you were so right when you said I've been drinkin'

there are about a dozen belgian abbey ales sold at the little grocer around the corner from my hotel. I plan to make it through all of them. (though not all tonight).

however, when you've spent three ten-hour days performing tests and then your software crashes, wiping out a whole afternoon's worth of work, you certainly thought of trying to make it through a good number of those delicious, high-potency brews. hey--they're brewed by monks, so it's sort of a religious experience, right? right?

so I left work. packed up my ball and went home. "work" being our office in belgium, and "home" being le Grand Hotel de Flandre, where they have a teeny little fridge to keep my belgian beer at optimal temperature. I am now in the process of recovering the aforementioned data and pledging an eternal curse upon the software maker (Areva, if anyone's asking). May their customers always be late to pay, including this one.

if you're in europe in the summertime, but you're stuck in a hotel room all night manually renaming hundreds of computer files*, I recommend a good drink or three, some fresh strawberries from a roadside stand, and killer music.


*yeah, I rescued these files from a temp folder, but have to manually rename all of them with different names so that my software will recognize its prodigal children again. yes, my friend david could probably write a single line unix script to do this task automatically. but kids, I'm on windows and DOS just ain't cool. so one-by-one the job will be done. see, I'm stuck in that limbo of computer literacy where I'm savvy enough to find the lost files, but not clever enough to figure out how to make this job easier. alas.

I've got an answer: I'm going to fly away / what have I got to lose?

motherf.....you know how you can hear more than usual when listening to music on headphones? I always thought Wilco sang "Distance has a way / of making love / understandable" when, in fact, they say "Distance has no way ..."

the opposite! of what I thought!! this whole time!!!

when the hell did yankee hotel foxtrot come out? 2001? six years deluded by brutal realism masquerading as grand optimism (in my ears, in my mind).

it's a good thing katie's arriving on saturday. my world be blowing up at record pace here.


it's time for the "do do doot do do"s

(note: today is non sequitor day on "the baby seal club". It's fitting I guess because it's pretty much how my brain works.)

years after I first heard "judy blue eyes" by crosby, stills, and nash I was searching for this song I could hear in my head. I had no idea who it was by, or what it was called. Then one day I heard it again: an epiphany! I went ran out immediately and bought the album. still a fantastically catchy song with a great build and singalong ending. you can't help but to smile when hearing it.

I had a similar experience with bob dylan's "like a rolling stone." for about two years I was singing these lyrics (albeit wrongly) in my head, with no knowledge of what song they were from: "you don't talk so proud / and you don't walk so proud." I was singing them for so long that a girl I was dating made fun of me for it for our entire relationship. (okay, a total of 6 months or so) A year or two later I finally heard the song again and an amazing feeling washed over me. it was like deja vu crossed with winning the lottery. I was so happy I wanted to call the ex-gf right up and tell her that I wasn't crazy, that mr. dylan had my back on this one.