Miss E's opinion pages

Who are these monkeys?

Sun, 29 Jan 06 18:02:00 UT

Who are the Arctic Monkeys? Where did they come from? Why did their show sell out so quickly at the Great American?

All these questions can be googled, I suppose.

Bad customer!

Sat, 21 Jan 06 17:32:00 UT

Ok, everyone, let me just frame this entry by admitting I am going to look really bad.

It turns out Timbuk3 or UPS never lost the bag I ordered. The whole damn time it was at my house.

The reason I never found the box makes sense, alright, but it doesn't really provide a good excuse for badgering Timbuk3 to produce another $150 bag for me.

Here is my explanation, it is going to seem a little off-topic but here goes:

My roommate Jonathan, the construction worker, owns three cars, all pre-1976 models. He's got a 1970 BMW 2-dr sedan, a 1976 Bronco with removable top, and a 1968-70 (I'm guessing) VW Bug convertible. All these cars amount to a lot of service requirements and repairs. Over the last two months, Jon's been ordering car parts from various places on the Internet and over the phone. A lot of boxes came over the holidays and they were stacking up on this dresser by his room. When I got home from the holidays, around Dec. 28, I noticed these boxes, checked the addressee labels on a couple of them, but they all appeared to be for him. Secondly, shaking a few of them produced that tell-tale sound of loose metal car parts within.

I guess that one of the last boxes I failed to meticulously check contained the Timbuk3 bag. Whoopsie.

All this was found out AFTER the company put a rush order on the replacement bag on Thursday afternoon. It's a custom order, so I can't really call to cancel it because they would be left with a bag they can't resell anyway.

I am going to write them a nice letter thanking them for their good deeds. I will fail, however, to mention any of the above.

Friday's low-fi streams

Fri, 20 Jan 06 00:28:00 UT

It's Friday. Time to relax and collect ourselves.

The link leads to album covers you can click on and listen to free, complete streams of music from the UK's Clientele.

The Clientele

Great company!

Thu, 19 Jan 06 16:43:00 UT

I think I spelled "alleved" wrong.

Anyway, Timbuk3 called me today and they are going to send me another bag as the first one was snatched off my doorstep. This is fabulous. The company didn't even try to haggle me.

Still, I want to know who stole my damn bag.

That's quite a site

Wed, 18 Jan 06 01:02:00 UT

Wow, I never realized how naughty Suicide Girls is. No wonder it is so popular among some friends of mine.

How the Court decides on Oregon...

Tue, 17 Jan 06 15:30:00 UT

Oregon's Assisted Suicide Law Upheld

Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas dissenting in a 6-3 ruling favoring the fair state of Oregon's Death with Dignity Act.

I was robbed three weeks ago and I just found out

Tue, 17 Jan 06 13:55:00 UT

The start of the new semester is exciting in many way for many different reasons. New classes, a fresh start, no homework, reunions with friends, and shiny new school supplies.

Over the holidays I had my mother purchase a custom made bag that I can use for school. You see, my backpack I used for the last 9 months is ripped to shreds. I may need to find some saftey pins to get through the week. The bag was ordered from a purveyor of fine messenger bags, I'll call them "Timbuk3".

Timbuk3's order confirmation email it could take awhile to get the order made, so I should remain patient, and that I would get an email from UPS when the bag is leaving on their delivery van. I never got an email, so therefore, I never figured it might have been delivered. It is now nearly a month since I ordered the blasted thing. Today I checked in on it and I found out it was delivered and left on my porch on Dec. 23.

Goodbye $150.

Some blasted homeless person who traversed down Bateman Street two days before Christmas is now carrying his or her load in style. Bastards. My only hope is that I run into the bag snatcher. I'd easily be able to identify them since the bag's color combination is distinctly my own design. If anyoen sees a grey, silver and red large Timbuk3 messenger bag on the back of some poor schmuck, please let me know where they were immediately.

Bastards...

Doing drunk stuff when you're sober

Mon, 16 Jan 06 13:27:00 UT

Last night I was at a music/club venue on Fell Street between Franklin and Van Ness. I was seeing a band I'd seen before. I arrived with two friends in tow. Since I wasn't driving, I was drinking, naturally. I had three drinks over the course of nearly 4 hours there. All the drinks were evenly spread out, and I'd had a big meal right before. By the end of the night I was absolutely sober.

Because there was a $15 minimum charge for credit card orders at the bar, I left my card with the bartender. The place was crowded, so when the show let out, I was just sort of following the mass of people out toward Fell Street. It was at that point that my friends and I started talking about the show, this, that, etc. My financial wherewithal was not on my mind, and the credit card was sadly left behind, in the hands of the Rickshaw Stop's barkeep.

I called them at 12:45 and it sounded like the bar was having a load of fun during the afterparty. The only thing I could hear in the background while someone looked for it was some whooping and muffled laughter. Then the bartender got on: "This is Casey...Wow, you're fast. Well, we have your card, you don't need to cancel it. Come back when we open on Wednesday." Click. I surmised that this happens a lot, but usually the people don't realize their card is gone missing until the next day or so because they were rightfully inebriated.

Great. Hmm.

So at least I have some Wednesday night plans taking form. What a great use of my time, I'd say.

That perfect bottom

Sun, 15 Jan 06 14:49:00 UT

I just cooked something naughty and entirely non-Californian. In preparation for my pending field trip to rural Georgia on the 2nd of February, I felt the need to make a connection, however feeble, to the culinary south. I made corn bread.

Let me clarify:

I made bacon infused cornbread in a cast iron skillet. I started with 6 strips of smoked bacon in the skillet and cooked them until slightly crispy. I removed the bacon, cut it into bits, and put it in the batter. Then comes the fun. You pour the cold bacon-batter into the hot bacon grease in the skillet and then bake it in the oven which has been preheated to a toasty 425.

My instinct to pour out half of the bacon grease into the trash before pouring in the batter was admittedly short-sighted. I should have left it all in there. The perfect bottom I was hoping for was a little short of what it could have been. It tasted like bacon, it smelled like bacon, but it wasn't as crispy like I thought it should be. In fact, it was light, airy and moist, just slightly crisp.

Now the house smells like bacon. Life is good on Bateman Street.

What have you been cooking in bacon grease?

Blog fodder

Sun, 15 Jan 06 00:22:00 UT

Lounging about here tonight I find myself lacking words to type. I commonly like to quip here about strange things that happen to me or things I find interesting, entertaining, annoying, or comical, cute people I run into, or wild, feral animals that haunt Bateman Street.

Nothing happened today. Nada zilch. I even left the house twice. Nothing. It must be the full moon or something like that. Maybe if I go outside, I'll ramble into a werewolf. If I survive the encounter, I may have some excellent material to write about. If I am maimed or harmed in anyway, I will surely post the photos. I just need to get my coat...

On other fronts, school starts this week. School always creates material.

Sit tight, folks.

Saturday's ballad

Sat, 14 Jan 06 14:18:00 UT

The Greatest, Cat Power

Feces on the rooftop

Fri, 13 Jan 06 15:48:00 UT

Today's mid-morning activity of assisting my roommate in her endeavor to dismantle a rather pernicious jasmine plant from our rooftop resulted in some strange findings.

Finding 1: someone thought it would be a good idea to affix chicken wire to our gutters to help support the weight of the climbing jasmine plant

Finding 2: result of Finding 1 over at least a decade resulted in our gutters over the bathroom being filled with dirt and mulch. You could grow plants in those gutters.

Finding 3: Finding 3 is the most interesting of them all. For the last several months I have mentioned the clan of vicious raccoons that live within the confines of our property. I routinely hear them on the porch, underneath the floorboards, and sometimes running across the roof. I had no evidence it was actually raccoons on our roof until this morning. Climbing on the rooftop, we found and ENORMOUS pile of animal feces. The pile was several feet in diameter and several inches thick. Rain and debris had mixed into the mass, causing it to be rather SOLID and FORMIDABLE. Within seconds, we surmised that the feces was a gift from the mulititudes of procyon lotors that haunt Bateman Street. The strangeness about the feces, though, was that it appeared too big to even come from a raccoon. But it would be rather impossible for a dog or reckless homeless person to get up there without us NOTICING. The only other feasible culprit is our toothless cat. However, we are ruling her out because although she is constantly seen on the roof, she hardly eats anything. The raccoons tend to eat her food before she does.

Finding 4: Our house was on the verge of being overtaken by not only a rabid jasmine plant, but a flurry of blood sucking spider spawn. They were all over the place and managed to get in the house by crawling all over Christina. She showered but they were still surfacing somehow.

Finding 5: Roofs are cool places. No wonder the cat and raccoons like it up there. In Berkeley, you could feasibly go from one rooftop to the next if you had good jumping legs and rooftops of similar heights because they are somewhat in close proximity.

Finding 6: The status of our roof is actually quite good. Not terribly much evidence of the roofing coming apart or being deteriorated.

Rave: Apples to Apples

Fri, 13 Jan 06 01:03:00 UT

This is a great card game for groups of people copiously drinking together. We had a good couple rounds of it in Tahoe this weekend.

List

Fri, 13 Jan 06 00:51:00 UT

The weekend approaches and there is a laundry list of tawdry tasks to do:

1. Obtain ladder
2. Assist roommate in dismantling enormous jasmine plant that is swallowing the back half of the house.
3. Complete chapter for professional report that I've ignored for weeks
4. Inflate bike tires
5. Purchase concert tickets
6. Purchase auto insurance
7. Rethink owning a car
8. Organize notebooks and binders for class this week (yikes)
9. Be more social
10. Learn about Louisville, GA
11. Commit to exercise regimin
12. Coon proof the house
13. Return holiday decorations to Eliza

Ah, so much to do. And so little time to do it all. The story of my life, really.

At least I can now do all these tasks with 20/20 vision. It's been working out fabulously, btw.

It taunts me

Thu, 12 Jan 06 01:34:00 UT

The '89 VW Fox is not widely known to be a facetious or malicious machine. No, in fact most people would say it's a tough, basic worker. The model is a no-frills version of the Jetta - smaller, fewer cylinders, fewer doors, less gadgetry, and less footroom.

Since I bought the Fox (with 39K miles on it on a nice June afternoon in 1993) it has never until this December caused me the slightest angst. Sure, the car has been through a lot since 1993 (driven by my older sister and my stepbrother for 8 years), but I still feel there is merit in the claim that the car has a good reliability record.

Last month, after the oil pressure* switch and the instrument panel light were replaced, the problems began. The main concern is that the oil light is going on and off all the time. I start the car, it flickers, then goes away. I drive a couple miles, it stays off. I get to a traffic signal where I idle for 45 seconds and the next thing I know the oil light is wavering between a shade of dark burgundy and crimson. The signal changes to green, I accel, and the oil light fades again. This process repeats and repeats over and over and over a-gain.

Yes, reader, do not fret; there is PLENTY of oil in the car. I am no dolt. In fact, there's more than enough. It's not like I am letting this happen without checking the car's vitals every few miles. Each and every occasion out with this car entails an oil check. I check it in parking lots, on streets, in alleys, outside of the REI, you name it. If I ever get in the car, I make sure to carry a couple liters of 10W-40 and a towel. When strangers see that I am checking my oil in the parking lot, they are prompted to ask, "So, do you know what you are looking for?" I nod to them, looking ever so confident - they continue with their business, and I shut the hood, annoyed that my reading shows there is a ton of oil in the car - yet my oil light continues to blink, blink, blink.

Tonight on the way to Walgreens it was a similar tale. Light was off for the first mile. Got to a stop light where I was idling for one minute. I accelerated, and the oil light starts blinking. By the time I pull into the parking lot, the light is off again. I check the oil - there is a ton in there. Why does it torture me so? The better question to ask is, "How do I stop this abusive cycle?"

I called Karmakanix and explained the situation. I am advised to take the car in next Tuesday. However, I was not advised to discontinue driving. Therefore, the risk-taking shall continue until further notice.

*Oil pressure switch was replaced Nov. 16, 2005 to alleviate oil leak I reported to mechanic.