Category: Uncategorized

First, thank you Susan Brownmiller for the great party last night.  Susan threw a party for me (thanking me for Echo) and Jackie (her birthday). Great food, great company, saw a bunch of people I haven’t seen in a while.  But of course I didn’t have a camera to take pictures to show you.

Then, yesterday, on my way to the gym there was an explosion on 13th Street.  A big boom, the ground shook, the area filled with smoke!  A tourist bus happened to be there right then and I wondered if they thought, “So this is New York.” There was a second smaller boom shortly after, the place was filled with firemen and cops.  But of course I didn’t have a camera to take pictures to show you.

Very frustrating.  I think my camera might arrive tomorrow.  Can’t wait.  I took this picture of the flowers on my desk with my isight camera.  But man, not having a camera at the party was particularly hard.  One, I would have liked to take have been able to take pictures of the people there to prove I have friends, and two, you just wouldn’t believe the view Susan has.  She has this wrap-around terrace on the top floor of her building and it’s mind-blowingly paranoramic of downtown/West Village Manhattan.

Explosion Info:  It was from an electrical fire underground.  One of the explosions was from a manhole cover blowing.  I don’t know about the second, smaller one.

It’s official:  I’m insane.  Canon sent me an estimate to fix my camera and it was high enough where it made no sense to fix it. But it turns out they have something called a “Loyalty Program.” Instead of fixing my camera, I could trade it in and choose from one of three refurbished better-model cameras instead, one of which was a digital SLR!  I was just whining here the other day about not being able to afford a digital SLR and days later I was presented with the opportunity to buy one at an affordable price … and I didn’t go for it!!

I researched, to death, the three models they gave me to choose from and went with this one, the G9.  It seems to have most of the great things about point and shoot cameras and digital slrs, but at the point and shoot size.  I hope I don’t regret it.

I worked for hours and hours last night, getting this blog ready. See how tuckered out Finn is? That is me. Minus the drool. That’s actually an old picture from an old post. I had to go back and tweak many of the old posts, and in the process got to read so many of the old things I said, and about the things I did. It’s like I have an okay life. Kinda.

Anyway, there’s a weird problem. It keeps going back to pointing to the old blog. Weirdest, freaking Twilight Zone thing. It’s driving me crazy. Plus I’m tired. I woke up in the middle of the night in time to see Phelps win another gold, and to watch the women’s (children’s) gymnastics. For the love of God, please let the next Olympics be in my time zone. This is killing me.

I hope you like the new space. It looks pretty much the same, I know, but there are some key differences that I hope to take advantage of in future posts.

Hopefully today or tomorrow, or soon after I will be switching this blog over to WordPress. It’s going to look a little different but mostly the same. WordPress will be a lot easier to use and give me features that I don’t have now (like the ability to embed music, which I’ve been wanting to do).

In the meantime, this is my cousin Bill Kaelin and my brother Douglas Horn at the Pan Mass Challenge, a marathon bike ride which raises money for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where my cousin conducts research in “Functions of Tumor Suppressor Proteins”. Good god. He is also a Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School. Apparently our cousin is scarily smart. We didn’t know that growing up, when he got up every year at Christmas to sing Edelweiss.

No, not ladybugs. Last night one of those huge, monster flying cockroaches was loose in my apartment, freaking dive-bombing me. I can take most bugs, even spiders, but these things just terrify me for some reason. I can’t be in the same room as one without literally screaming and crying. I couldn’t even bear to put a picture of one of them up here so I put up a picture of a ladybug instead, it’s that nuts. I ran to my neighbors, they weren’t home, logged onto Echo and explained my problem, hoping someone would volunteer to come over, but no one did.

I had no choice but to try to come up with a plan to kill it myself, and I will already tell you I was not successful so he’s going to pop up again, waving his evil “Yes, I am that evil and I see you” antennae at me.

I did come up with one idea that helped though, and that was the idea of opening an umbrella and using it as a shield. It just made me feel less panicked. My plan was to swat at him with this huge feather duster I have, which would hopefully mess up his flight, cause him to fall to the ground, then I’d smoosh him with my shoe.

So for a while I was walking around my apartment carrying an open umbrella, a big feather duster and a shoe. Yeah.

Anyway, this bug was always one step ahead of me, flying too high and too fast. Plus, I mostly cowered.

Finally I gave up and tried the neighbors again, and Beth was home this time and she sent over Malik, but the freaking bug was once again hiding. Thank you for trying, Malik! I appreciate it!! I was able to get to sleep, but he’s still in here somewhere, and you know he’s going to appear at the most inopportune time, like when I’m carrying a large mug of hot coffee. Over my keyboard. With a cat next to it.

It’s the flying part that gets me. I just cannot cope. It’s the most unfair of all unfair advantages.

The point is: they suck.