A few months back, we were given some painted turtles. Apparently someone bought them and their young kids didn’t pay any attention to them at all, so they decided to get rid of them. With the turtles came the whole setup to make them a home for several years, including a filter and a large aquarium. The filter alone is worth about $92, so for the incredibly low price of free, we could not turn down the offer. (The cynical side of me thinks it’s equally likely that alternatively, they bought turtles, heard something about the over-hyped salmonella fears, and decided to get rid of them tout-de-suite.)

The day we brought them home, the kids chose names for their turtles. We hadn’t observed them at all, so knew nothing about their personalities – heck, we didn’t even know they really HAD personalities because our turtle knowledge was very rudimentary. We put them in a small fish tank with no filter Read the rest of this entry »

In the last week to ten days, I’ve purchased several electronic items. Most have been very inexpensive although a couple were quite costly (that’s another blog entry altogether). Note that I said “inexpensive” – as in reasonably good quality but on sale or reduced in price, and not “cheap” which implies something completely different.

3 out of 5 have been defective.

All my life, in spite of taking very good care of my things, I have had a higher failure rate than average. If there is a faulty item on the shelf in a store, I seem to always be able to pick it at random. I’m not talking about clearance or open box items, either. I am talking about factory-sealed, unmolested, apparently untouched-by-human-hands-since-manufacture things.

Almost everything I have to return is something electrically powered. It’s like I have a dark little cloud floating over me… and the cloud is made of some kind of bizarre electromagnetic field powered by static electricity. The number of BRAND-NEW items I have had to take back to the store and exchange is ree-donk-you-luss.

Do I chalk this up to some kind of silly superstition? The wife has picked up on the trend, so when we are purchasing anything in the store, SHE selects the item and she takes it to the cash so that my “curse” doesn’t affect it. It’s to the point that when buying something, I will handle the display model, or the one the clerk takes out of the box, but I won’t buy that one – because I touched it, and now it’s cursed.

I’m sure it is strictly just a load of coincidences. I’m not, by nature, the kind of person who believes in fate or bad luck. I constantly look for scientific explanations for things; I’m a chronic analyzer. I feel like there is a rational and predictable cause of everything that happens, and there are patterns even in chaos.

Therefore, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that I’m a mutant with an intermittently-active, electricity-disrupting superpower that occasionally overloads or destroys things that have to be plugged in and/or run on batteries.

If only I could control it, it could come in very

The more you attempt to paint me in the light of the moustache-twirling villain of the family, the more you prove that the conclusions other people have drawn about you from words spoken – or indeed, those that have NEVER been uttered – are true. In fact, your attempts to set yourself up as the Dudley Do-rights and Nell Fenwicks to my Snidely Whiplash have led to nothing less than YOU looking like itinerant assholes, wandering into my life to blithely and cluelessly pass judgment and tear me down and then quickly duck out again. YOU are the ones who have chosen to distance yourself after the bad behaviour of a one of our kin and your choice, in the absence of knowing the facts, to take that person’s side.

There are no “apologies” forthcoming here, because I have NOTHING to apologize for. I certainly have no reason to apologize to YOU, as third-party observers (or should I say meddlers?). I won’t be subjected to your attempts at inducing guilt to blame me for YOUR questionable choices and YOUR staggering ignorance.

And specifically to [redacted] – no, you don’t have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, you’ve NEVER had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and your feeling of being run down in no way compares to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome any more than the flaring of a struck match compares to a thermonuclear detonation. Read the rest of this entry »

The guitar and I have always had a love-hate relationship.

Love, in that I love music,and I love being able to create music. Over the years I’ve learned to play guitar, drums, trumpet, violin, flute, piano and various other instruments. I can read music “fluently” and easily pick up tunes by ear. By logical extension of my love of music and desire to perform it, I really enjoy music games. Keep that in mind – we’ll come back to it later.

Hate, in the sense that I’ve never really been truly competent enough at any instrument to play in front of an audience (not that I’ve WANTED to perform in front of a large audience, mind you). Well, except the trumpet – I was in school bands in grades 6 through 9. I wanted music lessons – my father promised piano lessons, but never followed through. My next-youngest brother received an electric guitar, and my parents paid for his guitar lessons, but although they’d given me an acoustic guitar when I was about 7 (although the damn thing was pretty much made of cardboard) I never had the luxury of a teacher. So I’ve done nothing but try to teach myself. And I’m a shitty teacher.

I can pick out tunes on most of the instruments I’ve held, but I would never be able to play anything in front of people because I just feel like I am embarrassingly bad at everything.

When I met She Who Must Be Obeyed, she had 2 acoustic guitars, and she “gave” me one of them. Read the rest of this entry »

Only a couple of entries ago, I talked about the arrival of my Kindle.

As I said at the time, I love to read. I also signed up for Star Trek Online, which I have also grown to love, and can be a major time-sink (but since my condition requires me to spend so much time resting in bed, I gots time aplenty). Plus, I got an inexpensive Xbox360 on sale, which has been fun since I’ve been catching up on all those games that everyone knows the name of but aren’t available (or are simply less attractive) on the Wii. My Xbox lives under my bed, and I have a stack of discount games which I’ve been working through – stuff like Deadspace, Halo 3, The Orange Box and most recently Batman:Arkham Asylum and GTA IV.

So – I’ve had plenty to keep me occupied and therefore out of the suckhole that the triumvirate of Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook can be. Seriously, I can understand why some people enjoy it, but I just don’t have the energy to maintain online relationships and play politics with people who are nice to each others faces but stab each other in the back every chance they get. I know that doesn’t apply to everyone, but I’m tired of trying to figure out which ones do it and which ones don’t. So, I read the people I want via RSS feeds and I don’t worry about the butthurt of those who get upset because I don’t follow them. I kind of enjoy the anonymity of it. That way, I don’t feel in any way compelled to share my opinion.

To sum up – Star Trek Online… Xbox… Kindle… RSS in Google Reader… – things I can do in bed to make the days go by more pleasantly, providing me a distraction from the pain and the fact that I otherwise can’t do much.

With all that to do, and sleeping so many hours a day, I’d expect to not be getting through a lot. But the other day I did a little reckoning and realized something. Read the rest of this entry »