I have to stop playing with photoshop.com.

Which is better?

The original:

The edited-in-photoshop.com

I’m feeling slow today. Mentally, physically, chronologically.

Just slow.

There are plenty of things to do today, but the ambition is already fading. Could it be that I have a bad case of the Fridays?

Cat took a poke at me last night. I was cleaning up the dinner table and she thought I was supposed to be feeding her. As I was walking past her she took a swipe at my leg. All she got was pants, but oooh was Robbie pissed.

I can breath today, which is nice. In place of the completely blocked up nose is a partially blocked up nose and a constant need to sneeze. Fair trade?

The Bruins lost to the Wild last night. Fail. Epic Fail.

Happy Friday.

I’ve been a Star Wars fan since 1977 when I was 6 years old. I’m a little obsessed.
I’ve been a Rush fan since 1981 when I was 10 years old. I’m a lot obsessed.

I’ve got nothing on this guy:

I’ve got nothing on him and I feel really good about it.

She’s meowing like a kitty who is desperate for attention. She’s come to the right red head!

If the penguin in question crashed into a few of the other penguins at random moments this would be the exact equivalent of every show I went to between 1995 and 1999.

There was always that one guy. I could never understand what it was about Letters to Cleo that made people want to do this.

So… this is one of the TV appearances that Pink Floyd made on their first trip to the United States. This was one of those times when Syd Barrett supposedly just went blank and stood there looking lost and vapid.

Funny how he doesn’t look any different than the other three guys.

Hey Dick Clark… nice interview there skippy. Nice. They crossed the Atlantic and all of North America so that you could ask them what they’ve had to eat. Urgh. No wonder Syd went crazy. Good thing we have Twitter to take care of that now.

I have nothing to say.

I’m really tired. So is Jen. I have lingering head cold. She has a stomach bug today. Kitty barfed again this morning. I think it was the beef flavored cat food.

Suffice to say, we’re not terribly sprightly tonight.

We’re just checking email and stuff, sitting on the couch. The Wild vs Devils game is on the tube, but it’s background noise. We will probably have ourselves a reading date tonight. That’s when we go to bed early and read ourselves to sleep… early. It’s a way to act like we’re old and go to bed before 9:00pm without feeling like we’re going to bed before 9:00pm.

So what sights in Methuen should I take my camera to now? I think I’ve run out of places I know about. Apart from the castle walls and the court yard behind city hall. I guess those are two options, huh?

The lottery drawing took place a few minutes ago. I seriously hope that we are now millionaires 300 times over. I bought two tickets (sucker) and I really want to retire before I turn 40 in May.

I need to get playing the guitar again. I need to finish my 2010 RPM and do a 2011 RPM. And my 2008 and 2007 RPMs. I have a ton of unfinished songs that need to be finished so that they can be fully realized crappy songs.

Jen is reading Eagle Tribune stories… our Greater Lawrence neighbors are a tad nuts at times.

Versus is doing a (brief) sob story interview with Brian Rolston. Never shoulda left the Bruins, you twit. By twit, of course, I am referring to the Bruins GM who let him go. Twit.

When the reading date commences I will be continuing with a biography of Syd Barrett called (I think?) An Irregular Head. The research for the book included interviews with Syd’s family. I’m hoping it won’t end in 1975 with Syd showing up uninvited and unannounced at the recording sessions for Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here… the way most Barrett biographies do. I want to hear about what happened after that. I want to hear his family say that he did all right for himself over the last 31 years of his life. I want to hear that, while he wasn’t the same guy he was prior to stardom with Pink Floyd, he wasn’t a crazy nut job lunatic who drooled at the mouth while staring at the television the way the main character did in the movie version of The Wall. I want to hear that things were all right with him. I want to hear that he stayed at his mom’s home and painted and quietly had a happy life. I am such a fan of his extremely brief music career that I want to hear that fans like me didn’t literally drive him out of his mind. His career was effectively over before I was born, but I don’t want to feel guilty by association.

If I get through the 2011 RPM challenge I want to record “Lucifer Sam” as a bonus track.

Now I think I can go to bed. G’night all.

An accident on route 93 South.

Police action on route 126 in Lincoln that almost completely blocked the road. Almost.

Two school buses whose drivers thought it was okay to stop and chat with the parents while they were stopped in the middle of the road. Also, most parents kept their kids inside their house so everyone had to wait for them to come outside when the bus arrived at the bus stop.

Stopped at 12 out of 16 traffic lights. I should actually say 13 out of 16 because one of them took two cycles to get through.

Twice cut off by people running stop signs. Apparently, the sun being bright gives you the legal right to ignore those big red stop signs.

Yes, it’s official: The holidays are over.

Lose weight… that’s the big resolution. Here are some secondary New Years Resolutions:

Play the damn guitar more. I suck so bad right now that I can no longer accurately call myself a guitarist.

Finish my 2010 RPM project. That sort of ties in to the first entry there.

Along with my wife, write some sort of web application using Microsoft .net and get it hosted somewhere so I can play with it from other people’s home computers.

Convince my beautiful wife, the novelist, to write more. It’s just wrong that I write more often than she does. Of course I write crap like this, while she wrote a novel. She’s the best.

Love my wife even more than I already do.

There… those will hold me for now.

Happy New Year

Sleep.

That sums it up.

I wasn’t feeling all that great toward the end of last week. I wasn’t sleeping and I was exhausted like never before. Still, I was up for some New Years Eve fun on Friday.

We made sort of kinda plans to consider maybe thinking about going to Boston. We got as far as me looking for an event listing so we could figure out where to go. When Jen got home from work though, she expressed a little unease at the possibility of being two out of (literally) one million visitors to the city I love the most.

She suggested Portsmouth, NH. Portsmouth also has a first night celebration, but it’s smaller and (hopefully) easier to manage. So, up North to Portsmouth we went!

At least… we tried. We hit every parking lot in the downtown area and every single freakin’ parking space was taken with a line already formed for when the next person left. We circled for a while and then gave up.

We went to a Chinese restaurant that Jen knew about. It was in Newington… I think. The food was pretty good, but Jen remembered it as being a much nicer place than it was. She was disappointed.

We then drove to Dover in the hopes of finding a place to hang out until the ball dropped. Again, every single parking spot in the downtown area was taken. Screw it, we thought, and headed to Jen’s mother’s house. We hung out with Mom and Sherman for a while and decided to head back toward home at about 10:30. Jen still had some energy left, but her big wimp of a husband was toast. We drove back home and got into the house just in time to see the ball drop and to once again beg ABC to let Dick Clark go. Nothing personal against Mr Clark, I just selfishly want to always see him as the ageless wonder. I don’t want to see him with 6 inches of pancaked make up on his face while he struggles to speak his copy.

So after the ball dropped and we had our midnight-happy-New-Year kiss we called the kids (we tried Face Time but couldn’t connect). My step daughter sounded like she made it to midnight with ease, while my step son sounded dead tired and pretty much out of it. He made it though. Last year he fell asleep on the couch at 11:50. Soooo close.

We also carried out Jen’s tradition of opening one outside door to let the old year out, and opening another outside door to let the new year in. Welcome to our home, 2011.

We were in bed by 12:30 (because I am OLD!) and I slept until 11:30. I just couldn’t come up from sleep. I was so bone tired that even the 11 hours straight wasn’t enough and I ended up taking a nap at about 2:00 until just after 4:00. I say just after 4:00 because I set my iPhone alarm to wake me up by 4:00 and I fell victim to whatever bug caused iPhone non-repeating alarms to not work on 1/1 or 1/2. I used it to get me up for work this morning though, and it worked fine. Good thing.

So by Sunday I was feeling sick. I was still tired, but at least I was able to function. I just couldn’t breath anymore. Today was about the same. Just a persistent cold. I thought about calling in sick, and there were two or three moments during the work day when I wished I had. I’ll be fine tomorrow.

My New Year’s Resolution is similar to other recent resolutions. I resolve to be less dangerously overweight than I currently am. It would take a miracle to get me down to the point where I am no longer dangerously overweight, and I am not shooting for a miracle. I just want to be somewhat less unhealthy than I currently am. The gym tonight is a possibility.