I was in Washington DC to see the Pogues this week and on the drive back home I stopped in Centralia, PA

Centralia is was a coal town in the PA mountains. One of the coal seams caught fire and has burning ever since. According to the internet, nobody really cared too much untill a kid fell in a sinkhole in his backyard and somebody threw a thermometer into the underground tanks at the gas station and it was 180+°

Anyways reading the Wikipedia article is probably better than driving to that damn place.
I didn't really see any smoke or sinkholes or zombies. Instead, there was a scheisser-lload of trash and junk. The place was a lot smaller than I expected. In fact it was less deserted than I thought: people were driving through to get to their other tiny mountain towns.

To get an idea of the size: An area bounded by Bryant, Richmond, Allen & Main Sts in buffalo

Not going to Buffalo for NE was a stupid thing to do. It probably rivals burning myself with an iron* for dumbest moment of 2008.

It was good to see everyone in DC, but fuuuuck that party looked good in Buff.



Remember that warm Saturday after Christmas?
My friend Mat and I were doing some scoping and we ended up inside this chimney in Rochester:



There was a white chimney inside the outer red chimney.
It was at least 60°F outside but inside the chimneys it was cold and as you could see sparkly frost as you looked up it with yer flashlight.

Anyways, no pictures, cause we left a camera in the car, along with hardhats.



You know I had a third item but I can't remember what it was.
Damn!

• Ironing a shirt you're wearing is ok, but you really need to stay away from the steam button.

Dear Estrip:

I love you and I love this wine. Like this wine, I have no idea what varietal you are or what soil you've grown in. I just like the way you "pair" with stuff.

Like this wine, you are always good for conversation or a hearty laugh.

Anyways, I babble to much. We'll hang out again soon.

Addios.

This is me procrastinating. I should finish updating my resume and apply for this job but its freaking me out.

My college roommate's wife's father's coworker's wife works at a company in Rochester that apparently is hiring EE's. (They are also paying a handy finders fee, which explains how it made it through the grapevine to me.)


Instead I've made a plot of my income for the past 10 years!
Social Security sent me a letter this week listing how much I've paid in etc. (Social Security, like Heaven, sounds really nice but unfortunately I don't think I'll live/die to see either.)



[All values are normalized to 2008 dollars]
The first years income comes solely from dishwashing. I probably made slightly more than SS knows cause I used to be paid in cash in a greasy white envelope. For a long time I didn't even know how much I made per hour because it seemed to change from week to week.

The line looks pretty low but I felt flush with cash in high school. Especially when I was a busboy and got tipped. I had quite the roll of 1's.

The plateau is summers during college at a summer camp. I worked on the maintenance/facility crew and it was the awesomeest job I've probably had. Supposedly it put me behind (instead of having internships) but I wouldn't trade being outside all summer long for anything.

The rest is after college.


Anyhow I should finish (start) this application. I'm as nervous as a whore in church about this, for a few reasons but none of them should really matter.

Its not that I don't like to get up in the morning, its just that the Time just before you wake up is some of the best sleeping possible.
Is it really that bad to extend that super-quality a little by hitting the snooze button for like an hour?

It probably is. So I'm always looking for ways to mess with my future waking self. Sometimes I'll make the alarm clock fast by strange numbers ( 5 or 10 minutes is too easy, needs to be 9 or 23!)

So I got the idea of putting a lamp on a timer to assist in the getting the fuck up procedure.

I got this little baby:




Its easier to set and doesn't make a whirring sound like the mechanical timer I used before it. It even has a random feature so the lamp goes off sometime between 6:00 and 6:30 for maximum fuckery.

This morning I was in that awesome dream twilight. In the dream I was chilling in a misty forest and I looked up at the sky and the dream froze, cracked, and then fell into little pieces.
It as the fucking lamp going off at 6:01.

That was a horrible way to start the day ( and I was in a rotten mood most of the day) so I'm only going to give the random feature one more chance.


Also, I've been thinking a lot, and I think the best way to get up is to get up exactly when the alarm goes off. Every morning.
I will try that eventually