It’s ok, they’ll still be there this fall and they’ll still kick ass.

(I identify a little less with ‘home’ every time we go back)

I want to touch on one little thing about it:

Bringing this back full circle and making this long story longer, yesterday six of my former colleagues from the project I was working on were laid off. They were all people who had no work to do and were not placed into new positions. They were given busy work for the past two years and that work finally came to an end.

I will also add that two of those people have said in my presence, “I don’t think I’ll be let go. They let me sit here and do nothing for six weeks after the project ended. I don’t see why they won’t do that again.”… and, “I’m more than willing to go find a corner to sit in and ride out my days until retirement.”

I don’t wish unemployment on anyone. It’s a terrible time to be out of work. But while others are wanting to wring their hands in worry and sadness for these people, going on about the hard times and the loss of benefits, I really want to say, what the fuck have they been doing for the past two years? Why did they think they wouldn’t have to be productive in any meaningful way to continue to be employed here?

I’ll go a step further and guess that these are also the type of people that will complain about how screwed they got and how other people always get the breaks and they just keep having shit thrown on them.

I’m pretty sure I touched on a similar thing in a post somewhere on this blog that I can’t seem to find right now.

Nevermind, I found it right here.

I don’t have a point. I read Carrie’s blog and it made me think of my own and then interject my own angle into her writing. But I suppose you could still take her title and apply it to my general ideas as well.

It’s just a pet peeve of mine (that general attitude). Fuck those people.

At first I thought I would write a long detailed remembrance of our east coast trek, then I noticed that the weird online aversion thing that happens after extended periods away from being online is really strong this time. Like I’m finding it hard to sit in front of the computer for any period of time. Online feels really stupid right now. I go through this every time we go somewhere and I have limited online time. Couple that with the fact that my interest in parks and coasters and stuff seems to be at an all time low (and that much of my online time revolves around those things) and I just have no desire.

But I digress.

Our vacation in a nutshell:

Thursday – We drove to Hagerstown, MD. Google severely overestimates drive times both online and on the Droid navigation app. Stupid Google. Unfortunately, the weather channel doesn’t overestimate temperatures and it did apporach three digits for most of the week. Stupid weather.

Friday – Washington D.C. isn’t much fun in the heat. The Hilton Garden Inn Arlington isn’t nearly as good as the online reviews would lead you to believe. Stupid Hilton Garden Inn.

Saturday – Washington D.C. is actually kind of boring. Stupid Washington D.C. The thai food I got for dinner was simultaneously delicious and replusive. I want more.

Sunday – Ocean City was fun for all the wrong reasons. The Bay Bridge is terrifying. Stupid Bay Bridge.

Monday – Six Flags America doesn’t deserve the reputation it has. Stupid coaster enthusiasts. Second best park of this trip.

Tuesday – Kings Dominion resonates with the same ‘meh’ tone that Kings Island does for us. Intimidator 305 was a big disappointment. Stupid I305. We cut out relatively early to eat steak in Williamsburg.

Wednesday – Busch Gardens crushed it. The coaster tour was awesome except for missing the Alpengeist ERT. Stupid Alpengeist. The food at Das Festhaus was equally awesome. Nice day at a nice park.

Thursday – Long drive to Charlotte. I actually like driving vacations – good times. Wouldn’t trade the memories for the convenience of flying much of the time. 4 tickets for Toy Story 3 IMAX 3D, 4 medium drinks and 2 large popcorns retail for $99.50. It cost just $20 more for tickets and unlimited drinks at Six Flags earlier in the week. Stupid movie prices.

Friday – Carowinds fail. Cedar Fair really is light years behind other park chains in so many areas. Stupid Cedar Fair. We were gone by 4pm. (where the thermometer in the car read 110 when I started it to leave)

Saturday – Drove home. Hit ridiculous and unnecessary traffic on I-77. Stupid tourists. Highlight of the trip? Our stop in Chelyan, WV. I hate to use something as easy as the banjo joke, but I really do think I heard banjos…and I think one guy told me my mouth “sure was purty.” That and I was kidnapped and tortured 70′s horror movie style by an bizarre family of hill people. Luckily I escaped to write this blog entry. Stupid blog.

(I was going to add some photos, but two days later I still haven’t gotten around to looking at them, so no photos – maybe I’ll add them later…or to Facebook)

November 6, 2007 – Your Music Is Worthless
November 8, 2007 – Your Music Is Still Worthless
May 6th, 2008 – NIN The Slip
February 2, 2010 – The Plan To Save The Music Biz

What can I say? It irks me that this mentality took hold.

Today I saw this story showing how much (or rather how little) musicians earn online and what they’d have to sell to make minimum wage.

From the article:

If recording artists ever go the way of the blubber merchants, it won’t be because there’ll be no demand for their product. It will be because making recordings makes no economic sense.

Here’s the same info in chart form if you’re illiterate or like pink circles.

I dunno. It’s a pet peeve of mine. Mostly because something like music seems to me to be one of the most valuable things there is. I know it sounds weird to say I think there needs to be an incentive to create art, but I do.

What kills me is the way their charges go up on literally every quarterly bill we get. As of the bill I just received, we’re up $7.24 over last year’s bill. Every one between then and this one is a dollar or a few cents or a buck-something higher than the previous. It’s almost like since you get billed every three months that they expect people to not remember what the last bill was.

Getting old, WM, getting old.

As an adult I never really had to keep up with any real treatment. Not too much bugged me on a major level – mostly dogs and cats and little else. If I pet a dog or cat I tend to get itchy skin where I touch it. God forbid I touch my nose or my eyes without washing my hand. It’s odd because I never had that serious of a reaction until the past decade or so. But beyond that, nothing really.

So yeah, nothing too major for most of my life.

Then I moved to Ohio.

Not sure what the fuck is in the air around here, but I’m a fucking mess. Watery-goopy eyes. Sneezing fits, runny, itchy nose. Tickly throat. It’s gotten worse each spring we’ve been here. Last year I was convinced I had Swine Flu in my eyes. This year I’m pretty sure my entire head is full of Chlamydia. (always use protection, kids!)

I try to be proactive and self-medicate, but the best I can seem to do is lessen the effects, not get rid of them.

The funny thing is I’ve talked to no less than a half dozen people who claim to have never had allergy problem until they moved to the area. I’m convinced it’s some government experiment emanating from the Air Force base.

Fuckers!

I’ve grown to enjoy Red Eye over the past few months. Very entertaining more often then not and I liked this little conversation on Health Care reform.

(link)

And if you disagree, you’re probably a racist homophobe who wears fur to whale eating parties.

He gave jamie some convoluted answer about how if the houses are side-to-side then they can make it work, but if the houses are front-to-back then it can’t be done. He talked in circles with quick apologies and that was that.

We’re one of about a dozen houses that falls into a weird little no-service gap.

I still insist this might not be the case and that if we got a technician or representative or someone qualified to physically come here and see things that there’s a good chance we’d get service…or at the very least I need someone knowledgeable to come here take a look and explain to me (not in layman’s terms) why it won’t work.

And I won’t let it go until that happens.

But I’m not going to push it right now. The warm weather is just around the bend and we’ll be traveling, doing the homeowner thing and generally living the summertime life, so TV is not a priority.

But come fall, we’re going to start making phone calls, emails and personal appearances until we get someone who knows what they’re talking about and what the deal is to come here and see how absurd it is that I can throw stones and hit a few houses that can get U-verse. I’m still not convinced it can’t happen.

Until then…

We really dug AT&T’s U-Verse and were a little miffed that it wasn’t available when we bought the house. We’ve been reluctantly paying Time Warner for a little over a year now and we went with (for the first time in forever) a lower package. We’re normally all-in when it comes to TV packages, but Time Warner just sucks so bad and is so out of touch with what customers want, need and expect that it’s not even funny. To be honest, I miss some of the channels we haven’t had for the past 15 months, but refuse to give TW any more than I have to. We don’t even have cable boxes on the TV’s upstairs because I don’t want to give them the monthly fee. It costs almost $18 just to have a DVR on the big TV. (Yes, $18 a month – broken down as 9.95 for DVR service, $7.64 for a Digital Converter and $0.32 for the remote… Fuckers!)

Anyway, over the past 15 months, I’d occasionally check the AT&T site and try the availability tool. It always told me service wasn’t available at our address. One time at the mall we stopped in and talked to them a little about how we had service and loved it then moved less than a mile away and now can’t get it. We were told that crews were always in the area expanding coverage. We also knew this was true because those crews usually spent months at a time at my wife’s hotel and she even hit them up trying to get them over our way or find out more info.

Then two or three weeks ago, I swung by the availability check tool and punched in our address knowing what the result would be. And I was right. But something clicked this time and I thought, “Why don’t I start punching in addresses in my general vicinity and see exactly where the lines are.

(In all fairness, I had done this before, but not to great extent. Just some random address on each street until I found availability. Nothing detailed or methodical. And I knew we were close, but not covered.)

So this time I start with the guy across the street and get a “no” on service. So I got around the circle of the cul-de-sac and get three more “no” answers for the two house on the end and the house to our right. So then I go to the house across the street at the end (the 6th house of 6 on our little cul-de-sac) and get a “yes” on service. WTF!?

So obviously being on a cul-de-sac, our street hits the perpendicular street and forms a “T” shape. Our street runs east/west and hits the “T” on the east side (the west is the ‘circle’ end of the cul-de-sac) and the perpendicular road runs north/south. Of the six houses on the cul-de-sac (three on the north side and three on the south side) only the easternmost house on the north side shows availability.

I’m trying to paint a picture here.

So I decide to go south down the perpendicular street and find no one able to get sevice on either side of the street. But if I make a right and head west, so that I’m now checking houses who share the woods behind our house (people who we share property lines with in some cases) I’m seeing that they all show it available and two of them actually currently have AT&T service!

So I come back to the “T” and go north on the perpendicular road and find that everyone that direction has service available and a few even use it already. I complete the circle by checking the houses behind the people to our left on the end of the cul-de-se (the next perpendicular street to the west) and find complete availability with some customers sprinkled in.

Ahhh, let me just draw a picture:

The yellow glowing house is us. People in red can’t get service and people in green can. That’s how broken and fucked up it is. My guess was seem to be right in between two VRADs. I don’t know a whole lot about how it works, but I know it’s distance based and that it’s not unusual for odd patterns like this to appear based on the way established wires/cables are running.

I figured I’d either need to go back into the AT&T store or give the 800 number a call and explain the situation and see if they could send someone out to see things firsthand and let me know if there was a way to make this happen or not. All I know is it was frustrating looking out the front window and seeing a house that got service and then looking out the back and seeing another bunch of houses with service available.

Then, no shit, two days later, my wife gets a call from a friend of ours who just moved (into a really nice fucking house/neighborhood). She wanted to let us know they were getting U-verse and wanted to pass along some info knowing we had been wanting it for a while. Basically they were in almost the same situation. Houses all around able to get service, but their address showing not available. The difference is that AT&T just got over to their neighborhood and had salesmen going door-to-door to drum up awareness, interest and sales. So they talked to the dude and explained and he confirmed the weirdness and said that this happens a lot and most times, AT&T just has to come in and “get it working”. I assume this means running a few new cables to shorten the distances, but I have no idea, really.

At any rate, she gives my wife this guy’s name and number.

So on Monday she calls and he shows up at the hotel to talk to her. He gets the info (our address and the addresses around us) and tells her the same thing. Basically, let me get hold of some people and see if we can get this working for you, it shouldn’t be a problem. He’d be in touch.

We heard from him today and he made an appointment to stop by on Saturday. Not sure what for, but it’s a positive sign.

So here’s to me getting my hopes up and maybe, finally, after 15 long months, getting rid of Time Warner and their bullshit once and for all.

If this doesn’t pan out, I might have to consider DIRECTV. I’m not totally against it, but I’d rather not. And I’d still need to use TW for my net connection. So that’s less than optimal too.

Keep your fingers crossed for me.

This commercial kills me on so many levels:

(link)

Puh-leeeze! If you’re smooth enough to just happen to have planned to give your lady jewelry in a cabin during a storm and were aware enough to have it in hand knowing your woman is a scared little bitch who jumps and whimpers at the sight of lightning and also have the presence of mind to deliver the line “I’m here and I always will be” while handing over said jewelry to aforementioned scared bitch then you’re a better man than I.

Fuck that commercial. Is there anyone…anyone…out there who watches that and feels warm and fuzzy instead of annoyed and maybe a little homicidal? And if so, what the fuck is wired wrong inside of you? The commercial is the height of absurdity.

Arrrrgh!

I know Ikea stores are a fresh and new idea for a lot of people, but Pittsburgh had one of the first. Way back when I was a kid and didn’t care a bit about home goods, the hillfolk of western PA were getting dumb little chairs and tables at Ikea. The first time I actually stepped foot into one was when we moved back to Pittsburgh in 2004. My wife’s hotel was across the highway from it and we lived like 10 minutes away. Basically, it was quick local shopping for us that people would drive hours to visit – go figure.

I initially thought it was the best place in the world. But I noticed that the more I returned the less enthused I was about what they had. It lost its luster a little more with each visit. We’ve owned a few things from Ikea. We had some chairs that were fine. We gave them away after a couple of years because we really didn’t need them any more. We had some neat big white curtain thingies that we used in front of our sliding glass door. We had a funky-sized artowrk thingy that the movers broke when we came to Dayton. My daughter’s side table in her bedroom as I type this came from Ikea and it does what it does.

In fact, that’s the thing about Ikea – their shit is fine. If you just need to slap together a little table and toss it in the corner, it’s fine. Need a shelf somewhere? Stop at Ikea, their shelves are just fine.

So my wife got me to drive to the Cincy Ikea that opened in late 2008 or something like that. Long enough ago to be established but recent enough to still be ‘new’ and an attraction for people.

I can say that the place offers me next to nothing. In general, I don’t think their furniture is nice. It’s plasticky. Not necessarily literally (although sometimes) but in a more general way. If I was allowed one adjective to describe the furniture in Ikea, I’d choose plasticky. (and I’d spell it like that too) Every thing has a shiny, plastic, retro-modern look to it – even wood items. It’s not that it necessarily looks cheap, it just doesn’t look right. It looks like dollhouse furniture or something. I can’t quite put my finger on it or find the right words to get close. It’s off.

Which is fine when you’re finding something significantly cheaper than you can elsewhere – like the aforementioned fabrics, little sidetables and one-off shelves. That’s the one place Ikea excels…or at least makes some sense to me.

But it just feels like as far a big things go, you can do much better for “same ballpark” prices at any number of furniture stores…and the things generally will have nice finishes that don’t look so plasticky…and aesthetic design, not just functional design.

Speaking of design, the style just screams college dorm room chic to me. Again, I use that for lack of a better term, but it’s like a manufactured, fake sophistication – fauxphistication (can I trademark that?). I can’t imagine furnishing my house with the stuff at Ikea (and I mean in any significant way, remember, I have some of this crap in the corners around here too) beyond the age of 25…30 if I’m generous and definitely at 25 (or less) if you’re in a relationship and cohabitating.

I dunno, it just doesn’t do it for me on any level. I’m less enthused everytime I visit a store. I suspect the same happens to their products in the house (again referring to big things – like doing a room in all Ikea crap). Like at first it’s a shiny and sleek and everyday it starts to look a little plastickier (oh yeah, I went there with the spelling) and a little less shiny until you hate it and realize you bought weird fucking Swedish shit for your house.

I’m sure there’s someone going to read this who swears by the place and has an Ikea house that will be sure to let me know how nice their stuff is. That’s fine. To each their own. It’s certainly not for me, so maybe it’s for you.

Today’s visit was a special treat though because of the extra super special Sunday morning crowd. It was the stop-and-gawk theme park mentality taken to the max. And yes, I realize that’s kinda what you do in a furniture store – stop and look. But it was a wonderful mix of yokels from the southern Ohio, Southern Indiana, Northern Kentucky area who were amazed at the shiny visions of plasticky furniture that was “surely from the fyooture” and wannabee hipsters and intellectuals who took it way too seriously and discussed extra-loudly why this piece worked and why it would work in whatever area of their swank pad needed this piece. It was like the fucking Twilight Zone. I’ve never seen so many Ikea-goers with the checklists and tiny mini-golf pencils going around scribbling whatever it was you scribble on those little pieces of paper. My daughter and I picked up a paper/pencil combo about halfway through and kept imaginary mini-golf scores with it…whenever we weren’t pretending a cobra was jumping out of everything that could be opened and striking when we opened it.

Turns out we didn’t find any curtains and their selection of artwork/stuff for the wall was lame at best. I’m convinced at least 50% of it was the same stuff I saw during my last visit to the Pittsburgh store 4 years ago.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot – the stupid-ass product names. Arrrgh! I’m convinced it’s just abstract word association with ‘modern’ misspellings. For example, let’s pretend we need to give a clock a product name. Hmmm. Clock. Clocks keep time. Units for measuring time. Hours. Days. Minutes. Years. Decades! Now a funky modern misspelling and voila!

The clock product name is Dekad.

It really feels that shallow and manufactured most of the time….just like the furniture!

(yes, I understand the names are usually Swedish words that are just literal translations or adjectives describing preferred qualities of the product, but’s it’s not cutesy and SKÄRPT – it’s silly and OMTÖCKNAD.)

Whatever. Your mileage will vary to be sure. I’m not a fan of the place and, by my estimation, won’t step foot in another Ikea store until 2014 or so.

Even worse is that there’s a website, contests, a full-length music video – even a ‘making of’ clip about the video…all based on this crap.

This is why the rest of the world hates us…and why we’re great.

We need more doing and less thinking.

As corny as it sounds, Nike had it right – Just fucking do it, already.

Life isn’t that hard. Go with the flow. Don’t overthink it. Just do it.