home |
musings index |
feedback |
other journals
dreamed last night that I was drinking some sort of vanilla that had been made with isopropyl alcohol. The vanilla had tussin-like effects, and I wasn't interested in the alcohol. I was trying to maximize the vanilla dose while minimizing the isopropyl (which is toxic). Somehow I got it wrong, and my stomach began to churn and cramps spread throughout my body. But I also felt like I was on tussin. It bears mentioning that when I was in college, I used to drink vanilla extract all the time. It contains 40% ethyl alcohol (the same kind you find in beer, wine and distilled spirits), and I would drink it just to get drunk. For me vanilla was free since the campus eating co-operatives bought it in bulk and did not guard their food stores.
usually think of myself as an intelligent person. But that's through my own bias. In these musings I try to present more than my bias, if at all possible: the good, the bad and the retarded. Here's a tale from that last category. Yesterday, as you know, I put wheels on my car. The wheels on the back were hard to put on because the hub aperture holes were too small for the hubs to fit through. I put the wheels on anyway, and tightened down the lug nuts until the aperture hole stretched to fit around the hub. A subtle difference in apertures was not going to stand in my way! Well, today I realized that those wheels may never come off those hubs again; the aperture holes hug the hubs so tightly that even when the lug nuts are removed, the wheel just sits there. You can't pull it off no matter how hard you tug. I tried, they wouldn't come off. This was going to be a problem if I wanted my car to pass inspection; the wheels have to come off so the brake shoes can be examined. What to do? I tried banging at the hubs with various crude instruments, hoping to force the aperture bigger, but it clung defiantly. Then I tried drilling and even rotary-sanding. I was getting desperate. My car is worthless if the back wheels won't come off. Regardless of inspection, what if I should get a flat tire? Then I considered an age-old technique I learned while building the Shaque. It's been my experience that you can exert an enormous amount of force by strategic banging with a heavy object. The problem was figuring out how to bang the inside of the wheel with a heavy object. There isn't much space to work down in there, especially when the car is being held up on blocks placed under the suspension. Somehow I managed to fit a stout metal pipe squarely against a wooden block placed against the inside of the wheel. Then I used a concrete block to wham the pipe from the other side of the car. Somehow the gods smiled on me and I succeeded. I then spent an incredible amount of time sanding and filing the aperture holes to make them slightly larger. I could only finish one before exhaustion set in.
n other things, Michelle (Matthew Hart's Chinese-American friend) has announced her intention to rent Kappa Mutha Fucka at the end of my lease. She has even offered to let me be her housemate under her lease (which will begin in June). She came by today with a friend (her only confirmed housemate) to look over the house one final time. She was extremely friendly, full of hugs and sweet nothings. Kappa Mutha Fucka is looking nice these days; that's one of the many benefits of the fact that neither Matthew nor Shira the Dog live here any more. Yesterday I tidied up the back yard (cleaning up scads of Shira-chewed items, including a barely identifiable Dodge Dart side-light) and today Deya did a lot of cleaning. In the evening we hooked the cable up to Matthew's old teevee (to which Deya has some claim since she rescued it from the final days of Big Fun). By various sneaky measures, we find we can now watch HBO and other prime channels! Morgan Anarchy, ripe from the road, also dropped by today briefly. I don't know what the hell he's doing in Charlottesville during Mardi Gras. I'm in Olssen Hall catching up on the musings.
'd like to accept credit from and give credit to Grinder. First of all, it seems his new sweetie (whom he is soon to visit in Texas) found him via a link from one of my pages. Second, Grinder is apparently the person who first called online journals "the new rock and roll" (a term used the other day by *&&*). Now, however, Grinder claims
"I've actually changed my mind and decided that IsabellaCam (http://useeme.com/isa/isacamnew.htm) is the new rock 'n' roll - and online diaries are the new ambient trance speed-metal with a touch of the delta blues.". Hmmm....
ater, Deya and I sat around drinking Milwaukee's Best and watching mediocre action adventures on HBO. It's not hard for Kappa Mutha Fucka to be something better than a nasty cesspool once you evict the infantile orangutan and the chew-happy Siberian Husky.
|