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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Author: Karel Kerezman

  • Birthday Party Weekend, Plus

    So, my son turned 17 on Saturday. He doesn’t look any older than he did a year ago, but that’s probably because his face has been half-covered in fur for the last couple of years. We went to what has become a little tradition for his parties: Ultrazone, down along McLoughlin. Hooray, laser-tag! (This wasn’t a good showing for me… 10th out of 12, then 4th out of 14. I blame it on the blue jeans that fluoresced very nicely under the black lights…)

    Spud’s just glad I gave him a Rifftrax DVD instead of another math book, of course. Heh.

    The other notable event of the weekend? Irvington’s “farmer’s market” launched, taking up one small piece of road between Broadway & Weidler next to the Kitchen Kaboodle. (I think we spent more time there than we did at the market, but there you go.) It was a modest assemblage, though I hope it goes well and they can attract a few more merchants. A cheese vendor, for instance, would be nice. A hike down Broadway on Sunday beats waking up early enough to get to PSU before the insane crowds make that market unpalatable…

  • Motive A Shun

    Do you remember what it was like when you were excited by something?

    I wish I could, lately. It seems like everything I try to do either blows up in my face or sputters to a halt. The anime forum? It’s limping along, with maybe five or six posters (counting myself) contributing during any given month. The webcomic? About 30 visitors every Monday and Thursday, sometimes one or two will comment, and now that I’ve run out my backlog of story and joke ideas it’s going to be a challenge, indeed, to keep it rolling. Writing? Hah. (Double hah, even.) Journalling? Yeah, you can see how many times I’ve posted in the last few months, eh? Music? I don’t have the budget to seek out new material anymore. Movies? I rarely set foot in a theater, and it’s not like I can afford DVDs very often either. Photography? Other than the comic, not so much.

    I don’t know if I’m just getting old (which is silly, I’m not even 40 yet) or if life plus work equals being too worn out to do or care much. I’m not happy, though. But what can I do about it? Solutions all require time and energy that I lack.

    I’m tired of being tired.

  • Who needs sleep?

    So, how does my body follow up a night in which I start with insomnia, and end with an anxiety attack?

    By starting with insomnia and ending with a giant-spider invasion nightmare.

    Maybe eight hours of sleep between the two nights, and one of those was a Saturday night so in theory I should’ve been able to get as much sleep as I needed to, right? I anticipate a fun-filled day of yawning and nodding off…

  • What’s this, the Iditarod?

    Here’s another dose of “English FAIL” for your amusement:

    Sometimes, the spellchecker isn’t enough to save a sign’s maker from embarrassment.

    These have been up on a residential block near Kyla’s place for months while an ugly-as-sin lump of condominiums goes in. I finally remembered to take a picture before construction completed…

  • Trailor Spot

    Oh look, it’s a bit of English FAIL on the way to work this morning! This, near the Washington County Fairgrounds…

    In other news, my new phone’s camera seems not to suck nearly as much as the xv6800’s… nice, eh?

  • xxRAGE xALE

    Here’s a taste of how my mind works:

    There’s a cardboard sign bent partway around a streetsign-pole at the end of our street. It’s for a garage sale, but the way it’s bent it reads “RAGE ALE” from most legible angles. What’s also odd is that there’s another sign at the corner of the block on the way to work, similarly bent, also thus advertising a RAGE ALE.

    So. As I leave home, I pass the first sign at the end of the block. As I approach work, I pass the other sign at the start of the block. This is a strange sort of symmetry in my morning.

    The world is weird. And this is the sort of thing which my old superstitious mind would interpret as a Sign Of Some Portent. Now I just think it’s silly… and wonder if anyone’s trademarked the name Rage Ale, because c’mon, we all know somebody who’d drink that.

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