I had this well-written and eloquent entry about Friday night all ready to be posted when I accidentally hit the escape key and wiped it all out.

I'll rewrite the stupid thing tomorrow.

Yesterday after work I decided to kill some time before grocery shopping and have a couple of beers at Rich O's.

Since Monday's experiment of ONE beer went well I thought I'd try TWO beers and see what happened.

My first beer was a BBC Organic Amber. CanadianGirl has told me several times that this is her favorite BBC beer. She can keep it - I thought it was horrible. Chewy Budweiser.

My second beer was a Smithwick's that tasted okay, but not as good as it has in the past. I blame the poor showing on my senses being rattled by the BBC beer.

Anyway, these two beers didn't kill me, and I didn't have a hangover this morning, so I may be ready to risk Rich O's sometime this weekend after all.

My original plan to wait until September when NABC Cone Smoker came back has been scratched because it now looks like Cone Smoker won't be back until late November.

dis-turb-ing
adj.
1. Emotionally or mentally troubling; upsetting.

per-vert-ed
adj.
1. Deviating from what is considered right and correct.
2. Of, relating to, or practicing sexual perversion.

damned
adj.
1. Condemned, especially to eternal punishment in Biblical Hell.

I am, as it turns out, a horrible person.

I didn't plan to end up this way - it just happened.

Hopefully, now that I've identified the problem, I can make efforts to eliminate or at least reduce its impact on myself and others.

The other day I briefly wrote that a friend of VigilanteGirl had been in an accident.

This was a very serious accident as it turns out.

I stopped to see VigilanteGirl after work yesterday, and as I hadn't seen her since Sunday morning, I asked her how her friend was doing.

Her friend is alive, but pretty well fucked up. Probably for life.

VigilanteGirl demonstrated all of the cuts, breaks, internal injuries, etc. that her friend had suffered after being hit by a drunk driver.

VigilanteGirl used her finger to trace, along her own body, long elaborate paths of carnage that had nearly killed her friend in front of her eyes.

(This is the part where I'm a horrible person.)

As VigilanteGirl traced her imaginary cuts and breaks along her arms, down her face, and pretty much everywhere on her body, I actually became strangely aroused.

I actually had to avert my eyes, lest some twinkle in them betray my sickness.

I certainly wasn't glad that the poor girl (who I've never met) had sustained these horrible injuries. I also wasn't at all intrigued by the actual injuries themselves. They sounded truly horrific.

It was the tracing that got me.

Ahh, the tracing.

I've seen lap-dances in movies that were less erotic than VigilanteGirl's little destruction demonstration.

If this doesn't condemn me to eternal damnation I don't know what would.

Today I watched a show about a place. A place that a person used to work.

The show reminded me of the person, and I found myself watching the show (taped years ago) for a glimpse of the person.

The person did not appear on the show, though I'm pretty sure the person worked at the place during the filming.

I'm a little pissed that I couldn't watch the show without thinking about the person.

Today I started work on an entirely new 'blog software suite.

I've gotten to sick of all the typos and other errors on my posts - errors that I sometimes don't discover for months.

I was first just going to work on the spellchecking function of my existing software but in the end decided that it would just be easier to start from scratch.

I hope to have the new (email based!) software ready for production use this weekend. Hopefully nobody will even notice the difference except that it might be a little faster.

The hardest part will actually be converting all of my old posts to the new format. I haven't quite figured out how to do tackle that problem yet.

pull
v. tr.
1. To apply force to, so as to cause or tend to cause motion toward the source of the force.

This past Friday and Saturday I could feel my favorite bar calling to me as I drove home from Louisville.

I was able to resist that calling, telling myself that if I couldn't even spend one weekend away from Rich O's then maybe there was indeed a problem.

Today, on the way home from work, I felt the pull again, and this time I relented.

I stopped and got myself a pizza, and while I was waiting I decided - what the hell - I'd have myself a beer.

What I had was a Robert The Bruce scottish ale. I'd never had this before, but I was definitely intrigued by its scottish name. After my experience with the Pyramid Tilted Kilt ale in June I'm not very likely to pass up any scotch or scottish (I forget the difference) ales anytime soon.

This was really good. If it's still there when I next make a weekend trip to Rich O's I'll definitely be having more. I actually noticed three things that really stood out. First was the reddish color that revealed itself when I held the glass up to the light. Second was the slight gritty feeling that continued until the head had dissipated, and third was the slightly bitter aftertaste - something new to me in my limited experience with this style of ale.

gran-di-ose
adj.
1. Impressive because of unnecessary largeness or grandeur.

My sister Dina bought this smimming pool. It's about half the size of her house. My other sister described the view of the thing from the kitchen as looking like The Great Wall of China ran through Dina's backyard. I have to agree.

Too bad it's been so cold here - she might have to wait until Spring to enjoy it.

ME: You didn't show up last night. Nine or ten more times and I'll start to take it personally.

VIGILANTEGIRL: My friend got ran over by a car last night. She's still in intensive care and might not live.

ME (THINKING): Wow, this foot sure tastes terrible.

And now for something completely different.

To see this post go to the bottom of the page and enter the password into the search field.

(crossposted from pool 'blog)

Just a follow-up on the theft of my PDFs and videos by another site.

I've had two conversations with the owner of the business with the website. He's assured me that all of my files will be removed from their site during a change of their outsourcing company. That change will take place within the next few days.

They're changing outsourcing companies at least partly because that company was, I believe, responsible for putting my stuff on the site to begin with.

I believe that the business with the website had no idea that this was being done, and I'm giving them several days to make the changes we've talked about.

I check my own website access logs regularly, and today I was able to follow the trail back to what looks like a new version of one of the offending pages. So far, it's exactly the same except for a little blurb at the end about how the videos came from www.barenada.com.

I don't know if the plan is to leave things that way, but if so, those plans will not be acceptable to me. My files are still there, and I want them gone.

Please people, just put up a link to some pool pages. Don't copy their files to your own site.

This while thing still has several days to get straightened out.

It's surprising how many attorneys are pool players. I've been contacted by several. I just tell them what I told the guy - if they remove my material from their site then I'm quite willing to drop the whole matter.