- House suddenly infested by trap-avoiding mice.
- Found new house in Huffman Historic District; will probably take it. Rent much higher.
- Lungs shot to shit. Quitting smoking.
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Author: jae
jae lethe (he/she/they) is a blogger, musician, artist, poet, web developer/designer, armchair philosophizer, teller of tales, and gadabout. Also, something he calls a "behavioral artist." (Not sure.) She has plans. BIG plans.
Among the things that he has done for a laugh are minor fractures, cuts, scrapes, and various scabs. Though she's quick to point out that they're no imbecile, we're fairly certain that he thinks the word means some kind of medieval pharmacist.
This is her latest home on teh internets - where jae stores their swear words, when they're not hurling them at the sun in vain.
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randomness
i’ve been sick now for weeks. i just used up the last of my second Rx of antibiotics and i still don’t feel 100%. Maybe 75%.
Holly quit work. She seems to be doing much better.
My Studio Projects VTB-1 mic preamp is dying. I think it’s got a bad tube. A great cheap pre, but i’ve probably run less than 6 hours of audio through it.
We have mice. I cannot kill another living thing.
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Space Void!
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home, sick
Been home sick for the past few days. Last night i finally went to see a doctor (at the local Urgent Care) and got a couple of prescriptions. Apparently, i’ve got a real crappy sinus infection that’s spreading to my lungs. I let it happen by not going to the doctor, but i honestly just thought it was the result of all the plaster i’d been breathing in lately. I figured it would just work itself out of my system, and that would be that. Well, it wasn’t.
Speaking of which, the ceiling guy (the old guy) did finally patch up our ceiling. In the process, he and his daughter managed to cover everything with yet another fine layer of plaster silt. They’re supposed to be painting the ceiling soon. They fucking better bring more drop cloths this time. Paint is impossible to get out of electronics compared to fine dust.
So i’ve been working on music in my downtime. The good news is that “Like We Are” is coming along rather nicely. The weird part is that it’s somehow morphed from an Afghan Whigs mope-n-dope dirge into a funky piano ballad. I’m not sure how it happened, but the refrain has managed to resolve itself into a syncopated shuffle. I guess that’s okay, but i have yet to toss the guitar part in. That was the first part i wrote, about ten years ago now. I’m just not sure how or if it’s going to fit. I can’t compromise my original vision for this song. Although it’s taking me down some unexpected paths – which i do find myself quite enjoying – i will not let this one stray yet again from being recorded as i have always heard it in my head. So we’ll see. Hopefully it will work out well enough that i won’t have to scrap everything and start over from scratch.
I promise to have some audio up soon.
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home, sick
Been home sick for the past few days. Last night i finally went to see a doctor (at the local Urgent Care) and got a couple of prescriptions. Apparently, i’ve got a real crappy sinus infection that’s spreading to my lungs. I let it happen by not going to the doctor, but i honestly just thought it was the result of all the plaster i’d been breathing in lately. I figured it would just work itself out of my system, and that would be that. Well, it wasn’t.
Speaking of which, the ceiling guy (the old guy) did finally patch up our ceiling. In the process, he and his daughter managed to cover everything with yet another fine layer of plaster silt. They’re supposed to be painting the ceiling soon. They fucking better bring more drop cloths this time. Paint is impossible to get out of electronics compared to fine dust.
So i’ve been working on music in my downtime. The good news is that “Like We Are” is coming along rather nicely. The weird part is that it’s somehow morphed from an Afghan Whigs mope-n-dope dirge into a funky piano ballad. I’m not sure how it happened, but the refrain has managed to resolve itself into a syncopated shuffle. I guess that’s okay, but i have yet to toss the guitar part in. That was the first part i wrote, about ten years ago now. I’m just not sure how or if it’s going to fit. I can’t compromise my original vision for this song. Although it’s taking me down some unexpected paths – which i do find myself quite enjoying – i will not let this one stray yet again from being recorded as i have always heard it in my head. So we’ll see. Hopefully it will work out well enough that i won’t have to scrap everything and start over from scratch.
I promise to have some audio up soon.
i was reading about the new Bryan Singer movie about the July 20 Plot against Hitler, and i found this out: a November 1943 allied bombing destroyed a truckload of new winter uniforms which were to be personally inspected by Hitler. Axel von dem Bussche was to have demonstrated them for Hitler, with two live grenades in the pockets for the purpose of a suicide-bomb assassination, on the very next day.
Oops!
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ceiling still broke
Sunday night
Murray the landlord: “I’ll have a guy come out tomorrow to fix it.”
Monday
Tuesday afternoon
Old guy, about 85 years old stumbles into the house, walks past the front room, looks up at door jamb (??!).
Holly: “No, it’s over there, on the ceiling. In there. In there. No, up! Up! On the ceiling… see it? See it? In the other room. Look where I’m pointing.”
Old guy spots the giant hole in ceiling, says, somewhat exasperatedly, “Well, that’s probably going to cost around $200. I’ll have to get with Murray, see what he wants to do.”
Exit old guy.
Wednesday evening:
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ceiling still broke
Sunday night
Murray the landlord: “I’ll have a guy come out tomorrow to fix it.”
Monday
Tuesday afternoon
Old guy, about 85 years old stumbles into the house, walks past the front room, looks up at door jamb (??!).
Holly: “No, it’s over there, on the ceiling. In there. In there. No, up! Up! On the ceiling… see it? See it? In the other room. Look where I’m pointing.”
Old guy spots the giant hole in ceiling, says, somewhat exasperatedly, “Well, that’s probably going to cost around $200. I’ll have to get with Murray, see what he wants to do.”
Exit old guy.
Wednesday evening:
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Today Our Ceiling Fell In
So today, Holly goes “you should take a lookit this ceiling in here” and i knew it was gonna be something bad. There’s been an open seam running parallel to the wall right above the sofa, underneath the upstairs bedroom closet. This afternoon, it had suddenly open and torn itself roughly perpendicular, in an ‘L’ shape. I immediately called our landslumlord (the guy who refused to fix the downstairs electrical tangle-box, and who doesn’t seem to care much that people who wear sandals over here get their feet cut open because the front door has an entire pane of glass completely shattered and glass is always falling out of it all over everywhere; it’s a good thing Speck hasn’t eaten any – yet), and left a message that he better get someone over here soon, because it’s GOING to fall in.
Why is it that these things always, always, always happen directly above the sofa?
Later that day…
Holly and i go out for supplies. We pull back in to see a van in the driveway. Then, a white-haired figure coming out of our house. It’s our landslumlord. I ask what brings him over, wondering if he got my message, but also wondering just what the hell he was doing in our place. He’s coughing his lungs out and looks bad. He’s also dumping god knows what into the neighbor’s trash can. He tells us that the ceiling had fallen out. We’re like ZOMG WTFH!?!! and he’s telling us that yes, it actually did fall. He tells us to open as many windows as we can, that someone would be out to fix it tomorrow (today now), and hightails it out of there.
So we’re like ZOMFG WTF! and we open the door to see… pure, pure white. A thick powdery haze is everywhere! We’re breathing plaster.
Everything in the downstairs floor was covered in white powder. Everything. The worst, of course, was in the living room, where my PC and the laptop were. And the furniture, and the TV, etc.
We cleaned up as much as we could, and let it air out (none of the windows open, or the ones that do don’t have screens, so we open the doors and i prop a box fan on a chair and point two more to it, directing the coke-like haze to leave at once. It’s approximately breathable again.
Incidentally, we’re pretty sure that it hadn’t crashed down before he arrived. Holly has a giant teddy bear that we keep in a chair. When we got in, the bear was on the floor and wasn’t nearly as dusted up as the chair it had been propped up on. We think he was fucking around with the ceiling and it crashed in on top of him.
Here’s what we have now. I can’t find our Olympus, so these were taken with the laptop’s webcam. Click on the pictures for a larger view.
Approximately what we saw when we arrived on the scene (haze added in GIMP 2.0):
And here’s what it looks like right now:
Close-up:
Incidentally, a black PS2 controller:
The black shop-vac that he left for us:
How am i feeling? I HAS RILLY ANGRY!1!!!
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Today Our Ceiling Fell Down
So today, Holly goes “you should take a lookit this ceiling in here” and i knew it was gonna be something bad. There’s been an open seam running parallel to the wall right above the sofa, underneath the upstairs bedroom closet. This afternoon, it had suddenly open and torn itself roughly perpendicular, in an ‘L’ shape. I immediately called our landslumlord (the guy who refused to fix the downstairs electrical tangle-box, and who doesn’t seem to care much that people who wear sandals over here get their feet cut open because the front door has an entire pane of glass completely shattered and glass is always falling out of it all over everywhere; it’s a good thing Speck hasn’t eaten any – yet), and left a message that he better get someone over here soon, because it’s GOING to fall in.
Why is it that these things always, always, always happen directly above the sofa?
Later that day…
Holly and i go out for supplies. We pull back in to see a van in the driveway. Then, a white-haired figure coming out of our house. It’s our landslumlord. I ask what brings him over, wondering if he got my message, but also wondering just what the hell he was doing in our place. He’s coughing his lungs out and looks bad. He’s also dumping god knows what into the neighbor’s trash can. He tells us that the ceiling had fallen out. We’re like ZOMG WTFH!?!! and he’s telling us that yes, it actually did fall. He tells us to open as many windows as we can, that someone would be out to fix it tomorrow (today now), and hightails it out of there.
So we’re like ZOMFG WTF! and we open the door to see… pure, pure white. A thick powdery haze is everywhere! We’re breathing plaster.
Everything in the downstairs floor was covered in white powder. Everything. The worst, of course, was in the living room, where my PC and the laptop were. And the furniture, and the TV, etc.
We cleaned up as much as we could, and let it air out (none of the windows open, or the ones that do don’t have screens, so we open the doors and i prop a box fan on a chair and point two more to it, directing the coke-like haze to leave at once. It’s approximately breathable again.
Incidentally, we’re pretty sure that it hadn’t crashed down before he arrived. Holly has a giant teddy bear that we keep in a chair. When we got in, the bear was on the floor and wasn’t nearly as dusted up as the chair it had been propped up on. We think he was fucking around with the ceiling and it crashed in on top of him.
Here’s what we have now. I can’t find our Olympus, so these were taken with the laptop’s webcam. Click on the pictures for a larger view.
Approximately what we saw when we arrived on the scene (haze added in GIMP 2.0):
And here’s what it looks like right now:
Close-up:
Incidentally, a black PS2 controller:
The black shop-vac that he left for us:
How am i feeling? I HAS RILLY ANGRY!1!!!
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The Highest Cost of War
If i were living in a video game, i would probably do video game things: senseless slaughter, reckless driving, and generally causing mayhem. It’s sure as hell fun in a video game.
I’d probably have a real itchy trigger finger; blowing character’s heads clean off would cause me to ceaselessly cackle as i wheel about looking for more victims, and more nastiness to get into.
Soldiers, however, do not live in video games. They kill real people. Actual human beings, with lives and families and friends and day jobs – be they evildoers or just innocent civilians, caught in the line of fire. Sometimes, though, things go wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.
Frankly, it’s getting a little tedious, hearing and reading about all the civilian deaths in Iraq. It has been going on for a long time, after all.
That’s why i put off reading this The Nation piece (alt.link.print) for about a week before i got around to reading it.
The Iraq War is a vast and complicated enterprise… Fighting in densely populated urban areas has led to the indiscriminate use of force and the deaths at the hands of occupation troops of thousands of innocents.
I can not and will not blame soldiers en masse or individually. It’s a real bad situation over there, and we need to get those guys out of there as quickly as we possibly can, before more soldiers crack under pressure and bring the whole damn thing down.
It’s ok to be against the war and NOT spit on returning soldiers. That kind of folly is for idiot hippies with misguided frustration. These guys need a lot of help, from many different angles. War does terrible things to a man’s soul. But we must have hope that these inner demons can be defeated, every last one of them, for every last soldier who was there and saw bad things happen.
The bottom line: we’ve gotta get out of that place.
In the four long years of the war, the mounting civilian casualties have already taken a heavy toll–both on the Iraqi people and on the US servicemembers who have witnessed, or caused, their suffering. Iraqi physicians… published a study late last year… that estimated that 601,000 civilians have died since the March 2003 invasion… [They] found that coalition forces were responsible for 31 percent of these violent deaths, an estimate they said could be “conservative,” since “deaths were not classified as being due to coalition forces if households had any uncertainty about the responsible party.”
“Just the carnage, all the blown-up civilians, blown-up bodies that I saw,” Specialist [Jeff] Englehart said. “I just–I started thinking, like, Why? What was this for?”
“It just gets frustrating,” Specialist [Garett] Reppenhagen said. “Instead of blaming your own command for putting you there in that situation, you start blaming the Iraqi people…. So it’s a constant psychological battle to try to, you know, keep–to stay humane.”
Holly- we went to the ER a couple of weeks back. She’s back on insulin. She’s been really up and down a lot lately. It’s rough for us both, but i can’t imagine having to be her and go through that. She’s getting better, though.
Music- i’ve been making music again. Funny thing is, i started trying to rework a 10 year old song of mine that i’ve always loved that i’ve never been able to get a good recording of. It’s a dark ballad about love gone badly wrong; very much in the Afghan Whigs tradition. I did arrange a brand new piano part for ambience, but stranger than that is that i was fooling around and stumbled onto a new chord that just completely breathes new life into a chorus part that was definitely in danger of being a little too comfortably numb. I changed a G to a Em/G in the third position, like a Cmaj7 but with a G root. I think it saved my song. I’ll have a recording of that in a few days.
Residence- we have yet to meet the new owner of the house we’re living in. We’re dealing with some tough issues with that. Like what happens if he decides that we’re not paying enough rent to live in a crummy but huge house? What if he wants us out right away? We have no idea what our near future holds with regard to our living situation. And that blows, big time.
Locally- It’s been so hot here that the glue holding the rear-view mirror onto the windshield of my grandpa’s Alero has melted and the mirror fell clean off!
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gah!
Ok. We found out that our landlord has definitely sold the place.
And i keep hearing his words from right after he took the buyer on a tour through the house: “I really love your dog… if you ever want to get rid of him, let me know, I’d love to have him!”
i am beyond frustrated.
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well, there goes that.
I haven’t talked to him yet, but i’m all but certain that my landlord just sold the house that we’re living in. The one we just moved into. The one we had our hearts set on buying. What this really means is anybody’s guess.
See, he just showed the place last week. And just today, the listing i had bookmarked is gone; in its place, a dialogue box pops up advising that it’s been “taken off the market.”
We’ll see. I really, really, really don’t want to move all over again.
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R.I.P. Tom Snyder
Enjoy the colortinis, good guy.
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Grandpa, Grandma… and Stickboy
So yesterday, on my way home from work, i get a text message. It’s a reminder from my Google Calendar. My grandpa’s 87th birthday would have been next week.
I knew it was coming, but the reminder kind of slapped me across the face a little bit.
I’ve been thinking about him, and about my grandma, almost every single day. The desire to cry and shout and punch things is palpable, but i don’t. I carry on. After all, i’m not the one who died. I am living. I have it pretty good. Still, it seems like something should be done on their behalf.
On a far, far lighter (and yet somehow nastier) note, i recently won and received this.
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religion is phony II
And old high school friend of mine has been posting a bunch of junk bulletins on MySpace about how evolution is a “lie.” I sent him a fairly nasty response, but i thought it worth posting here, at least for the links at the end. I have corrected it for capitalization to make it easier to read; and added emphasis, because adding HTML code in MySpace (the first time around) might have janky consequences.
I’m sorry dude, but that kind of idiocy is pure mind-pollution. Face it: religion has ruined history, and it’s threatening to destroy humanity even now.
You can not debunk so many fields of natural science with one broad swath of a very dull blade. Science is what it is: an exploration of truth. Sometimes science is wrong, and then it ceases to be science. It is science’s goal to continually reevaluate itself and update its data when better facts come into focus. Science’s entire agenda is based on questioning – gasp! – ITSELF in the search for more and more accurate answers! Can the same be said of religion?
Evolution, however, is testable, and its evidence is all around us. Natural selection is simply a process that happens, not unlike the semi-millennial phenomenon of millions of overzealous Christians propping up a mad buffoon in some leadership role because they’re sure he’ll help to bring about the so-called “end times.”
How about this one: if the world is only a few thousand years old, then how come we can see, with the naked eye, objects in space, such as galaxies, that are clearly millions of light-years away? Can light, originating from these objects, suddenly travel faster than itself? Or, if the universe was “created” whole (the distance between objects vast from the beginning), then why is it expanding, with everything rushing away from everything else at incredible speed?
If god is trying to “trick” us into thinking the world is more than a few thousand years old by planting evidence of creatures hundreds of thousands of years in the past (which we can easily verify by measuring the amount of atomic decay of carbon-14, which has already been proven to have a half life of 5730 years), then what kind of a sick bastard is this deity, anyway?
No, sir, the biggest lie ever told is that there is some mystical figure up in the sky who can (through his human – and presumably fallible – interpreter, of course) get you to DO anything and, even worse, BELIEVE any stupid idea, out of pure primal fear of some terrible “eternal” punishment.
Religion is phony. An outright lie – which has cost untold millions of lives throughout history. Think for yourself and you’ll see what i mean. It’s time to put the toys away and stop playing a sick game of pretend with the goal of destroying all of humanity. That’s just evil.
No one can save us but ourselves. If you think there is some god who, in the whole of the universe, would bother saving the practically infinitesimal inhabitants of a tiny speck floating in the inky black void of space from themselves, then ask yourself where this god was throughout all the genocides and holocausts, all the tragedies and disasters of human history. Testing our faith? That’s just fucked up. If that’s the Christian idea of “god,” then “god” is one seriously warped asshole and i don’t want anything to do with it.
Sorry, R***. Just THINK about it, man. Don’t be duped by hustlers and con-men making big promises about things they ultimately know nothing about.
And now, i present to you some recommended reading:
http://www.ex-christian.net/
http://www.exchristian.org/
http://www.christianism.com/
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jim_meritt/bible-contradictions.html
http://www.losingmyreligion.com/Lookin’ out for you, friend,
~jer
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link roundup
Best of Craigslist: “From an Angry Soldier” – a must-read.
Songbird, a “a desktop Web player, a digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up” – have not tried it yet, looks promising!
Awesome contraption a la Rube Goldberg!
Some Dayton, OH YouTube-ness. (Bonus: look for some great Brainiac live footage!)
Some things never change: what my mom’s been up to lately. (This last apparently involving something along the lines of stealing cable.) (Also i found some interesting busts from the early 90s here, including petty theft, unlawful use of property, and drug abuse.)
Information relating to the indictment (for involuntary manslaughter) of my good friend Derek Bayes, a kind and gentle fellow musician, who, according to anecdotal personal testimony, was defending himself against his girlfriend’s enraged, blind, shotgun-wielding estranged husband (or something very similar), when he accidentally choked the guy to death. According to some mutual friends, when the ambulance and police came, he was still on top of the guy and was crying when they took him away. A trumped up case, especially after the local media got ahold of it and spun it the wrong way round like the bloodthirsty vampires they are. I know Derek, and he is a harmless and sweet man with a good heart. And he’s still sitting in prison, with a couple years left on his nine-year sentence. (Don’t let his mug shot fool you, he was obviously having a very, very bad day.)
Another good friend of mine: Dee, who shares my birthday and who is yet another extraordinary kind human being who was caught up in some bad circumstances. Thankfully, Dee’s free again.
Historic South Park District in Dayton, OH (where we now live).
We’re thinking about buying the house we’re in, and this information has been pretty helpful thus far. Also, knowing more about bad mold can’t hurt!
Well, that’s weird, “Bob”… Something weird didn’t happen yesterday….
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