Radical Georgia Moderate

He’s been walking around the past three weeks with a liter of fluid in each lung, two arteries 95 percent blocked, and one artery totally blocked. All those symptoms were the result of a heart attack he didn’t know he had. When the doctor explained all this to us after performing a quintuple bypass surgery on my dad tonight, he used the words “stubborn” and “mean” and “ornery” among others. All fit.

It’s probably best that I went home without having to hear him hooked up to the ventilator. It’s the slurping noises that really bother me.

Here are your odds for this round for now. I’m strapped for time and have limited Internets access right now. I’ll update this post later this week (Thursday morning I hope) with results from last round and possible score corrections (I haven’t forgotten about them). Your pick for the Fresno State game is due Thursday by midnight, the rest are due Friday by midnight. Geaux Tigers!

The upside to being a nomad the past two months or so is I’ve spent most of my time sleeping at the GDGF’s place, which has been awesome. The downside as a hopeless nerd is I’ve been without a computer that feels like my computer; with my documents set up just so; with my e-mail read in Apple Mail instead of through a clunky webmail interface; with iCal events that help me jog my crappy memory. During the aforementioned stretch of time, my Mac Mini sat collecting dust in a bedroom at my parents’ house, a sleek little waste of silicon and plastic.

You can imagine how giddy I was when I unpacked it night-before-last and hooked it up. At long last, it was mine again, if only for a little while. Unfortunately, the goddamn gas won’t be on in my place until Wednesday, so I couldn’t stay over to play with it. It be cold in there. Plus, there won’t be Internets in there until at least Thursday or Friday, and maybe not until next week. Gah.

Anyway, no Internets there has given me more time to learn Texas’ offense in NCAA Football on my Gamecube. My cable should be hooked up in time for the SEC title game Saturday if anyone wants to come over to my place and watch Georgia lose on my stunning DLP TV. If this post seems a little incoherent, it’s because I was up at 4:45 this morning for work and haven’t taken a nap.

Some of you may have noticed that our technocratic overlords at AOL decided to add MovieFone and ShoppingBuddy bots to your AIM buddy list without your permission. Below is a transcript of my first attempt to communicate with the MovieFone bot.

I think the phony shops painted on the walls and windows in the Lindbergh plaza (just outside the MARTA station) are tacky. As if they’re fooling anyone given the total lack of foot traffic in that area. They make me think of that guy who got arrested a few weeks ago for driving in the HOV lane with a stuffed dummy in the passenger seat.

Also, on Peachtree near the GDGF’s place (and Rhodes Hall) there’s a window that’s been grafted with a picture of the Shell station across the street from it. WTF is that about? That print couldn’t have been cheap at that size. Wouldn’t that money have been better spent paying for advertisements to rent the property out?

Maybe Atlanta’s slogan should be “Painting neighbors where none would care to reside.”

I want to somehow put myself into a situation where a complete stranger shoots me a horrified glance and says, “Oh, put that away!”

In trying to think about what to blog about tonight, I asked the GDGF for ideas. In a sardonic tone of voice, she responded, “You could blog about what you’re thankful for!!1!” To which I replied, “Oh, Holy Horseshit!!1!”

We pronounced our bang-bang-one-bangs. No, for serious. Except we didn’t.

So, that got me thinking about seeing the Johnny Cash biopic Monday night, and a conversation she and I had after watching a pre-flick commercial for a video game (we showed up just to watch the commercials).

VOICEOVER (from screen): “I am an elite undercover operative on a classified mission…”
GDGF: “They always are.”
ME: “Yeah, you never see a video game about someone cleaning toilets.”
GDGF: “Maybe there should be. This could be an untapped market.”
ME: “You’ve got two minutes to clean a toilet. If you don’t finish in time… … … you get another two minutes.”
GDGF: “We don’t want kids having unrealistic expectations for the future. Not everyone can be an elite undercover operative. Someone has to clean shit.”

I’ve been moving crap since 10 a.m. pretty much non-stop, so that’s all I’ve got for you. Thanks to the GDGF for helping me edit this since I’m out of it. She noticed my use of keyboard shortcuts and said, “I am so wet right now.”

I got situated at my new place this morning. It’s in the Ice House Lofts in Decatur. Here are some photos. Captions to come later.

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Congratulations to your SEC champion LSU Tigers!

The GDGF bought me some gifts and whatnot for my birthday, and now I’m going to bore you with photos of me opening them. There are 13 photos total. It’s probably best to click the first one if you want to view the whole gallery.

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This is also your first preview of how my newly-integrated photo gallery will work with my blog. A lot of the dates and arrangements are still messed up, but most of the photos that were present in my old gallery have been re-posted. Also (non-nerds can stop reading) I’m going to use the Gallery software as an image CMS for anything that appears on my blog in the future as opposed to maintaining a separate images folder for blog images. This will work because of Gallery 2’s neat multiple sizes feature, and because of the awesome WPG2 plug-in.