One of my reasons for donating Emily's car to a friend for the winter was because we get so much snow here and they hardly get any in Baltimore.

Yawell:



(Actually, I'm thrilled that Donna's daughter is home with her for the holidays and both are getting to tool around in the ol' grrl.)

----

The joke only one person here will get:

Coming soon to the OLV Basilica: the Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus presents its annual holiday rendition of The Mesi-siah. In which the Three Wise Guys (Steve Pigeonczar, Susanna Grelickazar and Tommy Golisanozar) attempt to bring presents to the Baby Joseph, but all of them get stolen out of his car.

----

And now, one that even she won't get:

So the founder of ebaumsworld, who ironically enough had his website stolen from him a year or so ago, has gone into the restaurant business and has opened a fancy new steakhouse in suburban Rochester. Food critics quickly noticed that the facility has no kitchen: turns out he steals all his steaks from the Red Osier and just slaps his own restaurant's watermark in the lower right hand corner.

----

Off to walk dogs. Who, unlike Donna's, actually WANT to go out in this weather....

Somebody on my Flist posed the question the other day that's often asked this time of year: what's everybody's opinions about overt religious displays at work?

I have pretty well-set feelings about this issue, but I've never really written them down in any cohesive form, so I've decided to make my first official Office Policy. Since I have no employees at the moment, I don't think it will cause anybody any grief, but unless one of you can talk me out of it, I fully intend to keep these ideas in place when my business has grown enough to have other people hanging around.

To: Employees
From: Ray
Re: Holiday Decorations, Music and Themes

Now that we're past Thanksgiving, it's time to get ready for the upcoming holidays. We will begin setting out decorations on December ___, and mailing the cards (which we picked out months ago) the following Monday. This is a joyous and festive time of year, but it is also very busy and not without divisiveness, so I have set forth these guidelines to help ensure that everyone feels included and appreciated in their choices of celebration.

1) All expressions of all faiths, beliefs or even non-beliefs are welcomed here, short of outright proselytizing of fellow workers. You may decorate the common areas, and your own work station, with whatever symbols of the season- be it Christmas, Festivus, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Solstice or just plain secular winter- that add meaning to YOU and beauty to the overall presentation of this time of year. (Notice I listed those alphabetically; blame the Greeks, Larry Keefe's family and the Maccabeeans for the order of the first three.) Likewise, music played at firm events, or as background through the office or at your work area, may include any or all of the centuries of sacred music and recent years of secular songs that have become part of our shared traditions. (Exception: if Bruce Springsteen's version of "Santa Claus is coming to town" is played more than once, the instigator will be fired, if not shot.) All of these efforts should be made in something resembling harmony, and keeping in mind the overall spirit of this season, whatever your beliefs.

2) The foregoing policy will be in effect beginning with the start of decorations on December ___, unless any one of you feels, for any reason, that specific reference to a religion, or to religious beliefs in general, is offensive to you. A signed note or email to that effect, which will be kept confidential, must be in my inbox by 5 p.m. that previous day. We will immediately drop all non-secular decorations, songs and other expressions of the time of the season from our holiday observances, and nobody other than me, and you, will know you to be the cause of it.

3) Beliefs, or even non-beliefs, do come with a price, however, and this is yours, if you should exercise the foregoing option. You want out of Christmas? You got it- and everything that goes with it. That includes participation in any holiday functions sponsored by the office (you will not be docked pay but you will be expected to leave), and of greatest significance, it includes any implicit benefit to you from having a paid holiday as a result of things you do not believe in.

4) You have three choices with regard to the observance of December 25. You can take a vacation or personal day if you have one remaining. Whether you do or not, I would encourage this second choice: since you do not observe Christmas, but you are otherwise a decent human being (or I would not have hired you), you may devote at least four hours of that day to volunteering in our community to help, or substitute for, people who do. Serve at a soup kitchen. Volunteer at a hospital to relieve a non-medical worker for the day. Shovel an elderly neighbor's walk and take them to the grocery store (the day before will count just fine). Get into the holiday spirit that's even bigger than the Christ in Christmas or the pole in Festivus. Be a mensch, if Hanukkah's your thing. No approvals or reports are required; I will take you at your word that you intend to do this and will assume without checking that you've done it, and if you burn in hell for lying to me, that's gonna be the least of your problems, anyway.

5) If, by the payroll cutoff before December 25, you do not tell me you are doing one of these two things, you get the day off without pay. What, you thought it was a holiday or something?

Comments are encouraged, or I'll have to link this to a poll, the only sure way of finding out anything around here...

The word "homophobia" is a fairly recent creation, traceable to 1971 (either a book or an article, depending on what part of the Internet you believe), and while its definition is well established- the hatred or fear of homosexuality- from a literal standpoint, it means something totally different:

Greek homós: one and the same; phóbos: fear

That, I believe, is the answer to the question I've heard raised so many times in recent years, and especially in the past day since my own So-Blue-It's-Purple State of New York voted down a basic human right for a double-digit percentage of its citizens:

Why are these people so afraid of letting gay people get married to one another?

I submit that it's NOT because they're afraid of gays for being different. It's because they're afraid of their sameness. These are 38 little boys (all but two of the naysayers are male), all still stuck in their six-year-old latency periods and not sure whether if it's safe to fuck their mothers, so instead they stuck out their middle fingers and fucked everybody in this state.

An even more cynical view is that the worst of these bigots, the Family Values freaks like Larry Craig and Jimmy Swaggert, are afraid of committed long-term gay relationships because it cuts down on the number of available lays for them to pick up in motel rooms and airport loos.

They are cowards. They are chickens. As for the 30 Republicans in the State Senate, who voted in lockstep against this basic act of dignity? They are sheep. (And right now, if I were a sheep in upstate New York, I'd be more nervous than ever.)

But let's not make this a generic rant. I know some of you 38 fear-of-the-same-uals personally, or at least through people in your offices. Our local paper made a big deal out of the bill failing to pass, and that only one State Senator from Buffalo voted for it (Antoine Thompson, who just came up a notch in my book) but let the rest of them pass without telling everybody who they were. So I will.

My own state senator, Michael Ranzenhofer ("oppression of a large number of people? That IS German!")? You, sir, are a faggot.

The senator from Polonia, William Stachowski (who already sold his soul after squeaking back into office)? You, too, are a faggot.

The representative of Niagara County, George Masiarz? Faggy McFaggotson from Faggytown, Fagsylvania.

A bit to the east, and the first Republican in the roll call to set the tone, Jim Alesi? About whom it was reported that "he paused and held his head in his hands as he said 'no,'" selling out a major segment of his constituents? You, sir, are a sensitive faggot. The worst kind.

As for the rest of you traitors to my party?

Joseph Addabbo, who comes from QUEENS, for crysake?
Daniel Aubertine, whose name sounds French and we all know what THEY like to do?
Ruben Fucking Diaz, who made veiled threats at Senate leadership even after he sold the few remnants of HIS soul down the Hudson?
Shirley Huntley, the only female Democrat to sell out for the sake of a few votes?
Carl Kruger, who got the seat after Freddy sliced up his last victim?
That true champion of heterosexual family values, Hiram Monseratte?
Senator George Onorato, whose name has "rat" right in it?

Faggots, each and every one of you. Limp-wristed, light-in-the-loafers, flower-arranging faggots. (Well except for you, Shirley. You're a dyke. I'm guessing the bitch rather than the butch, because if you had any balls you wouldn't have sold out.)

There. You're out. And I am not proud.

So has your Google home page been acting funny the past few days?

Kinda like this?



Mine started doing it this morning.  It's not much of an issue in and of itself, but it got me worrying that it was a symptom of some kind of virus, worm or other icky I may have stumbled on- and I've had at least a couple stumbles in the past week, one a Facebook friend getting hacked and sending out a video I clicked on the entry for (but not the actual vid link), the other some code on some page that tripped an antivirus alert.

This site, in an entry from almost two months ago, explains it all. Or rather, doesn't explain much about why the Google boys were up to these shenanigans, just that they thought it was cool, heh heh, and decided to inflict it on us.

There's a way to turn it off, but it involves a Firefox add-on called NoScript, which I was using when there was some serious Naughty Hacking going on with LJ entries. It's an even bigger pain in the ass itself for everyday browsing, so I guess I'll just get used to the fade-in. At least until they turn it into a full preview/refreshments/feature presentation reel like this one, which I still whistle at least once a week despite General Cinema having been defunct for decades now:



Gummi bear? It's been in my pocket; they're real warm and soft....

You've seen these kind of signs, tacked to telephone poles or planted into the side of the road. "Work from home!" "We buy foreclosures!" "Other shit with exclamation points at the end!" Desperate recessionary times leading to desperate recessionary measures.

Yet even after I've long become acclimated to such things, it came as a bit of a surprise to see one of these critters stuck in a corner intersection in the village of Williamsville today as I returned home from the bank, and not for one of the usual suspects:

1-863-XXX-XXXX!

Learntoflyquick.com

Turns out it's a real website, for a presumably real flight school in Florida, that promises you pilot certification in just two weeks.

Eleanor thought the same thing I did when I mentioned it, moments ago: who, other than a terrorist, would want a quickie pilot's license in this day and age?

I thought of calling: "Salaam, this is Mohammad Atta, Junior, and I wish to take your quick pilot course, DEATH TO AMERICA, ummmm, do you offer FAA health insurance?"

If they teach you to put your seat backs and 72 virgins into the upright and locked positions, there's probably something fishy going on here.

Well, we finally got the measurable snow that'd been so long overdue.  Here's the sight out the back door from around 8:30 this morning-



It was even more Currier-and-Ivesish when I first had the pleasure of gazing upon it, four hours earlier, when Tasha, our older dog, started barking like a crazywoman about wanting to go out.  After going on ten years with this animal, I can pretty much translate her barks into English:

I GOTTA! I'm part Labrador! It's my heritage!

(well, yeah, but you're also part German Shepherd, and that doesn't mean I'm gonna let you invade Poland....)

CMON! It's good packing snow! We gotta go out and play!

(it's 4:30 in the God-blessed AYEM, dog! Go find a house burglar to toss snowballs at you:P)

Do you just want me to stand here barking for another two hours? I can DO that, you know.

(finally, fur triumphed over reason, and half an hour later, a soaked but happy puppy re-entered the premises, smiling smugly at the human she'd managed to get into his clothes an hour before even their already ridiculously early feeding time.)

I forget who said it, but dogs are basically canine mammals frozen in mental age at about the second grade. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but some hours of the day are more suited to it than others.

----

Zoey's also had her daily excitement, returning to the vet to get her stitches out. The tech was telling Eleanor about another patient's human, who just adopted an older cat and brought kitty in for a checkup without benefit of leash or carrier. Before he knew it, the little guy was scooting under parked cars in front of the hospital entrance, and since their Sheridan Drive location is not conducive to pets playing in traffic, practically the whole staff was out there trying to round him up. Just as one of them was about to get purchase on the paws, the neighboring gas station let off a screechingly loud air brake, sending the cat into the upper atmosphere. All worked out in the end, but it's just another of those occasions when they take pains to remind us who really owns whom.

And there's the first call- only it's an email. Cross fingers, guys....

For all his awesome powerfulness, I can't say I'd ever paid much attention before to what our Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke actually looked like. But now, our fiscal collapse of the past few years makes perfect sense.

Separated at birth?

 

Somehow, I think our national finances would be in much better health if George Carlin had been running the Fed for the last three years of his life.  For one thing, he did a far better job of regulating his icebox than Bernanke ever did regulating the contents of Wall Street:

Perhaps the worst thing that can happen is to reach into the refrigerator and come out with something that you cannot identify at all. You literally do not know what it is. Could be meat, could be cake. Usually, at a time like that, I'll bluff. "Honey, is this good?" "Well, what is it?" "I don't know. I've never seen anything like it. It looks like...meatcake!" "Well, smell it." (snort, sniff) "It has absolutely no smell whatsoever!" "It's good! Put it back! Somebody is saving it. It'll turn up in something." Thats what frightens me. That someone will consider it a challenge and use it just because it's in there. 

Substitute "financial sector" for "refrigerator" and "mortgage-backed security" for "meatcake" and you pretty much have the story of 2008.

George also had a healthy disrespect for the most untouchable of institutions, even though he grew up under the wings of the Catholic Church, and even as it turned into one of his most reliable targets for his satire and criticism. Early in his just-released memoirs (which I was reading even before ol' Ben's picture suddenly turned up), he describes the conflict between the sacred and profane that he made a very healthy living off of for most of his career. The nuns back at his old school on 121st Street ("White Harlem," he once famously called it) heard about all the references to their church and school in his standup; even when it got into "shit-piss-cocksucker-tits and God-has-no-power" language, the sisters still ate it all up, even over his own mother's protests. Now, he says, those words "have just received the imprimatur of Holy Mother Church. Now they're nice words."  If Bernanke had spent a little more time yelling "fuck" and "cocksucker" at those derivative traders, we'd all be in much better shape.

There's also a description in the book of his work on Shining Time Station, which was a unique acting gig in that all the other characters were CGI or otherwise not present on the set, so the whole thing was green-screen. That's kinda how the Fed chairmanship works, too, modelled on The Man Behind the Curtain in The Wizard of Oz more than anything else.

And so, in George's memory, I hereby nominate Al Sleet as the first-ever Hippy Dippy Fed Chairman. I can hear his acceptance speech already: "If you don't like the economy, MOVE!"

As we continue our near record-setting stretch without measurable snow here, I found myself looking back at some postings from this time last year. Partly out of a general sense of nostalgia, but also partly to see if this Thanksgiving's demi-agitas with Eleanor's brother was just another example of Einstein's definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Sure enough, Charlie managed to put his own indelible stamp- albeit a different one than this time- on last year's events, as well. The Memory Lane excursion was even more valuable for me, though, for it was this weekend last year that I (and several very appreciative connoisseurs of Teh Stupid among you, as well) discovered the motherlode of medical mishaps, the Bonneville Salt Flat proving grounds for countless future nominees (some already posthumous) for the Darwin Award, Emergency Room subclass:

Things I Learn From My Patients

Nearly a whole year of object-inserting, narc-begging, body-part-deleting patients have passed by, mostly in severe pain, since I last visited this site. That link is to the most recent page; you can then scroll back to the prior pages, getting so many of our shared national events from an ED standpoint, such as July 4th (lesson # 2714: if your bottle rocket does not light, do not use a propane torch to coax it along) and last year's Christmas (lesson #2605: if you've had the runs for 124 consecutive days, Christmas Eve is DEFINITELY the right time to come in and present, finally).  Most stupidity, of course, is far more timeless, such as one of the ones right before that one:

If you decide to OD on your friend's loritab, pass out, lockup the accelerator, miss your turn, and slam head on at 45 MPH into the EMS station, don't ask me to do you a favor and grab your cigarettes from your truck. You have caused more paperwork then you can imagine.  Of course he had no injuries, and got to spend the rest of the night with the nice man in the brown uniform and taser.

Enjoy them all. Carefully.

* "Why, sure, I'd LOVE to go shopping!"

* "Boy, that President Bush sure got a bad rap. Why is everybody so mean to him?"

* "I love my auto mechanic."

Fortunately, only one of those statements is true. Since the second one is patently absurd, and the first is hardly one I'd utter on this of all days, I should explain the props I'm giving to three guys: Erin and Bill, the proprietors, and Scott, the runner of the service counter, at Maple and Sweet Home.

----

Finding this place may have been the only long-term good thing to come out of Eleanor's many years in her last furniture retail job. One of her co-workers there recommended them- on its face, no different than a dozen dozen other gas-station-connected service bays in our home town, but just a couple of blocks down from Ashley Furniture- and they've always done well by us. When the antilock brakes on Eleanor's truck got gorked earlier this year, right around inspection time, Scott had a simple solution to the problem that saved us hundreds, if not thousands, over the full repair the dealer would've surely recommended: he pulled the fuse on the ABS circuit, and the remaining brake-brakes work just fine (ABS being a bit redundant, anyway, on a truck that rarely drives more than 40 mph or the five miles to Wegmans and back, and it has all-wheel-drive for the rare occasions you would want extra vehicle control). My friend Donna entirely owes her current ride to their good efforts over the summer. Today, though, my car and I were blessed with their smarts and their kindness.

The car's run fine, but has sounded a little shaky the past few weeks. Literally so- at idle, at times, it sounded like somebody shuffling cards under the front end. On Wednesday, I made a biryani-and-bagel run to a shopping plaza near here (we've been ordering shrimp biryani from that restaurant as a Thanksgiving Day side dish for over a decade now), and happened to walk back to the parking space at just the right angle to see something hanging out from under there.

Eleanor looked earlier today after I made my lookee appointment with Scott, and her earlier posted guess about it being a heat shield issue was exactly right. I'd suspected that, too, but was mostly worried that the shield was somehow intergrated into the catalytic converter, which is a restricted-repair part that can't be fixed or even replaced with a functioning used one in this lovely country of ours. That was the source of my earlier worrier about winding up spending more on Black Friday than even the mallrats were.

Ten minutes after my 2:00 appointment began, Scott confirmed both that it was (a heat shield) and it wasn't (a repair requiring a new converter, or a new anything, for that matter). Ten minutes after that, they'd nailed it back into place, good as new. Cost of this effort: zero.

Scott did notice my ever-balding tires (an issue I've known about since March, when automotive houses of far less repute brought it to my attention), and quoted me on a new set and an alignment. Of course I'm going back there to have that done. 

Seriously. If you have car issues here, call 836-7500. Scott will answer. Mention either of us, or "honking yellow truck" if he sounds especially busy and doesn't recognize our names out of context. They'll take good care of ya.

At the bottom of an LA Times article yesterday about Roman Polanski's imminent release (into house arrest) from a Swiss prison, the comment section began, surely unintentionally, with the following words.

Post a comment
If you are under 13 years of age you may read this message board, but you may not participate.


You may, however, be raped by a famous movie director and then excused for it by half the intelligentsia of Hollywood.

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Off, likely, to spend far more money today than any of you Black Friday honks, and I'm not going anywhere near a mall:P

I've been posting clips of the famed Turkey Drop scene for several years now, all of them duly swept away by the ©PD since those posts, but this year, there's a Hulu of the whole ep for your dining and ducking pleasure. Be thankful, for what you have, or in this case, what you don't: dinner hitting the ground like a sack of wet cement:)

Here are the two viral videos which have been all over my Flist the past coupla days:




...and....




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Also also wik: we watched the Star Trek movie from the privacy of our own home tonight! Chekhov's just as cute! Scotty's just as Scotty! Sylar's just as spooky! Uhura's just as Nyota! Did I even notice in-theater that the Admiral who almost keeps Kirk on-planet after the Kobayashi Maru cheat is named after the director of TOS episode A Piece of the Action, who was even better known to me as an actor-director on The Courtship of Eddie's Father and as a producer on Chico and the Man and Welcome Back Kotter?  Why am I asking you?

Gag reel tomorrow, which, I hear, will also be Thanksgiving. I do; I will.

I know, the calendar and the culture are pointing decidedly to "thankfulness" right about now, but two friends from two completely different circles of life passed along news today that's making that a bit harder than usual.  One, I knew over 30 years ago, and not so well, but through friends-of-friends and the added binding of Facebook, we've renewed contact and had more than our share of laughs over the past few weeks. Tonight, not so much: Steve's son goes in for a biopsy tomorrow.

Another friend's mom is even further along in her diagnosis, and well on her way to some very aggressive treatment. Kim's mom had to travel this road to recovery once before, and thought she had it beat, but a seemingly unrelated condition earlier this week revealed some Very Bad Things in a number of very bad places today. There's the certainty of radiation and chemo in her future, but I've just as certainly been witness today to dozens of prayers and hugs and offers of help and heart from a circle of her friends including three people here she's never even met (and more than a few of you).

It's harder for me than for some to put that all aside and give thanks anyway. And yet I do, as we all must when faced with the inevitable, the inescapable, even the incurable (which hopefully none of this actually is). It makes pettiness over money, or perceived slights, or magnified misunderstandings, all seem very, very small.

Love what you have. Love WHO you have, while you have them. Give thanks, with a joyful heart.  As I do for each and every one of you.

It's not THAT unusual to have an FBI investigation of local public officials doing dirty deeds. Happens in places like Detroit and DC all the time.

It's even relatively common, around here at least, for such public officials to cop pleas to minor offenses, only to find out that, under the rather persnickety terms of this State's Public Officers Law, they are forced to give up their public office on a conviction for (or, just as bad, a guilty plea to) even a misdemeanor offense,  if that offense constitutes a finding of/admission to a "lack of moral integrity." (Never mind that, absent guilty pleas in open court, that would probably entrap about 90 percent of the elected officials in this entire country.)

Yet only Buffalo has the rather unique requirement of, essentially, advertising a midterm vacancy caused by such chicanery like it was an opening in the Public Works Department, requiring the majority party (or in this case, the anti-mayoral faction OF the majority party) to solicit resumes for a specified period before voting for an interim successor to the not-quite-felonious former City Councilperson.

The most recent victim of such questionable legal advice was a Friend Of The Mayor who used his City Council position, mainly, as a checkbook for himself and other assorted friends and family. He has now bitten the bullet of his misdemeanor plea and resigned his office (but probably not his lifetime health care or pension), but the real fun is coming in the parade that is lining up to seek the remaining Council's blessing in the filling of the resulting vacancy until at least next November:

The list of people interested in becoming Buffalo's next Ellicott District Common Council member continues to grow.  A former city commissioner, a housing revitalization expert, the owner of a downtown chocolate factory and a former banking executive are the newest candidates vying to fill the empty seat. The vacancy occurred after Brian C. Davis pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors. He admitted that he used campaign contributions for personal use and then lied about it to the Board of Elections.

Of course there are only three words of interest in THAT to my much-addled brain:

downtown chocolate factory.

It took all of five minutes for me to get going on the obvious response, posted on one of the paper's blogs earlier today. Forget lifetime political hacks, so-called experts, and already-overpaid executives from the banking industry. (Not to mention the unmentioned Jesse Jackson wannabe who already ran for, won, and resigned a seat on the school board because even that part-time post was conflicting with his pastoral responsibilities.)  No, what this city needs more than anything is in the air, and it smells like Cocoa Puffs.

Really. Hopefully, Jenn will back me up on this. When the wind is blowing in just right from the General Mills factory, the entirety of downtown makes Sonny just go kookoo.

But a genuine chocolate factory OWNER would bring so much more. Or rather, so MANY more. It made me just want to break into song....

Oompa loompa doompety doo
I've got a perfect puzzle for you
Oompa loompa doompety dee
If you are wise you'll listen to me

What do you do when your councilman quit
Putting the mayor right into a snit
Cause his vetos, they now won’t stand up
His power will be limited,
I don't like the look of it

Oompa loompa doompety da
If you’re in Grassroots, you will go far
You will live in happiness too
Like the Oompa Loompa Doompety do!

Of course, Urkel is likely to run for somebody's Congressional seat and get out of this mess through the glass elevator before all of the rest of this hits the fan....

I just got my first Google Voice voicemail. This came as a bit of a surprise because I didn't think I'd actually given the phone number to anyone. Eventually, I figured out it was a wrong number, but since the program, um, translates it into text for you, it was kinda hard to tell:

Hey there, It's Ed from H. S. B. C. Basically it's a or if it's already been in there, just click the dates that is that you dark learning conditions and lawn quest. I know what you do, do is just plain avenue commitment and send it out the customer. That's pretty much out if it has not been sent to. We're good conditions are actually in loan quests. At this point what I'll do is mark your old on the ready worksheet not. Feruse uploaded new one without that condition and there. It just give me a minute. What status at cents. That's Phillip 3300, you're still able to make that change 3400 conditions are long quest just court dates, that's been cleared and you can send out of the new commitment letter alright. Any questions give me a call 5716XXXXXXX. Thank you.

Well, ya, Ed. Clears it right up for me.

At least those seven digits I just X'd out after the "5716" were correct, and I was able to call and tell him he'd left the message for the wrong person. Making it all the weirder is that I do have a client who is desperately trying to close a loan in the next few days, though not with that bank.

I take it this is what they mean by an app still being in "beta"- except it probably would come out as "in bed" or something.

Let the record reflect that, thanks to the kindness and generosity of a certain benefactor, I am, this day, watching The Waters of Mars.

21 November 2009. Fifty years to the day.

The day of what? No idea; haven't seen it all yet, have I?

I just had to review a docket on a case I'm working, and there it was. Docket entry 32:



Sheesh. I don't think even Shakespeare intended you to take that icon LITERALLY.

----

Other than that, I'm a little more sentient this morning than I was after court yesterday. The client was enormously happy on at least a moral-victory level (winning the trial does nothing to ensure dime one of actual payment), and I got taken out to lunch at a place on Rochester's west side which is much like several others I knew in that neighborhood in my years there. VERY Italian, VERY down-home, fake wood paneling on the walls of the bar, pasta to die for, framed pictures of the Holy Trinity of the Mafia (the Pope, DiMaggio and Sinatra), and probably more made guys passing by me than I've ever seen at one single time in my entire life.

I noted that to one of my clients and said, I could never join the Mafia. Can't stand the sight of blood.

----

Zoey's still collared, although Eleanor cut it back a bit yesterday so it's not quite as much of a strain on the poor grrl's neck. I'm waiting for Em to get home before heading out this afternoon, just so she's at least semi-supervised all of the time. Despite the stitches and the limitations of the albatross on her (ALBATROSS!), she's still as rambunctious as ever (ALBATROSS!) but, if anything, even cuter and cuddlier when she's having her downtime (ALBATROSS!).

( In case you don't know why I'm screaming that.... )

Cheers!

Things haven't been as hell-bent as I expected them to be this week. Over a month ago, events began converging very unharmonically, where it looked like during this week, I would have at least four court appearances in three days, yesterday through tomorrow, two of them extending for almost full days, and all of them spread over three different courthouses in two different cities.

Tonight, they look not so hellish. Yesterday morning was a bear, but a brief bear, and the second, most-of-the-day hearing got postponed, possibly forever. That gave me the time I needed to pick up Emily's new computer and get it mostly working. Now there's just tomorrow morning's still-on hearing, which could take the whole day but should be relatively brief unless my pompous-ass opponent lives up to billing and tries to make a mountain out of something much more akin to (and remarkably shaped like) a molehill.

Next week will be quiet- Thanksgiving and all- but the following one is starting to show signs of the River Styx running through it: Buffalo hearing Tuesday, Buffalo hearing Wednesday, then two Rochester hearings Thursday. In the middle of all of them, Zoey goes back in to have her stitches removed.

----

It certainly isn't behaving like frozen hellish parts around here, either. We ate in the greenhouse tonight, the second time in two weeks we've been able to do that. Sixty-degree days are not supposed to be on our menu the week before Thanksgiving, but we're certainly not complaining about them.

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I spent way more time today at Best Buy than I would've liked. The impetus was needing to replace the earphones I use for everything- phone, music, computer videos- which had begun shitting their bed a few weeks ago and are now just momentarily lost.

Finding a comparable replacement for them wasn't a problem, but from there it was kinda downhill. I'd seen a reference to a cool-looking CD of Johnny Cash-recommended songs recently put out by his daughter Rosanne, and while I could download it for 10 bucks, it was one that I thought might have some album art or other added value in actual retail packaging, so I headed over to their CD section to try to find it.

Just one problem. Not only no Rosanne CD; no CDs, period. That section of the selling floor is now turned over to washer-dryers and other major appliances that are presumably harder to duplicate through a torrent.

So I headed to checkout with just my earphones and got behind the Customer From Hell. Your basic Clarence soccer mom was buying all make and manner of electronic junk, a humongous Playstation set being the biggest part of the order. She then proceeded to get upsold on extended warranties for all of said crap, and while the War and Peace of a receipt printed out, over 500 bucks in all, she got out her form of payment. Or rather, forms: a stack- an actual, factual STACK, half the size of a deck of playing cards- of gift cards which wound up paying for more than half her purchase.

Five freakin dollars at a time, give or take. Each one of them requiring the one-of-only-two cashiers on duty to scratch off the coating over the activation code on the back, enter said code, and file away the evidence of the credit before getting her down, finally, to a couple hundred bucks and change that she insisted on paying for with exact change- all while I waited, with a single item and a debit card.

The closest she came to an apology was to say, "Yeah, I get one of these every month from using my credit card. And I use my credit card a LOT." Gee, ya think maybe that's SOME of what's wrong with this economy? Deepening your debt to your bank (and ours to the Chinese) and getting rewarded for it with even MORE unnecessary plastic objects?

I guess I was due for at least a LITTLE hell this week.

(And I finally gave up on getting a hardcopy of Rosanne. The B&N next door had the CD, but they were charging its full $18.99 suggested retail, even though their website sells it to members for 11 bucks. While they still HAVE a CD section in the store, it's way smaller than it used to be- and who can blame customers for not showing up if they're gonna treat us like that?  Off to iTunes, where the action is fast and there's no sales tax- or beyotches in line in fronna me.)

Zoey's home, complete with the post-op Elizabethan collar which will be a thoroughly unsatisfactory part of her life for the next week and change. Naturally, she's made it her life's work to try ripping her stitches out, so the collar's a must to prevent that. Unfortunately, said collar must be removed whenever she eats (which is often) and it prevents her from getting through the catdoor to the downstairs catboxes, so we've reinstalled one in the bathroom for her entertainment use during her convalescence, which also requires supervision and, um, assistance for as long as the collar's on her.

As Eleanor posted after collecting her earlier, Zoey was quite the rogue at the vet's after the surgery, quickly acquiring the nickname "Houdini" on account of her escape attempts (and, since then, "Masochist" on account of her stitch-removal attempts).

For the moment, at least, she's passed out on the floor in Emily's room. She also purrs up a storm whenever anyone holds her, especially if we scratch behind her ears or anywhere else she can't reach with the collar on. We also need to get a picture of her basically connecting her collared head to the fish tank so the top appears to be hermetically sealed to it, presumably on the premise that, well, if it's clear plastic and THIS is clear plastic, why don't the fishies just pass through it and head down my gullet?

( ETA-Oh look, we GOT such a picture.... )

Such wishes are not to be confused with our dinner. Eleanor made baked crabcakes, far closer to the Lumps from my recent travels than any of her prior efforts at frying the beasties. Om nom nom. Even Emily liked them- third time in a week that she's- SHOCK AND AMAZEMENT- eaten the same meal that we did.

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In addition to yesterday's relatively major feline surgery, in the past week I've acquired new (well, newer) laptops for both Eleanor and Emily- the missus's prior one was in better shape but had been literally coming unhinged in recent weeks, while Em's, our first XP model from probably going on eight years ago, was close to literally being held together with gum and scotch tape. We're all in the 21st century now, just in time for our house full of Vista to be rendered obsolete anytime now.

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The news on the way home from court and computer acquisition was all agog about the Bills finally firing their coach from the past three seasons, who'd once again underwhelmed everybody with a 3-6 record. The funniest moment from Jauron's Waterloo game was the opposing team's owner, an 86-year-old coot, flipping a double-bird to Bills fans in his stadium:



The only thing more depressing than an 86-year-old owner? Our 91-year-old one.

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Tomorrow promises to be my only relatively quiet day of the week, with far more and further fun and games awaiting me (especially) Thursday but also the end of the week.