Author: jkonrath

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There has to be a better way to wash dishes

Jesus, I hate washing dishes. There has to be a better way. And don’t tell me “a dishwasher,” because I had a dishwasher in Seattle, and I had to wait until I had a full sink of dishes before I ran it, and then it ran like as loud as a god damned Harley with straight pipes for an hour and a half straight, and I spent just as long rinsing off the dishes before I put them in, and then half the time I had to rinse them before I put them away because they reeked of lemony fresh calgon scent or whatever the shit was, and all of that water and energy was wasted and it would have been easier just to hand wash the god damned things. What I’m looking for is a machine where you just put the plates right in it, and it blasts away everything, like the kind of machine you use to take the paint off of car parts before you chrome or paint them.

Okay, here’s the deal. And don’t screw with me about this, because for six weeks, I washed the god damned dishes at Columbo’s in Elkhart, and I spent about a semester cleaning the shit off of dishes at the Collins lunchroom when I was in college. So I’m a professional here. Anyway, I only have one sink. And the usual procedure is that I stack up plates in the sink until I have completely run out of plates. At that point, because I have like 16 or 20 sets of Faberware, the stack of plates has like the Swamp Thing growing on it, with all sorts of slime trails and other growths that a god damned biologist could write a thesis on. Then I get out one of those little things with the sponge and the handle and the dish soap in the handle, and I wash like one or two plates when I get some delivery food, then throw them back on the pile when I get done eating. So it’s like a stack in computer programming jargon, which means the bottom plates are fused to each other like some sort of natural cement, like what some ancient Indian tribe would use to build a fort or a pyramid or something. Plus the stupid handle always leaks the soap all over the place between uses, so a bottle of Dawn washes like four plates total, and costs like $6.79. (I know it costs like a dollar out in Indiana at Kroger, but you have to realize that the stupid, tiny, piece of shit grocery stores here overcharge you on everything and only have the smallest size possible, and like no variety, so like out there you probably have 863 different flavors of Dawn with various antibacteria, antivirus, antigrease, antifood, anticarb, or whatever else, and we only have the old-school blue shit.) Also, the sponge tore off of the handle, and now I will have to buy a new handle and a new set of sponges, since there is no compatability between sponges and handles, because why would there be when we still have a little bit of room in landfills.

So here’s a system for washing dishes the old-school way. Sink A has the dirty dishes, with hot water and dish soap. Sink B is clean and is the “rinse” sink. Then there is a strainer, where you dry them. You soak and scrub the shit in A, then move it to B and queue up a bunch of stuff there. Then when A is done or B is full, you rinse off the items and put them in the strainer thing to dry. Easy enough, right? I used this method at the horrible Italian restaurant, and it worked fine (although sometimes on Saturday nights, me and the other guy John used to have contests to see who could go the longest without changing their water in sink A, because you’re continually adding new dishes to A, unlike your situation in a domestic environment, because unless you have a fuck of a lot of dishes, sink A is like a one-shot deal. Anyway, we’d go for hours, and sink A would look like the Exxon Valdez crashed in it, with oil slicks and chunks of pizza crust and pasta and cigarette butts and who knows what floating in it.)

Well, I DON’T HAVE TWO SINKS. So here is my system. Sink A: water, some dirty dishes, soap. Then a wash tub as sink B. I can stack stuff in there, but I can’t rinse into it, as it doesn’t have a sink or drain or whatever. So I stack everything in there that is cleaned but not rinsed. Then I take it all out, one at a time, and rinse it as I am overflowing sink A and water is going all over the floor and flooding my kitchen, unless I pull the plug and lower the water level and dilute the soap in A. So it works better with less shit in A, and all of those dishes stacked on the floor and the stove and the living room and whatever else. So I did this for a while, and it sort of worked, but I only got like three plates cleaned and then all of the bowls and silverware and stuff. Tomorrow, I will put away all of the shit, and then start over.

I bought a box of brandy cherries from the discount wholesaler store, which is right below where I work. They were horrific. They tasted like they were filled with kerosene. I ate one, and even the faint thought of it makes me want to go hurl chunks. I am never, ever eating another alcohol-based confection again in my life. I am also never drinking any hard liquor again in my life, as I overheard a completely stupid conversation today about the merits of hard liquor because of its lack of carbs. I realize I do not eat that healthy of a diet, but I am hoping to improve it to the point where in ten years, I will be fairly healthy at the same time that everyone who was preaching Atkins is on an organ donor wait list.

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Sadaam is back, and so am I

Sadaam is back, and so am I. I, however, feel a lot worse than he looks. I’m still trying to kick the last remains of whatever I caught from that flu shot, and a week in Indiana didn’t exactly help me shake it. I got back last night at about 8:00, and found that my phone and DSL service were tits-up, and I didn’t even have a dialtone. I suspected either that Verizon had randomly disconnected my service, or my stupid fucking landlord decided to snip some copper pairs in the basement and sell them on the black market or something. After a week of getting by with my Sidekick, I was looking forward to some real web browsing and email catchup, but no dice.

Verizon got a guy out to the house at about 10:00 this morning, and he had to go through the usual bullshit shuffle because out landlord doesn’t have a super (which is against the law) and the phone closet was locked. After a few hours, the repair guy got in there and determined the problem was in the CO, and the pair was fine at my place. He phoned it in, and within an hour or so, I had service again.

So about the trip… the whole thing was very subdued, and I didn’t really do a lot, so there is no trip report and there are no photos. I did see all of my family, see both of my sisters’ new houses, and hang out at Ray’s place. Elkhart in general hasn’t really changed much, at least in my view. Some stores are new, and some buildings have been built, but I had an incredible sense of deja vu for most of the trip. So much of the scenery reminded me of my time driving around Elkhart and South Bend in 1990, 1991. I had this incredible nostalgia, this feeling a step above depression but still a strong pull back into the past. I did not like the year of college I spent in that town, but I wished I was still in that timeframe, maybe so I still had the friends, the job, the old favorite restaurants and hangouts to return to. Being there without any of those things made it all seem like a huge daydream to me, and very unsatisfying.

I also had mixed feelings because everyone had houses, new houses with full basements and spare bedrooms and giant kitchens and lots of closets and driveways and garages, and here I am in a tiny one-bedroom apartment overrun with DVDs and books. When I see this, it makes me wish I could settle down into 2000 square feet and a decent mortgage. But there’s no way I’ll find that in New York for under a half a mil, and there’s no way I could move back to Elkhart. If I could keep my current salary, and keep my current DSL connection, and have a house, and find the perfect woman there, I would move back. But those are four things I don’t think will happen in Elkhart.

I read a big chunk of Summer Rain while I was gone and decided that while I still like the book, it would be a waste of time to try to correct or reissue it. I really need to write another new book, and it won’t be some straightforward, sappy, nostalgic thing. It needs to be Rumored to Exist times two. I don’t know beyond that what it will be, though.

Okay, it is almost 6:00 and I have not eaten all day, so either I need to stall a bit, or think about an early dinner…

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don’t ever get a flu shot

I was supposed to fly to South Bend this afternoon. Adding to the stress of this family visit was the fact that I’d been sick all fucking week due to the stupid flu shot. DON’T GET A FLU SHOT. EVER. Especially don’t get one if you have an immune system already deeply weakened by the fact that I drink a lot of Coke, don’t eat right, and don’t happen to be a marathon runner or mountain climber like everyone else in my office. I’m not going to lay out any kind of  conspiracy about the shots or anything, it’s just that the dead flu stuff got on top of me quickly, or maybe they just took out my defenses and I got infected by some other thing. Either way, I spent all week completely laid out by some kind of fast-acting and brutal flu or viral infection or something. Leaving the house and trying to breathe the air during my quick run to the subway made my chest feel like I was breathing pure kerosene. Sleep helped a lot, but you can only sleep so many hours a day, especially with the whole job thing. I went to a doctor to see if it was maybe some Chernobyl strep throat, but after a swab, he said it was viral. As of today, I’m slowly getting better, but it’s not done yet. I had to cancel a date on Friday which really, really pissed me off, and on Thursday I thought it would be even money that I’d have to cancel the whole trip and spend the week in bed.

So I was sick, and to add to that the fact that organizing anything with my family is like trying to organize a labor dispute between the Teamsters and the WTO or something, and every 7 seconds, I was getting another phone call from another random person wanting to know the obvious. And then, to spice up the whole thing even more, it started snowing.

First, let me say that New Yorkers are horrible when it comes to snow. Yesterday, the stuff was barely coming down, and the ground had the consistency of a Slurpee you left in your car for a few hours in July, and people are running to the grocery store to buy like ten loaves of bread and a few gallons of milk. Why do people buy so much bread and milk? How much do you go through in a weekend? Are they starting a bootleg french toast restaurant? You’d think these Atkins-obsessed health freaks would be buying power bars and backs of bacon or something. Anyway, the stuff was barely dusting down, and people were abandoning their Hummer H2s on Houston or something because they were “snowed in.” Anyway, all day people were giving me shit about how I would miss my flight, and I ignored them, or at least tried to.

I woke up this morning: flight cancelled. I spent about an hour on hold with Delta, hoping they wouldn’t pull some bullshit and say my ticket would not be reassignable and I’d have to pay $27,000 for a new ticket to leave within the next month. Finally, I got an agent, and she was nice enough to push me to a flight that left at 7:00 tonight. So I was happy, it didn’t cost anything, and I went back to bed.

So I woke up at about 2:00, and guess what? That flight got cancelled too. After another hour on hold, I ended up getting on the first flight back I could get, which is… MONDAY. So I get two days trimmed from the vacation, and we have to reschedule christmas, maybe to Wednesday. On the plus side, I get to hide in my apartment and have some time alone to get over this death sickness, and maybe if I feel better, I can reschedule the date for tomorrow.

BTW, the whole low-sodium new diet thing did not work out. It’s impossible to keep on any kind of diet when you’re sick and all you want to eat is soup and grilled cheese. I’ve been reading more about low sodium stuff, and it’s all very depressing. It’s amazing how so much stuff can have sodium in it, even if you don’t know it. I’ll worry more about this when I get back from this trip.

OK, now it’s time to relax…

[Also, please ignore my stupid advice and get a flu shot.]

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sodium, travel

The longer I don’t update, the less important it seems, and the more I think I have nothing going on that’s worty of an update. So I’ll randomly try to mention everything that’s going on.

First, I’m going back to Indiana on the 6th, for a week I’ll be flying straight into South Bend (well, via CVG) and staying with Ray the whole time. This is sort of the pre-emptive holiday visit, since I don’t like to fly during the blackout period and I wanted to get a frequent flier ticket. The original plan was to just go to Ray’s and sit around for a week, get caught up on various video games, and not much more. But I will also see the various family factions and I guess have christmas early. So I’ve had to do all of my shopping early, but I did it all on Amazon, so that’s not too bad. I have not thought about the trip at all, so I feel like I should be doing some detailed planning or scheduling, but I realize that it will all be thrown off anyway.

I am on a diet, I guess. I’m having various medical issues I don’t want to discuss here, but I’ve basically got to cut the shit and stop with the sugar, sodium, and fat. So I went to the grocery store today and bought $67 of food that might be healthier for me, provided I don’t eat it all in one sitting out of some sort of starvation kick. Shopping for low-sodium food is imporrible. Everything has a ludicrous amount of sodium. Even those hippy-trippy, east asian, vegan-macro-micro-whatever diets are a total salt bomb. If you have any wise ideas on low-sodium cuisine, get them to me, and fast, because my heart is about ready to explode. Also, I go to a grocery store that’s smaller than the deli section of a Kroger, so the aisles are barely wide enough to walk through, and it makes it hard to study the labels on various foods without getting kicked in the shins by a four-foot-tall Greek woman.

I’ve been very apathetic about the annotated Rumored or the rerelease of Summer Rain, both of which have sort of fallen by the wayside. I got a test print of the Rumored thing, but they messed up the spine and I have another round of hell to go through with them, and I really don’t see the point or feel like it right now. Maybe after the holidays. I have been vaguely been thinking about a new project, but just vaguely.

I just finished SOCOM II on the easy level. It wasn’t too bad, but the last level was actually a bummer. There were much harder levels before that one.

OK, I need to get out of here…

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TD

I got a voice mail from Simms last week, when I stepped away from the desk for a second. Tom Donohue died, he said. Tom was a really great guy who worked at a used CD store back in Bloomington, and eventually opened up his own place. Most used CD places in town are just out to rip off students coming in and going out, but he always seemed to give everyone the “friend” rate. He would talk to you about whatever music you were into, if it was the Flaming Lips or the Beatles or Cannibal Corpse or anything else, and he’d know weird trivia or obscure releases better than you would. He always kept aside weird Death Metal when I was into it, and then cheap Zappa stuff when I was into that. He also did a lot with WQAX and WFHB, and sponsored a lot of local bands. He was a class act indeed.

You know, I even mentioned Tom in Summer Rain, because back in the day, I was in his shop constantly. I went in there last August when I was in town for a split second to have lunch with Alana, and I ducked in and said hi. It was good to see him, and now I’m glad I did catch up with him. Anyway, here‘s another tribute to him, courtesy of the IDS.

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Shoe burial ground

I’ve been in overdrive, trying to get the annotated version of Rumored to Exist ready. I have the front cover and back cover designed, and they look cool. The whole book is in FrameMaker, and it’s amazing how smooth things have gone with it. I mean, I use Frame all day long every day, so I should have great faith in its ability, but this project has been wonderful. The footnote numbering problem was a ten second fix; the new template was about five minutes of work; the importing of the document from Word took no time at all. Now I need to finish writing the introduction, and comb through the thing for any style issues, and it will be ready.

Every time I buy new shoes, I do not throw out the old ones, even though I typically wear shoes down to the point where there is a hole all the way through the sole. But I need the backup pair, and there have been many times I’ve bought new shoes that simply didn’t work, and I had to go back to the backups until I could find another store with another shoe that did work. Anyway, today I was sitting in bed and realized I had five identical pairs of white on white Nike Air Force III Mid-height hightops, each right one with a hole right through the toe side of the sole. Each left one was fine. I put them all in a garbage bag and hauled them out – that’s a lot of square feet of space. I wish I could simply replace the soles, but now this paragraph is turning into an Andy Rooney rant, so I’ll shut up.

I have been reading the Chuck Barris book Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and I really like it. I don’t know that I’d like the movie so much, but the book has a certain gritty feel to it that reminds me of Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, Elmore Leonard. I’m pretty far into it, I should finish tomorrow. I got the Bukowski book Open All Night, but that’s a poem book, so it will probably be read random page by random page at night when I can’t sleep. I think the next book is this one on the history and invention of the television, which I got at Strand this weekend, along with the Bukowski and an old book on modern warplanes by Bill Gunston, a book from 1980 full of pictures that I remember from the school’s library, so I figured it was worth the five bucks.

I actually wish I knew anything about Bill Gunston. He published hundreds of these books for Jane’s, and a million other aviation-related magazines. Maybe he’s just a figurehead, or a pseudonym for like a dozen other writers, like Louis Lamour, or Don Pendleton, the “author” of a few thousand Mack Bolan books. Anyway, when I was a kid, I used to eat up any of those airplane books, the ones with tons of photos of planes in action. It’s funny to look at these books now, and see how all of the text in the books has to do with the “looming” war with the USSR, and how various US planes were well-poised against Soviet counterparts. It’s also weird, especially in this book I got yesterday, how the MiGs and other Warsaw Pact planes had very sketchy details; the photos were grainy and improvised, the artists’ renditions were just educated guesses. Of course now, if you flew to Moscow with a suitcase of money, they would practically give you a MiG-25, teach you how to fly it, feed you like a king every day, and let you date their sister. It’s amazing how things change.

Oh, my Latitude laptop died. I should be more pissed about this than I am, but it’s almost a non-issue, given how little I use it. I think the hard drive is fried, or it could just be the registry. I guess I could nuke it and start over, but I don’t feel like messing with it right now.

Okay, I’m done for the night. Time to read for a bit.

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projects, sick

Just a quick update. I’m so fucking busy I can’t find enough hours in the day, yet I keep playing SOCOM and I’ve been stuck on the same level since MAY. I could probably draw a map of the whole level and where all of the dudes are hiding in my sleep with my eyes closed (as opposed to that open-eye sort of sleep) and yet I play it twice or three times a day and always get killed at the last screen.

Anyway, two big projects here at home, and both of them are running at the same time, waiting to see which one hits the gate first. One is the glossary, and I am editing it on paper, adding new entries, editing stuff based on comments, and trying to get the text all locked down and in shape. That maybe will take another month, but I am getting bored of it already. Then it needs to be moved to FrameMaker, the cover needs to be designed, and then it will go out. That might or might not happen by the end of the year.

Then Rumored to Exist – there will be an annotated version. I have been working on the annotations for a long time, and they are almost done. It needs an introduction, which I am writing, then it gets into Frame and gets a design and a cover. That might happen first. Both books will be fairly cheap and only available from one online store at the publisher, not from Amazon et al. They will not have a UPC or ISBN or be in Books in Print, but they will be a bit cheaper. And they will be cool! So I am excited about that.

I think I am almost over this cold that has been killing me since I have been back. I do not have a runny nose, but I have a horrific yet productive cough. So maybe that means another day or two and it will be done. I saw an ad on TV for some shit that is supposed to help you not get a cold. It looked like Alka-Seltzer, which would be bad because I am allergic to aspirin, plus that fizzing shit is NASTY. But the ad on TV said no details, and I don’t remember the name of it, either. It would be nice if there was some sort of inhalant that you could take, like maybe before of after you got on the germway (i.e. subway) and it would somehow protect your lung lining so it didn’t immediately absorb all of the vile shit you breathe down there from a 45-minute subway ride. Or maybe I could bring a scuba tank.

That’s all.

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back from Vegas

I’m back. I had a pretty good trip to Vegas, and the photos and a quick bulleted list are here. [Now dead, sorry] It was cool to see my sister and brother-in-law, and it’s always fun to go to Vegas with people who haven’t been there before; it makes everything seem new to me. Probably the highlight of the trip was seeing Blue Man Group again, this time in the 5th row of the center section. The lowlight was getting delayed on my way out because of the California fires. And also the last day was depressing, being by myself and being almost out of cash as I walked around without much to do. The weather was beautiful the whole time I was there, but I didn’t feel like doing much other than going to the movies and going to Denny’s. But now that I’m home, I wish I was back there again.

I’m still sick – it never really went away, and just got worse in different ways. I stayed home today and slept all day, which seemed to help a bit. Now I hope that two more days of extreme sleep and much more juice will make it clear up. I have a lot of stuff around the house to get done, and I am editing the glossary on paper, which makes for a good in-bed project.

I didn’t do anything special for Halloween. I was going to watch Psycho, and I started watching Motel Hell, but I don’t have the attention span tonight to stick with a whole movie. Instead, I flipped channels and ended up on a Friday the 13th sequel, the one in Manhattan (8? 9?). It was funny only in that it belongs to that sub-genre of cinema best described as “I hate NY.” There were all of these films in the late 70s/early 80s that formed my early impressions of the big apple, the kinds of things like showed the city as a total disaster, with people getting killed on subways, and every other building on fire. Now that I live in the post-Giuliani version of the city, it’s very amusing to watch these films. It’s almost like watching campy 60s movies about the futuristing 1995, with floating cities and rocket jet-packs and stainless steel robots. I need to hunt down a copy of Escape from New York and see if it measures up.

Not much else is up. CSI is on now, so I’m getting pulled in…

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really winter

It’s really winter out now. Okay, 41 degrees, rainy, cloudy – it’s more like a Seattle winter. But it’s finally the weather where my leather jacket seems justifiable, and where it feels good to get out of the cold and huddle up in my apartment. The heat is on, which is no small miracle, given that my landlord tries to fuck us out of heat and hot water whenever possible. I remember exactly a year ago, when I had neither, and I was using an electric heating pad in bed and warming pans of water on the stove for a lukewarm spongebath. The downside to the steam heat is that I have my annual no-humidity headcold, which sucks and is slowly progressing, thanks to a regimen of about a gallon of juice a day plus as much extra sleep as I can possibly muster.

I’m leaving for Las Vegas on Friday, for a short trip until next Wednesday. This time, I will be going with my sister Monica and my brother-in-law Derek. It’s always fun to go with someone who has never been there, so we should have plenty to do. The only small issue is that my sister is currently about four and a half months pregnant. So this won’t be a trip filled with trays of stinger shots and trips to the all-nude strip clubs after several rounds of rollercoasters. I’m thinking we might hit a show or two, and take a leisurely walk around the neighboring casinos, but not much more. We’ll also have to go to the Star Trek thing, and they are getting there a day early and driving to Hoover Dam. The nice thing is that the current temperature out there is a high of 91, so I will get to break out those shorts one more time.

Nothing else has been going on. Going to bed early puts a cramp on everything. I’m reading Green Mars, and I’m past the point where I quit reading five years ago. Now it’s all new territory for me. I guess it will go with me on the trip, and I will also probably bring a printout of the glossary to mark up.

OK, time to hit the grapefruit juice again.

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headache, las vegas

I’ve got a headache, and I’m watching Las Vegas on TV, sort of in the background now that only 15 minutes are left and I pretty much know where all of the plot lines are going. I’m also editing crap for the glossary, slowly trying to lock down the last of the changes. I noticed that all of my old comments had vanished, so I dug around the HaloScan web site and found out you need a premium account to get to your old stuff. So $10 later, all of my stuff is restored, and I think there are some new features I’ll be able to use at some point in the future. I also took all of the entries from the letter A and brought them into FrameMaker to see what it will look like in print format. The template needs a hell of a lot of work, but at least I know how much effort it will take when CafePress finally offers perfect bound books.

Not much else is up. I got a new DSL modem via UPS today, and when they get my line hooked up on that end, my home speed will go to 1.5Mbps download and 256Kbps upload via lineshare, at the same price as my current 768/128 dedicated line. It means I have to dig behind some dressers and the entertainment center to install line filters on the phones, so I will probably inhale a metric assload of dust bunnies in the process. But that’s a small price to pay for faster speed.