[Ring]
Me: Hello?
Telemarketer: Hi, I'm calling from [something] Vacations? I had you down to come hear a presentation?
Me: Yes, and then I got fired, so I won't be buying any timeshares anytime soon. Could you please remove me from your list?
Telemarketer: Fired? OK, whatever.
[Click]

Dear whatever-your-name-was: I'm sooooo sorry that my unemployment disrupted your day. I really hate to think that I caused you any inconvenince in your plans to sell unnecessary stuff to unwilling people by, oh, losing my job and therefore having no source of income, thus being concerned about how to pay the mortgage. I cancelled my appointment despite the promise of free tickets to Vegas -- one because I didn't trust you to deliver, and two because I didn't feel right taking said free tickets to Vegas and wasting your saleperson's time when there was no way in hell I was going to put money down on a vacation.

OK, fine, I also decided to hell with free tickets, life is too damn short to sit through an hour-and-a-half hard-sell on timeshare. Sorry, Lotti and John, if I can't make it to Vegas in December -- even for you, I couldn't do that to myself.

Pat thinks I'm nice. Gawrsh.

Little does he know, huh?

I've been watching a lot of Iron Chef -- god, TiVo is a wonderful thing -- and I've noticed that Chairman Kaga starts off every episode with "If my memory serves me correctly...."

So here's a question for any Japanese speakers out there: Is that the Japanese equivilent of "Once upon a time" or "In my day" or something to indicate that a story is starting? Or is it just a stylistic quirk about the way he talks?

And I still haven't heard from anyone who understands Mandarin and watches Firefly. Help me out here, people....

I got in a car accident on Friday. Everyone is fine, no one was hurt, but my car is in the shop and it's gong to take some time (and money) to fix. I'm still a little shaken up by it all. It didn't occur to me until the next day, when I was talking to my parents, that saying "The driver's side door in mashed up" indicated that I was actually quite lucky not to be hurt. That's the driver's side door. As in, the bits of metal that were between me and the front of that '84 Olds that hit me. Sigh.

My insurance pays for a rental car, so I got one from Enterprise. They do, indeed, pick you up, which is quite nice. However, in the car on the way back to the office, the Enterprise chick was telling me about the rash of car thefts in the neighborhood.Then she gave me a zippy little red car that's much more tempting than my plain old Geo Prizm. So I'm paranoid as hell about this car getting stolen. That would be just fucking fabulous, wouldn't it?

In other news, Jane castigated me for being a wimp about going up on the roof of my house: "OK, if I can get up on my steeply pitched, angular roof and clean my gutters, you can get up on your flat little Chicago number. Which should be true. However, I'm a wimp, and she's a homeowning stud. And the problem isn't the roof itself -- it's that four feet or so between the top of the ladder and the hatch to the roof. And I'm a wimp. I have no problem copping to that.

Yesterday was Lotti's horror movie party -- always a good time. This year I was hard-core and stayed for the whole shebang -- a full 12 hours of horror movies. Have I mentioned that I don't like horror movies? That I actually get well and truly freaked by them? And yet I go every year. I even won the damn trivia quiz. What the hell has she done to me?

This year's selection:

• Trilogy of Terror Only the first word of the title actually applied, as only the last story -- the one with the Zuni hunter doll -- was at all scary. And even that was more frustrating than anything, as come on, she's being menaced by a little doll and she's running around barefoot. Put on some damn boots and stomp the little thing! Jeez. The only other thing that is notable about the trilogy is that Karen Black stars in all three segments. She's not terribly good in any of them.
  
• The Brood Dawn apparently has an Oliver Reed fixation. I think this movie may have cured it. It's about a psychiatrist (Reed) who gets his patients to develope a physical manifestation of their rage. One of them does it a little too well and produces Rage Babies who kill the folks that piss her off. There a couple of people who deserve to die for their wallpaper alone.
  
• Wolfen This was a quality movie, in that it was shot very well. That does not mean the plot made any sense. It was a Native American werewolf story set against the backdrop of urban blight. It also involves Edward James Olmos naked, which is surprisingly fun. He was in good shape when he was young.
  
• Festival of Short Films, which included the ever-popular South Park Chistmas card, William Shatner's Rocket Man, Ben's musical montage from Mausoleum, and more.
  
• The Changling a ghost story that truly freaked me out. George C. Scott and a very petulant ghost. But here's the thing -- who the hell would choose to live in a house that freakin' huge all by himself? Do you have any idea how much it would cost to heat that monster? Come on!
  
• Motel Hell, which was just very silly. And gory. And made no sense. There's pig heads. And the immortal line "One of these days, I'm going to teach you how to smoke some meats." Well all right then.

Plus, as an added extra-special bonus, Ang and Jordan brought little Alex out for his very first social engagement. Yes, just over two weeks onld, and they decided to expose him to Lotti and horror movies. That poor kid will be scarred for life.

We do, in fact, have a roof. I know that for sure now, because I finally got the nerve to go up the damn ladder and take a look at it. I originally thought I'd wiggle through the hatch and go up on the roof, but I discovered that heights increase exponentially when you're actually climbing a ladder. But I did actually see the roof, and I now know we don't have a lightning rod, and I saw where the gutter was, and I verified that there was not, in fact, a meth lab up there. So it's been a productive day.

One of these days I'm actually going to have to go up there and clean the gutters, but not yet. Not until I get a longer, sturdier ladder. And a safety net.