Earlier this week, I saw Aimee Mann at the Woodland Park Zoo. In typical Pacific Northwest fashion, the weather was a lovely shade of overcast, with hints of drizzle and rain. This proved to be a bit of a challenge for a "bring-your-own-seating" show - wet grass plus patches of mud everywhere. Thankfully, Lish was tres resourceful and manufactured seating out of garbage bags and blankets. Yukinon, Lish and I perched precariously on two of these things while Aimee Mann kicked out the tunes.

The set seemed to be evenly spread over Magnolia, Bachelor No. 2 and Lost in Space, but there was a smattering of tracks from the earlier albums plus one new song. The songs I remember hearing were Real Bad News, Red Vines, The Moth, Deathly, Save Me, Calling It Quits and the new song. Asides from that, Aimee Mann did her impression of one of the Russian woman's gymnasts (Svetlana Khorkina?) - "...'I can't be bothered to put my arms up properly. *ungh*" - as well as noting the hair difficulties of outdoors venues before letting her hair down to rock for the final song.

Speaking of of the Olympics, this is the first time in about 12 years I actually watched them. Fet's enthusiasm seems to have rubbed off on me - I've watched pretty regularly over the past week in spite of the shite coverage that is NBC and the IOC's blatant "The Man"-ism. It's truly amazing what humans are capable of doing.

I recently did a wonderful job of injuring my left ring finger by slicing the finger tip about a quarter of an inch deep. It seems to be healing pretty well - the doctor says that there's no infection and that it should probably be mostly healed in 10-14 days. In order to keep it from getting any more abused, I've been trying to avoid using it as much as possible. Lish remarked that it makes me look like I'm sticking my pinky out trying to do things delicately. I've also discovered that hand injuries make for poor card shuffling jobs and horrendous typing habits. Guess typing will be on the "rehab" list of things to do.

A while ago, I decided that I would only purchase black and white laser printers it didn't make much sense for me to get an inkjet based on my usage patterns - almost exclusively text documents. However, I found that I needed a printer for those times I just can't bum printing services off of people. On a whim, I took a chance and purchased a Canon i960 printer and was pleasantly surprised at how good it was. Unlike the throwaway laser I had before, this thing is quiet. The text quality was nice and crisp compared to the inkjets I've had before. Best of all, the 4x6 photo I printed out on the sample photo paper was undistinguishable from a lab printer. Heck, someone even remarked that it "smells like it came from the lab". Mmm...photo ink scent.

After much cleansing over the weekend, I pretty much have a clean apartment. There are a few piles of stuff here and there, but it's a vast improvement over the federal disaster area it previously resembled - mini-mountains of clothes, monuments of packing materiel, and stacks of various media bordering the walls. Now, pretty much everything is neatly organized or hiding out of plain sight. It's remarkably closer to something I would call home. And it's so nice having empty floor space.

Now that I have my place all sorted out, I'm hoping the trend carries on to my standard week. It would be nice to get back to the schedule I had laid out prior to work throwing general mayhem in the way of doing those things I had planned.

Sorry for the great spell of inactivity here, but this is pretty much the first break I've gotten in a few weeks to actually post an entry. As mentioned earlier, work has been pretty crazy. Sadly, for the all the 12 hour days, I ended up missing the original deadline. Oh well.

Now that I'm out of the madness temporarily, I finally have a chance to cut loose. Of course, pretty much the first big leisure activity after this big stretch is a hardcore 8+ hour poker night. Although I was down for the night, this was probably the most fun poker night I've been to so far. We started out with the standard Texas Hold 'em buy in and tourney. However, instead of calling it a night at that point, we forged on with a second buy in. That was followed with a few rounds of razz and finally a round of dealer's option that included 7 card stud, more razz and 5 card draw. We finally called it quits around 4:30 am. It was great madness, but great fun.