a new home, and he’s nosy as all hell. I figured people would look in closets and such, but cabinets and drawers? WTF? I feel violated. (Did I mention my house has its own full-color brochure? Right on. Oh, here’s the listing, in case I didn’t already show you 20 times. Don’t worry, we accept all major credit cards. Go ahead and order it online.) So tonight I’m hanging out and writing this and knitting. I’ve gotten a lot of knitting done lately, due to being too worn out at the end of the day to go out. Don’t worry, I’ll be back to party girl once I move. In the meantime, I finished the hoodie from Vogue Knits. It’s awaiting my mom’s help sewing in a zipper, because there’s some disconnect in my brain when it comes to being able to run a sewing machine. And apparently it’s really tricky. However! I’m very excited about this project, because it came out great and it fits me absolutely perfectly. That’s hugely satisfying. Also, I finished knitting camo sock #2, so I have an official pair. The thing about sock knitting is it’s stupid. Who wants to wear knit socks? They’re… blech. But I did it because if you can do all that heel-turning and grafting and knitting in the round with four tiny needles, you can handle pretty much anything. And did I mention they’re camo? Yeah. I’ll take pictures of my projects one of these days, because they could be your new pornography. Just you wait. So then I went back to my other project (since one must have two concurrent projects at any given time, in case one gets bored and/or frustrated), this sweater I’m making for a friend. After re-measuring about 200 times, I realized that it was going to end up probably twice the intended size, and all my work was for naught. Since I’m the girl with the plan, however, I pulled out the old work up to a loose end, then started the new sweater with the yarn I’m unraveling from the old one as I go. So sweater v2.0 is rising phoenix-like from the ashes of sweater v1.0. Smart, no? The thing about knitting is it gives you way too much time to think of shit like that. Also in my spare minutes the past few days, I’ve been trying to figure out WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH MY COMPUTER. This hurts me on the inside, not being able to figure it out. I was paid to do this kind of fixin’ for a few years, and I was damn good at it, too. So this one might be the end of me. What happens is a few minutes after I start it up (I don’t ever shut it down, actually, unless forced to against my will), the fan comes on and the drive starts spinning. And that’s what it does until I get pissed and turn it off again. It’s slow as all fuck, just spinning cycles like that. And of course that means it’s doing something, I just don’t know what. I’ve done the obvious: virus and spyware checks. I’ve shut down all unnecessary services, down to the few which will allow me to turn on the computer and get online. I’ve shut down antivirus, my backup routines, iPod services, all spare networking services, I’ve reinstalled service packs, I’ve checked for any available updates, I’ve rebuilt my spam filter twice, I’ve scrutinized running processes for days, and I’ve Googled the shit out of this issue. I’ve seen a million suggestions, but not one of them was my fix. I’m down to such a bare minimum I might as well be typing to you on an Amiga, for all the usefulness it offers me. Anyway, this leads me to believe I have perhaps some dying hardware. It’s flooding the system with interrupt requests or something. It’s all I can think of. So the processor keeps heating and the fans keep running and one of these days Buddha’s gonna erupt into flames and die. And there’s no phoenix action here, my friends. I am well and truly screwed, and my geek-girl pride has been dealt a blow. I already have my new laptop picked out from Dell. I just have to click that button, I guess. Sigh. Annnnd… Sunday’s fun fact: I have a mirror project fetish. Hot. See you on the flip side.Jenni