failure weblog

well, the last few days have been a barrel of laughs. (perhaps this would be a good place to mention that i was wearing my “lost cause” t-shirt when the accident occurred.)
a couple of days ago i decided the vicodin isn’t having much effect, so i stopped using it. i didn’t feel any different before, during, or after taking it. i told them in the e.r. vidodin hasn’t seemed to do much of anything for me in the past.
tuesday i spent most of the day in bed. the hrc took me by la fendee for lunch. i decided to not bother with the crutches part way through. i can hobble around, and i can put some weight on my leg, but i’m slow, and if i jar it a little or bend it too much it hurts. we just ordered there, then i brought it back to my house. i watched the island while i ate with my leg propped up on the couch, then i headed back to the bed.
wednesday started off badly. early in the day i finally started to hit the limit of my trying to be understanding and accepting of the situation i’m in. i wasn’t feeling sorry for myself, just more annoyed that it’s sinking in it may take a pretty long time for me to be mostly back to normal again. i was tired of laying on my back in the house staring at the ceiling. i was tired of my leg being swollen. i was tired of not being able to accomplish anything of value related to my job, because even though i have a laptop and internet connection it’s just not the same as sitting at a desk (even my home desk). i was tired of having to ask people to help me do things. i don’t mind if i have to hobble around some, i just want to feel like i know it’s healing and i can go to work and go to eat and drive myself somewhere. anyway, it wasn’t productive.
so in order to feel like i was accomplishing something, sometime around lunchtime (i’ve been sleeping a lot, and late) i called an orthopedic office to set up an appointment, because my leg was still swollen a fair bit and my knee is very sensitive to the touch. the e.r. just took x-rays, so i figured it might be a good idea to have someone check out my leg for ligament/tendon/etc. injuries just in case. this is the point i learned what a big clusterfsck this whole thing could be.
after talking to 3 different doctors’ offices, i learned pretty much none of them will take personal health insurance if you were in an accident. they want you to pay for yourself as an individual. this is because if they accept your insurance, the personal health insurance many times will — upon finding out it is related to an vehicle accident — tell them they need to give all of the money back. why? because it’s an vehicle accident and the personal health insurance companies don’t want to pay that. so then the doctor has to bill you. then you have to fight with insurance companies about who is supposed to pay. they try to force the responsible party to pay. in this case for me, it would be the party responsible for the accident…except we don’t know who that is — or if they even have insurance…or any money at all. so then it falls to my own vehicle insurance if i have personal injury protection. or, if the responsible party is uninsured or under-insured, then it could be you have uninsured/under-insured insurance on your vehicle insurance.
so it was that my simple plan of using my personal health insurance — you know, the insurance you pay lots of money for to take care of your health? — fell apart. i was pretty pissed, because i lived under the assumption that your health insurance was supposed to insure your health. evidently they try as hard as they can to not do so. because you know, they’d like have to pay money, and they’re in business to make money. it’s even more annoying since i personally have been positive cash flow for the insurance industry for most of my adult life. i have made almost no vehicle insurance claims ever (and the few i have made were very minor), and i rarely use health insurance (and when i do it’s usually for some antibiotics or such for a cold or something, nothing expensive).
the hrc took me by schlotzsky’s for lunch, then i came home and sat with my leg propped on the couch and watched adaptation. i then went back to the bed. (spot a theme?)
i had decided to skip doing the radio show, and i slept through the first part of it. i’d planned on getting on irc and listening to it, but i didn’t. around 9:30pm or so the potts (sans children) came by. they took me over to the teahouse. i decided to give a shot at staying out a little bit. but we went in the back where the soft couches are and i put my leg up on a couch, so it was sort of cheating. i was out of the house for probably about 1.5 hours. my leg did swell up some, but it wasn’t too bad and i got home feeling decent about the experiment.
when i got home, my dsl wasn’t working. well, sometimes a bit, but not very well. i tried disconnecting and reconnecting it, but it still wasn’t working. after trying to get a support number via my iphone, and spending time on hold, they told me there was a houston outage and i would just need to wait and call back later and see if it was working. so i gave up and went to sleep.
today when i got up around noon, the internet still wasn’t working. i hobbled over to the modem and it had no lights…no power, no nothing. i unplugged and replugged it. nothing. i changed outlets. nothing. the modem was dead. i called the support line and after it taking awhile they told me it wasn’t under warranty, so i’d have to sign a new 1-year agreement to get a new dsl modem. except the account isn’t in my name, so i said thanks and hung up. i kind of need the internet to do my work, plus right now it’s my connection to the outside world while i’m laying in bed. so i decided i’d go ahead and buy a new one myself.
the hrc came by and picked me up, and first we went by the post office where i picked up a certified letter from the towing company letting me know they had my bike. of course, i already knew that, and progressive insurance is taking care of that stuff, so it doesn’t really matter. from there we went to lupe tortilla. i decided to give a shot at being on my feet for awhile, so we ate there. they use wooden slat chairs, and that mixed with me having to bend my knee more and for longer than i have been wasn’t too comfortable. from there we went by microcenter so i could get a new dsl modem and wireless router. we also went by best buy so i could check on external drives there, which i plan to use with my exchange home lab.
oh yeah, and during the time i was out the guy from the honda dealership called me and said he’d done a repair estimate on my bike and it came out to like $7500 so they were probably going to be totaling it and just cutting me a check, but that my agent would get in touch with me. a while later she did call me, and told me that was the plan. i took the opportunity to ask her about how that works, what about custom parts on the bike, etc. i also asked her if i had personal injury protection or uninsured/under-insured on my policy and…no, i don’t. so i guess both progressive and my personal healthcare will be trying to go after the other people in the accident. i also talked to her about insurance companies and seeing a doctor and such, and she said she would help me if i needed to get proof for my personal health insurance that i don’t have pip or uninsured/under-insured. so maybe that will work out. i guess next i need to call my health insurance company and see what they have to say.
i was probably out of my house, sitting, standing, walking, for about 3 or 4 hours total. my leg was hurting some the whole time, but as we were driving back to my house it got pretty painful. it kind of felt like the lower half of my leg was on fire. (maybe the vicodin would have helped? but i doubt it.) eventually we got home and i got the wrap off and got in bed and elevated it. the ankle was pretty swollen, but the knee not as bad. but a lot more blood had pooled around my heel and the back of my knee and lower thigh. it looks like black bruises sort of. this is in addition to what looked like a number of yellow and purplish bruises along my leg. it’s been a few hours since then and my leg still is sore and tingling some. hopefully that will lessen the longer my leg is elevated. it pretty much sucks. and the trial run is not a good sign for me having little or no problems going back to work.
i had to call raj to try and get info about the dsl line, and then i had to break down and do some google searching on my iphone to get info about how to properly set up the device i got with at&t dsl, but i eventually got the dsl working. which is why i’m finally able to put this update out. yea for accomplishing something.

backtracking for a bit, friday was the geek gathering. via a conversation during the show wednesday, i had made a joke about wearing a “wanna cyber?” t-shirt to the gathering. after i got home from work, i spent about 15 minutes making one with a white t-shirt and a black sharpie. i have a pic of it that i may post later sometime.
this past tuesday as i was about to leave work i got an email from a p.a. employee asking about the status of a video server i’d set up. i figured the video process had stopped, so i went to ssh into it…no response. so i pinged the box…no response. at this point i contacted someone who could check on the system through an admin interface. we both tried looking at it, but the slot labeled for my system was showing a windows system. we thought maybe the console interface was messed up, but eventually i asked her to go ahead and reboot it. a windows 2003 box booted up. so i had to call the guy who is the main admin for that system. i explained what was going on and what slot i was checking, and he then realized he’d given the wrong slot number to someone and they had evidently done a windows install over my *nix box. “oopsie.” so after waiting for the main admin to do a base *nix install for me again, i had to spend a few hours tuesday evening getting everything installed and functioning as it had been before it got vaporized. that was certainly fun.
i was trying to decide if it was the windows gods trying to push me further towards running and using windows, in their own peculiar windowsy way, or if it was the *nix gods punishing me for installing windows 2000 and windows xp recently at home.
and regarding those installs, i spent some amount of time last week trying to get my old desktop running again. (this is the desktop that my hard drive fritzed on back in 2004.) based on previous experience leading me to think the ide controller might be bad, i decided i’d try a sata drive since it has two sata connectors. after pulling the old sata drive out of my power mac, i plugged it into the old desktop and started the xp install. but xp couldn’t find the drive. i went online to find the manual for the motherboard and it turns out the sata connectors can only be used in conjunction with the promise raid chipset. at first i was disheartened, but then i realized i could just make a raid 0 volume with 1 disk and try it. i set that up and started the xp install, but it still couldn’t find the disk. i did a google search and realized i’d need to hit f6 during the xp install in order to give it the promise raid driver so it could see the disk. i downloaded the raid driver (along with all other drivers, software, and manuals available for the mb on the asus site) and burned it all to a cd. i started the xp install and hit f6 at the appropriate point…then it wanted me to put the disk in a: and hit enter. well, “a:” is a floppy drive. and it wouldn’t look anywhere else except “a:”. *sigh* i’ve got floppies and a drive, but i really didn’t feel like doing that, so i gave up on that path for now.
so i got a known good 250 gig ide hard drive and plugged it in where the old drive had been, but the xp install format failed. so i switched eide cables, but it failed again. so i switched to an old 40-pin ide cable, but format with that also failed. so i’m still under the opinion that the ide controller is bad. next i’ll put the hard drive on the second controller (which is where the cd-rom is) and see if the format fails. if it continues to fail, it’s possible it’s the power supply i guess. but pretty soon i’m just going to give up on the motherboard and move on.
back to the recent past now, yesterday was pretty uneventful. i mostly laid in bed and slept quite a bit. the potts clan came by after church and brought me a sub from subway, and before they left sue re-dressed my wound. it still looked about the same. and the swelling was about the same. later in the afternoon i called my insurance company to tell them about the wreck and start the claim process. (fortunately, i’d kept full coverage even though i paid off the bike a couple of years ago.) the lady was pleasant and took all of the information and said an agent would be calling me the next day before noon. later in the evening the potts dropped me off a ham and cheese omelet from house of pies.
today i was in and out most of the morning. the progressive agent called and got some more info from me. she said i’d need to call the tow company to release the bike so progressive could pick it up. i called them, but they said i had to fax my driver’s license and signature to them or come by in person. i believe “sh!t.” was my response. i called the progressive rep back and explained the situation, but i told her if she had email i might be able to get a scanner here at my house working and scan stuff and email it to her, then she could fax it to them. fortunately, the hrc is a contract employee so she has flexible hours, so in the afternoon she agreed to come by and help me. i decided i kind of wanted to get out of the house, so she drove me over to the tow place (which it turns out is right across the street from the new saint arnold’s brewery, so i got to see them working on it.)
i hobbled up to the window and signed the release, but then i decided since i was there i wanted to see how the bike looked. they let me go back and look at it. when i got to it, the right side was the side facing me. that’s the side that dropped onto the pavement. it didn’t look too bad really, other than my highway peg extender being bent. i could see the front tire was either blown out or the bead had been broken, and the headlight was broken and dangling. the right mirror was bent around, but it might have just swiveled and not actually be bent. and i could see the aftermarket license plate holder and blinkers had broken and was dangling by the electric cables. but the side that hit the car was much worse. the gas tank was dented up. the mirror was broken off. the front fender (which i’d just replaced) had a dent on the back of it. and i could see the front forks were bent. it’s possible i might be forgetting some damage, but it had a fair bit of stuff wrong. i should have some pics that i might be able to put up soon.
once we left, i called the progressive agent to let her know they could come by and pick up the bike. they are supposed to be taking it to honda of northwest houston i believe. from there we went through the chick-fil-a drive thru and i picked up some food to bring home. the hrc brought me a couple of ice packs and a foam wedge that elevates your feet. (she has all kinds of stuff due to her many surgeries and back problems.) the wedge is really nice. my hip was started to hurt, and the swelling on my ankle and knee hadn’t really been going down. since this afternoon, i’ve had the ice packs on them several times and i’ve had my feet elevated, and it seemed to have helped the swelling in my knee a fair bit. my ankle is still pretty swollen. most of the front of my lower leg still feels numb to the touch, although around the knee is pretty sensitive. i did try putting some weight on my leg today, and i was able to get around that way, although i still feel more comfortable using the crutches for some support. i re-dressed the wound this afternoon, but tonight i left the wrappings off and am going to try and let it have a chance to dry out and scab.

well, my good luck on motorcycles finally ended today. around 1pm i went to the hot bagel shop on shepherd for some bagels. they were closing up at 2pm so i hopped on the motorcycle and headed toward home. i was just a block or two from the bagel shop on shepherd and there wasn’t any traffic around me. a turquoise green 4-door sedan was in the petco parking lot to my right ahead of me, waiting to pull out. when i was less then a block or half block from them, they quickly pulled out. and then completely stopped, blocking both lanes. i guess traffic was coming from the other way and they wanted to make a left, and they hadn’t seen me. i slammed on the brakes and started to veer to the right a little. but i hit the driver’s side passenger (rear) door or front of the rear quarter panel with my front tire and then the rest of my bike came up and slammed my left leg between my bike and their door. i’m not sure how fast i was going at that point. i saw a piece of chrome falling to the ground (probably my left mirror) and then my bike started falling over. i hopped off it onto my feet and realized my left leg hurt. i think a girl in the car might have screamed or something, then i heard a guy’s voice say “…go. go! go! go!” and the car took off. i turned to watch them and memorize the license plate. i was saying it to myself when i realized my leg hurt really badly, so i hobbled a couple of steps and then sat down. i was worried it might be broken or something.
it was right in front of the petco, so numerous people were around and saw what happened. other people also had the license plate and info about the people in the car. a doctor happened to be right there. she stopped and got out and was feeling my leg asking me if i could feel her touching stuff, if it hurt, if i could wiggle my toes. some guys picked up my bike out of the road and pushed it into the petco parking lot. the doctor said she didn’t think anything was broken, but they’d probably put it in a cast. other people were coming up and asking me if i was okay, somebody brought me some water, some people put pet beds (i guess from the petco) under my head as a pillow.
evidently the people in the car switched drivers and then the guy came back by. i thought they were coming back to stop and the guy wanted to claim he was driving, but i heard some people say “that’s the car! that’s them!” and then they took off again i guess.
within a few minutes i think, the cops showed up. they took info from me about what happened, what i saw, etc. i also heard them talking to other people around me. at this point, numerous people started coming up to me and telling me they were sorry and hoped i would be okay, and shaking my hand. that seems kind of weird, but i bet at least 6 to 10 people did that. someone told me they’d tried to chase them but got caught in traffic and stopped by a cop. a younger blonde lady in a running shirt said if she’d have caught that girl she’d have kicked her 4ss for me. an older white lady that was dressed nicely came up and said she hoped i would be okay and she hoped i “could take those people for everything they’ve got, but they looked kind of trashy so they may not have anything.” that was pretty funny. two of the guys who work at the hot bagel shop stopped to see how i was doing. when i saw them i pointed at them and said “you just sold me bagels!” several people came up and told me my bike didn’t look too bad. i know i saw the front tire was flat, and a mirror and/or blinker or something broke off. one of the cops gave me a card to where it was getting towed.
a few minutes later the ambulance showed up. they pretty much asked the same questions, asked me if i wanted a ride to the hospital and if so which one, and when i said okay and i didn’t care they put me on a stretcher and put me in the back of the ambulance and said they were going to take me to saint luke’s. those stretchers aren’t comfortable, and neither is the ride. (the emts in the back with me called the driver “sue” several times, so i refrained from asking if his dad was a big johnny cash fan.) on the way i said “y’all don’t have cable tv in here?” they had put a neck brace on me even though i’d been moving my head and neck just fine, so all i could do was stare at the ceiling. while i was on my ride, i called sue and the hrc. the hrc lives right by the medical center so i thought maybe she could give me a ride home, and i’d had plans to hang out with the potts so i called sue to let her know i probably wouldn’t be making it over.
i got to the hospital and they triaged me. i suggested they should put something to watch or read on the ceiling. when they rolled me into the e.r. room, a nurse asked how i was doing and i said “just great!” she said “i’m not sure about that, you’re on a stretcher in the e.r.” and i said “but i’m just laying here, and people are rolling me around.” they gave me a tetanus shot, then did x-rays on my tibia, knee, and fibula (or whatever your leg bones are). they said everything looked okay, so they cleaned up the abrasions, bandaged and wrapped the leg, and gave me some crutches. i got up to walk (i hadn’t tried putting weight on the leg) and it hurt pretty bad. the doctor had given me prescriptions for motrin, vicoden (hydrocodone), and bactoban. a nurse asked me if i wanted some painkiller now, but i said i could just wait and get the prescription filled. they got a wheelchair and i sat down, then one of the nurses asked if i felt dizzy. i didn’t, but i was feeling clammy and flushed and sweaty…like right before you feel dizzy then pass out. so they made me sit and wait awhile, and the nurse went and got me some ice water and a painkiller pill. i had to go to the bathroom, so they wheeled me into the bathroom. by the time i was done (which was difficult) and washed my hands, my toes on my left foot were blue/purplish. but they got better. the hrc showed up, so the nurse wheeled me out and i was on my way home.
humorously, after letting sue and the hrc know that nothing appeared to be broken or anything, both of them said they felt a lot better because “i know how you tend to understate things” (they both said exactly the same thing) so they were worried just how bad it was since i’d been in an ambulance and bothered to call and tell them at all.
i got home and the hrc went and got my prescriptions and got me some gatorade and food and such. while she was gone i got up and used the bathroom. it’s about 10 feet from my bed, and i used the crutches, but by the time i got back to the bed my leg hurt pretty bad for several minutes. my knee and ankle have also both swollen up to about twice their normal size. but i’m assuming the pain will get worse before it gets better, since that tends to be how these sort of things work.
it seems like most medical workers asked me if i was wearing a helmet, and when i told them no they all said i needed to do that. i figure considering the possible scenarios, the fact that i appear to have gotten away with just battered up flesh and muscle is pretty good. hopefully they didn’t miss any problems with my knee or ankle. looking back on it, there really wasn’t much i could have done. i don’t really blame the driver too much, as mistakes happen. it’s pretty poor they took off though. maybe they didn’t have insurance, or she had a suspended license, or they had drugs in the car, or who knows what.
hopefully this will count as my motorcycle accident, and i won’t have to have another one in the future. anyway, i hope y’all are having a better weekend than me.

last weekend i broke out my old windows 2000 computer and thought i’d give a shot at trying to recover data off the hard drive again. for those not in the know, back in fall 2004 (friday, september 17th, 2004, to be exact) my web server crashed, and i lost a blog i’d been writing for a few months. i hadn’t really advertised the location to anyone, so almost no one knew it existed. and i was really just using it to write out some of my thoughts with what was going on in my life since tamara had decided to have affair and completely fsck up everything. in addition to losing the blog, i also lost a lot of email that had only been on the server. there was some stuff that i had copied to my desktop computer though. then a month or two after that (november 7th, 2004, to be exact), my desktop computer fried. so even stuff i’d had in both places got lost (email, etc.). my wife has a miscarriage, then she has an affair, then she leaves me, then my server crashes, then my desktop crashes. ah, the good old days.
at the time, and since then, i thought it was my hard drive that was the culprit. i’d tried doing stuff using the same machine, tried doing stuff using my old windows 98 desktop, and nothing really seemed to fix it. i did manage to use a recovery program to search the raw device and pull files that had identifiable headers and were in contiguous blocks. unfortunately, a lot of stuff wasn’t, and even what was saved was only identified by file extension and a number for the file (e.g. file0001.gif, file0024.jpg, etc.).
this time i took a computer my parents had handed down to me after they upgraded and put an unused 80 gig hard drive in it (so as to not overwrite my parents’ data, just in case they needed something and had forgotten about it). their computer had windows me on it originally, and i had the dell restore disk, but i just couldn’t bring myself to install me. *shudder* so i installed windows 2000. humorously, after i installed it and got it set up i immediately went to start security patches…but it couldn’t get on the network. “what’s up?” i was thinking. i went into the control panel and looked at the hardware and it had a yellow warning on the nic card. i clicked on it and it had no driver. “uh…oh yeah. drivers.” haha. i’d forgotten about that. luckily, i had a cd with a driver that’d work with the card in the computer. i installed that and was on my way to doing updates.
i had some recovery programs from the last time i’d messed with this stuff years ago, so i installed those again. one of them did me no good at all. the other seemed to perform the same as last time, finding stuff but finding files only by doing a raw search on the disk. i went ahead and let it run and extract everything it could.
at this point i also ran a couple of programs that tested the disk. they claimed nothing was wrong with the drive. hhmmm. perhaps it was the motherboard on my old windows 2000 machine that borked, not the hard drive. i also decided i’d try to find some other data recovery programs. i poked around and found a few, but i wasn’t too excited about paying what looked to be between $70 and $150 for recovery software.
i was about ready to break down and buy one of the cheaper ones ($70) that still seemed to be mentioned favorably in multiple places, with a discount from following a link to a special price page on their site ($56), when i noticed you could get the software free ($0) by using “trial pay.” i did a bit of poking around to see if it seemed legit, and it did. the deal is the companies have an agreement that you can get their product for free if you follow the trial pay link and make a purchase with one of the companies on trial pay. you have a decent choice of companies and products to buy from, although probably half of it or more involves signing up for some kind of subscription to something (which i assume you can cancel). but there are some decent things too. i didn’t find anything i was really excited about, but i did find a purchase that i was okay with, so i bought something and got the recovery software too.
the new software (easeus data recovery wizard) has done a better job than the old stuff i was using. it has identified lots of files by name. unfortunately it doesn’t include the directory structure, so it’s a bunch of individual files from the whole system. which is a lot. but i’ve been able to pick through quite a few things and get a decent amount of stuff that i thought was gone.
one of the best ones so far is that i was able to recover my thunderbird mail and index files and open them up in thunderbird. i was able to do the same thing with a number of outlook express dbx files, but i’d moved to thunderbird so i think thunderbird had everything that was in outlook express.
the other awesome thing is that i was able to find an html cache file that had the text of almost all of my published blog entries from my first blog attempt. i’m missing a few from august and september of 2004, but i think everything from july 2004 back was in there. i’m sure there are some entries that were in draft mode that are forever gone, but i’m pretty excited i got most of the published stuff back. hopefully here pretty soon i’ll be posting the text on this blog with the original dates intact. (which means they won’t show up as new entries.) in addition to covering thoughts and feelings about the situation with tamara while i was in the midst of it, it also covers the purchase of my motorcycle and the first roadtrip on it (to cornerstone in illinois, summer 2004).

okay, let’s run through the stuff i’ve acquired over the last couple of weeks…

• like a pen single – the knife (rabid/brille/mute)
• we share our mothers’ health single – the knife (rabid/brille/mute)
• silent shout single – the knife (rabid/brille/mute)
• sillent shout deluxe edition – the knife (rabid/brille/mute)

i decided to try and buy most of the knife’s output. unfortunately, accurate discographies seem hard to come by, and sometimes the european version of a release has one or two things different than the u.s. release. plus some stuff is only available on vinyl. and some stuff is pretty rare. add all that together, and it’s a mess trying to find and buy the stuff. even online, since when someone says they have something you don’t always know if it’s the european or u.s. version. (some people know the difference, some people don’t.)

• nausea 12″ vinyl – adult. (ersatz audio)

i picked this up on ebay. i don’t even have a record player. mostly i wanted to get a 12″ for the artwork, so i can display it. plus “nausea” is one of my favorite adult. songs.

• lonely hearts – tara mcpherson (dark horse)
• built in Texas – abernethy, et. al. (unt press)
• goodbye to a river – john graves (knopf)

the first is a book of tara mcpherson’s artwork. i really like her style — pop art, fairly minimalist clean lines, limited color complexity, kind of innocent yet also creepy and dark. good stuff. unfortunately, the version i got from amazon looks like they left it laying around at either a mechanic shop or a ink toner manufacturing shop. hopefully i can clean it up.
the second is a book put out by the Texas folklore society. it’s got texts, pictures, and drawings. different sections are written by different people. there are a couple by terry jordan. it covers the different styles of construction in early Texas: houses, barns, windmills, water sources, etc. mostly buildings though. it discusses origins, areas styles were prevalent, variations, etc.
the third is a classic Texas book, but i’ve never owned or read a copy. this is a hardcover version and appears to be the twentieth printing.
i got my new fender dropped off by ups earlier this week. when i pulled off my old fender after the incident, i angled it and pulled it in between the forks. it’s not really meant to be taken off and put on that way, you’re supposed to take the front tire off — but i managed it. so i decided i’d put the new one on the same way. unfortunately, i wasn’t thinking it through and as i was angling it and rocking it i managed to put some pretty nice scrapes about 1″ long on it. *sigh* fortunately, they are on the back side of the fender facing the body and radiator, so it’s not blatantly visible like it would be in some other places. plus i guess i can always do some cover up if i want.
i went to poison girl last friday with a group of people celebrating a co-worker’s birthday. by chance, i happened to run into jason, one of the guys i ride with. i hadn’t seen or talked to him in a number of months. he bought a bigger bike a few months back. we talked for awhile, then i went back to the people i was with. as i was leaving, jason and his friends were sitting at a table near the bar. i stopped and talked to them for awhile. i was squatting since they were sitting, and i was half blocking the foot path so i had to move now and then when people were walking by. all of the sudden i heard a crash and felt something hit me a little. i turned around and there was a bar stool on the floor. along with a young lady in a dress. i looked at the people i was talking to and said “did i cause that?” they said no. she got up and seemed to be okay. i’m not sure if she was sober enough to be embarrassed or not. the poison girl is a cool place, despite the falling girls (or maybe because of it).
last night brad texted me to see if i wanted to meet him at a place in rice village and then ride. i met him and hung out awhile, but we ended up not riding. the funny bit of the story is i was sitting across from a girl about my age and we talked some, she was drinking more than me. i was getting ready to leave and when i got up she said “did i give you my card?” i looked at her and smiled and said “no.” her facial reaction was a bit odd. and she’d been reaching around in her purse, but she started closing it and said “uh…ok.” it was about this point i realized she must not have said what i thought she did. so i said “did you say ‘did i give you my card?'” and she replied, “no, i said *can* i give you my card.” i felt kind of bad after realizing what must have been running through her head and how she probably felt after my response. but it was kind of funny too.

“this is your 2nd reminder! the factory warranty on your car is about to or has already expired! this is your final warning! we won’t call you back again!”
so how many times have you picked up the phone and heard a bit of silence then a recording saying that, or something similar to it, over the last year or two? i kid you not, in the last few months i’m pretty sure i’ve gotten at least a dozen to a couple of dozen of those. work phone, cell phone, probably home phone if i had the ringer turned on. heck, one time we even got one at the radio station during our show! it’s f’ing out of control.
every time i got one of these i got more and more pissed. it was even more annoying after i had gotten rid of any vehicle they would possibly provide an aftermarket warranty for.
finally, two calls ago (a week or so ago), i decided to talk to them. i listened through the spiel and hit to talk to a representative. i asked them what vehicle they were calling about. they didn’t know, of course. (because they weren’t calling about a specific vehicle, though they won’t admit it.) i told them i was interested. i wanted a warranty on my ’55 chevy bel-air.
they couldn’t warranty that. it needed to be mid 90’s or up (if i recall correctly) with less than 60k miles. okay, what about my ’65 ford f-100 pickup?
nope, that one either. it needs to be a mid 90’s with less than 60k miles. okay, okay, then my ’77 vw camper bus.
they couldn’t do that one either. yet again they explained it needed to be mid 90’s or up. finally, i said okay then i guess my 2004 honda.
they got excited. “okay, a 2004…honda, you said…what model?” vtx1300c. “a v..t…what?” vtx1300c. “that’s not coming up on my computer. how many miles?” about 26k. “okay…just a sec. <hold> back. um…is that an accord?” no. it’s a vtx1300c. they evidently wanted to make the sale even though my motorcycle didn’t show up in their car list, so they said they’d pass me on to their manager for more info.
now they needed my name and address and phone number. after much pausing and acting weird and questions, i gave them the name “jason dean” (christian slater’s character from heathers). i gave them the address of the astrodome. then i asked why they needed my number, since they called me. they said they didn’t have that info. i asked how they called me. they said it was automated and they picked up the calls, so they needed my number in case we got disconnected. i told them to give me their number in case we got disconnected. they said they didn’t have incoming lines. so i gave them my number…which was the main line for the houston police department. (i didn’t tell them that last part.) they thanked me, and i put them on mute. after a bit of hold time, the manager came on the line. i didn’t take it off mute. they said my name several times (and by “my name” i mean “jason”) and eventually hung up.
i smiled. d4mn, it feels good to be a gangsta.
a few days later i got the same automated call again. i went through the same deal, but this time i gave them the phone number for the fbi here in houston.
i must say, i’m enjoying their calls quite a bit more since i started doing this. i feel like i’m wasting their time. if a bunch of people would do this, it might clog up their system with crap. maybe they are using outgoing lines to call the police and the fbi to ask for jason dean. or at the least, maybe they’ll mark my numbers as bad. even though it may lead to nothing, it brings a smile to my face to think about it, and makes me feel a bit better — instead of being annoyed by their stupid calls.

i’ve gotten a few more things i bought on ebay…
back in 1999 or something, i picked up a garden gargoyle (fake stone) at lowe’s. i got it home and put it on top of the entertainment center. not too long later, i decided i wished i would have gotten a second one so i could put them on the corners (instead of just having one in the middle). by the time i got around to going back to lowe’s, there were none to be had. i figured i’d wait and they’d have some more, but no. over the last few years, i’ve looked online from time to time. a year or so ago i found a place in england that had a picture of a match, but shipping would have made it pretty expensive. well, a couple of weeks ago, i typed in gargoyle statue (which i’d done before over the years) and another of mine was listed! it was $10, and with $10 s/h it came out to $20. but considering how often i’ve seen them over the last 8 to 10 years, i decided i should go ahead and do it. i watched it and no one else bid on it, so at the last minute i bid and got it. interestingly, it’s the same thing but it’s not quite crouched as much and it’s a little lighter in color. but it’s close. and i now have the pair sitting atop my speakers.
years ago, tamara and i picked up a softcover copy of the day i swapped my dad for two goldfish. it’s written by neil gaiman and drawn/painted by dave mckean. it’s also gaiman’s first children’s book. we had it upstairs at our old house in the red room, which was decorated with a lot of kid’s stuff. unfortunately, where it sat was in direct sunlight for several hours a day, so over time the cover got pretty bleached out. partially because of that, when i saw a new version had come out, i went ahead and bought a hardcover version of it. (it also includes a cd of neil reading the book.) anyway, a couple of weeks ago i saw a hardcover version of the original pop up on ebay. it originally cost $22, and they wanted $20 plus $4 s/h (so $24 total). i figured i would have paid that for it brand new, so i was willing to pay that. no one else bid on it, so i snatched it at the last minute.
neilgaimanbibliography.com has been a great help to let me know what gaiman material exists, how many versions are around, who published them, when, etc.
awhile back i was looking around for madman comic book stuff, and i learned that allred has started a new madman series a couple of years ago. issue 13 was the latest. so on ebay i managed to pick up a single lot of madman atomic comics 1-12. friday i went and picked up 13 at bedrock comics.
i’ve read through 11. the artwork is pretty nice, and some of the concept stuff he’s been doing is pretty interesting. the storyline has been kind of bizarre. i mean, it’s always been that way, but it seems kind of disjointed to me this time around. like sometimes it feels like things are paced oddly. there have been some typos or misspellings as well, which makes it feel kind of sloppy or hurried in my mind, even if it’s not. comic books also don’t seem like a cheap thrill to me like they used to — i’m not sure if their relative cost has gotten out of control, or if it’s just me. i guess i also feel like movies, books, and cds seem expensive as well. movies should be about $5 or $6, paperback books should be $5 to $8, cds should be $10 to $12, and comics should be $1 to $1.50. am i just living in the past?
i got several shirts i had ordered from strange candy ink. they have shirts related to madman and the atomics. i got a black madman exclamation bolt short sleeve and a black and white madman exclamation bolt 3/4 sleeve. it took a while to get my order, but when i got the package there was a free blue yellow ringer atomics logo t-shirt in it.
i’ve gotten a few of the things i ordered on amazon:

• mom: music for our mother ocean – various (surfdog/interscope)
• like a pen cd single – the knife (brille/mute)
• marble house cd single – the knife (brille/mute)

i picked up the mom compilation for the helmet cover of bjork’s “army of me”. (thanks for pointing out where i could get it, ash.:) that’s really the only reason i picked it up. although there are a few other tracks i’m insterested in checking out (brian setzer orchestra, reverend horton heat, primus, no doubt, beastie boys).
this past monday i got home from work and ended up falling asleep. i woke up to my phone ringing. i groggily answered it, and it was the guy who backed into my motorcycle. he said he was on 59 near kirby and wanted to know where to go. half asleep, i gave him somewhat confusing directions to my street. he said he’d call me back when he was at the turn. over the next minute or two i woke up more and realized maybe i should have just met him somewhere. after a few minutes i texted him and asked him if he wanted to meet me somewhere if that would be easier. he replied pretty quickly and said whataburger. so i drove over there and met him. he gave me $260, but i told him $250 was fine. he was paying in $20’s so he asked if i had a $10, so i told him $240 was fine. so i got paid. it’s nice things worked out with an accident, unlike the last two times when i got hit by someone.
i had tried calling a local bike shop earlier in the day to get their price on the fender, but they’re closed on mondays. so i called them on saturday (yesterday) to inquire. their price? $400. haha! i had found that one online for $263. (both oem honda parts.) the dealership’s part number didn’t match the one i’d found though, so i got their part number and looked it up online. i found other sites that had them, all a fair bit below $400. so yesterday i ordered one online. total price with shipping? $269.
friday was downtime at work, so that’s why i was able to do some stuff during the day. like going by bedrock comics. i also got stuff printed at an office depot, so yesterday i used the mat cutter to frame some things. i jacked up one mat, so i’ll have to go to Texas art supply and buy another mat. but the other two i did came out pretty well. the only thing left i really need to cut a mat for is the russian political poster i got back when i was working at nasa.
yesterday evening i went over to the potts house and had supper with the family. when i arrived the kids all got excited and started giving out all of their valentine’s day presents. we ate supper, the kids went to bed, then the adults watched snl. as i was leaving, sue asked about the status of my dating life. the rumination on that (along with finding out about yet another marriage of people i know likely falling apart) is what led to my post last night i suppose. maybe one day things will be good in that department. but i’m not holding my breath.

joel: “[valentine’s day] is a holiday invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap.”
(from eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, of course.)
alex: “well, put it this way: i feel very low in me self. i can’t see much in the future, and i feel that any second something terrible is going to happen to me.”
(from kubrick’s clockwork orange)
“life is wasted on the living.” –douglas adams

after writing most of that last entry, i spent a couple of hours saturday going through some of the containers of junk tamara abandoned when she left behind her failures and moved on to her new hope. at some point, i’ll have a container of stuff to ship off to her parents. the rest of it i’ll give to sue so she can offer it to tamara and then give it to the salvation army or sell it or whatever. i’ve also thrown away a fair bit of stuff, and put junk in the recycling bin. in addition, i’ll have a little collection of stuff myself when i’m done, which will be ceremonially burned.
just to follow up on the replacement speaker, my dad got it a few days ago and hooked it up and everything worked. so he should now hopefully be able to listen to his music in stereo through some decent speakers.
i’ve been buying stuff on ebay lately. mostly trying to back fill some holes in my gaiman/mckean and mike allred collections. there have been a number of years where things were coming out that i wasn’t buying anything (or even aware of what was coming out). i’ve recently gotten these in the mail:

• modern masters #16: mike allred – eric nolen-weathington (twomorrows)
• the vault of michael allred (vols 1-4) – allred (aaa pop)
• it girl mini-bust (#29 of 500) – allred/bowen (bowen designs)

the retail price on the modern masters is $15. i was kind of surprised when i got it — it’s printed on fairly low-quality paper with a pretty thin weight glossy cover. i haven’t read through much of it yet, so i can’t comment on the quality of the content.
i was surprised to see the cost on the the vault… issues was $7 a pop. but the entire thing is printed on high quality glossy paper. plus i’m sure a fair bit of time must have gone into collecting, organizing, and making notes on all the stuff. i read the first two so far, and it’s kind of an overload of info — it gets somewhat tedious, but with some great things here and there. i’m not sure i care as much about picking up the special limited edition (500 prints) version any more. that atomics super deluxe special edition (also 500) though — i’m still wanting one of those.
i picked up the bowen bust on a lark. it was on ebay and no one bid on it until a couple of hours before the auction ended. jack and sue called me about meeting them and scott and kendra (who were in town to visit for a day or two) for supper, so i put in a bid and left. my bid only had to go about $2 over the initial bid to be highest, but when i got back home i saw no one else bid so i’d won it. i couldn’t find online how much it originally sold for, but i was guessing $35. i paid $48 including shipping and everything.
i’ve got a few other things i’ve won, but i’ll wait until after they arrive to comment on them. i also picked up some cds recently through amazon, which should be arriving over the next week or so. i’ll go ahead and say at least most of the stuff from amazon is by the knife. my poking around online for this led me to info about fever ray, the new project by half of the knife. the self-titled cd is already for sale in electronic form, but i still prefer physical media. i found a creepy video and a nice “if i had a heart” remix (by familjen) via the fever ray website.
friday night was the geek gathering. no one i know got towed, which is nice. i got to see and talk to natalie a bit — it’d been a while. i also talked with jamie, who was there with her son. as well as loopylow, lambowolf, barrett, jay, and others.
yesterday i got up and decided i’d drive down to clear lake and stop by the credit union, then go to village pizza and seafood for lunch. it was about 12:15pm when i decided, and the credit union closes at 1pm, but i figured i’d have enough time. until traffic on i45 come to a stop a mile or two before beltway 8. i eventually took an exit and went over to highway 3. which was completely backed up as well. i looked at my watch and it was 1:06pm, so i gave up and turned around. a mile or so inside 610, i45 north came to a stop. i eventually exited on telephone and took a bunch of side streets to near downtown, then hopped back onto 288/59 — which immediately was stop and go. jeebus, what the heck was up with the traffic? i wasted a total of almost 2 hours for nothing. the only saving grace was that it was on my motorcycle. i think the only good part of the day was eating supper at tacos-a-go-go. (although the bjork parody on snl news was pretty hilarious.)
an update on my motorcycle front fender: you know, i think about it every time i have to drive through a wet area on the street and my front tire spews it up into my chest and face. i called the guy a few weeks ago and talked to him a bit. he gave me his email address so i emailed him the info about the replacement part. after a week or two of not hearing anything, i emailed him again and asked if he’d gotten it and what he wanted to do. i hadn’t heard anything as of today, so i called him this evening and he didn’t answer so i left a message. he texted me back soon after and asked if we could meet tomorrow so he could give me money. so hopefully that’ll work out tomorrow.
today i went by Texas art supply and bought some mat boards. i’ve got a few things i’ve got frames for, and i borrowed jack’s mat cutter a week or so ago. i needed to get some of the things printed because they’re a little bigger than a normal sheet of paper, but the copy/print place i went by was closed today. on my way back home i stopped by soundwaves and picked up a couple of cds:

• forever – freezepop (archenemy)
• the definitive collection – patsy cline (universal/mca nashville)

on friday after work i used a coupon at border’s to get something for about the same as the best price i could find online. it was a bit annoying though, because the price in the store was a little different than online. since i was already there, i went ahead and bought it. it cost me probably about $5. on top of that, the lady helping me didn’t go to take the box set to the counter (which they have always done), so i asked her if she needed to take it up for me. she asked if i was getting anything else and i said “no” so she told me to just walk down there. as i was walking to the stairs, i was intercepted by an older white female employee and she asked me if she could take it to the counter for me. she wasn’t mean about it, but it kind of put me off because i felt like i was being accused of being in the wrong even though i’d specifically asked the other lady if she needed to carry it down for me. anyway, here’s what i got:

• the tiffany transcriptions – bob wills and the Texas playboys (collectors’ choice)

it’s a 9 volume box set with an additional cd of mckinney sisters numbers, plus a booklet. the 9 volumes were originally released on rhino as individual cds, but they’ve been out of print for awhile now. (i have volume 4, all songs about Texas, which my brother gave me at some point.) they’ve been remastered and collected into a single box for this release. do you have any idea how many hours…no, days…of bob wills music i have now? a lot.

remember that pic i posted a few entries ago that came to me by way of amanda? well, when she sent it to me she mentioned she had a second one. she described it in passing as me “sitting in front of a door with an awesome drawing of a TMNT”. fortunately, that meant it’s not one of the pictures that i shuddered to write about in that past entry. but it piqued my curiosity. i didn’t remember the picture, and i wasn’t sure which tmnt drawing it was referring to. so i asked her if she had scanned it, and if so if she would send me a copy. her response was “Are you sure you want to see this? You didnt seem to like the other one that much, and I have to admit, its the better of the two. 🙂 Well, you asked for it…….”
i’ve chopped it up a bit, just because i don’t particularly want to post the whole picture. this shows the door in question, and the chalk drawing of a teenage mutant ninja turtle i did on it. i can see it would have been room h-3 of hart hall — a nice, big corner room with four windows right above the lounge. i tended to stick articles or comics i thought were interesting or funny on my door. i also would put commentaries about any number of things up. drawing or writing stuff in chalk on the door was also something i did a lot. the desk to the left is the right corner of my desk. i can see some comic books, some cds, the drawn/written upon envelope of a postal letter (something else i always did), and some binders…probably for rocket science. looking around my desk right now, it doesn’t appear things have changed much, other than the rocket science. i wasn’t a huge fan of the tmnt, but for some reason i liked drawing them at that point in time. my roommate that year (whose name was bill) had his family visit one time, and his little brother loved the tmnt. so i looked at a comic i had and drew a pretty cool pic in pencil of…raphael, i think…and put it in a comic bag with a backing board and gave it to him. he seemed pretty excited at the time. and you can sort of see my arm and leg on the right, which we’ll get to in a bit.
and now for a major shift…
a couple of weeks ago i was bored and futzing around on the computer and somehow i ended up looking at some stuff from tamara’s blog. i never had done that before, and i hadn’t really ever planned to, but it happened. it was an odd experience. i sort of perused some things and read a few entries.
one thing that struck me was how she only ever mentioned her marriage or my divorce in passing, mostly just to say it was the right thing for her to do. it’s like she denies her feelings from then, her perspectives, her love, her commitment. it’s kind of funny, since we used to laugh about how her dad had seemed to completely block out negative things from his past. he certainly wouldn’t talk about them, but he wouldn’t even admit to remembering things happening. i guess she got those genes. *laugh*
so as i had kind of always assumed, she quickly mentally brushed aside most of the good times and things about me and us (e.g., she claims perhaps the only way we were compatible was enjoying a lack of activity? an absurd claim), erased all of the lying and such she’d done to me and others, and put it all in a nice box that said “right and good choice” and put it on a shelf.

i read some negative comments about me that she’d never told me. for example, she claimed she had hated my last name and avoided using it. she actually seemed to take some amount of literary pleasure in describing how horrific my last name was to her. was this merely her flair for storytelling? or had she always completely hidden this from me? it’s kind of funny if she actually always felt such loathing for it, yet spent all those years biting her tongue so completely that it wasn’t even hinted at or joked about. silly girl.

an interesting bit i learned was how googly she was over alistair while we were still married. haha. the guy she trash-talked. i’m honestly not sure her blog version of events is true though, since she tends to gild things until she gives up on them. (it would be kind of funny if she falls into that female stereotype though — i.e., trash-talking guys they’re actually attracted to.)
in fact, in general most of the mentions about me or our time together or the divorce leads to one of three conclusions: she’s lying now (on her blog); she’s manipulated the past in her mind to try and justify and deal with things; or, she was lying about all kinds of things to me throughout our marriage. i prefer to not believe the last one, and it honestly seems pretty unlikely. the first one is possible…but the middle one seems most likely.
it used to really anger me that she was out there lying about and misrepresenting me and our relationship. it’s still annoying, but time has lessened the anger a lot. plus i doubt she brings it up much. and these days, any direct effects to me are fairly unlikely. and to some degree, i’d think the cracks in the spackling are probably obvious to people.
as a serious aside, one bit of truth from her blog is that she said she probably wouldn’t be here if she’d stayed with me. that certainly seems possible. she had a history, and she was pretty fscked up as time progressed. i felt like she was driving us into the ground, evidently she felt like she was trying to save…herself, our marriage? whatever it was, she was ocd about it. and not in a good way.
obviously the big theme of her blog is her struggle with eating disorders, which almost killed her at least once. i did learn this started right after she broke from me, which i’d always wondered about. interestingly, she seems to somehow on some level blame my being overweight and her time with me. well, sometimes. i honestly didn’t read much of the eating disorder stuff. it’s not a part of my experience with her.
the most curious thing was her entry about the day she ran into me recently at brasil. i’d written about it, but it was interesting to get her perspective. she evidently wished she was skinnier and more put together in the brief moment, but quickly got over it. she then went on to talk about how horribly fat i am. (for the record, i’ve been pretty much the same since some time before we split.) i think she needed to defend that comment about me, since she followed it up by stating that it wasn’t the fat cells that disgusted her, it was knowing that my weight was due to my “ironically narcissistic self-loathing” (if i recall correctly). it’s kind of sad so much of her view seems to be based on weight. it seems she thinks her being skinnier is her being happier/successful/good, and i guess vice versa — therefore my weight must correlate the same. or something. i mean, if i’d lost a bunch of weight would she have had to conclude i was happy? or less narcissistic and/or self-loathing? (heh.)
maybe that’s why she used to drool over that pic of me from years ago…i must have been satisfied and happy then, since i was skinnier. which brings us to the me from the pic above…
i sort of remember that printed sweat shirt. why in the world would i be wearing something like that? i remember that watch — a gold fossil with a brown leather band. it was from one of fossil’s first years i think. ah, and the sides of my head are shaved, which is a look i’ve always liked. but i’m not sure it liked me. i think the round mound of bangs make it worse. but they’re wrapping to the side of my head, and they sort of did what they wanted. hopefully the reason i’m wearing that sweater shirt is because it’s cold…i thought my tastes had improved by then.
anyway, i just want to state that i can tell you for a fact i wasn’t happier in those pictures. and my gaining weight over the years, both before and during our marriage, wasn’t due to unhappiness. do i like being overweight? no. have i put in much effort over the years to do much about it? no, not much at all. but perhaps my weight is a sign of my laziness, enjoyment of foods high in starches and fluids with too much sugar, a job and hobbies that involve being sedentary, genetics, and a general lack of enjoyment of exercise.
tying your judgments about someone’s self to their weight — or clothing styles, haircut, cleanliness, punctuality, or any number of other things — is about as valuable as other stereotypes and generalizations. i would have hoped someone with her past — personally running into stereotypes and generalizations and trying to combat them — wouldn’t fall into that kind of trap. but then she surprised me a lot once she had no use for me anymore.
anyway, some of it was new to me, and i tend to think and analyze stuff, so it gave me some new things to mull over. in the end though, i think it helped reinforce that there’s no good justification or reasoning for what happened with her. she’s just…who she is. the good, the bad, the dreamer, the hurt, the broken. when we married, i (we?) believed we would do whatever it took to honour our vows. eventually, through our time together, she fell apart, she gave up, she changed, and i was churned under. i was collateral damage in her quest to find herself and to find happiness. i’ve tried to learn from the events, from mistakes i did make during those times, but the consequences that were brought down upon me still feel inadequate for my mistakes. saying/hearing “life’s not fair” doesn’t really make it better either. then again, perhaps i got the better end of the deal in the long run.