I realized today: I'm always either saying things to get a reaction (playing the funny man) or feeding other people lines (playing the stooge), enrolling other people unwittingly in my own little comedy duo.

I had a sick, sick dream this morning. I was in a university library trying to pick up women. I was particularly sweet on this one pretty blonde, a soccer player. In fact, we'd had a one-night stand once, and sadly i did not perform well. She obviously restrained laughter when she turned me down.

Then for some reason, people started stalking me and threatening me, including cousins and old friends. One of my favorite cousins even pulled a gun on me. I managed to get away, and I dialed 911, but it was too hard to describe my location.

I hid out for a while, but I stupidly tried to catch up with the girl again. Eventually she appeared and brushed me off again, not too surprising. Soon after, the posse caught up, and things were looking bad.

My memory of the next bit is blurry. Something happened that didn't seem possible, and the girl saved my life using knowledge she shouldn't have had. And then she explained that she was my lover from the future. The whole thing was a big prank set up with her and my pals – no hard feelings, everything was going to be great, look forward to a long relationship with her.

Congratulations, ropo and wimsey70, for surviving another spin of the odometer! Here's hoping that every year treats you a little better than the last one!

I understand now why remodeling destroys marriages. It's like moving, but instead of cramming all your stuff into a truck, you pile it into one corner of your house and then live in the mess for a couple weeks.

On the bright side, the worst part is almost over. The floor installers arrive tomorrow and should finish by Wednesday. Then I can move the furniture back where it belongs and sleep in a proper bed again. I still need to do the top borders: white crown molding in my daughter's room (pictured) and a stencil in my room. I was originally thinking ivy, but my ex suggested vector swirls, which suits my abstract fancy. I'll have to see what I can find at Michael's or online.

Exercise is similar to drinking in that, if you do enough of it, you can pass right out. (And wake up in pain.)

Tonight we went to my daughter Naomi's school to watch her drama class put on one-act plays, mostly comedy skits. She has been taking drama classes for a few years now – in fact, it's consistently her best class – and it turns out that she has some decent comedic timing.

Her skit was called “Reservations,” the story of a girl on a date and the voices of her conscience: vanity, boyishness, innocence, and propriety. Naomi played the inner tomboy. The four voices sat at a table like a judge's panel and shouted advice at the lead girl (and at each other). It was a cute skit, and Naomi was hilarious. “Omigod! He ordered a hamburger, why can't we?! I'm HUNGRY!”

The advanced class played one comedic and one dramatic skit. Kiddo says that they wrote their own material. The comedy was brilliant: “Players 101,” about a school that purports to teach losers to become ladies' men. One of the “losers” was a Michael Jackson impersonator, and the impression was uncanny! He did pastiches of Jackson's famous dances, including obvious things like the moonwalk, but also the shambling zombie dance from “Thriller.” He had the Gen X parents rolling in the aisles. They also borrowed the Family Guy “hurt knee/ow ow ow” routine to side-splitting effect. That joke plays great to a live audience.

One of my favorite bits was from a throwaway line just before intermission. In that skit, the main character was getting hauled off by MIB-style government agents.

Boy: You can't do this to me! This is America! I have rights!
– beat –
[Audience laughs.]

At least we can laugh about it.

Had another nightmare last night. I only remember the very end.

I took a date to a scary movie. The movie had a cute gimmick where it would intercut a scene with low-fi, sepia footage of a killer stalking the principal characters. Slightly unnerving. The next gimmick was a bit scarier: The theater had a mechanism to brush something past your feet, like scurrying, triggered to move whenever there was a jump-cut in the killer's motion.

The third gimmick was the worst. When the stalker finally stopped moving, actors jumped out of the aisles, dressed like him, to startle us. One shook me by the shoulders and got in close to my face. At first it was ludicrous, but the actor didn't let up, and I felt panic building. I reached out to grab my date's hand, and she wasn't there.

I woke up gasping, and the dark bedroom was far too similar to a darkened theater, with an empty bed next to me instead of an empty theater seat. It took me a minute to sort out whether I was awake or still asleep.

I went back to sleep with the lights on.

[Please stay for our next film: Deep Throat in Feel-Around!]

My home remodeling project is officially under way. A guy from Home Depot came over today to measure the two bedrooms for new flooring (see photo) (note to ropo: not actually my home in the photo). He startled me at the front door, but otherwise the visit went very well. He was only in the house from 11:30-11:40am, which gave me maximum time to get the condo ready while still leaving me enough time to make my noon meeting at the office.

My daughter and her mom are coming over tonight to finish cleaning out her room. Between the three of us, I think we'll get everything out of the bedrooms except for the furniture. That's amazing. I might actually get everything done on time. I still need to organize the stuff that I took out of my bedroom, to make room for the furniture, but I'm just thrilled that I got so much done already.

Kiddo has asked me to paint her room purple. I'm going to use a light shade for most of the room, a medium shade for one accent wall, and a dark shade for the window and closet curtains. For highlights, I'll use white for the ceiling, crown molding, and floor molding.

For my own room, I think I'll just freshen the white paint and add a stencil border to the walls. I'm thinking an ivy stencil with dark brown stem (to match the floors) and black & gold leaves (to match my dark, metallic furniture).

I've been so busy that I forgot to post my ridiculous dream this morning. I was on the set of a supernatural/conspiracy TV series starring Keanu Reeves. At one point, there's a brilliant bit of product placement as he answers his iPhone, which shows “Undead” on the caller ID. Only, it turns out that it's just some girl who likes him. And it wasn't the caller ID, but rather a special iPhone app that warns him when undead sneak up behind him. So he asks her out while smacking down a zombie with a baseball bat.

So ... ADT didn't show up this morning. I gave them a little extra time in case the service truck was running late, but by 2pm I'd already given them more than enough extra. I spent most of an hour on the phone learning that the original installer didn't want to honor the service order, that they tried to reach me but didn't have my phone number (even though I've given it to everyone I've spoken to – they only had the previous owner's number), that it would cost at least $138 to fix it if they could, which they couldn't, because I'm not their customer. So they referred me to the company that refused the work order in the first place.

After all this I've wasted most of a workday, so I asked to speak to a supervisor or complaint desk. I told my story again, and the guy asked me whether I could remove it myself. I explained that I have a background in electronics, I do wiring work around the house all the time, I just need to know the layout and what precautions I need to take. He tells me, it should be safe to just cut & cap everything. If it has no lights, there is no power, and if I'm concerned about the phone, I should be able to trace the box to a phone jack somewhere.

Which is exactly what I called them to find out in the first place. Oh well, could've been better, could've been a lot worse.

For some reason, I had trouble uploading this to “I Has a Hotdog,” so I'll share with you via LiveJournal instead.


Original photo by Pamela Carls, some rights reserved

I figured out how the credit union avoids fraudulent check deposits via their new e-Deposit system. They simply reject checks entirely, claiming they can't find the account numbers. Oops, OCR fail. (It's possible that it was just a quirk of the rebate check I tried to deposit. Still, it was a significant waste of time, and I'm not too happy about it.)

Climbing the stairs to my office, I tripped on a step, right in front of two co-workers. “I guess they raised that one a couple inches since yesterday,” I quipped. That got a laugh, but the trip still hurt, and I can't tell whether I broke my toenail. At least I didn't faceplant, just stumbled.

A minute later, I sat in my office chair and crushed my left thumb between armrest and iPhone. Damn.

Today my bank notified me of a new service called “e-Deposit.” You endorse a check, mark it “for deposit only,” scan it into your computer, and upload it to their Web site. Bam, deposit done, no bank required.

Once upon a time, my condo had an alarm system. It's been inactive since before I moved in, and the control panel has always been kind of a hassle. It's just around a blind corner at shoulder height, really bad placement.

I'm currently remodeling, and the damned thing is especially in my way this week. I figured I'd see how it's connected, if I could remove it somehow. I tried to disassemble the control panel and failed. In fact, I ended up pulling it half out of the wall instead. There's a big hole in the wall behind it and a bundle of wires. I would love to finish hauling the thing out, cut the wires, and patch the hole, but I don't know whether that's going to cause problems. In particular, I'm afraid that it might be connected to my phone line, and I really don't want to disrupt that. For now I've just jammed it up against the wall again, but it's not anchored very securely anymore.

Any experts out there who could advise me on this thing?

Update: After I finished panicking and calling everyone I know, I did the sensible thing and called the alarm company, ADT. I had to wait a bit while they discussed the best way to deal with this situation, but ultimately they decided to send an (un)installer out free of charge. Monday morning, I will finally be free of the awkward control panel!

I like humor the way I like martinis: with vodka, and extra olives.

Kiddo & I recently stumbled upon the new “Curry House” restaurant in Cupertino. The sign advertises “Japanese Curry & Spaghetti,” and the logo combines pseudo-Japanese calligraphy with a cartoon of a fat white chef obviously related to Mr. Boy-ar-Dee. Some investigation revealed that they serve only Japanese curry, not Indian curry. Japanese curry and spaghetti.

The menu (available at the Curry House web site) actually looks pretty good. It's just a little thematically challenged.

I had a series of odd dreams this morning, all about money, women, and games, although maybe not in the way you'd expect.

In the first dream, I stumbled across a forgotten game of online Scrabble. My erstwhile opponent was an ex-girlfriend, and I had abandoned the game when we broke up. The game was stopped at my turn, and I happened to notice an opening for a 15-letter word down the right edge. I laid the high-scoring word and, soon after, won an unexpected $21,000 prize for the play.

Next, I dreamed that my mother had died. She and I still hadn't reconciled, and now I had the job of cleaning up after her life. Her finances weren't too bad, but the rest of the situation was ugly.

In the final dream, I was invited to a chess tournament. The host was queen of a small nation or private island, something like that. She played by bizarre rules, and when I questioned them, she acted as though she'd never heard of standard chess rules. She also took it as a personal insult to her integrity.

When suffering extreme heartburn, do not eat more.

I'm not sure where the postcard was mailed from, but the reverse side describes the picture on the front.

Four Seasons of the Imperial Palace • Dokan-bori Moat in Autumn