Fond of rumpots, crackpots, and how are you, Mr. Wilson?

In brief:

* The Plotbunny Adoption Agency seems to have been a bust. Ah, well, c'est la s'omething.

* Work training today involved an application in MS-DOS. Clearly something James Morrow-ish has gone wrong with the Universe.

* The kids come this weekend. Somehow, I have managed to complete Christmas and birthday shopping for them before the day in question. Like I said, James Morrow-ish.

* I seem to have developed a mild obsession with Django Django's "Default".

* My coccyx still smarts. Sigh.

Fun fact: if you cover the Gin Blossoms' hit "Found Out About You" on an acoustic guitar, slowed way down and in a minor key, it's creepy as hell.

It's a testament to my manager's abilities that I can start off my Monday workday by being told everything I royally banjaxed the previous week, and not spend of the rest of my day hunched over my keyboard sniffling like a despondent blancmange.

I fielded a voice mail this morning from our landlady, informing us that our well has just run dry. I am to gather that this is not good.

Go see Argo. Yes. Do it. If you would prefer to see Pitch Perfect, that's fine, as it weren't bad, neither. But dude, Argo.

It was a day.
Work was tedious.
The Buffalo wings didn't sit right.
I squandered yesterday's beautiful autumnness and time to myself for How I Met Your Mother reruns.

On the other hand.
I finally watched Super 8, and loved it.
It's figmentj's and my 6-month wedding anniversary, and we had a lovely in-house date night to celebrate.
We're going to see Glen Hansard tomorrow.
I've had some great interactions with belgatherial over the last several days.
Game night with zeyr and fiddle_dragon was splendid.

So I think I win.

And now, I sleep.

So much to talk about. So, so much. Note to self to discuss the following in as near a future as circumstances warrant:

* belgatherial, and the 26,917 things that go along with that
* the Glen Hansard concert in Manhattan
* fiddle_dragon and zeyr's wedding (which is nearly beyond the statute of blogging limitations at this point)
* the radio show, yet again
* new glasses!
* the State of the Cabin, and the attendant promised-but-never-delivered Critter Report

In the meantime, I've been off the grid somewhat, and I miss you all, and I'm sensing a lot of flux filtering through the Interblag, so yet again I ask that you please take a moment to chime in on That Damned Poll:

[Poll #1853348]

Thanks. Love you guys.

Here, have some positives:

* We got the cabin! Let the dancing begin! Moving day is June 4.

* A week ago I applied for an on-air talent position with Party 934 (94.9 FM Hudson Valley, which broadcasts remotely via Internet), which got me shortlisted and invited to fill out a program proposal. I just returned the form last night; next step if they approve is a phone interview, and then I'm on the air! I honestly don't know if it's a paid position or not, but even if it's not it'd likely be a once-a-week hoopty at most, cost nothing to produce, and dammit, I haven't hosted a radio show in almost two decades, and I miss it abominably. Crossing all available digits!

* This weekend, my lovely and brilliant figmentj graduates from Mount Holyoke, which I've been looking forward to since we first started dating. Cap and gown photos to follow in abundance!

Speaking of which, I need to stop typing this and resume the packing process for the weekend. See y'all on the other side.

1) Several weeks back, I got an email from Sarah Kate from the then-soon-to-be-unveiled Small Screen Adventures podcast, asking if I'd be willing to let her and Emma Lee, her partner in geekery, use "88 Lines About 44 Fangirls" as the theme song for their biweekly show. I told her hell to the yes, and after a bit of waiting the first podcast is available, a nifty feature-length commentary on The Princess Bride. Go give it a listen!

2) figmentj went to file her income taxes, only to discover that someone had already filed them, under an old name she has not used in a decade. We've put our heads together, but cannot come up with enough cuss words to properly encapsulate the situation (although "pustulant stoat-felching stumphumper" is a good start). Paperwork has been paperworked, and now we wait. To counter this, however, she whipped up a veritable K2-sized heap of amazing baked goods yesterday, so I can safely say that life is, indeed, good.

3) I'd really really really like to dip my toes into the 100 Things Blogging Challenge, but I'm having difficulty narrowing down what genre my 100 things should fall into. Thoughts?

4) Also on the horizon, the once-every-decade Sight and Sound Critics' Poll of the greatest films ever made takes place this year, and it's making me want to dust off my semi-regular movie poll as well. On the one hand, my last attempt at doing this brought in a relatively low number of responses, and I'm afraid I'm making the regular responders sick of having to do this One More Time; on the other, the timing of the S&S poll is seriously making my thumbs twitch, and I'm wondering if doing it up in Google Docs instead of LJ and flinging it out to the other social madhouses on the web might not bolster the numbers. Ehh. We'll see where my motivation lands.

5) The mandolin (thanks to the suggestion of both of the folks on my f'list with "weird" in their names, maverick_weirdo and weyrdbird) has officially been named Vanya. I've christened it by learning how to play "Locomotive Breath" on it. Thank you.

Jeezum crow, am I finding the prospect of a year-in-review post daunting. I apparently don't do small years any more (engagement! music career! all the things!), which I know is something of a blessing and something of the sort of curse they build summer blockbusters around. So today, while I have a bit of patented Oklahoma WiFi to exploit, I'll make a sworn promise to do an actual Year in Review within a week of my return to the Northeast, and instead do the whole "post the first line of the first post of every month of 2011" thing that all the other kids in their pumped-up kicks are doing:

January: If y'all can read this: Birthday!

February: My diabolical plan to get a good night's sleep ran into a snag a little before six, when I was awakened by the sound of my digestive tract.

March: After a great deal of careful consideration, I’ve decided what I want for my 40th birthday. *

April: Things that bring me joy on a Monday:

* the people I surround myself with
* thunderstorms (especially on the East Coast, where they are considerably rarer than in my native Midwest)
* LiveJournal being functional
* blankets
* Oreos and milk (even if it means venturing out to CVS at 11:30 on a Sunday night to get them) **

May: Before my inevitable collapse for the evening: last week I was finally persuaded to do a quick-and-sleazy recording of "One by One" (a.k.a. "that squirrel song").

June: Let me tell you a story. ***

July: I am very pleased to announce that I have exacted revenge on figmentj for getting me hooked on Mad Men, by in turn getting her hooked on Top Chef.

August: My father, my stepmother and my stepbrother are all flying into Boston tomorrow for a week's visit.

September: I'm typing this from the corner booth of an Au Bon Pain in South-ish Boston, nursing the $2.50 bottle of Nantucket Nectars half iced tea-half lemonade that's perched at my elbow.

October: Just a quick update, since I haven't posted here since figmentj's mom went into the hospital and we were about to get on a plane to Tulsa: her mother responded pretty well to antibiotics, but her gall bladder had to come out.

November: For no good reason other than inertia and the occasion blue mood, I haven't posted here in almost two weeks. ****

December: First of all, thank you thank you THANK YOU to everyone who has listened to/bought/pimped out The Elmsley Count so far!

As for the trip in progress, we leave shortly for the Texas panhandle for New Year's celebrations with figmentj's relations, which promises to be an experience of the cacophonously fascinating flavor. Cheers!



* = Criminey, did I talk a lot about my birthday this year....
** = Yes, I'm counting this as one sentence. Sue me.
*** = That was the engagement. Thought I'd make that clear.
**** = Theme of the year, really. This has been my least LJ-posty year since I started back in 2002. Fixing that is on my resolution list.

Some positives in my life:

* The CD is well more than half finished, and sounding amazing
* I got to GM for the first time ever on Saturday for my kids, using a simple quasi-system that I pretty much made up on the fly and a ten-room "dungeon" with both puzzles and monsters to slay that I scrawled in about 15 minutes (for the record, they did an awesome job for their first time out of the gate)
* For that matter, it was a pretty terrific weekend with the kids all around
* I have figmentj and belgatherial, both of them positives any day of the year
* Opening for Heather Dale in a week!
* We just had the planning meeting for Thanksgiving at shadesong and yendi's, and it's shaping up to be a superlative year
* I'm learning to be master of my fate and captain of my soul, a little at a time
* [censored]
* Pepsi Throwback, and don't judge me
* I still have a roof over my head, food in my belly, and too many friends and loved ones to count

How about you?

1) Kids over this past weekend! There was an aquarium with fiddle_dragon and kids! Fur seals! Manta ray petting pool! Penguins! Zomigod, the PENGUINS!

2) I've now lost count of the number of box fans I've purchased over the last eight years. All I know is that every last one of them, even the ones that broke prematurely, was worth every penny.

3) Massively multiplayer Scrabble. Bizarre stuff, and deeply fascinating in an almost cartographical way. Just prowl around the playspace for a while, and you'll see what I mean. (Thanks to figmentj for the link!

4) We have grapes. I like grapes.

* I seem to have mislaid my driver's license, the one I just received a few month's ago. If I'm lucky, it's in one of my other pockets; if I'm unlucky, some guy in Dorchester named Flash is using it to cut lines of nose sugar on the back of a Bon Jovi Slippery When Wet jewel case.

* DOODLE JUMP IS THE BEST APP EVER. IT GOES "BOING!"

* I was telling figmentj that when I was still taking calls for Verizon, at least a few times a week someone would give a phone number with the old exchange letters attached (like GR7-1234 for 477-1234), and once in a very great while I'd get the exchange name (like GRamercy 7). After some discussion, I've decided that this practice needs to come back; for these reason, my own phone number will henceforth be given out starting with FAraday 1.