Sporadic

Memorial day is coming up. It’s one of our few American holidays. It’s the same as what the Europeans call “Bank Holidays”, however they get on average 10 holidays to our 1. I thought as a service to Americans everywhere I’d let you know what the 10 European holidays that will be place up against memorial day so that at least we can stay informed and not seem so provincial

1. Cheese rolling day
2. Say heeeeelllllo00000 to the queen day
3. Guy Faulkes Day
4. We still own the colonies day
5. Hey we’re French day (every second Thursday)
6. Surrenderance Day (France only)
7. Pope day
8. Double pope day
9. Fat guy with a monocle day
10. What were we*just* talking about day (Amsterdam only)

So my employer*, announced the second round of layoffs today. I think ** I made the cut. I am however, willing to be wrong about that.  The thought of layoffs in this economy is scary as hell and so I have devised a scale by which you can measure your own personal disasters. This will help all of us feel like we’re part of more global perspective.

so here, from best to wost is the Personal Disaster Index or PDI

1. Walk in spring time holding hands with the one you love
2. Walk in springtime by yourself
3. Walk in springtime holding hands with someone who you are about to break up with when you get to that park bench 10 feet from here
4. Scabby rash
5. Food poisoning
6. Broken collar bone
7. Deciding to move to Alaska without supplies and then further deciding to eat those potato seeds with the stripes
8. Sucking chest wound
9. Train accident, where you are either a.) the train or b) the person under the train
10. Clockwork orange treatment watching Myriah Carey’s movie “Glimmer”

Hopefully this helps you rate the stuff that’s wrong with your life in a way that’s both easy and numeric.

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* who let’s just call Macrosquishy

** fingers crossed eyes closed tight

Today, may the 4^th,  is “Star Wars day” which doesn’t make any sense until you have someone say it out loud to you.

Actually try it yourself. Say it out loud, don’t just say you’re gonna say it and assume that because I’m just some blinking text on your screen I won’t notice, you seriously will not get the joke until you actually talk.

did you do it?

May the forth be with you!

It’s so dorky and hysterical. Okay huge  seagueway….

So the real topic of discussion is the blue balloon and San Francisco drivers.

There was this blue balloon that was across from Delores Park this weekend, not a helium balloon, just the regular kind of blow it up yourself kinda balloon. It’s a little bigger than your standard party balloon, maybe the size of a prize winning pumpkin. It’s robin’s egg blue like maybe it came from a baby shower*.

 I was driving back from dropping Jon off after the baseball game.** The Balloon is just rolling around in the center of 18th and church. Slowly moving from one lane to the other. This was the weird thing: people were avoiding running it over.

I was three back at the stop sign so I got to watch 6  or 8 different drivers trying to avoid this balloon, all the while anxious for my turn cause I am totally gonna run this thing over.

Every time someone drives by the wind from their car slightly changes the balloon position, so for me to get to hit it without screwing up traffic patterns is gonna take some magic. I watch and will the balloon to be on my side***, I am calling on the universe to let me pop this balloon.

However, the universe had other plans for that balloon, because right before I get my turn a Muni-train comes by and brings with it a gusty breeze****. The balloon is carried well into the park and my chance to pop a balloon with my truck is removed.

I think, though, that because the universe seems to be honoring contracts these days, that there will be another balloon or maybe and box filled with pudding or a plastic bag full of streamers and glitter***** that will be in my way soon enough.

I can wait. You hear that universe?

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* It’s a boy!

**Giants 1 to 0 in the bottom of the 10th– it was the smallest of ball. And Zito didn’t pitch bad despite not getting the win.

*** I saw Neko Case “in conversation” and she mentioned buying a bunch of pianos on craigslist. This makes me decide I want to be the kind of person that owns a piano. Jody said that when you “put something into the universe” it just happens. So right after that someone is selling an upright piano across the street. Sadly by the time I got back from running Jen home someone had bought it, which is fine, cause now the universe knows and I will run across another one.

**** Cool things that rhyme with gusty breeze: lusty fleas, Dusty please! , musty crease, trusty trees, klutzy knees and crusty sneeze

***** In San Francisco I am certain there’s more than 1 bag of streamers and glitter. Actually my guess is that there’s probably 1 bag of streamers and glitter per every ten residents of the 7 by 7.  

I was up at 4:30 AM this morning so that I could drive to Fairfield and pretend to commute back into the city.

I’m going to sit here and let you reread that little nugget because you didn’t understand it the first time. Go ahead.  I won’t move on until you get back.

See? I knew you were gonna have to read it again, because it doesn’t make any sense to me either. So here the back story:

John, our friend from back in the Circle days, called me up and asked if I would like to appear in a webisode he cooked up for a client of his. The treatment is such: some IT guys* who commute in to work together** talk about servers and stuff on their way in.

Two of the guys in the car are actual real to life super geeked out IT dudes, then there’s a woman who works for a bank and me***.  All these people actually live Fairfield. This is thier commute. It’s what they do. Me? Not so much. So I have to drive to Fairfield so I can drive back to the place I came from****.

 By the time I get in the car I have had two large starbucks coffees***** and two bites of a weird sausage starbucks sandwich John had purchased for me******.  So two coffees, no substantive breakfast, and very little sleep made me a little glassy eyed. Combine that with the fact that these two IT guys are talking a mile a minute about “cloud computing” and what happens is that I don’t speak at all for almost 20 minutes and when I do speak I say stuff like “I like email!”, “Sometimes I buy muffins!” and “My laptop is nice!”. I sound like some kind of adult, borderline-retarded version of Ralphie Wiggum. It was not pretty.

The good thing is that tonight, after working all day, I get to pretend to commute back to Fairfield. I am spending the day reading about blade servers and packet sniffing, so that I’ll be able to actually have some input on our fake ride to my fake home.

However I do hope to use my favorite IT guy joke at least twice, which is to tell and off color story and close with the line “I guess you can tell who installed her operating system!”

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*which I am not

** which I do via BART

*** I was refered to, more than once, hysterically as: “The Talent”

**** Dear Earth Day, Sorry about that. Love, dac

*****There were no Peets in Fairfield, as a matter of fact it took us almost 15 mins to find Starbucks because every building in Fairfield looks like every other building in Fairfield. The place is an infinite loop of strip malls which ends in a feild with cows.

****** I forgot to include in my rider the list of demands I had as “The Talent”, but the sandwich was not bad and his heart was in the right place.

I have developed a new way to detect changes in our global climate. I think this datapoint may be the perfect way to track and manage changes to our climate without having to pay for sending IceBreaker ships deep into the sub-arctic sea ice.

I call it the SDI or Shirtless Dude Index.

As many of you know, one of the lovely things about our fair city is the weather. It only rains between December and March, and the temperature runs between 50 and 68, pretty much year round*.

We have two summers a year and they are never during summer. We have a spring summer and a fall summer. They are the times when our weather behaves like what summer is in other places, i.g. 80 degrees and sunny. We are now in the middle of our spring summer. When this happens it does two things:

1. everyone clogs up the beaches

2. people put on their 2 or 3 “summer” outfits**

This year I feel like we’ve had more summers than we usually get. So this weekend when I went for a run on Saturday I decided that I needed some type of measurement for this. Thus the SDI.

No one ever goes shirtless in San Francisco unless they are either

1. a crazy homeless man (zany musical spaceships…give me a dollar)

2. one of the weird middle age nudists out at Baker Beach who spend all day naked and for some reason, in a superman stance***

So if I count the number of shirtless dudes I see during the day ****. I should be able to get an accurate Idea of how much we’ve been affected by Global warming.

Saturday SDI: 16 (including the baseball game which may skew results)

Sunday SDI: 6 (including Ocean beach which may skew results)

Today SDI: 2 (thus far)

*Except for (like right now) we get 3 days of 80 degree days or (worse) 90 degree days in spring and fall.

** For me this means it’s the one time a year when I veer from my normal work clothes which are always Button down shirt, grey t-shirt and jeans. Today I’m wearing a *short sleeve* button down and khakis (I know! It’s a huge leap!)

*** legs spread, chest out, hands on hips

**** excluding the Castro, for obvious reasons

Okay, the sporadic has been on an incredibly long hiatus and I feel that now it’s time to get back to it. I couldn’t think of anything particularly witty to open with except that I intend to

1. update at least once a week
2.  switch completely to blogity blog mode*
3.  start thinking about the funny things that I might type here.

So there you have it. Not only can you read me if you want, but now you don’t have to set up an outlook rule to delete my emails when they arrive.

*Yes, tony.

I have uploaded all sorts of new software and changed my web hosting from whatever the hell it was over to Linux, which I don’t fully understand. Hopefully at the end of all of this the Sporadic can move from 1996 email version to 2005 web based version. Fingers crossed.