Perfectly Petersen

Progress with The Expressionist Today

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One of my partners, Jason Dowd, called me as I pulled in at school tonight with some exciting news: we are being given complete access to The Improv comedy club in Ybor City! They are sending us their history and schedule to write up an article and will be notifying us of new comedians coming in with interview privileges and (hopefully) press pass access to review their routines. Jason expects to wrap those details up tomorrow.

Our business cards are under way and the T-shirts are in-process, as well. Shoot us an e-mail at theexpressionistmag@gmail.com if you would like to get a white t-shirt to show your support of our new venture.

Lots of exciting things coming our way, so stay tuned for more announcements.

Another Day in the Waiting Room

Warning: I am in fine form today. My words are sharp and on target, though far from politically correct. If you want watered-down PC crap, go somewhere else, because I don’t subscribe to that mumbo jumbo.

Today as I walked out of the elevator on the third floor of my doctor’s office, I knew I was in for quite an entertaining wait. There was already a line in the hallway of grumpy old farts, and I do mean grumpy. I was a bit ticked at myself for not being first today, but I soon realized that would not have been possible with this crowd. (Also, I’d like to be clear that not everyone in my book gets the opportunity to be called a “fart” by me; just the crotchety, idle seniors who would be labeled “jerk,” “meanie,” and several derogatory terms in their younger days. They are afforded the niceties of being labeled a “fart” by attaining an amazing age despite their lack of social grace.)

Scanning the hallway, the first one in line was an old bow-legged man, as wide as he was tall, shifting back and forth, hands in pockets, with his wife standing statuesque next to him with her arms crossed. Next to them was a white-haired woman sitting on the floor spouting off her dislike of the situation non-stop.

Thankfully there were two more people buffering me from them, because I sincerely wanted the freedom to laugh to myself over their antics, and they didn’t disappoint my desire for premium material.

The seated woman just kept coming with volley after volley of anti-doctor, anti-society, and anti-Bush statements that took everything I had to both not laugh out loud and tell her how unfounded and idiotic her ideas and feelings were.

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Life as a Possible–or Probable–Narcoleptic

It seems like I might finally know why I fall asleep all the time, and it my not just be that “button on my butt” that I inherited from my grandpa. It might actually be narcolepsy, which is also genetic–makes sense to me.

The cool thing about having a sister-in-law studying psychology is you get free diagnoses from time to time. On our way back from Orlando last weekend, I (as typical) fell right asleep in the van with everyone chatting and laughing. I was completely oblivious to everyone. Apparently she looked it up as a joke, and it kind of matched in their minds, without knowing the full extent of my sleep patterns.

I have always been able to fall asleep on a dime when I’m tired, unless my mind is busy. Ever since I was 16, I could fall asleep in the chair watching movies with the family. I have fallen asleep during explosive action movies in the theater in the afternoon. I can fall asleep within 3 minutes of picking up a book, which makes studying REALLY hard. I fall asleep at work, just for a minute or two, but it’s the nodding that drives me crazy. I nod and fight the eyelids when I’m driving to the point where I will go take a nap in a parking lot to keep going. All it takes is 5-15 minutes of sleep, and I’m good as new–for a couple of hours.

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Rainy Season Is Here

When we moved to Florida 13 years ago (Gosh!!!! Has it been that long?), we jumped into a full-tilt rainy season the first summer here. What constitutes normal? Rain, rain, and more rain, almost every day during the summer.

I call summer as any day in May through November here. There may be the odd day that is actually a comfortable mix of temperature and humidity slapped in there somewhere (usually a work day), but those are few and far between after May. When I walk outside in the morning to go to work at 4:45 am, the temperature is usually between 75 and 82 degrees with 90-99% humidity. Basically, it’s a deodorant check right off the bat, “yup, I’m covered.” Somewhere between 10 am and and 8 pm it is supposed to rain somewhere in the area for some amount of time. Every single day, unless there is a high pressure front pushing things away.

The last 3 years or so have been gradually drier and less normal, until most ponds and lakes are showing visibly lower water levels. That all changed the weekend, as it has rained somewhere in the Tampa Bay area between Clearwater and Lakeland every day without fail. It’s so cool to see rain on our retention pond and lightning in the distance. My favorite lightning is the completely black sky at night with the cloud to cloud lightning that reveals the clouds that were previously unseen.

I think it’s time to start taking weather photos. What is the weather like in your neck of the woods?

Another Home Improvement Weekend

The big pile of stuff in the garage corner has been driving me crazy for, like… a whole week now. Yeah. It was time to do something about that. Gorgeous and I went out in the stifling 90-degree, 95% humidity weather yesterday and stood there and looked at the walls, the water heater, garage door railing, and measured all of our boxes to come up with a plan.

So much for a plan when you hit the isles at Lowes or Home Depot, right? That is when you realize what you have to work with and how much it’s going to cost. At least we had the measurements for the boxes, so we could figure out the linear feet we had to accommodate. After about 90 minutes of hemming and hawing and going back and forth between opposite ends of the store and picking up about 20 different types of screws and drill bits, we had our loot. More »

My New, Used Apple iBook

My griping about my sucky laptop is over. Days gone by. For more than two years, one of the bezel hinges was broken, allowing too much play with the lid. When I got up to Chicago for SOBCon last month and opened it up when I got to the conference center, the second hinge broke and destroyed any chance of it saying open on its own. When I took the laptop to our new townhome the morning after closing, I powered it up to see if I could get any wireless signals before the Verizon guy came over. The screen was dead. Dead. Dead. Power, but no visual=useless piece of junk.

We suddenly realized that in two weeks I will be spending 18 hours per week on campus with no way to do any papers or earning freelance money for that time without another laptop. My wife, being the wonderful person she is said I could get a $100 laptop if I needed one that badly. Yes, I laughed at the number (silently) and thanked her for considering getting something done about the situation. I knew there weren’t any for $100 that could run Firefox with a few tabs open, but I was willing to wait to see what was going to come about.

After work, I came home to an e-mail from her that had 4 Craigslist ads for used laptops. One of them is the one I’m using now. It’s a 2002 iBook 700 with a 12.1″ screen, Airport wi-fi card, and an extra battery for emergency power. It’s not the hottest system out there, but it is worlds better than the PC I had and will more than do me until it dies or we start getting some major stuff flowing in from my freelancing, which is far from free, I assure you.

So, right now, I’m sitting in the waiting room (again) at Tampa General Hospital waiting for my quarterly clinic visit running off their wi-fi connection to get some real work done after this post.

All Moved In

It was a heck of a weekend moving into our townhome. Here is a run-down of all of the events since my last post.

Thursday

I took a half-day on Thursday to pick up My Precious and head to Home Depot for an immediate dining room light replacement. We ended up getting another ceiling light/fan for the master bedroom while we were there. The bank took forever to do our closing cashier’s check. It should have only taken 3 minutes to do, but our teller managed to stretch it out to a round 20, just enough to stress me out about getting to closing on time.

Closing went amazingly good. They had our names spelled correctly everywhere and we had already been over a few of the FHA forms before, so it wasn’t as much reading as I thought it would be. The great news is that the closing costs ended up being significantly lower than estimated at contract, and our mortgage payment came out to be a mere $26 more than our rent for a 2BR/2BA apartment! That was a huge blessing for our first home.

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