The store-and-forward version
Since the Great Lightning Strike (apologies to leiacat), I've been writing my LJ in a sort of catch-as-catch-can way, mostly offline on a borrowed laptop. Below is the entry I wrote this morning on the train; below that is a blast from the past that I wrote on the way to Tulsa. There was also one I wrote at Tulsa, but I haven't included it because it's short and rather incoherent; I was absolutely wiped out much of the time that I wasn't doing something there and I fell asleep while writing it.
Ridin' the choo-choo again. I borrowed this laptop from starfyrone a few weeks ago. Works okay, but I'll have to come up with something more decent soon, which will require money that we do not have.
My schedule for the past two weeks has been something like this: get up, go to work, do that all day, take Metro out to Greenbelt, get picked up by DW and spawn, drop off DW and D at rehearsal, turn back around, take crazieabby to her rehearsal, fart around in G'belt for two hours while trying not to spend money, pick up one kid + DW, pick up the other kid, head back home with family, and pretty much crash upon arrival.
Of course, the next few weeks will be really crazy. Abby's play (see her LJ) is in Hell Week right now and will be having performances for the next three weekends; as soon as that's over, just about, aramintamd's play, featuring efbq as stage manager and Kid-the-Second on stage, goes into its HW, followed by performances there. On top of that, crazieabby rejoins her soccer team soon, starting with a tournament in Bowie on the weekend of the 20th, and both kids go back to school at the end of the month.
There's going to be a chassis rollout at work which will likely require weekend hours coming up, and of course there's Steering Committee duties for the GP, which at the moment requires me to defend myself against pretty much constant attacks from GDI and those related, currently in the form of a recall vote which is being "tried" at a Local meeting next Wednesday and will likely come to a head around...the end of the month.
So much for "after Tulsa I'll do X". I'd been planning a great many things, mostly social, such as getting to game nights, planning out an RPG campaign of my own, and just seeing some people. And "seeing people" is not just a matter of being friendly and saying, "Let's have lunch"; I consider it a serious obligation to people who are my friends and lovers, and I impose it on myself. It's very important to me, and something I need, and while I have been out and about somewhat, it's currently not happening.
Another in a series of to-be-posted-later LJ entries. Collect 'em! Trade 'em with your friends!
On the plane now to Chicago-O'Hare and eventually to Tulsa, a few hours later than expected thanks to your friendly staff at American Airlines, who insisted that I was late after standing in line for a 6:50 flight beginning at 6:01, which I explained. "I announced that before," sniped the line-wrangling harridan whose attention I'd been trying to get for twenty minutes. "You just weren't paying attention." The ticket taker was more sympathetic in booking me on this flight, and with the exposé in the harsh glare of my LiveJournal of the heartless bitch whose mumbling about St. Louis I was expected to decipher from ten meters away (Charlene is her name, btw, in case you might feel an irresistable need to go to BWI and harrass an airline worker), the karmic balance has been restored.
I briefly considered getting my flight booked through Minneapolis so I could stop at the stadium, head into the visitor's locker room, and personally horsewhip B.J. Ryan. Our "relief" "ace" hocked up another hairball, again in the ninth, and served up a game to the Twinkies on a kaiser roll. Men have been lynched for lesser crimes. This on a night when the Rangers took a pitcher's duel from the Yankees - do not adjust your set; you read that correctly - and the Red Sox had a bye (Tampa). Sox in first, Yanks half a game back, Good Guys a full game back and in desperate need of a ballplayer in the bullpen. Tell me these miserable pretenders are not vying for our spot in first and hurry up with that trade for Burnett.
The passenger pellets have just been dropped off. Eff that. I will not have Tostitos for breakfast.
Very mixed feelings about Tulsa. Unless Camejo pounds the podium with his shoe and rants about burying us, it can't be as bad as I'm fearing. One way or another, the national party will make it out of this; I'm trying to keep my concerns realistic (as befits a member of the reality-based community) and look at the long-term. I'm more acutely aware than ever that we're on a knife-edge: give in and we risk being co-opted by the Camejo forces and turned into yet another of the completely useless red parties of the Left, à la Socialist Labor, SPUSA, CPUSA, the SWP, Workers' World Party, the ISO, and so forth. Fall the other way and we get co-opted by the Democrats and shunted off to the corner of the Big Tent - just as anyone who's had a chance to change things has. We're going to have to have our hand at the rudder 24x7 to keep this from happening - and it won't be easy to do with bunches of screaming yutzes announcing their latest conspiracy theories - and why we're part of them - in the Party.
We are more or less doomed to this kind of nonsense. People who believe in our ideals but are willing to accept politics as they are are in the Democrats. That means we end up with those who aren't willing to do so - either because they have other, better plans, or because they'll just automatically reject anything that doesn't fit with their cult of personality or personal hallucinations of the time.
Ridin' the choo-choo again. I borrowed this laptop from starfyrone a few weeks ago. Works okay, but I'll have to come up with something more decent soon, which will require money that we do not have.
My schedule for the past two weeks has been something like this: get up, go to work, do that all day, take Metro out to Greenbelt, get picked up by DW and spawn, drop off DW and D at rehearsal, turn back around, take crazieabby to her rehearsal, fart around in G'belt for two hours while trying not to spend money, pick up one kid + DW, pick up the other kid, head back home with family, and pretty much crash upon arrival.
Of course, the next few weeks will be really crazy. Abby's play (see her LJ) is in Hell Week right now and will be having performances for the next three weekends; as soon as that's over, just about, aramintamd's play, featuring efbq as stage manager and Kid-the-Second on stage, goes into its HW, followed by performances there. On top of that, crazieabby rejoins her soccer team soon, starting with a tournament in Bowie on the weekend of the 20th, and both kids go back to school at the end of the month.
There's going to be a chassis rollout at work which will likely require weekend hours coming up, and of course there's Steering Committee duties for the GP, which at the moment requires me to defend myself against pretty much constant attacks from GDI and those related, currently in the form of a recall vote which is being "tried" at a Local meeting next Wednesday and will likely come to a head around...the end of the month.
So much for "after Tulsa I'll do X". I'd been planning a great many things, mostly social, such as getting to game nights, planning out an RPG campaign of my own, and just seeing some people. And "seeing people" is not just a matter of being friendly and saying, "Let's have lunch"; I consider it a serious obligation to people who are my friends and lovers, and I impose it on myself. It's very important to me, and something I need, and while I have been out and about somewhat, it's currently not happening.
Another in a series of to-be-posted-later LJ entries. Collect 'em! Trade 'em with your friends!
On the plane now to Chicago-O'Hare and eventually to Tulsa, a few hours later than expected thanks to your friendly staff at American Airlines, who insisted that I was late after standing in line for a 6:50 flight beginning at 6:01, which I explained. "I announced that before," sniped the line-wrangling harridan whose attention I'd been trying to get for twenty minutes. "You just weren't paying attention." The ticket taker was more sympathetic in booking me on this flight, and with the exposé in the harsh glare of my LiveJournal of the heartless bitch whose mumbling about St. Louis I was expected to decipher from ten meters away (Charlene is her name, btw, in case you might feel an irresistable need to go to BWI and harrass an airline worker), the karmic balance has been restored.
I briefly considered getting my flight booked through Minneapolis so I could stop at the stadium, head into the visitor's locker room, and personally horsewhip B.J. Ryan. Our "relief" "ace" hocked up another hairball, again in the ninth, and served up a game to the Twinkies on a kaiser roll. Men have been lynched for lesser crimes. This on a night when the Rangers took a pitcher's duel from the Yankees - do not adjust your set; you read that correctly - and the Red Sox had a bye (Tampa). Sox in first, Yanks half a game back, Good Guys a full game back and in desperate need of a ballplayer in the bullpen. Tell me these miserable pretenders are not vying for our spot in first and hurry up with that trade for Burnett.
The passenger pellets have just been dropped off. Eff that. I will not have Tostitos for breakfast.
Very mixed feelings about Tulsa. Unless Camejo pounds the podium with his shoe and rants about burying us, it can't be as bad as I'm fearing. One way or another, the national party will make it out of this; I'm trying to keep my concerns realistic (as befits a member of the reality-based community) and look at the long-term. I'm more acutely aware than ever that we're on a knife-edge: give in and we risk being co-opted by the Camejo forces and turned into yet another of the completely useless red parties of the Left, à la Socialist Labor, SPUSA, CPUSA, the SWP, Workers' World Party, the ISO, and so forth. Fall the other way and we get co-opted by the Democrats and shunted off to the corner of the Big Tent - just as anyone who's had a chance to change things has. We're going to have to have our hand at the rudder 24x7 to keep this from happening - and it won't be easy to do with bunches of screaming yutzes announcing their latest conspiracy theories - and why we're part of them - in the Party.
We are more or less doomed to this kind of nonsense. People who believe in our ideals but are willing to accept politics as they are are in the Democrats. That means we end up with those who aren't willing to do so - either because they have other, better plans, or because they'll just automatically reject anything that doesn't fit with their cult of personality or personal hallucinations of the time.