Alanis, Furniture, cleaning.

Started: 2004-08-03 20:19:07

Submitted: 2004-08-03 20:49:16

Visibility: World-readable

I got bored today and bought the "iTunes Original" Alanis Morissette album. Right now, I can only listen to it on my iPod (which is where I listen to all of my music anyway) and a Windows box running iTunes (although I'm fascinated by the possibility, mentioned today on Slashdot of running iTunes on Ziyal). One of these days I should get bored and burn my own cds so I can rip them for my long-term collection.

The "album" is my first serious foray into downloadable music for pay. It has about a dozen songs from all of Alanis' four studio albums, each with a short audio commentary by Alanis herself. Half of the songs I've heard so far are remixes, which are interesting, although I confess I like the original studio versions better. The heavily-electronic "Excuses" from So-Called Chaos is ... erie ... acoustic. In "Ironic", the middle of the song has been changed to:

It's like meeting the man of my dreams and meeting his beautiful husband.

Welcome to the two thousand four the Bush administration is trying desperately to avoid.

I also downloaded Senator Kerry's acceptance speech (for free), which I might not actually listen to, but I'm fascinated by the idea anyway.

Kiesa and I finally picked a coffee table and end table for our living room last Sunday. (That's 25 July 2004.) I essentially gave up on the process, but Kiesa headed to a number of furniture stores and called me from Amish Showcase, where she found an oak coffee table she thought we could both agree on. It was about twice as expensive as I was hoping on paying, but given the likelihood of finding something else (ie, zero), I decided to go for it.

This meant we got to get rid of the boxes of junk formerly adorning our living room in exchange for something that looked a bit better. The boxes didn't really leave until this weekend, when Kiesa and I got bored and cleaned out our junk. I've been collecting electronics and computer junk for a very long time. Saturday morning I decided I could get rid of three Pentium II motherboards, some old video cards, several old modems, and a bunch of other junk. (They're still sitting in the corner of my living room waiting for me to take them to Savers, which has a vast collection of junk. Most of this junk is still functional, in theory, except that I have no use for it.) Kiesa and I spent a non-trivial portion of Sunday cleaning out our stuff. Kiesa filled two giant trash bags of clothing to take to Goodwill. I triaged the boxes of electronics junk in the boxes that previously formed the coffee table; much of it ended up in our Dumpster; the rest of it is waiting to go to Savers. I booted Defiant and Yukon, copied all the files I had off them, wiped myself from the drives, reset the keyboard to qwerty, and blanked the root passwords. I hope someone else will find them useful.

I also concluded I didn't really need to have a bunch of boxes sitting under my desk, so they're now in a corner of the living room waiting to go to our off-site storage; namely, a friend's basement in Erie. I suppose I should Dumpster half or more of this stuff, but I'm not quite ready to do that yet.

Kiesa and I showed up late for church Saturday morning, just in time for the post-church potluck functioning as a going-away celebration for my parents. They officially left Boulder on Sunday, only to return as guests to the city they lived in for thirteen years. I thought I would be able to get away from work this week (for a day or two) to join my parents and siblings at their timeshare in Mesa, but the amount of work we have isn't conducive to getting away anytime before the end of September. (Some loyal readers will understand the significance of that date.) Bethany, Mom, and Willy will be staying at our apartment for two nights in the middle of September on their way to Walla Walla College. After that, I only get to see my family for occasional vacations. I'm honestly not sure how I'll react to that; I guess I'll see.

(I'm fully expecting at least one of my siblings to figure out a way to stay in Boulder next summer. The theory is Kiesa and I will have some sort of "house" by then, but that's a story for another changelog.)