I saw you talkin’/ To Christopher Walken/ On my TV screen
You could mock me. I would certainly mock you.
You could scoff and tell me all the reasons why this song sucks.
Or, you could grow a pair and post your guilty pleasure song in the comments. But I really doubt anyone has a more embarrassing song than this.
Unless it’s this:
Negative bonus points if you’re married and didn’t explicitly ban this song at your wedding.
This not-a-meme-but-just-a-neat-idea borrowed from Stephanie.
1) This weekend I went over to my brother’s house so we, along with my younger brother, could work on a birthday present for my mom’s 60th. My niece had just finished watching episodes 4, 5, and half of 6 of Star Wars. I took a break from working on the present to play with her, and I was asking her to find different characters among the toys scattered on the floor, and she was able to easily find Princess Leia, Chewbacca, Han Solo, Darth Vader, and Yoda without any trouble. She was babbling incessantly about Darth Vader and Chewbacca, holding them by their legs and flying them through the air, eventually tucking Darth Vader under her arm and picking up a TIE Fighter while making flying sounds. I obliged by picking up the Millennium Falcon and chasing her with it. She seemed to really be getting a kick out of the whole Star Wars thing, so I asked her, “Did you really like the Star Wars movies?” and she kind of shrugged and said, “They were okay.”
2) The good cat, Wookie, woke us up early on Daylight Savings morning by yarfing her breakfast all over my jacket. It actually cleaned up so quickly and easily that I was tempted to not throw it in the washer, until I picked it up and noticed the distinct bouquet of half-digested kibbles and cat-innards. Into the wash it went.
3) Mrs. ACW recently bought a fish for her pre-school class. After much in-fighting, wheedling, consternation, back-stabbing, and compromise, they came up with this list of names:
-Chomp
-Dolphin
-Humpback Whale
-TV
-Spongebob
-Daddy (kind of really weird)
-Rocky
-Rainbow
-Orange (The fish is blue and red)
-Troy (from high school musical, I am told)
-Mr. Fish
and her favorites,
-Mr. Nachos (a close second, and if that one dies or they get a second
fish, that’s going to be his name)
-Spider-man (The name they picked)
I hereby decree that all pets shall be henceforth and forthwith named by preschoolers.
So Mrs. ACW and I have been selected to participate in an energy-saving experiment with Baltimore Gas and Electric this summer. BGE selected about 1000 homes at random to participate in what they call the “Peak Time Rebate program”, and we were lucky enough to be one of them.
Basically, it works like this: BGE will run the program for 12 days between June 1 and Sept 30. Essentially, they’ll let us know by phone, email, or even text a few days in advance when a “peak day” is coming. (Can you believe that? Text? I’m shocked at their acceptance of modern technology.) Then, when the peak day rolls around all we have to do is reduce our energy usage between 2pm and 7pm.
“Ha ha, sucker,” I can hear you saying now, “They’re just duping you and some other suckers into reducing your energy so that they don’t have to brown-out the state for a few days this summer.”
Yeah, I was skeptical too, but they’re providing incentives out the ass. First of all, just by calling to see if I qualified to participate in the program they gave me $15. Not bad for 5 minutes worth of work.
Next, they’re going to refund me for every kilowatt hour I reduce off my average usage. So if they measure that I normally use 1000 kWh per month and on a peak day I use 5 or 10 kWh less, they’ll pay me about $1.16 for every kWh reduced. That means $5.80 or $11.60 (or more) for doing nothing! Even better, there’s no penalty if I don’t reduce my usage during peak days. At this point my plan is to flip all the breakers on everything except the refrigerator on “peak” days. I don’t care if the cats suffer for my cash.
Once the experiment ends in September, and if I don’t bail out, which I won’t, they’ll pay me another $100 just for participating. This is on top of whatever I earn through reduced usage and the $15 they paid me initially.
Finally, the coolest part of the experiment are the tools they’re giving me to help reduce energy usage. They’re installing a device on my air conditioner/heat pump that will cycle on and off while the air conditioning is on. The air conditioning will stop, but the fan will keep running for a few minutes to blow around the already cold air, then the AC will kick on again, then off again while the fan stays on, etc. So they’ll be saving money FOR me. How can I lose?
The other cool thing that we get is an Orb! When I read about these in Wired a few months ago I thought, “Man, I’ve GOT to get one of those.” It keeps track of any number of things, but in this case, it’ll be our energy usage. So we can see if we’re using more energy than we need to be using and I can yell to Mrs. ACW, “Hey, the orb is red. Stop doing whatever you’re doing! Jerkass.”
I know I’m totally nerding out here, but I’m totally psyched about this, and can’t wait to see how it goes. And there’s really nothing nicer than getting paid a fat wad of cash for having a lower energy bill.
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For the last few weeks the temperature inside our house has been nut-shrinkingly cold. In an attempt to save a little money, and because we desire to open the electric bill and not see, “You owe us assrape dollars and non-consensual-fisting cents.” Our electric bill has never been too crazy, really, because I’m that guy who walks through the house and turns off all lights and unplugs items that aren’t being used, but still the bills were more than we wanted to pay. So we’ve set the thermostat for a steady 62 and dealt with it.
Before I go on and eventually reach the uninteresting point of this story, I’m going to preemptively defend myself from those of you who live in the arctic tundra north of the temperate zone better known as the mid-Atlantic seaboard of the United States. Yes, 62 is cold for us. Yes, the temperature in the winter usually only hovers around 20-40 degrees Fahrenheit. Yes, we know you are buried in snow for all but two weeks in the middle of the summer. Yes, we realize that Kelvin is just a guy on your street who stands on his porch in his underwear when it’s -273.15 degrees Celsius outside.* Yes, we realize that you set your thermostats at 2 degrees and you just throw on another sweater. That’s awesome. You’re awesome. We’re all glad that you’re so awesome that you can live in such unforgiving climates. Really, no one at all is tired of hearing you scoff, “27 degrees? Heh, that’s warm for us!” That never, ever gets tired, especially when we grew up in the reasonable climate we grew up in, and you grew up in a snowman’s armpit. So, yes, to conclude this diatribe, our house is kept at 62 degrees and that’s cold for us. Shut it.
Anyway, we’ve been getting by with hoodies, sweaters, and blankets on the couches. That generally keeps us from being so cold that we’re uncomfortable. But I’m 6′2″ and though I’ve got some padding around the middle, my fingers, and especially my toes, get cold fast. It’s not uncommon for my toes to go completely numb, even if I’m wearing socks and slippers. I’m tall and blood doesn’t circulate well to far-away places like my toes. No big deal. I can make do. For example, instead of wearing regular socks, I might throw on some wool socks or thick Xmas socks. Or I’ll sit cross legged and try to keep my toes warm with my hands. Or I might tuck the bottoms of my pants into the top of my socks, and my sweater into the top of my pants. This makes me look like an utter goon, but I don’t care, because it keeps me warm.
Every time Mrs. ACW sees me with my sweater tucked in, or with my pant legs tucked in to my socks she just shakes her head and says, “I can’t believe I’m married to you.” And I guess I could be offended, but the fact is that I really don’t care. She’s stuck with me, and my feet are cold, so until the weather gets a little warmer I’m going to look like the gooniest goon that ever gooned an automatic gooning machine. Also, I retort by saying, “Not only are you married to me, but we also have sex,” which usually just leaves her shaking her head and wondering where she went wrong.
*I so love nerd jokes.
Posted by: mokiejovis
If you find your gaze fixed to the screen, reading this text, then you’re reading it served from our totally awesome new upgradified server.
How upgradified is it, you ask? I’m glad you did. It’s exactly one hojillion times faster. Now that’s precision.
You may or may not recall the old setup. For the non-nerds, I point out that we are officially speed-hole free!
For the nerds: it was a converted POS Gateway-brand machine with 384MB of RAM, about 15GB of 8+ year-old RAID-5 SCSI disks, and a sub-GHz P3. Our new system has 1GB of RAM (upgradeable to 4GB), 160GB of space via a 4-80GB-disk SATA RAID-5 array with one hot spare, and an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Manchester 2.0GHz processor. Woo!
PS: Guh, I was just interrupted whilst writing this post by a software developer - a person who works with computers all day, every day - because she couldn’t figure out “how to make the internet work.” Her first problem? She plugged the phone cord into her laptop. Terrific.
Winter is coming
I can tell by less cat hair
Bunched in the Roomba
Swish flop swish flop swish
Windshield wiper is broken
Swish flop swish flop swish
Car starting is a fight
One hundred dollars: new starter
Real problem? Battery
Homework all the time
Never any time for fun
Free time is extinct
Staining a deck sucks
Hurts my back, smell is horrid
Deck stink still lingers
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