Cold November Rain

November is my favorite month.  I like Thanksgiving.  This is a known fact about me.  I also like that it rains a lot in November.  Oregon in November has this gorgeous palate; it's 50 shades of gray in the sky, then shocking green on the ground.

This November has been all the better for the fact that I'm working at The CC, and thereby have a sense of timing as the term draws to a close (rather than just another 35 years of working with computers until I get to retire, which is where I was at this time last year.)  As I may have mentioned, B and I have also been enjoying the wide world of brown liquor quite a bit.  It's somehow way more satisfying to sip on little tiny glasses of bourbon than to drink beers (which is what we were doing this time last year), and it's both less expensive and involves fewer empty watered-down calories.

Things are going well with The Nervous.  My +4 sword (that would be the bass) is still having some issues, but I feel confident that "me and" Ransom will be able to figure it out.  I'm trying a new thing with songs, namely, paying attention to how I'm singing them, rather than just spitting out a bunch of lyrics at the same tempo and following the exact same notes I'm playing on my bass.  New tune I'm working on: "(I'm gonna kick your ass with my) Bionic Arm".

Godspeed, internet.

Start Your Engines

Some notes on culture and other things:

• Ru Paul's Drag Race is on Netflix streaming.  It's about 80% as awesome as it could be, which means it is pretty awesome.  I always find the catty fighting on reality shows to be irritating and cumbersome, and we're talking about a pack of drag queens here, so there's a lot of that.  BUT!  The actual competitions they do are hilarious.
• Finally watched Avengers.  Yep!  It's pretty darn good!  The pacing was relentless, but they had an awful lot of main characters to cram in there, so I can't really blame them.
• Speaking of Thor, Snow White and the Huntsman has a fun part with fairies in the middle, and also normal-sized actors playing dwarves.  I get excited every time the dude who played Al Schewerengen in Deadwood shows up in anything, so it gets a pass just for that.
• In the interest of listening to more Portland-based punk and punk-related genres, I picked up the album by my old roommate's latest band, The Blood Types (it's good!) and the best-of of The Punk Group (it's hilarious!)
• I'm going to put pictures of our new kitchen on my blog soon.  That's how we 34-year-olds do things, you see.

I'm Not Feelin' It

...which is, in my case, a good thing.  Today is a Saturday.  So far, we've done errands and house stuff, I worked out, I played my bass, and I'm looking forward to seeing some good friends at dinner tonight.  It's the first day I can remember where I don't feel overly tired with the attendant minor grumpiness and general desire to curl up in a ball and mutter quietly to myself in a dark corner.  That would be what I would describe as my "default state."  Today, instead, I found myself able to cheerfully keep up with Plan C, crack wise with B, and operate with a reasonable degree of faith that the Other Shoe was not necessarily about to Drop.

Possible causes:

• A genuine 8 hours of sleep.  As in, one more than seven, SOLID.
• No heavy-duty sleep drugs to induce said sleep.
• Fun but low-key and easy activities last night.
• Kind of getting the hang of teaching four classes at once, and mostly prepared for next term.
• Feeling really good about my clothes these days.
• Doing tons of crunches.
• I like bourbon!
• Obama won, and every NY Times article is about how the republicans have no idea what to do.
• I like my band.
• The idiotic digger machine has finally been towed away from in front of our neighbor's house.
• It's almost Thanksgiving, which is the Best Holiday.

I'm going to keep up the science to try to figure this out.

Dear Red States: Run Along.

Feel free to secede anytime you want to.  The rest of us won't miss you.