It’s a beautiful day out and I wish I wasn’t at work. But, I just have today and Monday, and then I go on vacation. Also, we had pizza for lunch here at work, and ate out on the 10th floor terrace. The sky’s very blue, really clear, and it’s a little windy, so some boats were out on Lake Union. I hope it keeps up until 5.
I found out that Queensryche will be playing here June 21, and in Portland on June 20. I’ll have to find out if the fan club has any special deal or anything like that before I buy tickets. I’d like to go to both shows, but I might only be able to afford one.
It feels weird that I won’t be leaving tonight for Longview or waiting for Karena to come up from Longview. I’m not sure what I’ll be doing tonight, but I’ll probably just work on the video or maybe watch some videos, and get the place cleaned up. If I’m staying in this apartment for another year and a half, I need to think about how things are arranged and stored. I’m tearing apart my closets right now, throwing things out and rearranging things so I’ll have more space. If I rearrange all of the disorder, it will give me more room to live and make it feel like a new place. So, there’s a lot of cleaning projects going on before the vacation.
I’ve been reading two books lately – _Your Money or Your Life_ and _Living Cheaply With Style_. They are both good books and get me into the mindset of spending less money. If I read video magazines or catalogs, I start thinking about how I need to spend money and buy new equipment or get involved in some giant project that involves a major investment in new gear. But these two books are slowly teaching me some things about saving money. This might just be a fad and I might just give it up and start blowing money in a week or a month. But I’d like to eventually pay off the bills and live somewhat frugally. I used to exercise some of these principles when I lived in Bloomington, just to survive. I didn’t always have the money to eat fast food every day, and I did more cooking back then. But, I also mismanaged money even more back then. I need to combine the two, and start to get money in the bank.
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I want to find that Boeing surplus store in Renton or Federal Way or whereever it is, and buy a bunch of weird shit and put it together to look very Geiger-like in my living room. I wish I knew how to weld, and owned a torch. I could build facing plates for my bed and appliances, and make them look like a crashed jet. Too bad I’ve got such a hangup about steel and the touch of metal – it makes every filling my my mouth try to jump out of my face or something. If I could eat with plastic silverware every day for the rest of my life, I’d be a happy man.
I’ve seriously been thinking some surplus military radio gear would be almost perfect in my apartment. I should explain, since this is a new journal. I live on the 5th floor of a 5 floor building in downtownish Seattle. It’s technically called “pill hill”, the area between Pioneer Square and Capitol Hill, and it’s home to about a dozen hospitals. My deck overlooks James Street, which is 7 floors below me (2 garages), and The Thing They Didn’t Tell Me when I moved in was that about 400 ambulances come screaming up the hill every night, in addition to the helipad that’s just across the way at Harborview hospital. So when summer rolls around and all of the drunken rednecks who don’t wear helmets wreck their motorcycles, waves of helicopters come rolling in to attempt to save part of the pathetic people’s spines, maybe so they can still wrap their hand around a Budweiser bottle without the help of a nurse. Anyway, if I had a good enough radio, I could listen to these emergency radio bands and maybe even broadcast on them.
On a vaguely related note, I was changing channels after watching ER last night, and at about midnight on the public access channel, they were showing all-out porno. Not that I’m against that or anything, but it was pretty surprising to see it on regular cable. It was some sort of artistic statement about having sex in public or something. It wasn’t just a couple people in swimsuits under a blanket or something, though. It was full-out, penetrative, no-holds-barred stuff. I guess they will let you play anything on public access cable.