Remember how I marveled last night about how smoothly the whole process of replacing my ragtop was going? Yeah, well…
I got a phone call from the upholstery shop this morning. Seems the proprietor hasn’t ordered the replacement yet because he forgot to make a note of the necessary color. The color. Isn’t that kind of a basic data point?
Sigh.
In case anyone is interested, my visit with the insurance claim adjuster was surprisingly painless. He looked at the car, took a few digital photos, and said, “yeah, I think we can approve the full amount of that bid you got from the upholstery shop.”
I was damn near speechless. I really expected to have a fight with the guy. Of course, there’s still the possibility that next month’s premium will be, ahem, unsatisfactory. One battle at a time, though.
I called the upholstery shop this afternoon; it’ll take three to four days to get my replacement top, then one or two days to replace it. I’m thrilled at how smoothly this has all gone, while simultaneously nursing a small, intensely hot flame of rage at the miscreants who made it all necessary in the first place…
Yep, one of those days when paltry little morsels are the best I can offer our studio audience:
Puritanism is a religion based on being miserable and liking it.
From a comment on this blog entry. And this:
The beneficial effects of caffeine may be most pronounced in conjunction with sugar. For example, one factor analytic study has shown caffeine-glucose cocktails provide benefits to cognition not seen with either alone.
From Caffeine: A User’s Guide to Getting Optimally Wired, via Andrew Sullivan.
So I missed several hours of work yesterday morning while I took care of business and filed an insurance claim on my car. The insurance company naturally wanted to send me to their affiliated vendor to do the repair work, but I wanted to talk it over with my dad first — he’s a mechanic and an old-school car guy who knows lots of other car guys, and I wanted his recommendation before I made an irrevocable decision — so the telephone drone who took my claim put things on hold until I made up my mind. I was given a callback number for “the claim office that would complete the process” (presumably a different call center from the one that opened the claim, or at least a different floor in the same building; seems rather inefficient to me, but what do I know of modern corporate labyrinths?).
I took the car to see a guy, got a quote, then, with the clock pushing noon and the certainty that my inbox at the office was buckling under the strain, headed for work. I got busy and didn’t get around to calling my insurance company back, which was probably foolish procrastination on my part, but that’s how it happened and I won’t apologize for it.
This morning, I tried calling that claim-office number first thing, figuring I could maybe fax them my bid or something and have everything wrapped up in short order. Silly me…
Um… I really have nothing to say about this, but it was so magnificently daft that I simply had to share:
To create a install script to update the binary on the target computer, you need to create an install script.
Circular logic at its finest, eh? Pretty much everything I’ve proofread all bloody day has looked something like that…
Given my recent experiences with bone-headed sociopaths who like to mess with other people’s property, I found this video of a would-be vandal failing to think through all the possible consequences of his actions amazingly satisfying:
[Warning: Grown-up language ahead. Click away now if you have a weak constitution for that sort of thing.]
This is what some asshole son-of-a-bitch did to the ragtop of my Mustang on Friday night. From the placement and size of the cuts — near the edge of the top, and right over the door-lock post and the door handle itself — my guess is that someone was attempting to break in, rather than merely vandalizing the car. Not that I’d know anything about how to vandalize a car, since it was drilled into my head from an early age to actually respect other people’s property, but it seems to me if the goal had been merely to ruin somebody’s day, the bastard would’ve carved a big X right down the middle or something. But as I said, I don’t know what could be running through the mind of someone who’d do this to another person’s car.
Needless to say, I’ve had a pretty crappy weekend, alternating between surges of impotent rage and a crushing sense of violation and generalized despair. I tell you guys… between losing Rusty, various work-related issues that I’m sure no one would be interested in, some personal stuff I’d rather not share, and now this, I’m feeling completely and utterly defeated right now. I know it’s a cliche for old farts to bitch about how the world has gone to hell since they were kids, but, well, it has…
Catching up with the news, I see the Hollywood obituary list has been unusually long the last couple weeks. They say these things always come in threes, but there have been seven notable passings recently: a renowned actor-director, a composer, three of the men who made the original Star Trek into the classic it is, one of the funniest comedy straight men who ever lived, and a seminal blues-rock guitarist. Chances are you’ve all already heard about these, but I’d like to mention them anyhow…
Briefly noted, today is the 75th anniversary of the first drive-in movie theater, which opened June 6, 1933, in Camden, New Jersey. I’ve never been a regular patron of drive-ins, but I have had a few memorable experiences at them — no, you may not ask me to elaborate on those — and of course I’m always a bleeding-heart for anything that’s both nostalgic and endangered, which drive-ins definitely are. (There are fewer than 500 left today, down from some 5,000 in their heyday.)
Wired.com has a short history of this venerable institution, and local movie critic Sean Means lists the surviving Utah examples on his blog. I recommend the Motor Vu in Erda, for what it’s worth; The Girlfriend and I spent a very pleasant evening there last summer with her family, all of whom live nearby. It’s a family-run single-screener, charmingly low-budget and down-home feeling.
One moment in particular from that night stands out: as the darkness thickens and a cool breeze begins to rise from the surrounding farmland, I notice a freight train chugging along the benches of the mountain range to the east, behind the screen. It’s far enough away that it looks like a black thread with a light at its tip, sliding along beneath the huge, projected face of Johnny Depp, the mournful cry of its horn providing counterpoint to Captain Jack Sparrow’s dire circumstances (we were seeing Pirates 3, of course; I have to say, it worked much better as drive-in fare than it did the first time we saw it in a quote-unquote real theater). That, my friends, is one of those rare moments when you start to think time travel might actually be possible, when you find yourself connected by experience to an audience that would’ve been experiencing more or less the same thing 50 years earlier. Moments like those are truly magical and all-too-rare these days.
A week ago tomorrow, The Girlfriend — Anne — came home to find that her beloved miniature poodle Rusty had died while she was at work.
We knew this was coming. Rusty was diagnosed with congestive heart failure last fall and he’s been steadily deteriorating since then. But he didn’t seem to be deteriorating that quickly, and when he wasn’t wracked with fits of vicious coughing and wheezing, his behavior was pretty much what it’s always been. Which meant that somehow Anne and I had gotten it into our heads that he was going to last through the summer, that we wouldn’t have to face this inevitable sorrow until the weather turned cold again. But we were wrong… and sometime during the day last Thursday, little Rusty’s heart just… stopped. At least, I hope that’s how it happened. Anne told me that he appeared to be sleeping normally when she unlocked the door to her apartment, with no sign that he’d had to fight to take his final breaths. Again, I hope… well, I hope it was easy for him. He was a good dog; he deserved a painless journey into the unknown country.