Forget what I said earlier; today it is colder than fuck out. And I didn’t really bundle up, because I went out yesterday and it was in the 30s, fairly reasonable. It was the walk of death from the subway to my front door today. And while my apartment was like an oven all weekend, I’ve only got a lukewarm temp with a horrid breeze ripping through the closed windows.

I’m doing the dance of computer software and hardware upgrades, or at least trying to avoid it. I feel like I won’t get much out of this video setup unless I have a copy of Premiere running ($500), but that will require a copy of Windows XP ($200) and a big hard drive ($200). Or I could do nothing and spend $0. But then when I decide to spend nothing, I later get this nagging feeling that I should do something, maybe cut a corner and only buy one or two of the three. I don’t know.

And part of me thinks I should take the money and go on a vacation to somewhere warmer. Delta had a fare this weekend to Orlando for $220, including hotel. But I would have to leave at 7PM on Friday (not a major problem) and come back at 7AM on Sunday (a major problem). I don’t deal with early flights like that, and I don’t think it would be worth it to spend essentially one day in Florida. But shit, I would spend $200 to spend an hour in Florida if it would mean I could feel my toes again.

I’m not reading anything or writing anything. My new book is available for preorder on iuniverse, but I don’t feel like mentioning it with a link because they are so shitty about preorders, and I don’t think anyone will buy the book anyway. Oh, and I put Vegas pictures online: here. [Broken link, sorry…] They are not all captioned or turned the right way. I’ll get to it eventually.

I’ve installed anti-spam software, and I’m pretty happy with it. I have the Spastic set of procmail rules, and it’s only accidentally deleted one mail, from Evite, but otherwise it is running 100%. It doesn’t pick up all spam, but I’d say it gets more than 90% of it. Today I had about 70 pieces of spam, and all of them got quietly whisked away. I am not actually deleting them yet, but once I’m sure the filters are working, I will automatically nuke stuff marked as spam.

That’s it. Throat still hurts, but it is slowly getting better. OK, I think I am giving up on this so I can read or something.

It is too cold to think. To get to work today, I wore two pairs of pants, an army jacket, a leather jacket, a hat, a hood, and a pair of gloves. I was still so cold I couldn’t breathe. My apartment has been in spats of hot and cold; the heater runs but sometimes bangs like Godzilla is in the basement and trying to escape via the radiator, and that worries me that the whole thing will stop working and my landlord will be in Italy for months. If so, I will light the place on fire. Also, the wind blows so hard, it blows right through the windows, no matter how much foam tape and bunched up blankets I cram into the crevices. I am slightly sick, but not a lot - maybe some kind of infection in my throat, a lump that I can’t swallow. It is getting slowly better, so hopefully more juice and water will lodge things free.

I got back on Tuesday from a pretty decent trip to Vegas. There were four of us: Bill, Lon, me, and Lon’s pal Cliff, who is a pilot for a regional airline. It was cool to talk to Cliff about planes and flying and the inside world of the aviation industry. I envy being able to fly a plane, but I don’t envy the fact that a third-year pilot makes about $20K a year. Anyway, we did a lot of cool stuff, so here’s a short list off the top of my head:

• Went to Blue Man Group and sat in the front row (the poncho section.)
• Ate at Emeril’s fish restaurant; had the 6-course tasting meal, which was all incredible.
• Shot a Madsen M50 9mm automatic rifle with a silencer.
• Rented a pimped out Caddy with leather everything, power everything, onstar, rear radar, an incredible stereo, ass-heating seats, and all the other goodies.
• Bill found out that the Caddy has a 120 MPH cutout. It felt and sounded like we were going 60, though.
• Ate at In-n-Out and Jack In The Box
• Went to the Grand Canyon; threw a copy of Rumored to Exist into the canyon.
• Went to the Hoover Dam, took the tour, found a tour guide who didn’t know what The A Team was. I made the wild sarcastic guess that she was born in 1986; she was actually born in 1984. I officially feel old.
• Ate at Denny’s twice.
• Went to 7-Eleven. Got a Slurpee. Did not fuck sluts. (Sorry, Ray.)
• Went shopping at Caesar’s Forums. Bought a new pair of Vans shoes.
• Went to Best Buy and bought a ton of new CDs and a new camcorder battery.
• Won $40 on blackjack at Imperial Palace.
• Went to the car museum at Imperial Palace.
• Threw paper airplanes out of the hotel windows.
• Got the Caddy airborne on a speedbump.
• Went downtown and saw the Fremont Experience light show.
• Went to the worst pawnshop ever downtown.
• Talked to some strippers on Fremont Street.
• Watched the movie Jackass on pay-per-view.
• Watched the movie Undercover Brother on Bill’s laptop.
• Ate a good breakfast at the Luxor.
• Drank way too much at Smith and Wollensky.

That’s all I can think of. But we got a lot of stuff done from Thursday to Tuesday, and we didn’t do that much Vegas strip stuff. So I’m pretty happy with the results, except for the part about puking up a $160 dinner.

My camcorder was great on the trip, and now I have a firewire card for my PC. I installed all of the stuff on my Windows partition, and it works pretty good for editing video and pulling in stuff through the DV connection. I need to now pull in old stuff from Hi8 and make some real movies with it. I still have a lot to learn, but it’s not like I’m going anywhere this weekend.

OK, I need to do some more DV editing research. I’ll try to get back on schedule with regular updates, but my semi-hibernation isn’t helping things much.

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…