I seem to have fixed my sleep cycle problem to some extent by going to bed this morning at 0100 and rising today a little after 1200. The late rising was more out of sheer laziness than anything else, since I woke up roughly once an hour from 0700 onward, but with nothing on the schedule today I didn't see any reason to stir forth and do stuff.

I did finally go out and get the mail, which included drugs from the VA, the new (and horribly screwed up) Sprint bill, the quarterly statement from my brokerage (didn't want that retirement fund anyway) and a helpful letter with flyer from the VA about their suicide assistanceprevention line. I don't think I'll really be needing that, so I chucked it along with the rest of the junk mail. Sprint had done exactly what I asked them earlier in the month and switched the numbers on my phones, so that the Centro -my main phone- is in the 703 area code, and the Katana -my "home" phone- is in the inappropriate 301 area code. Unfortunately, they didn't switch the plans along with the numbers, so I got billed for some texting and data use. :( Fortunately, Sprint being Sprint, they have outstanding customer service which fixed this problem, credited me with the charges for the texts and data, and also credited me another $50 for extending my contract on one of these phones for two years. Ha! It's not like I'd ever voluntarily leave them in any case, so it was free money. :)

The Forgotten Army is a pretty depressing book. Granted, just about any book about the ARVN would be, but this one is particularly poignant since it's not only a once-over-lightly organizational/social history of that doomed army but also a biography of a pair of colonels who came from similar backgrounds, were acknowledged as two of the best young officers in the ARVN, and wound up in very different and tragic places. It's also depressing to see how our Army and the press screwed the ARVN out of the credit for winning the battles of Hue and Hamburger Hill, among many other dumb mistakes the US made in South Vietnam. I'm not done with it yet, but it's hard to keep going when you know how it all ends.
UPDATE: Done with it now. I need a drink, but I gave that stuff up. :(

Time to go out and replenish the groceries, maybe hang out with some friends if they're available.

God, I miss EVE. I'm not really cut out to be a forum whore, and reading the op threads is monumentally frustrating.

No post yesterday since I was pretty much caught up in events, so I guess I'll play catch up now.

Neighbors in the apartment next to the laundry room moved out; maintenance people were in there stripping out the carpet and doing other stuff yesterday.
Speaking of which, I did my laundry, which took most of the morning as I was periodically distracted by Civicrack. Poncho liner now looks strangely fluffy.
Finished Amy Chua's World on Fire, which is basically a polemic regarding economically dominant minorities and why democracy in Second/Third World nations that don't have a strong legal tradition is a Bad Idea.
( Good, but... )
Spent the late afternoon and evening getting caught up with Mr. Taylor, who was not down in the valley with his dad the Master of Llamas after all. This of course precluded the drive up to Hagerstown for baseball and fireworks, but I'm willing to argue that I had a better time in Reston.

So I missed the Big Announcement from Governor Palin. Initial reaction: it's her life, and if she wants to quit being governor for the benefit of her family, that's up to her.

P apparently went and talked to animaltofriends last night, and if jamestrainor's reaction is any indication, it went about as well as I thought it would.

Oh, man...this may have been a big mistake, but for now I'm enjoying the hell out of it. Since I was out of milk for coffee, I decided to go out for breakfast and replenish dairy products on the way home. Original plan was to get a McMuffin at McDonald's and some McCoffee to wash it down with, since McCoffee no longer tastes like it's been filtered through burned socks, but since the neighborhood McD's credit/debit machines were fux0r3d I took my GI tract in my hands (not literally, euwww) and went to the IHOP on the other side of 395.

Much better than the IHOP by the Sprawl, it was. *burp* I drank 3-4 cups of coffee to wash down my biscuits & gravy, read USA TODAY in a leisurely fashion, and then motored on down to Harris Teeter for a gallon of whole milk, a buttload of store brand yogurt (there was a BOGO deal), and a couple heads of broccoli that were also on sale.

Now here I am at home, feeling righteously energized, and considering a road trip to Hagerstown (home of the Class A Suns) for Friday night fireworks, since Woodbridge (home of the Class A Nationals*) is more expensive, and, well, it's Woodbridge. Okay, it's down 95, and I have a horror of being stuck on that wretched piece of road in the middle of holiday traffic. Besides, Hagerstown Municipal looks like a nice old park, as opposed to the Nationals' Pfitzner Stadium. I'd stay at home and watch the college kids play with wooden bats, but apparently that league shuts down for the 4th.

And speaking of the Dukes, my fantasy team remains mired in seventh place, bogged down by a pitching staff that can't win, can't strike anyone out, and can't keep runners off base or away from home plate. Fox Mike Lima, as the cool kids say these days.

Ah, well...at least I can laugh at Iowahawk, who brings back memories of Disco Demolition Night with Recession Demolition Night.

*Who, interestingly enough, used to be the Alexandria DukesMarinersDukes before moving to Woodbridge in 1984.

First of all, since we don't get the National Post down here, you should go read beatonna's Canada History Debate comic.

Yesterday I got a fair amount done despite sitting on my butt for most of the day. Got my doctor's appointment scheduled for next month, got out and finished grocery shopping, and did some cleaning. Also got the date, time, and location of next month's DC Goonmeet nailed down. (How the hell did I wind up as social secretary for the DC goons?)

Also realized I'm missing a lot of the background stuff I had bashed out for Blood Red Skies, which I apparently left in my other pantscomputer along with the PDF files of my transcripts. Which latter makes applying for Federal jobs a pain in the ass since half the Civil Service jobs out there want a copy of one's transcripts along with the resume. brian_edminster thinks he may have the problem with the Failbox nailed down, which would be good; even if he hasn't, I'll be on the road to Frederick today since I need to have those files and would prefer to just pull them off onto the new thumb drive instead of having him burn them to CD, put CD in the mail, etc. Besides, it's a nice day for a drive and I need to get out of the apartment more often anyway.

Last night I learned Rail Baron at the hands of the Dunhams and therevdrnye. If you haven't played Rail Baron, it's sort of like Monopoly except instead of plodding around the board in a circle one does runs across the nation (for which one is paid, and has to pay track fees to the bank or to other players) to generate money. This money is spent on the aforementioned track fees and for buying railroads large & small; the railroads allow you to collect track fees much as one collects rents in Monopoly. As usual in Monopoly-style games, I got my head handed to me and finished fourth, but that was mainly due to bad luck in destinations: I was forever getting sent to Philadelphia and Sacramento, which couldn't be reached without going over other peoples' railroads. So it goes.

I also got patiently schooled in the ills of Metro, where Dutch is working as a consultant. The problem with Metro, dating back 40 years to when WMATA was formed out of what used to be DC Transit and the proposed Metrorail system, is that it relies for funding on DC, Maryland and Virginia; it has no revenue source to call its own except for the farebox, which never covers operating expenses (much less capital investments). From this all the other problems arise, and lord God, are there a lot of problems. :(

Got a call from a headhunter wondering if I was interested in a three-month contract job @24/hour. HELL YEAH. Hopefully either that or the Monday interview will work out.

In the meantime, more shopping tonight. I should be set for a couple weeks now, with the possible exception of milk and eggs. Maybe coffee.

In the unreal world, Michael Jackson is dead. I was surprised to find out he was roughly my age, but considering the life he's lived I'm surprised he didn't punch out sooner, possibly with an assist from an angry parent. Ah, well. He's a shining testament to the uniqueness of our nation: only here can a poor black child grow up to be a rich white woman.

Tried to get my sleep cycle back on track last night but that didn't work, so I'll give it another shot tonight. In the meantime, I'm baking bread, doing laundry, and spending a lot of unproductive time online. Tomorrow, I think, I'm going to prod the temp agencies and see if they have any data entry gigs available. Hell, $10/hour may not be much better than unemployment, but it'll give me something to help cover the bills with. Especially since I need to start saving up for August rent, as the last of the Cardboard Box Fund is in the process of being liquidated so that July rent can be covered.

Also need to knock out some pages for the next issue of StippleAPA, which is going to be collated Saturday. That'll go to the copy shop Wednesday morning and get mailed out immediately thereafter.

Managed to pry myself out of the apartment ~1530 to go get a cheap sub (and sushi) at Harris Teeter, ejecting a lot of garbage into the dumpster en route. Hit Walmart next for paper products, Borders to cash in a 40% off coupon on a Bill James book, and B&N to cash in another coupon on another book. While there, killed time during rush hour by reading the first half of C.J. Cherryh's Conspirator, the latest novel in her Foreigner series. This appears to be her second novel retooling "The Ransom of Red Chief" as a comedy of manners involving humans and atevi, and as such seems very well done so far.

Made a dinner appointment with RS to talk about rehosting my Geocities website, which Yahoo! will be closing later this year (date/time TBA).

Did some other shopping at MicroCenter and did dinner with P at Moby's; we also got caught up on stuff since I hadn't heard from her in a week. Got home from that after another stop at Harris Teeter for milk. Wasted time online for a while, and now it's time to hit the rack.

Less sloth and indolence today; bagged up a bunch of garbage and am running the dishwasher. Soon I shall emerge from my burrow and chuck the garbage in the dumpster! Woo! Now if I could just beat this scale into submission, or at least figure out how to be 10% smarter than the tricky power cord/tube combination that's getting in the way of using it...anyway, I also got a bunch of books shelved last night and did some writing.

It's a little disturbing to me that the sun coming out earlier did so much to get me in a better mood. I normally prefer overcast or partly cloudy days (double order of cumulus, side order of Iowa road trip, kthxbye) but after a couple of days of drippy rain I am happy to see the sun come out. Maybe it's an emotional shift coming from the anniversary of Mom's death on Monday combined with finding out that banzchan's little sister had died, and then today realizing that a couple of my oldest friends are having birthdays this weekend. Whatever it is, I feel better now. :)

Finished Cyteen last night, and it helped to have read Regenesis since I noticed a few things going on in the first novel that I'd missed when I'd read it before. Things tied together better this time around, and there wasn't nearly as much psychological horror visited on a couple of the main characters as I remembered.

You would think some of the stores around here would have back scratchers, but evidently enough people have S.O.s with quality nails that there's no market for them. So I ordered one off the internet.

Going to try and get into those Amy Chua books tonight; I notice that I've been putting them off in favor of SF and baseball books.

Murphy being the bastard he is, P's truck is fixed and needs to be picked up tonight; unfortunately for her, I had other plans for this evening and plan to carry them out. So we'll be going out to retrieve said truck ~2200, which means I'll probably be leaving the PRSFS meeting around 2100, maybe earlier. We'll see how that goes.

Also on today's agenda: calling the doctor about fixing one of my prescriptions, buying soup spoons, filling the gas tank, and paying my income tax to Richmond, which I apparently forgot to do at the beginning of May. Oops.

edit: Well, they're good plans until they run splat into reality. Since the PRSFS meeting starts at 1930 and is in northwest DC, having to run out to Ashburn is going to mean I'll be up half the night. The hell with that. Guess I'll be doing that PRSFS thing next month instead.

Got laundry done, filed some applications and sent off some resumes, and ~1900 stirred forth to do some shopping. Hit the Walmart for razors and Oxiclean (that stuff is the bomb for getting white things like underwear & Ace bandages clean) then did Five Guys for dinner and hit the library on the way home.
( library gets )

Up for no good reason at 0600; couldn't get back to sleep, so I got up and did the breakfast thing. Blood sugar was very good, down to 144. You'd think I'd had a full night's sleep or something. Also, the legs are continuing to heal up nicely. At this rate I may be able to hit the pool soon, which would be a Good Thing.

I guess today I'll go out and get the paperwork started to transfer my medical records from Kaiser to the VA. It's pretty annoying. If I want a copy, it's about $25 for the first 50 pages and $0.25/page after that, and of course it's not available in electronic format, even though that's they way they store it. Bastards. On the other hand, if my doctor asks for it, it doesn't cost anything. This is the sort of horseshit that makes people wonder how things could possibly be worse if the Feds were running the system.

Also on the agenda today is refueling the Sportage, filing my unemployment forms for this week, checking in with my agencies, and staying dry, which is going to be an achievement since it was raining when I woke up and is expected to keep raining all day. No idea yet what I'm doing this weekend; hopefully getting the Failbox whipped into shape will be part of the goings-on.

In today's mail, I got a notice from the Postal Inspectors notifying me that they have some of my mail, which they're holding on to because they think somebody may have stolen some of my other mail. WTF. Like anybody ever sends me anything worth stealing? Come to think of it, they do, but they always send that stuff Fedex or UPS. So I guess I'll find out what I'm missing whenever it is they're done busting and jailing the loser who swiped my Jockey catalogs, or whatever it was that I haven't missed until now.

Got the Failbox home last night but decided not to set it up since I'm only going to be unhooking it and hauling it off to brian_edminster's joint in a few days (or a week, depends on his schedule) so he can walk me through the BIOS flush and whatever else we need to do with it. Frustrating.

Long exchange of letters with digex and others about weight loss, DIABEETUS, diet and exercise, since we're in pretty much the same boat. digex has been more aggressive and program-oriented than I've been, to say nothing of more strict about the starches & sugars,so he's made a lot more progress, but it's an example I could stand to follow.

Fired off some more resumes, went to the bank to get more quarters (which it turns out I didn't need) did laundry, found my pistol (which I had absent-mindedly stuck in the closet after the last range outing) and am going to call it a night. Going to rise tomorrow, call in to the agencies, and do some major cleaning around here; maybe rearrange things a bit and get the remaining bookshelf assembled. God willing, I can dispose of 3-4 boxes tomorrow.

Been waiting for the sun to come out, since I need to go out, put stuff in the mail, and drop by the library, and none of those things go well with rain.

Going to pick up a couple of things at the grocery store, too...am out of milk and I don't like the way the half & half is starting to taste.

The search for work continues - more resumes sent, another job site signed up for, another Federal job applied for. The temp agencies are having problems as well - for once, they're having to call around and see if anyone needs help instead of waiting for the clients to call, which is the usual practice.

An agency I never heard of called me to offer a temp-to-hire position for $7 and change less than what I was earning at Wilbar. No guarantee that I'd get a pay bump when I went permanent, either. What killed the deal? I said I'd take it but reserved the right to quit the assignment if something better came along. They didn't like that. Excuse me? Being a temporary cuts both ways - if the employer isn't willing to deal with you as a contract employee but insists on temporary status, I don't see where they get off demanding any kind of long-term loyalty. So there went that deal.

Laundry done, more garbage going out, and three pairs of pants going to the tailor's for repairs. Also going to fill out forms for Wells regarding the student loan deferral and draft a letter to Fairfax County reminding them that I don't live in their shitty county and don't owe them jack. If they don't do their own work to get me off their list of people who owe tax, I'll sue their asses.

UPDATE: Ouch, fifty bucks to replace two zippers and get three patches done. Still, when they're done I'll have four pairs of work pants suitable for the office.

Because once again, there's no work out there. I'm going to invoke Murphy at this point and proceed on the assumption that nothing will happen before the Memorial Day weekend. This leaves me free to wander around today dropping stuff off at the tailor's, picking up paper at Staples, and picking up the odds and ends that are cheaper at Harris Teeter than they were at Walmart.

Currently reading: Charles Stross' The Merchants' War.

UPDATE: Ordered new checks and deposit slips with the correct address, ordered bandages & tape, and downloaded the paperwork to defer my student loan payments on account of I now have no job, as opposed to last year when they were deferred since I had a job that didn't pay enough to enable me to make payments. Someday I'll have a job that does. Or I'll hit the lottery. Going out to do stuff after rush hour subsides.

So I went up to hang out with brian_edminster last night, burned steaks, and talked a lot about this that & the other thing, which was all good. Coming back, I did major grocery shopping at the Walmart Supercenter, which has a selection only slightly less impressive than the local Harris Teeter and very comparable prices - especially without the sales tax that the Commonwealth imposes on food. For once, gas prices in Frederick weren't that much better than they are here in Alexandria, but they weren't any worse either. Got home around 0300, unloaded the perishables, and went to bed.

Today I am off to confirm that Mr. Taylor has not been stuffed into a brain box by the Fungi from Yuggoth. Afterward, I shall buy coffee & filters, and pick up some paper at Staples, maybe. I'm hoping for a semi-normal bedtime tonight.

Liquidated (but did not cash out) half the Cardboard Box Fund today; dithering over whether to do the rest now while the market is twitching upward again or wait until next month. So no matter what happens between now and the beginning of July, I'll have the rent covered. The electric bill is also covered since Dominion has refunded by deposit, and I plan to be very very conservative with the juice around here.

Picked up my last check from Wilbar today, dropped it off at the SunTrust in Kingstowne, and will be using a quarter of it to get the Sportage out of hock tonight. It turns out that the starter switch and a loose wire under the dash were the two problems keeping it from starting and from being able to signal right turns, so I got a twofer. Also got the dome light replaced, so I'm street legal again. Plus, this means I'll have enough spare cash to do Balticon on a budget.

Cashed in my BordersBucks and wound up buying more than I planned, since they not only had mzmadmike's Better to Beg Forgiveness and Charles Stross' The Merchants' War, but a trade paperback of Stross' The Jennifer Morgue. NOW HOW MUCH WOULD YOU PAY???? So it was kind of like a BOGO but not really. I know I know I should have just gotten the Stross trade pb.

Not even Alan Greenspan with a pancake on his head.

No work in the offing from either of the agencies I'm signed up with, and the boys at Don Beyer have so far received three starter switches for my Sportage - all of which have been broken in the box. :( So basically nothing of a productive nature at all is happening, or will be happening, today.

Also, Google Reader is worse than crack.

Got my new needles today and a 90-day supply of metformin in the mail from the VA yesterday, so whatever else happens I won't run out of drugs and insulin for the next three months. Still haven't heard from the mechanics at Don Beyer and still haven't heard from the staffing managers about work. Going to call them all tomorrow and find out what's what. If the lack of work persists and the VEC turns thumbs down on my unemployment, I may have to dip into the Cardboard Box Fund to make rent. It was just starting to bounce back from the election slump, too. :(

( Michael Flynn )

Tonight's fun includes another drive out to Ashburn to help P retrieve her truck from the shop. Fortunately, I burned a CD yesterday featuring the better cuts off the Combichrist/Funker Vogt CD thaadd made for me plus some Front Line Assembly and some more conventional rock. Good driving music.