I’m watching ER, packing for the trip. I’ll leave for Vegas tomorrow afternoon, meet up with Lon and Bill, and check in to the Boardwalk for four nights. I’ve barely planned for this thing, but it should be fun. I still feel slightly sick, but much better than yesterday. I hope another gallon of juice and twelve hours of sleep will get me closer to better.

I bought my birthday present to myself at B&H photo, a new Sony camcorder. This will replace the old Hi-8 I got six years ago, the one that I recently broke. It is the TRV-240, and it records in Digital8. This is the same format as DV or Mini-DV, but it stores the digital data on a standard Hi-8 cassette. This means it is bigger than the palm-sized camcorders (it is almost exactly the size of my old one) but it also means it will play my old Hi-8 tapes. Camcorders have improved quite a bit in the last six years; this one has a cool flip-out LCD screen, and a night-vision feature, plus a million other bells and whistles I will probably never figure out. Most of all, it has a firewire port on it, so I will be able to easily hustle the movies in and out of my computer.

I’ve spent the last two nights watching a lot of old movies, and they really remind me of Seattle. It’s very strange, and it makes me wish I taped more stuff from New York and Bloomington. It’s so cool to have a solid record of a timeframe, to see a room the way it was, to hear the sounds and see the traffic and actually look at that period. I really need to take more video, and starting with this trip, I will.

Not much else here. I need to pack now, and get ready to roll. Wish me luck!

I stayed home from work today because I felt sick on Monday and couldn’t get out of bed this morning. I ended up sleeping from about 10

at night to about 5 this afternoon. I kept waking up every hour or so to drink some juice or water and try to think about a shower and some food, but then I would go back to bed. I feel a bit better now, and I will go to work tomorrow, but I have this horrible feeling in my throat, and I really don’t want to be sick at the end of the week when I travel. But I always seem to get sick right before I fly, which always sucks.

The proofs for the book came back this afternoon, and I looked through them tonight. Everything seems cool, and I approved them, so it will take a few more weeks and then people will be able to place orders. It’s great to have the proofs, but I haven’t been able to think about it too much because of the mental haze from the cold.

Not much else is up, except that I’ve had some truly bizarre dreams while I was asleep. I’m going to bed in a few minutes, so I look forward to more of that. Maybe I will be able to write some of them down, use them in a book, something like that.

The apartment is still a bit too hot, but it’s a nice oasis from the weather outside. With temperatures at about 30 degrees and winds in the 20-30 MPH range pulling that down a dozen or so notches, it’s not the kind of weather to lounge around in. I went out for a while today, and endured the biting cold for a few hours, and it felt good to get out and do some shopping, but it felt better to return to a nice warm apartment with an armful of stuff I just bought.

Yesterday, I went to a screening of Night of the Living Dead at AMMI with my friend Julie. It was extra-cool because George Romero himself was there, and did a Q/A session after the film. First, it was cool to see the film on a big screen, with a sold-out audience. People laughed at a lot of the corny lines, and clapped for some of the more over-the-top stuff. Romero came out, and he was pretty cool. He reminded me of Bukowski in some ways, the tone in his voice or his articulation. He talked about Tom Savini’s craziness, the possibility of a fourth zombie movie, the fact that he was a director on Resident Evil but was fired after ten months, and a lot of other stuff. A bunch of suck-up people asked obvious questions and complimented him on obscure films that nobody’s seen, and that’s always a pain in the ass. Overall, it was a very cool screening, and the only bad part was that when I took out my camera to get some pictures, the damn batteries were dead. Oh well.

I spent part of today trying to hunt down these camera batteries. They are a lithium battery the size of two AA batteries, and I can’t just pick them up at the corner bodega. I ended up going to three different stores before I snagged two sets of batteries at a Staples. I also went to a Barnes and Noble and picked up some new travel books, and this totally fucked up Air Force survival manual. It was like $12 and is about 600 pages of information on how to skin rabbits and build shelters and what plants are edible, and tons of other stuff. It’s a very interesting read, the kind of thing I can open to a random page a thousand times over and still not get enough. It’s also the kind of book that makes me think I should be in the deep woods somwehere, digging a hole in the ground and covering it with branches while my campfire roars.

Not much else. I am watching this TV movie about JFK Jr. with some sort of sick fascination. It’s interesting, although I never really followed what happened with John John and I don’t really have an accurate mental timeline on the whole thing. I do remember when he died, because I was in DC visiting Larry, and a lot of people there were all bent out of shape and leaving flowers at the Kennedy grave. It’s an okay show, but not incredible.

I can’t believe I will be in Vegas on Friday. I better start getting my crap together for the trip…

My mom moved recently (for reasons I don’t really want to get into) and told my sisters to basically get any of their shit that was around her house a month or so ago. I’d already been through this in 1997 when my mom was preparing to rent out and ultimately sell the house where we grew up, and I’m pretty sure I even wrote about that experience here. Basically, at that point, I thought it was last call and I got what I thought were the last of my mementos, old books, and keepsakes from the piles of old stuff in the basement. Well, I was wrong, and my sister found amidst a bunch of garbage a rather interesting little item that she sent to me, and it arrived today.

The item in question is my baby book. I don’t know if this is a unique tradition to the Catholics or the people in the Midwest or particularly Better-Homes-and-Gardens-type parents, and I’m interested to hear if anyone else has one of these. Basically, it is a pre-printed scrapbook with various pages dedicated to clippings, photos, and tons of statistical information that new mothers love to gather on their baby, like when they first sat up, when they first held their bottle, when they first asked if Alan Greenspan is actually the head of a tribunal Masonic government that secretly runs the entire world via the monetary system, and so on. Mothers then write down all of these factoids and save birthday cards and kindergarden grades and locks of hair and so on. In a sense, it’s almost like a throwback to the entire blog concept, except it’s not on the web, and it’s not full of ads for vitamins.

So I guess my mom bought one of these books about 32 years ago, and I completely forgot about it. I do remember as a child that this book hid away in the buffet in the kitchen, along with commemorative candles from baptisms and bibles given to us at first communion and real silver silverware that never saw the light of day. My book was very late 60s looking, although I was born in 1971. I seem to remember Monica’s book being much more Gerald Ford-esque 1970s, and I don’t even remember Angie having a baby book. Angie was the Polaroid child; my parents had a crappy 126-camera that took slide film, which means there are about a dozen photos of me before the age of four. Monica was born when the 110 camera was the shit, and there are a fair number of shots of her in the family album. When Angie came around in 1976, my dad’s new toy was the Polaroid, and we have dozens and dozens of photos of Angie doing about everything. I think this novelty replaced the novelty of the baby book in the same way that email has replaced the novelty of writing a letter and sending it snail mail, so Angie’s childhood is in a sense much more documented, but it’s a much different experience. And now that everyone has a video camera the size of a book of matches, I doubt anyone but the most dedicated mother is still using the baby book concept. And I’m sure most of them have gone to the web.

Anyway, the book showed up today, and it smells like the inside of that buffet drawer, and like our old house in Michigan. The first thing I found that amazed me was… my own receipt! The bill from the hospital was in there; the Grand Forks Air Force hospital charged Sgt. and Mrs. Konrath a grand total of $10.50 for a seven-day stay, including food. Also included are my hospital tags that went around my foot (with a US military stamp on them); the slip that was on my hospital crib; the front page of the Grand Forks Herald from January 20, 1971; the newspaper announcement of my birth; some photos showing me and my mom and dad in the wood-grained trailer where they lived when my dad was in the service; and a chunk of my hair from my first haircut.

Aside from the initial birth stuff, there’s not a lot that would be interesting to anyone but me, unless you find the fact that I walked when I was nine and a half months old, and I used to call making the bed “changing the bed” when I was a kid. It’s still a very neat little discovery for someone who is as nostalgic about the past as I am. I’m glad my sister was able to liberate it for me.

Not much else is up, except that I’m busy as hell at work, and that makes the day go by faster, but it makes the time off seem much shorter. The Rite-Aid by my house can’t get a god damned thing done right, and every single prescription I bring there gets fucked up somehow and they either don’t have the stuff or they forget to fill it or the insurance company needs some super-secret approval and they don’t fucking call me and ask for it, even though they ask me every single time what my phone number is in case they have questions. The fact that I run into stuff like this in pretty much every avenue of my life makes me wonder how things ever happen at all. I wish this generation had a saying like “they can send a man to the moon, but they can’t _______.” But the thing is - they can’t send a man to the moon anymore. They can’t even install a public toilet in the largest city in the country, and I pay them $30,000 a year in taxes. You can buy a toilet at Home Depot for $100. Thiry grand times everyone else who has ever had to take a piss buys a lot of toilets.

Okay, gotta go see if Ray actually bought a region-free DVD player or not.

I just got a copy of my phone bill dated December 1, which is due on December 26. (Yes, last December 26.) I don’t know if this was a screwup with Verizon (very probable) or a screwup with my online bill payer situation, which recently was merged or bought or otherwise shifted over, resulting in massive disruptions in .05% of their customers, which means me. Hopefully I will get another bill shortly that is double, and I’ll pay it, and in the meantime, my phone won’t get disconnected. That’s my hope, anyway.

This is one of the kinds of situations that throws me for enough of a loop that I spend days wondering, “why does anyone ever pay their bills?” and I start wondering about grandiose systems to replace all international monetary functionality, and then I realize that the people I work with are just trying to upgrade a tiny, tiny, tiny facet of the banking world, and the amount of incredible bullshit involved with the infrastructure is tremendous. On one hand, I look at a bank (mostly when standing in line) and I think, “why can’t they replace all of this, and have it work for a fraction of the cost?” and on the other hand, I have no idea how trillions of dollars can flow through the system without catastrophe on a daily basis. It’s like when I’m washing dishes, and I think I’ve found a way to invent an entirely new dishwasher - no, an entirely new concept in dishes that is custom-engineered not only for comfort, but for maximized, automated washing and sterilization. Meanwhile, I can’t actually finish washing my own fucking dishes.

I’m still playing with this Ethernet adapter on the PlayStation 2. I still can’t get the Navy Seals game working. Tony Hawk 4 works great, although I can barely play it against others. I am slowly learning more about different tricks, but it’s complicated, and requires more manual dexterity than I can muster. But it’s an excellent game. I didn’t realize how good the PS/2 is until tonight, when I got Quake 3 going on my work machine. The graphics are very blocky and crappy-looking, compared to something like Medal of Honor. Maybe I don’t have them maximized fully, but they look very primitive to me. Quake is interesting, but playing games with a mouse and keyboard is very counter-intuitive to me, and ergonomically disastrous. Still, it’s fun to play networked with other people at work after hours.

Not much else. A lot of trouble sleeping, and I took Tylenol PM last night, so I was out of it all day today. I heard from my PSA at the book publisher, and I should have proofs in a few weeks. That could mean the proofs are done when I’m on vacation, but I told them to push back until I get back so I don’t have to try to download them over a modem or anything.

OK, gotta go play a bit more before bed…