Tons of lounging around and doing not much of anything this weekend. It was great. But between the sitting around and watching TV, we fit in bowling, a movie, dinner, a long walk, feeding ducks and darts. Jammie is the only person I’ve ever played darts with, not counting my brother when I was about 9 years old. And maannnn…Date Movie was possibly the worst movie I’ve ever seen. I knew nothing about it and it was completely Jammie’s idea and therefore her fault. But geez, horrible horrible horrible. I think it outranks Matrix 2 as the worst movie I’ve ever seen in a theater. I don’t understand how it didn’t go straight to video. Or how it’s #2 in the box office this week.

But our bowling before the movie and darts after the movie and video games throughout the day all made up for it. I got to impress her with my Miss Pac Man skills and she impressed me with her Simpsons Pinball skills. We watched 4 episodes of My Name Is Earl, which yomama convinced me to watch earlier this week. I downloaded all the episodes and I love the show. In just 2 days, I’ve watched 13 of the 16 episodes.

I woke up today completely without a headache and without allergies. I guess one night of not sleeping in a mold infested room really makes a difference! I’ve moved everything out of my room now. When I leave for the airport soon, I’m going to open up all the windows in the house and hope the breeze takes care of some of the leftover spores throughout the house. But I guess it’s not much to worry about since my sickness is gone.

I’m leaving for the airport soon, to pick up Jammie. I decided to wear a suit when I picked her up. So yesterday, while I was at Goodwill, I spent upwards of $13.00 on a brand new used suit. Won’t she be surprised!

Stopped by Goodwill today and found the very last piece of furniture I need for my house - a dresser for my room. It was only $13.00 and is a very ugly shade of yellow and white. Perfect! As I was putting it into place and finally taking my suitcase off the floor, I noticed the mold. All along the wall, where a baseboard should be (but isn’t) large specks greenish black mold. It seemed to cover the entire wall so I moved my bed, where I found the worst of it. It continued onto the other wall and stopped halfway before the end. Pretty gross stuff. Luckily none of it got on my bed or clothes.

For the past week, I’ve been suffering from a combination of allergies and sinus infection that I’ve never experienced before. I figured it was just the after effects of the cold and flu I had a couple weeks ago. But I read up on mold on the internet and found that all of my symptoms are most likely a result of being surrounded by mold while I sleep every night. Thankfully the kids never sleep in there.

The best part of all this is that I got to call up my landlord and be like, “Listen here, bitch, I’ve got a problem and YOU have to deal with it!” That’s something I’ve wanted to do ever since I started renting again. Screw home ownership, I have a landlord to do everything for me! They’re supposed to send someone out ASAP to take care of it. I looked outside and noticed that in the very spot where the mold is the worst, there’s a drain spout coming off the roof and pouring water right next to the foundation. There’s nothing there to really take the water away from the house.

So I moved my entire bedroom into the dining room. I can’t wait for all this sinus stuff to go away. I’ve had headaches for over a week now and all kinds of cold symptoms, only without the actual cold. Very annoying.

My streak of bad luck continued this afternoon when my “check engine” light came on. That can’t be good. The engine has been kind of sputtering for the past few days and I’m hoping it’s just the fuel filter or something. Car dealerships usually charge something like $75.00 just to hook up your car to their computer and diagnose the problem. And then hundreds or thousands more to actually fix whatever the problem is. Hopefully I can avoid that. I hate cars. Maybe this would be the perfect time to try life without a car for awhile. I’d sell my car in a second if I didn’t have kids.

Last night the kids and I went to Elmer’s for supper. Then to Home Depot and Fred Meyer. Got a couple of shelves for each of our bathrooms. Did homework, watched Zathura and went to sleep.

Geez, what a day…worked for an hour or so in the morning. Then drove to Portland to meet D for lunch, a 70 minute drive of listening to Podcasts. It ended up being a lunch with a total of 7 people there at some fancy restaurant. After that D and I walked to Powell’s Books for awhile, back to his room, to some office building where he left his backpack, to another dinner at an even fancier restaurant and finally to see the movie World’s Fastest Indian. Before I knew it, it was 10:00pm so I headed back home. It’s 11:45 now and I’m ready for bed. Had fun seeing D, though.

Last night I spent over an hour on myspace.com, putting in random names of family members, old friends, old classmates, people from my old church, random people from school, etc, and finding nobody. But then, near the end, I did find Eric. I wrote him an email and I just now noticed that he responded…

Hi Eric. I’ve just spent the past hour of my life inputting just about every name that I’ve ever known from my past into Myspace, just to search for people out of boredom. Not one single member of my extensive family has a Myspace. None of my good friends from high school do either. Nobody from my old church comes up. Apparently not even my old enemies use Myspace. Finally I decided to try your name and there you were. You were approximately ..103 on my list of names to try out.

Brad Carter

His reply:

Subject: Holy Crap?!

Eric

So that’s sorta interesting for me. I’d completely forgotten about the things he mentioned but remember them vividly now. I’ll have to swap some more stories with him. And I have plenty more.

Here are the first three items from the Police Blotter in the local paper…

TRAPPED IN DUMBWAITER: A 30-year-old man climbed into a dumbwaiter early Sunday morning at the Sweet Home Elks Lodge and became trapped between floors, according to the Linn County Sheriff’s dispatch log. Sweet Fire and Ambulance was called but the man was able to climb out and free himself.

NO HOSTAGE SITUATION: A mail carrier in the 2600 block of Burkhart Street SE found a note in a mail box on Friday that read “Postman. Help. I am being held at this address,” and the note was signed, according to Albany police. On Friday, the mail carrier found a similar note saying the woman was locked in the house. Police determinded that the woman and man who live there suffer from dementia. The woman later was taken to Samaritan Albany General Hospital after threatening to kill people.

TOUCHY SITUATION: A man told the Linn County Sheriff’s Office he checked on a car parked next to his trailer in the 2600 block of Old Holley Road about 10:30am Saturday. Inside, he reported seeing a naked man who was passed out with his genitals tied to the steering wheel. The caller woke the man up, and he drove away.

Get me out of here.

Oh, and watch this immediately.

Today I stopped by Salvation Army to look at furniture. The sticker on a cabinet with broken hinges reads, “Hengeses need replaced.” HENGESES??? I could accept HENGES as a misspelling, but geez. HENGESES.

Next stop was 7-Eleven for lunch. Total cost $1.58. Out of $5.00? And here’s three pennies. Then I get that blank look that I seem to get every single time I add a few pennies or nickels after they’ve already entered the amount into the register. And this lady is like FIFTY. At 50 years old, you should know how to do grade school level math. I mean, the total on the register shows that she should give me back $3.42. So just add 3 cents to that, right? Even without it written right there in front of you on the resgister screen, that’s not a hard thing to figure out in your head.

Isn’t it annoying how I always use LJ to pick on everyone else’s faults? As if I don’t have a million of them.

Remember that sand Java thingie I was raving about back in December? Well, apparently it’s creator made a new version of it. With Zombies! Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more addictive. Payton has spent at least 3 hours on it today. You just can’t go wrong when you add Zombies to something.

It should be noted that Jammie rules. On Friday, out of nowhere, she sends me a link to a post on the Eugene, Oregon Craigslists about some guy needing to get rid of some old dishes. Just out of nowhere. We hadn’t been talking about my lack of dishes for weeks but apparently she decided to keep an eye on my local Craigslist for me. So on Friday I ended up driving to Springfield, Oregon and got myself a rather large box of mismatched plates, glasses, SILVERWARE (I was tired of using plastic silverware. Hi murd0c.), icecube trays and other miscellaneous kitchen items. This is a very nice change from the paper plates and plastic forks we’ve been using. I didn’t want to buy any of that stuff since I’ll have my old kitchen stuff back hopefully next summer. Anyway, THANKS JAMMIE! I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that!

Today is Lazy Sunday. The kids are still in pajamas. This morning Payton and I played Hangman. Which is always fun with a first grader that doesn’t spell very good yet. Emily and I watched Just Like Heaven which was really good. Last night we watched the 1933 version of King Kong which was pretty much exactly like the 2006 version of it. The special effects were really impressive, considering they were done in 1933. The DVD had tons of cool extras. I’m going to watch some more of it today.

Walked to the 12th street park yesterday, then to Dari Mart for snacks. The kids recorded their own radio show on my computer last night. And then, completely without any prompting from me, Emily said I should put it on the internet so everyone would hear it. So I dunno, maybe I’ll set up an RSS for that later. I’m not sure if the world is ready for an exclusive interview with Payton. That reminds me - Emily made some really kickass stop-motion Lego animations a couple weekends ago. I was going to help her add sound effects to it and edit it a little but I forgot.

Hrmmmm, what else. Oh yeah, the weather is kicking ass the past couple days. No rain at all and the last 2 days it’s been in the upper 50’s. The lady at the bank assured me last week that Oregon makes up for all the rainy days with really great Springs. So hopefully that’s on it’s way. But it’s nice that the nonstop 4 month rain has finally stopped.

*points and laughs at all you on the east coast with 2 feet of snow*

Actually, I wish we could have 2 feet of snow. There hasn’t been any here this year.

UPDATE: Just minutes after posting all that, Jammie sent me the following picture message which I think ties in perfectly with at least two parts of my ranting…

9:48pm - That annoying low frequency humming sound coming from the direction of the hospital really needs to stop. Every night, from 9ish until I’m asleep. What the hell is it? The kids don’t complain about it. Maybe only I can hear it. I just started really noticing it last week.

We went for another walk today. To the park on Caloopia. Stayed there awhile, reading. Then we walked towards downtown, admired some kind of dam and waterfall thing, noticed a park off in the distance and walked towards it only to find that the entire park was completely under water. There was a playground area and a picnic shelter which looked like it was under at least a foot of water. It was the size of a small lake. Bryant Park.

Camera phone pictures dump:

An hour ago…

Wendys Lady: Here you go sir. *hands me a bag and my drink* I know you said it was for here but I hit the wrong button on the register.
Me: Oh.
Wendys Lady: I have a tendency to do that. I’m sorry.
Me: Oh. Well uh… Could I still have a tray?
Wendys Lady: *thinks about it* Okay! Here you go. I’m sorry about that mixup.
Me: It’s okay. Thanks!

In an effort to prove that I am more insensitive than anyone else, I made this Audioedit today for this Audioedit contest. I can’t wait for people on Fark to yell at me! Just hope my account doesn’t get suspended again. Be sure to listen to Pushay Control’s entry too! She makes fun of me in hers.