Happy July, random thoughts

So the school year ended, I finished up the yearbook, and started my long, hot stay in this little stuffy apartment for another summer vacation. There's been a fair bit of driving my father to and from hospital, as he had a radical prostectomy, and I've been having long phone conversations with old friends I fell out of the habit of phoning. 

     My little black cat likes to lie on the linoleum kitchen floor during the day to keep cool, and he's altogether too aggressive about begging for food every single time I go into the kitchen and open anything. I've been listening to Martin Zender webcasts again. He rants and raves, and raises interesting points. 

      I lent my mother Don Miller's Blue Like Jazz and she read it, which is cool. My parents' religion is treated like a closed book to us (because they exclude us, due to our not attending and agreeing with everything they believe), so it's cool to have Mom open a book that I got something out of.  

     Up until now I had two TV stands with shelves, one with the TV on it and DVDs underneath, and the other with the VCR, DVD player, amplifier and more DVDs. Thing is, I now have four gaming consoles. I have a Nintendo Entertainment System, a Nintendo 64, a Sega Genesis and an Atari 2600. I also have a lot of games for them. They've been kinda everywhere. 

     So, I boxed up the DVDs prior to perhaps getting serious about tossing out old VHS, perhaps getting them a new shelf, and got a single TV stand which is lower and wider and has more shelving. I put each console with its controllers and games on its own shelf, and rewired everything up perfectly. Now the TV can display whatever's on the computer, the VCR, the DVD player or any of the four consoles without unhitching a single wire and rewiring anything. And everything comes through the speakers as well. I have a small switchbox beside the TV that allows that. 

     Contrarily, though, this is unlikely to be one of my summers in which I watch lots of DVDs and TV shows. I've mostly lost interest in spending much time doing that, though I don't know what else I want to do instead either. 

     The plan this weekend is to go see D, up in the boonies where he lives, 7 hours north of here. My car has transmission problems (they appear to be problems with the electronic shifting, not with the gears) and gas is insanely overpriced, so seeing him up there was unlikely to happen until he bought a house with his girlfriend and invited people to a housewarming. Enough people from here are going that I can go up with friends of his girlfriend. Should be a time. 

     I'm practicing music each week with J and his brother and father have joined in on bass guitar and drums, respectively. They're cool, so it's fun to do. Too bad T is going away to school next fall. Having competent keyboarding is a rare pleasure. 

    Everybody and his brother seems to be adding me as a friend on Facebook right now. Obviously I'm ignoring requests from high school students. I've been playing Scrabulous (Facebook Scrabble) with a few of my Facebook friends. 

   Besides the games console shelving, the other big improvement to my place, not that there's much room to hang them, is a set of four prints by Andy Lee, who does Buddhist style brushwork versions of comic book art. The morans who ship his prints messed this one up. They didn't notice I'd ordered the prints, so I had to email them and remind them. They took a week to answer each email. Then they UPSed the prints, which came late, and crinkled on their edges from sliding up and down in the giant tube they mailed them in, and the exorbitant fee of $20 for shipping was doubled by trouble at the border. They look like this, though: