• i actually traded in my corporate whore wings to go work for the DFTU client. i can’t get in to the details but it was a long, painful, stressful process. but tis over now. i’m no longer a consultant. i dunno if any of you care but it’s a big big big deal. ok not really. but whatever. anyway, i have a real job now, ok that’s not true, the shit i’ve been doing for the last 2 years is now somewhat more offical. go me.
• natty’s pregnant. i hinted toward that in the last post, uh 3 months a go or whatever. well here it is, she’s preggers and i’m the goddamned father. err well at least i think. she’s at 17 weeks tomorrow and just getting out of the pukey, i hate the world especially you jefke phase. it seems the wow i’m huge and this really sucks phase is already starting. apparenlty baby 2.0 likes his/her space and is trying to set up a condo in there. what’s that saying? if men had to have the kids there’d be none. damn. fucking. straight.
• we have a realtor coming by the house on saturday. kid 2.0 calls many things in to question, firstly our 14.5 ft wide house. it’s fuckign small kids. oh sure, people raise 22 kids in a studio appartment in queens. yay, good for them, jefke don’t rock that. so we have 2 choices. either add on to our house (which is fairly doable) or move. adding on will be a process similar to pregnancy, but this time i’ll be feeling the physical pain. adn will not be done by the time 2.0 arrives. moving will suck big ass, as we’d need to ‘stage’ and sell our house. then actually move, and hten fix the new house. fucked on both fronts if ask me. a dp of badtimes. but somethign has to change. ok well maybe not. but perhaps. we’re entertianing both scenarios.
• the subie, while all that and a bag of old school taco flavored doritos, is a gas hog (yes i needed the goddamned turbo, fuck you) and actually doesn’t have that much space in the end. espcically for the air craft carrier sized double storllers natty is looking at. so on top/instead/or never, we are considering the jump to the mini van. yes, i understand people have 2 kids in a camry. they’re idiots. we have a dog and 3 cats and lots of shit. we neeed a big car. get over it.

so that’s pretty much teh update. i have heartburn and i’m getting my sympathy fat groove on.

so, yeah. that’s my update.

love and kisses

jefke

the papers are plastered with pics of all these middle aged men in colorful schmocks (is that spell it?) with their faces wracked in pain, head in hands, crumpled under the weight of the impending doom of recession.

jeebus, doesn’t this happen every fucking week? don’t these chumps make money on volume, not on the stock prices? (i’m making alot of this up….., no, really)

what do these guys do anyway, i thought all the exchanges were run by ebay now, or something–right?

freaks.

they sell hope. hope that this 79 dollar modular dresser will solve my clutter problem, solve my laundry problem, solve my diet coke problem. those sweeds are all blond and tall and happy. i am none of those things.

but alas it’s all a pipedream. by the time they’ve milked me for 3 extra hours, and 10 extra bucks on 1 dollar pretzels and frozen yogurt when we get to the door, it’s obvious that i’ve been had.

by the time you lug that flat box weighting 75 pounds to the fucking house, and open it up and extract the pictorial directions. you realize you’ve been totally had.

sweet revenge is busting out the bosch power driver with a hex bit and fucking going to town on those screws. nothing like cold german precision to bring you back to life.

well at least until i get the amex bill.

and how are all of you?

ok that’s crap– i’ve been like this since i was 4 or so.

but nevertheless, it was on 9/11/96 that i got on a plane at logan airport with my friend kurt and flew to belgium. i remember clearly, ordering my second johnny walker, (free booze on international flights!) and the belgian stewardess gave me a little sly smile and said “arue you soure that you’re twentig one?”, yes i was mildly offended.

now i just feel old.

richy the quebe is either in europe or about to embark on a bidness trip with will land him in the holy land on the same day he arrived 10 years ago.

he will meet up with the man who calls himself rud and they will consume lots of duvel and remember the old days and talk about how we all have wives (well, one each so not ‘wives’–well at least i do–i think richard does. rud’s in belgium who knows what goes on over there) and kids, and houses and jobs.

—wives

–and kids

-and houses

and jobs

it’s been a long 10 years.

naturally i can’t have any real idea, but i seems that i’ve changed more in the last 10 years than the previous 10 years.

then again maybe less. between 13 and 23 there were some pretty big changes, i guess. though, i swear, it seems that between 23 and 33 the changes seem bigger.

better i suppose- but it would be interesting to an analysis…having a kid vs getting a my drivers license, etc. you know, event to event. buying house. vs turning 21…

ok, now i’m depressing myself.

13 to 23, expansion, exploration, something else that start’s with ‘e’.

23 to 33—contraction–literally, contracts--mortgages, car loans, marriages, credit cards….

stay with me now–i’m going somewhere

but with the waning of youth and the acceptance of responsibility comes the well, joys (i know, i’m as awkward saying it as you are reading it here) of responsibility. throwing down roots, making commitments, buying, keeping and amassing stuff.

as one becomes more aware of this-one becomes more attached, and more attached means more fear of loss–the soft warm underbelly of that fear (ok i could have just said ‘silver lining’ but where’s the fun in that)- is thankfulness

wow this is like a sermon–just need to bring it home with a reference to jeebus

no but seriously–i’m an adult now-i’ve got adult worries, and i get the benefits of adulthood. a family, a home, debt (j/k–well i have it, but it’s not a benefit)–so in the midst of my ‘man i’m so old it’s been a lifetime since i went to over to the continent to spend 10′s of thousands of dollars on reading dead white doods and getting loaded–

happy thanksgiving everyone.

Greetings,

I am a resident of Baltimore, our great city. Well, I don’t really feel it’s great, definitely not the ‘Best City in America’ as the slogan goes, but it’s a good place and I’d even venture to say I like it here.

I can say one thing with certainty, I would like it much more if the drinking water would remain clear and clean on a consistent basis. You see, since my wife and I purchased our home in October 2003, I’d estimate that the water we use to drink and clean ourselves and our clothes, has run brown about 10-15 times. For the most part, the episodes only last an hour or two, though one, which was after the birth of our son, lasted 2 days.

Each time this happens, we call the city’s (wonderful, I might add) 311 service. Typically we are instructed to find the lowest tap in the house, and let the water run for 30-45 minutes. This was an ok answer the first, say 5 times, but then it dawned on me–I’m paying for this, brown water, and further, it’s just being wasted. Actually, let me tell you a bit about myself:

You see, I am not a strict environmentalist. For example, I love Air Conditioning, I have a multitude of electronic devices that waste precious resources so that I can enjoy silly things. We use disposable diapers for our child. One thing I do try to conserve is water. I firmly believe that our country, nay our culture, will run out of potable water way before we run out of places to pile up all our non recycled trash.

To this end, I installed a rain barrel, to capture the run off water from our roof and for the most part, I use that to water my plantings and garden. You can imagine how it pains me to crank open a tap and let it flow full blast for 45 mins. Not to mention that I pay something in the range of 1.833 to 1.998 (i don’t know the unit, cents?) per something (again i don’t know the unit–gallons?) for the water, and then i pay between, 2.464 and 2.686 per something for sewer charges—For water I couldn’t use.
To be sure, for the most part, this flushing of the pipes does solve the problem, and the water eventually runs clean. When it doesn’t, the city normally sends out a crew to come drain water from a hydrant. This seems to work pretty effectively, though again, it’s a waste.

What gets me is the frequency in which this occurs–I have live many places in my 33 years: Chicago, Rochester NY, Southwestern CT, Northern VT, Belgium, New York City, Annapolis, and finally Baltimore. This is the only place where I have turned on a tap, and water the color of iced tea flows out. I was living in New York City when the 9/11 attacks occurred. In spite of the collapse of 2 of the largest buildings in the world, my water service as never interrupted, nor did the water quality diminish.

My brother in law lived in Bangalore, India for 6 months, and while he couldn’t actually drink their water, he never mentioned that it was brown. Eventually, he could have started to drink the water, as his body would have adjusted to whatever nasties are over there. My wife spent a summer in St. Petersburg Russia, and while there were city wide outages of hot water–there was always clear water available.

Two days ago, I received a flier in my mailbox, informing me that Today 6/1, for 1 hour, I would loose water service. Thanks for the heads up. The time window was a bit vague (10 am-2pm) but I can live with that. As I feared, the when service was restored, the water was brown–not just brown, but gritty brown, one might say, sh!t brown. Imagine my surprise!

Look, I’m not sure what you can do for me, perhaps I just need some validation that I’m not crazy. Maybe I am crazy. I know that my taxes aren’t the highest in the world, nor probably are the water bills, but seriously–should this happen this often?

I can’t be the only one that notices these things.

Regards,

Jefke