Much as it pains me to say it, I do agree with Andy on this: I hate moving. We moved desks at work, and while I'm still by the window, my desk is smaller and I can no longer see the lake. Alas. Plus there was all the schlepping of crap from one desk to another, and the provisional organizing of crap, and the tossing of crap I discovered I know longer needed, etc. etc.etc.

The one good part of moving and tossing crap was that we had a marketing tchotchke fire sale: I got a messenger bag and a ratchet set that had been sent to us as samples of the nifty branded stuff we could be using to bribe our potential clients at trade shows and such. So that was something. Plus, I made sure the interns -- who had been lured into taking the job at least in part by the promise of endless free drinks, a perk that disappeared before they started, alas -- got some of the booty.

Otherwise, grumpy day. I did finish Casual Rex : A Novel by Eric Garcia, which is a hard-boiled mystery novel based month premise that dinosaurs didn't actually go extinct, but adapted with mammals and now are living among us in realistic human costumes. Yes, I read some weird books. This and Anonymous Rex, the first in the series, are fun reads, if nothing else because they keep making these throwaway mentions of who's a dinosaur -- Elton John, William Shakespeare and James Earl Jones are, apparently, but most pro wrestlers are not. Go figure.

Yay! Wendy the Geek Goddess was able to fix my blogger faux pas -- she introduced me to "safe mode", which allows you to delete seriously buggy code -- the type of code I am wont to write, alas. Sigh. I knew there was a reason I still liked WYSIWYG editors. I am officially a word person, not a code person. Sigh.

Bummer. Blogger won't let me delete those abortive posts. Time to talk to the tech goddess, I guess.

I may have broken Blogger. Hmm. Let's see.

Mongo did not come out from under the guest-room bed all night last night. I was searching the house for him this morning, convinced that he'd had a heart attack or something from all the explosions going on outside. He's fine, just a wimp. I know the feeling.

Right now I'm waiting for my friend Pamela, who is about to move to New Zealand -- New Zealand! -- to drop some stuff off with me. Our friend Tripp, who works for the Heartland AIDS Ride, has taken her bookcases and has therefore taken on the responsibility for selling the books she doesn't want. He's on the Ride now, so we're storing the books in my house 'til he gets back. Plus, she'll be dropping off stuff that The Chicago Choral Artists will be using for our garage sale. What fun.

Abortive and redundant post deleted. Huzzah for the Geek Goddess downstairs, for pointing out "safe mode"!

People in my neighborhood like fireworks a lot. And these aren't sparklers or the occasional bottle rocket. We're talking roman candles, flash bombs, things that fly higher than my house, things that continue exploding for about two minutes, things that sound like a serious firefight. And this isn't just in the park nearby -- in the middle of the street, on the sidewalk across from my house, on the next-door-neighbor's driveway, in the alley behind the house.... I feel like I should be in a foxhole.

If you don't hear from me, I've been hit. I'm going to go crawl under my bed with the cats now and wait for it all to be over.

Damn you, Jamey Klock! Damn you! Your "Spare change of evil/sofa cushions of wickedness" sig made my check out Sluggy Freelancer, which is entirely too addictive. It's a serial strip, so I've found myself compelled to start at the beginning and work my way through. The strip has been around since 1997. That's a hell of a lot of strips. Sigh. But it's a new bookmark to visit daily.

Saw AI last night, and was impressed, but disappointed. The visuals were amazing, Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law were both really good, the concept was intriguing ... and the follow-through left something to be desired. It should have ended about 20 minutes before it did. That would have been sad -- horrifying -- but would have felt more true. (I would have been devastated and pissed off, but I can't think of a better alternative.) Andy? Wendy? Rich? Anyone else? Let's discuss.

Right now I'm preparing for the traditional "We're a free country, so let's grill things!" celebration at Angie and Jordan's, and also schlepping things over to Lynn's for the garage sale. More on that later.

Just finished Folly by Laurie R. King. Mystery/suspense about a woman who may or may not be crazy moving out to an island to rebuild the house that her great uncle built -- and that mysteriously burned down -- 70 years before. The way King describes and treats depression and psychosis is pretty incredible, and it's a hard book to put down. Check it out.

King also writes the Mary Russell and Kate Martinelli series (Serieses? Sirei? Sireae? You get the idea). The first is a sequence of books that imagines that Sherlock Holmes, after retiring, finds his soulmate and perfect detecting partner in Mary Russell, a brilliant teenage girl. The Beekeeper's Apprentice is the first of the series. Check them out, they're great fun.

The Kate Martinelli books are a bit darker -- Martinelli is a San Francisco cop dealing with some pretty gruesome crimes. A Grave Talent is the first of that series.

In other news, completely unrelated news, Newton is apparently bent on making many of my friends nervous. First he sent Mary a blank message, then mocked Rich about Battlebots. If you get a message from him, fear not: He's mostly harmless, and just bored. I won't let him know where any of you live.

So, how's work, Newton? Passive aggressive or aggressive aggressive? And are you enjoying the fame and notoriety of appearing in a ... ok, probably sparsely read blog? let me know if the paparazzi start hounding you.

Just got back from Hedda Gabler at the Steppenwolf. I'd never seen it before. Quite a good production, with our friend (and Girl's Night Out bad movie aficionado) Amy J. Carle as Thea and Martha Plimpton as Hedda. I recommend it. Not exactly a happy-go-lucky night of brain candy, but you'll have that with Ibsen.

Which reminds me -- are there any Scandinavian comedies? I mean, I joke about my stodgy northern European background, but damn. Granted, Ibsen was Norwegian and my Scandinavian roots are Danish, but still. What is it -- No sunlight? Too much herring? A surplus of sweaters?

The other thing I rediscovered (besides my apparent genetic predisposition for depression and weighty issues) was the joy of ushering. Lotti and I checked out the show for free, and all we had to do was dress like penguins. Think about it -- you show up, you stuff some programs, you take some tickets, and bingo, you get a seat for the show. For free. It makes having to shower and put on real clothes on a Sunday a not-so-bad proposition.

Jeremy's response to my last post:

and for the record, my fit about the joke was not the joke itself, but the fact that she had destroyed my cardboard box--breaking a cardinal rule of practical jokes that you never do anything irreversable (you know how hard it is to splatter fake blood on someone's fridge making sure that every post card hanging on the fridge does not get dripped on?)

I stand corrected.

And apparently I let the cat out of the bag too early on Wendy's site. Oops. Sorry, Despain.

I must remember thast she has keys to my apartment, and therefore she is not someone to piss off....

Hah! Wendy, my geek goddess housemate, just put up a blog, and some of her links don't work! And the formatting on her FAQ page is all wrong (but the page itself is very, very funny.) I have bested the Geek Goddess when it comes to technology! .... if you concede that using defaults and not yet moving everything over to my own server and having everything on one page and... oh, never mind. She still wins.

Wendy is working on a book project, so she and her writing partner are putting up blogs to show what goes into it, much like Neil Gaiman's American Gods journal site. Can I even tell you how cool Neil Gaiman is? I first got into him when Deane and Jeremy introduced me to the Sandman series -- incredible stuff. I'm still collecting the compilation books -- I must admit I'm one of those evil folks who never actually bought comics, but instead sponged off my friends (Thanks, Jeremy! Thanks, Deane!) -- and when I get them all, anyone in the area is welcome to borrow them.

Reading Neil Gaiman's accounts of what book signings are really like makes me -- appreciate? Cringe in sympathetic horror and embarrassment? -- all the more Jeremy's birthday present to me several years ago. Neil -- wait, can I call him Neil? "Mr. Gaiman" sounds too stilted, but I'm certainly not on a first-name-basis with the man. Let's retreat to journalistic training, shall we? -- Gaiman was signing his book Neverwhere at The Stars Our Destination, a great Chicago bookstore. As person number 300 in a line that was only supposed to be about 150 people long, Jeremy walks up to the exhausted Gaiman and presents him with (1) a book that he, Gaiman, did not write, for him to sign, and (2) a copy of Neverwhere for me, which Jeremy instructed him to sign "To Fugface -- have a wonderful barmitvah (sic). Mind the Gap." And then told him to spell his name wrong. The poor man was apparently very confused, but too exhausted to protest. Jeremy, you are evil. In a good way.

Yeah, yeah, Fugface -- so, in my high school yearbook, they had a "Better Known As" list of nicknames. One of mine was Fugface. The first I heard of it was when we got the yearbooks. As far as I know, no one ever called me that -- at least, not to my face. Bastards. Is it any wonder I skipped my 10-year reunion? (Which didn't stop Jeremy from trying to hire a Sarah impersonator to go to the reunion as me. He turned down a man who was willing to go, but seriously considered the offer of a short, Pakistani woman, until he figured that even our class wasn't quite that oblivious. When my mom heard about it, she said "He should have asked me! I would have gone as you!" Sigh. I'm surrounded.)

Have I mentioned that Jeremy is evil? This isn't even going into the time he and Heidi put brains on my floor. It's worth noting, too, that when Becky and Cathy and I did a retaliatory practical joke against him, he had a temper tantrum and refused to accept it. So you can dish it out but you can't take it, huh, Jer.