All posts by tim

false alarm

My ankle was giving me fits until yesterday. Nothing major. Just the occasional shot of pain. You know, a “Hey they’re buddy, how ’bout treatin’ me better” type of thing. But it has been fine today. Haven’t gone running yet, but I did do a ton of yardwork with no problem.

Speaking of yardwork. We bought a new weed wacker today. It’s been quite a debate. I’d previously always used electric. But to edge certain parts of the yard will require dragging a cord across at least two flowerbeds and constantly maneuvering back around trees. And that’s just the close-in parts. I didn’t really want to test how many extension cords I could string together. So I looked a battery powered. Which apparently get about twenty minutes of use. What is that? I can only dream of having a yard where twenty minutes makes a dent in the edging. So I went with gas. I hate myself for it. But I also kind of love it. We spent a lot

not me ankle!

<a href="http://www.mapmyrun.com/run/united-states/tx/austin/568032201" _fcksavedurl="http://www.mapmyrun.com/run/united-states/tx/austin/568032201">bull creek route</a><br/><a href="http://www.mapmyrun.com/find-run/united-states/tx/austin" _fcksavedurl="http://www.mapmyrun.com/find-run/united-states/tx/austin">Find more Runs in Austin, Texas</a>

It’s a Thursday so I had to go into work today. I ran at lunch. Did my normal Bull Creek route. The route is pretty easy, but it’s littered with rocks and boulders. Plus there are a few perennially wet places. I’m convinced I’m eventually going to injure myself out there, but so far I’ve been lucky.

Today I was jumping from boulder to boulder (these are in the ground, not tall ones), and hit one at a bad angle. Felt a little pain in my ankle, but I ran it off pretty quickly.

Now this afternoon I got up after sitting for a while and I can feel light tinges of pain when I walk. I’m really hoping this isn’t one of those slow burners. Those always seem to be the worst.

I’d run on the road if that didn’t seem even more foolhardy.

I have a little shadow.

Two nights ago I was cooking dinner. I had given Stella a carrot and piece of broccoli to try. She always has to have a carrot while she’s waiting for dinner. The broccoli was part of my plan to get her to eat more by letting her sample the raw ingredients. She had been silent for a while so I went and looked for her.

She was in the living room with a bowl, the carrot, the broccoli, and one of her plastic knives. She was chopping them up and putting them in the bowl. I got her out a cutting board so she wouldn’t mark up the coffee table and we both went back to work. Cooking.

it came upon a midnight clear

I’m sorry. That song lyric will always have horror connotations for me. I guess that’s just suburban programming, but what good could possibly come upon a midnight clear?

Anyway. Last night our alarm woke us up again a few minutes before midnight. Our digital phone has gone out again and so the alarm can’t phone home. It conveniently phones home every night at midnight. Then it beeps loudly that something has gone wrong. It’s fantastic. I’ve found I can turn it off, by jumping out of bed and resetting the alarm.

So last night I was on my way to do my nightly reset when I noticed a figure at the window. At first I thought it was Punky, our cat, looking out. But it was on the wrong side of the window. Then I thought it was perhaps one of the 2,004 cats that live in our neighborhood and like to stare in our windows. But it was the wrong shape.

As I got close it shuffled off. It was a juvenile possum. Not quite as long as an adult. It shambled away looking embarrassed that I had caught it peeping in.

I mentioned it to Julie when I got back from resetting the alarm. “There’s a possum in the house?!,” she yelped. I calmly explained that it was outside the house. It was just looking in the windows. “I would have screamed bloody murder if I had seen that,” she replied. I mentioned that I thought its shambling was kind of cute. She turned over, convinced of my insanity.

sleepy

Man, I am tired. It’s been a rough few weeks which is why I haven’t been posting. I’ve been up against a ridiculous deadline at work that had me working until 2:30 am last Friday night. Or Saturday morning. However you like to structure your days.

I couldn’t really sleep in on Saturday. Stella was in a loud talking mood, and my body just refused to fight it. So I got up with less than 5 hours of sleep. Make that much less. Roxie woke me up twice that night.

Roxie.

Roxie. Bane of my existence.

Roxie is our dog who walked into our front door after deciding she was done riding the rails. She’s a depression-era hobo dog. When we took her to the vet initially they said she was twelve years old at minimum. That was three years ago.

unfinished books

Stole this one from Kate. Seemed sort of interesting. I wonder why so much Neil Gaimen is on here.

The instructions are simple:

Bold those you’ve read.

Add an asterisk* to those you have read more than once.

Italicize books you have started but couldn’t finish.

Underline those on your TBR list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (her own fault she needed an editor)

Anna Karenina

Crime and Punishment

Catch-22

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wuthering Heights

The Silmarillion (I tried this so many times as a kid. I have no interest in even trying again now)

Life of Pi: A Novel (attempted and was bored to tears)

The Name of the Rose

Don Quixote

Moby Dick

Ulysses

Madame Bovary

The Odyssey

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Eyre

A Tale of Two Cities

The Brothers Karamazov

Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies

War and Peace

Vanity Fair

The Time Traveller’s Wife

The Iliad

Emma

The Blind Assassin

The Kite Runner

Mrs. Dalloway

* Great Expectations (I loved this one the second time. Sooo good.)

American Gods (brilliant)

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Atlas Shrugged

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Memoirs of a Geisha

Middlesex (brilliant. Want to read it again in a few years)

Quicksilver (Thought I hadn’t finished this one. Finished this one. It was “The Confusion” [book 2] I couldn’t finish.)

Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

The Canterbury Tales

The Historian

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Love in the Time of Cholera

Brave New World (I want to read this. For some reason it’s one I pick up and start when I don’t have time to finish a book)

The Fountainhead

Foucault’s Pendulum

Middlemarch

Frankenstein

The Count of Monte Cristo

Dracula

A Clockwork Orange

Anansi Boys

The Once and Future King (Julie hated this one too. I’ve read it multiple times.)

The Grapes of Wrath

The Poisonwood Bible

1984 (again with books I start only when I have no time)

Angels & Demons

The Inferno

The Satanic Verses

Sense and Sensibility

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Mansfield Park

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (I’m assuming this is the novel. I’ve read the play dozens of times)

To the Lighthouse (yaaaaaaaaaaawn)

Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Oliver Twist

Gulliver’s Travels

Les Mis

my friday run

<a href="http://www.mapmyrun.com/run/united-states/tx/austin/547141413" _fcksavedurl="http://www.mapmyrun.com/run/united-states/tx/austin/547141413">Country Club Creek via Pleasent Valley and Wickersham</a><br/><a href="http://www.mapmyrun.com/find-run/united-states/tx/austin" _fcksavedurl="http://www.mapmyrun.com/find-run/united-states/tx/austin">Find more Runs in Austin, Texas</a>

So this was my Friday run. It’s been a long stressful week at work, and I didn’t get to start running until 4pm on Friday. It’s a decent route. Wickersham is still a pain. I took Stella with me, and my back was killing me from the hills at the end.

I haven’t been writing much because of the work. It’s been taking a lot out of me. We finally finished painting the exterior of the house last weekend. It looks fantastic, but it was a massive amount of work. And we still have to clean up all the drips around the house.

We got a big screen TV a few weeks back when we unexpectedly got our refund from Newmark. Every so often, Julie and I decide that our eyes are failing us and upgrade the TV. This led to 4 hours on a Friday night with a toddler at Circuit City. In the end we were happy with the TV. I managed to convince Julie to get a blu-ray player since the main purpose for our TV is to watch movies. I ended up returning it for a playstation 3, though after reading reviews online.

This of course led us to need new furniture. So the day after we headed off to Ikea. We put together a Besta solution that would put the TV on a nice cabinet, and we got some Besta bookcases that house all of our CDs in a manner that should not kill small children should the decide to climb on them.

Oh, and in the middle of this I finished my newest play – The Automat.

This past week was mostly a blur. One of the cabinets we planned for the living room was to be suspended over the TV. Julie always underestimates hanging things on the wall. She seems to think the reason I don’t want to put on child safety features is that I don’t believe children will ever use them. Rather than the fact I’m lazy and don’t want to spend 3 hours trying to attach a bookcase to the wall. Julie yet again assumed that hanging this cabinet would be a quick ordeal. Of course it was another 3 hours. 3 hours of holding the cabinet while we tried to measure. Tried to find our studs. Put in drywall anchors. Quite a pain. But it’s in.

Only 1000 more projects to go.

jesus loves parking lots

The statesman reported on my parent’s church this morning. You can read the article here. Seems they’re suing the City of Austin claiming that the city’s rules that keep them from building a new parking lot over our water supply is infringing their right to worship. Because part of your right to worship includes a free parking space.

Austin’s chief of litigation, Anne Morgan, says the church has other options: build a parking garage or ask its members to take the bus.

So in other words, these Christians won’t take a bus. Even though if you look at the route for the 331 it drops off practically in their parking lot. I know this because after much prompting my mother took the bus a few times. It also happens to cross bus routes with the 3, the 10, and the 1, which means pretty much everyone in Austin can get there by bus. Well except West Austinites. Who won’t pay for public transport. And from what I hear are pretty well represented at this church. At some point we should cut those moochers off. Especially since they can’t even be bothered to drive around a parking garage.

And people wonder why I want nothing to do with these “caring” churches. How about giving a damn about the water I drink? How many more missionaries could you send over seas for the cost of this lawsuit? How many people could you feed for the cost of your state-of-the-art sound system? Why couldn’t you build a parking garage on your current land? Or is this just about serving rich people their weekly singing and dancing catharsis so they can endure living one more week with the spouse they hate, at the job they hate, without pulling the plug completely?

I know a lot of people dislike organized religion. Personally I like it much more than this “dis-organized religion” of the evangelicals. Organized religion has shown historically that it’s pretty corrupt. Not having the checks and balances that organized religion has I think can only end badly. Which probably explains why most of these churches are essentially prosperity-preaching country clubs.

The Nymph at Frontera Fest

One of my shows is playing at Frontera Fest tomorrow night. It’s called the nymph, and it’s a bit of a twisted fairy tale about what happens when a river o’er runs it s banks. Fun stuff.

You can still get tickets here:

http://4thwalltickets.com/store/show/72

Just scroll down to Jan 23rd and buy some tickets. I recommend buying in advance. Frontera often sells out. And by often, I mean almost always.

This is probably my favorite show I’ve written, and I hope to return to it some day and make it into a full length script. Something along the lines of Neil Gamine’s Coraline.

Big and Little Stacy + Some Manlove

<a href="http://www.mapmyrun.com/run/united-states/tx/austin/899336311" _fcksavedurl="http://www.mapmyrun.com/run/united-states/tx/austin/899336311">Big and Little Stacy and a detour to manlove</a><br/><a href="http://www.mapmyrun.com/find-run/united-states/tx/austin" _fcksavedurl="http://www.mapmyrun.com/find-run/united-states/tx/austin">Find more Runs in Austin, Texas</a>

Decided to check out Big and Little Stacy today. I took a detour and looked at the houses near Oltor and Parker. There’s some cute stuff in there. Then headed over I-35 at Oltorf. Ran past Travis High.