Month: August 2012

Laser frontiersman

Last night, after work, I joined some fellow cappers for dinner and then the live simulcast of Rifftrax‘s Manos: The Hands of Fate. I thought it got off to a slow start, after some very funny shorts, but in the end I thought they did a really great job. It’s been a little while since I last watched the original riff, but last night’s was probably its equal. It was a good time, though I didn’t get home from Manhattan until after eleven, and I didn’t really fall asleep until after midnight.

So it’s probably a good thing I didn’t have to go into the office today. Every year we have some kind of company outing, and today’s was out on Long Island, at the Country Fair Park in Medford. That’s about a forty-five-minute drive from here, which seemed like the better option than an hour’s regular commute into Manhattan so that I could be on the bus the company had chartered for 8:45. A bus that, even if it hadn’t been a half an hour late, would have taken half an hour longer than my car ride. Then another hour-plus bus ride back into the city and an hour’s train commute back home. We were done at one o’clock, and by driving I was home before two. I think I definitely picked the right option.

The park itself was a lot of fun. There were go-karts, laser tag, a driving range, miniature golf, and batting cages. And while I only participated in the first three of those, I’m kind of exhausted now. Running around and shooting co-workers with sensors on their heads and failing to improve my heretofore nonexistent golf game…well, it takes a lot of you. But there was food, and the weather was good — if quite hot — and I got to leave the house at 9 and get home by 2. So I’m really not complaining.

Random 10 8-17-12

Last week, this happened. What will happen this week?

  1. “Something” by Eric Clapton & Paul McCartney (orig. the Beatles), guessed by Betty
    You stick around and it may show
  2. “Lady Writer” by Dire Straits, guessed by Betty
    Just the way that her hair fell down around her face
  3. “American Idiot” by Green Day
    We’re not the ones who’re meant to follow
  4. “Little Wonder” by David Bowie
    It’s all in the tablets, sneezy Bhutan
  5. “Arabella Angelique” by Grenadilla
    Walked right into the middle of the week
  6. “Levi Stubbs’ Tears” by Billy Bragg
    She was married before she was even entitled to vote
  7. “The Jealous Kind” by Joe Cocker
    I don’t want you shackin’ with nobody else
  8. “Play the Game” by Queen, guessed by Clayton
    Light another cigarette and let yourself go
  9. “Blueberry Hill” by Gene Autry (later Fats Domino), guessed by Occupant
    But all of those vows we made were never to be
  10. “Beautiful People” by the Books
    Behold the finite set of thirteen convex figures

Good luck!

Car trouble

“They grouped in the road at the top of a rise and looked back. The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.”
— Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

I’m never going to complain, like I did last week, about having a boring week ever again.

I didn’t feel so great this morning and wound up calling in sick. I don’t know if it was the garlic shrimp I had for a (rushed) dinner last night or what, but staying home seemed like the preferred course of action. It meant I missed drinks after work this evening, an open bar and hors d’oeuvre to celebrate the end of a recent sales conference, but I wasn’t in shape to make the most of it anyway.

Around 10:30, my mother said she was going out to get a bagel for breakfast and stop at the bank, and she’d be right back. And that was the last I heard from her until almost 7 o’clock. She spent the entire day with a stalled car, waiting for a tow truck and unable to reach me because the phone had gone out in the rain. I admit, I was kind of beside myself with worry at that point.

The weather had been terrible shortly after she left, bucketing rain in a huge and unexpected storm, with lots of flooding and — as I’m sure Heather will be pleased to hear — even some large hail. And despite a short respite, during which you probably wouldn’t even have known it had rained, the bad weather kept up into the evening.

My mother no longer has a cell phone, since this is her first week of retirement, and the phone she had belonged to her employer. So I guess it’s good I was home and she was finally able to reach me — this time from the local deli where she got her bagel. I might not have been home until 8 or 9 if I’d gone to work and drinks. The tow truck she’d been waiting on apparently never showed, so I drove over — at best a five-minute drive — and picked her up.

My father got home a little after 7 o’clock and I drove us both over to see if we could jumpstart the car and then, when that failed, if we could finally get a tow truck from AAA to show up. One finally did, after some more phone tag, and we were back home (sans car) around 8:30 tonight. She’ll have to call tomorrow to figure out what needs to be done with it.

Everyone’s okay, which is what matters, but I don’t know about you, but I think I’d prefer boring any day of the week.