Actually, I called a friend and he said I should be glad that I don’t have a Korean sister. He’s got it real bad, not only is she a Korean sister, but she’s also a doctor. Not only is she a doctor, but she’s a radiologist.

Anyway, it looks like the two thousand dollar washer/dryer set is going to be more like a three thousand dollar washer/dryer set. When the guys came to deliver it, it wouldn’t fit in our door and they had to take it back. I measured the space to see if it would fit but I forgot to measure the door. Our door is only 28″ wide, they needed at least 29″ of clearance, and a normal narrow outside door is 32″ nowadays.

There are several options here:

1. Get a new door put in, at a cost of at least $1000 more.
2. Have a whole new laundry room built which really needs to be done but it would start with a new foundation and that’s probably around $40,000.
3. Dig stairs into the basement including cutting a hole into the foundation and pouring lots of concrete. That can’t be cheap.
4. Get a cheaper washer/dryer for about $600, which means it would be about $1400 less.
5. Don’t do anything since the old washer and dryer haven’t completely broken yet.

Talking to my friends, the first option was the only one that made sense. However, my sister seems to think that my parents need a new cheap washer, not all this stuff. I pointed out that if we were being cheap, we could just keep the old set. The only person who has trouble with the current washer and dryer is her, since she turned all the whites pink once, and put holes in her clothes. No one else has that kind of trouble. She got mad and hung up on me.

I know, I don’t do much of the laundry lately, but I’ve never dyed the clothes or put holes in them either. I even had to use cheap Japanese washing machines where there’s a wash tub and a spinner tub. There was also no agitator and the clothes all spun into one big ball. My only big problem is that guy landry is easy, and chick laundry is impossible. The most delicate thing in guy laundry is probably the underwear, and that could be made of denim or burlap for all we care. Anything else that is unwashable goes to the dry cleaner.

Anyway, my mom wants the fancy washer, so we need to put in a bigger door. The only downside is that the door leads to a small addition that probably should be torn down and rebuild. Plus getting things into the laundry room doesn’t mean they can go anywhere else since the door from the laundry room to the rest of the house is an even smaller 24″ wide.

In any case, my sister has spent more money on a just a turntable and cassette deck in the past (and I’ve spent more on my ham radio crap) so I don’t know why she’s so against buying a decent washer. This is the first time she’s ever hung up on me. Maybe she wants a larger inheritance. Who knows?

Gaze upon the glory of the Gillette M3 Power!

Well, gaze upon the fuzziness of a picture from my cell phone.

Really, the best part of getting the razor was having the cute pharmacist say hello to me. It’s like when I was in high school and I’d ride my bike to North Portland to go by this girl’s house who went to my high school. She had some junk in the trunk, especially for a high school girl, but it was a pleasant diversion. I never did see her when I rode by, but it did give me somewhere to go on my new Univega 10-speed. Somehow I’d keep going and make it all the way to Vancouver, Washington. After all these years, I’m not sure how I got from St. Johns to Jantzen Beach, but I do remember a lot of dead possums roadkill on the way.

Yep. That describes my high school romance (as it were), riding my bike hoping to see a girl but really only seeing a bunch of rotting marsupials. Oh, once there was a time that I met a cheerleader from Lincoln High School and kept her from riding the wrong way on the freeway (it was tricky following the bike lanes onto the Interstate bridge and she almost made it into oncoming traffic on I-5) but I was too stupid to do much about that. Other than make sure she didn’t ride into oncoming cars. So there’s the other part of high school romance. Utter obliviousness.

Last season I quit watching when I wanted nothing but Jack to shoot that Chase guy in the head. And what was up with season 1 and the whole amnesia thing? Anyway, instead of watching that, I was reading Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen. Oh, how I should have avoided this. Every time I pick up one of his books I end up reading it straight through until the end. And they all seem to be about the same story, too.

Did I mention that the cute librarian was wearing a big rock on her left hand? It didn’t quite look real, but who knows with the library lighting.

To clarify on the washer/dryer, I got a Kenmore HE4T which has an internal water heater (for boost, since the hot water heater in most houses isn’t all that hot) that uses less water and less energy than standard washers. It’s SPECIAL. I also got the matching dryer. The newest electrical codes for dryers require different plugs and the installers won’t hook up the dryer unless you have the correct outlet. For TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS it should run on whatever electricity I give it.

Say it isn’t so!

After spending over TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS on a washer/dryer set, you’d think they’d come and do everything for you. However, there’s lots of preparation involved, including the changing an outlets and opening a door that hasn’t been opened for about FIFTEEN YEARS. In fact, the last time it was opened was to bring in the last washer and dryer.

Anyway, we’ll see how my mom likes her new Kenmore washer and dryer. (And we’ll see if I electrocute myself tomorrow.)

OK, time to find the crossword puzzle.

And perhaps I am. At the gym I talked to at least three people I’ve never talked to before. One guy with a Reno Air Race t-shirt about the Reno Air Races and two women about magazines. I also talked to a couple of people I’ve talked to before, including a relatively well known realtor from the neighborhood. I got out of there as quickly as I usally do, so I think I wasn’t screwing around that much, but I have not reached the level of “ALL FOCUS” that other people have.

Oh, and my blog is still pretty broken. I tried updating things and it told me all my posts were from December 1, 1969. That was a mess. The worst part is that I have to edit my posts using sql on a command line. Good thing I’m a geek.

I use pretty current versions of just about everything. For that reason, this blog is broken form time to time. This is one of those times. I noticed earlier that I couldn’t edit the time of my posts (I had WordPress misconfigured and it thought it was still PDT so every day I had to edit the time.) Now I realize that all of my edits aren’t taking, either. So if you see some oddly written text (well, more odd than usual) it’s because I write these things willy-nilly and can’t edit them.

On the other front… wel, there is no other front. The sick girl called me on her crackly phone and told me that peapod.com was what she was trying to use to get gingerale delivered to her sick self. But to me it sounded like “P<crackle><crackle>d”. 2.4GHz phones are a bad idea. Fortunately, it sounds like she’s getting better and her big dilemma tonight was which TV show to watch. She likes dramas (or whatever you’d call the OC) and I like dumb shows like Joey so I really was no help at all.

Anyway, I’m typing into an odd web form, so I’m not sure what it looks like. We’ll see if it updates correctly.

Sun asked if she’d forgotten my birthday but, no, she remembered it’s in APRIL. So that means it took eight months for this stupid thing to arrive. It’s “just” a USB connected radio with some recording features, but now I can record some NPR shows so I can listen to them later.

Not much I can say about work or the gym, except that one of my old bosses is often there and he’s buff as hell now. After he sold the internet startup I worked at, he hiked the Pacific Crest Trail solo. He wears shirts from some military combat camp where he went to play soldier. Yeesh.

Oh, and Carolyn appears to have eaten something horrible that doesn’t want to digest peacefully in her stomach. How does one get ginger ale delivered to your door when you’re sick and away from people who’d do that for you? I suggested safeway.com but there aren’t any Safeways in Chicago. And gone are the dot-bomb delivery services of homegrocer.com and even better, kozmo.com. Now that I think of it, she could have ordered the soda from a pizza delivery place, but who wants to call around to pizza delivery places looking for ginger ale when you’re tossing your cookies? I’ll have to think about this.

Or is it me? The sound quality is a lot better than previous phones but that’s probably because I’m using a Motorola flip phone with a microphone closer to my mouth than the candy-bar Nokia’s I’ve had before. And I can do a lot more like take videos or pictures and email them. But it all costs more money. And Cingular is more expensive than most everyone else. Oh, well. I guess that’s just life.

I think my birthday present is about to arrive. The RadioShark my sister got for me last year was scheduled to arrive today according to FedEx, but they told me “mechanical failures” delayed the package. I first heard about the RadioShark a couple of years ago and it’s finally being shipped. We’ll see how useful a TiVo-like radio thingy is.

Oh, and I found out what the explosions I saw were. On my way home, at about 7:30PM, the sky lit up like they were shooting off aerial bomb fireworks off in the distance. I thought it might be transformers blowing up on the ridge, but the arc of sky that was lit up was too wide. And it couldn’t have been lightning because the sky was too clear. I found out that it was a problem at a substation 15 miles away in North Plains, OR. Holy crap. Sounds like no one was hurt by the explosion. I hope the lack of electricity didn’t do more damage than that.

I’m using a development version of WordPress because, well, I’m foolish.

So things get broken from time to time. Like now.

Even better, their mailing lists are down and I don’t know what’s going on. Just that I break things because I keep using whatever is new.

This has nothing to do why I’m not posting anything interesting. Interesting things just aren’t happening at the moment.

OK, so I’m not the one missing work since it was a beautiful Sunday. But beautiful days around the start of the year in Oregon mean it was BUTT COLD. Here’s a puny picture from my cell phone. The phone has a short focal length meant for taking pictures of people a couple feet away, but I took a picture of a mountain hundreds (at least dozens) of miles away. I cut out most of the sky and freeway, as they were uninteresting:

It’s Mt. St. Helens, and it’s venting steam!

OK, time to make a resolution or something.

National Lampoon’s Movie Madness is on and I decided to watch it. It doesn’t compare favorably to the bad westerns I saw yesterday: A Fistful of Dollars (a ripoff of Yojimbo, which is, in turn, a ripoff of a Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest), For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I know people think they’re masterpieces but, really, unless they were chopped up for TV, the movies aren’t that good.

I went to the gym today and they finished moving the equipment around and I’m not really sure that it’s an improvement. Previously, my favorite machine was the Bodymasters vertical chest press and my second favorite was the StairMaster StepMill. This was because I found $0.75 in quarters near the vertical chest press and $0.25 on the StepMill. Now that things are moved around, I don’t what my favorite machine will be (or why there’s so many quarters rolling around the gym.)

Yeah, right. So today I kept the vacation going by watching Clint Eastwood westerns on cable TV while playing with software (OnSync) to get my phone book transferred from my Mac to my cell phone (a Motorola v551). It required a USB cable but I think I’m supposed to be able to do this all via BlueTooth.

It all proved that I need a faster Mac. I think I bought the slowest one available in late 1999/early 2000 and I’m still using it now. I also spent the morning playing banker, adding up the dues checks from the ham radio club and writing not enough checks to not enough charities from my own account like I do at the end of the year. I really hate having people call me on the phone asking for money (it’s usually the NRA or NARAL) so I keep the donation envelopes until the end of the year. Unfortunately, I lost a bunch of the envelopes this year.

Wait, I also watched Requiem for a Dream. Note to self: stick to comedies. Good movie but depressing.

Today is a cold, rainy day. 40 degrees and wet is just not that much fun. So I can use that as another excuse to stay in on New Years Eve, can’t I?

Oh, and Happy New Years! It’s exactly one year since I was told, officially, that I have CML. So far, so good!