My weekend comes to a close, and I wish it could be just a little longer, but isn't that always the case?

Yesterday was Saturday. I got up bright and relatively early for a weekend, went to the bank, got a cashier's check for my first rent payment (required for the first month, but everything thereafter can be personal checks), and turned it in along with my errata checklist. Collected my package from Amazon.com, full of sparkling new DVD's. Check.

Paid a visit to my mom's place to drop off the rest of the family's mail (which she will pass on to the other parties), and saw bouncing there as well. As of yesterday morning, she had many, many boxes all over the place -- much more stuff than I had to worry about unpacking. The longer one lives, the more stuff one accumulates.

I returned home, watched (more to the point: listened to) a bunch of Sarah McLachlan in concert, was found myself getting sleepy again, so I indulged and took a nice nap.

I was awakened mid afternoon by a knock at the door. It took me a minute to register that yes, that was somebody knocking at my door. Even then, I wasn't totally sure until I opened it, and saw someone walking away. It was the building maintenance guy. He turned around, and said he was there to look at the missing latch to the porch sliding door which I had reported on my errata list. He looked at it, and said it would require ordering a special part to repair. I said I wasn't really worried about it, since the door closes shut fine. It just doesn't latch. If someone is insane and/or well equipped enough to traverse up to a third floor porch, a latch on a sliding glass door isn't going to be much of an obstacle anyway. He agreed with my analysis, and said he'd look into ordering the part.

I channel surfed for a while. (I don't normally like to watch tv unless there's something on that I'm interested in, but with new digital cable, ya just gotta take it for a spin!) When my brain reached the point where it felt like it was about to rot off and crumble into a decaying pile of radioactive dust, I exited the apartment and set out to give Tobias a bath.

Unfortunately, upon a slightly closer look, the car wash near here was not quite the kind Tobias prefers. It's one of those kind where you drive it in and wait while the automated brushes do their thing. Probably a notch up from the gas station versions, but up to par for Tobias's tastes.

Tobias is very picky. He doesn't like those. He likes the one in Boulder, on Canyon and 3rd Street, right next to the mountains. The one with the vacuum, the manually operated foamy brush, and high pressure hose that squirts soapy water and a hot rinse afterwards. He would accept nothing less, and demanded that we travel all the way to the west edge of Boulder to get it done. I rolled my eyes and acceded.

The sun was going behind the mountain as we traveled down 36, and by the time we navigated through the nasty Boulder traffic, the sky was getting dark. The much needed wash was performed in thorough style and completed. By the time the bath finished, it was completely dark outside.

I contemplated whether there was anything else I wanted to do while I was in Boulder, and decided that was a negative, and so proceeded back in the direction of the Castle Lair.

The traffic on 36 was utterly horrendous. Stop and go at its worst. By the time I got to the Table Mesa exit, I could see that the situation was just as bad all the way up the hill ahead. I got off on South Boulder Road, and decided to take a long way if it meant avoiding the mess on 36. I considered it ironic that I was driving the route I would normally have taken to get back to the Louisville Compound even though I didn't live there anymore. While driving, I considered my options for the evening.

I stopped at a Safeway parking lot in Louisville (the very same store that used to be my primary grocery source), called Zan Lynx, and suggested we coordinate a viewing of Monsters, Inc. He agreed to this, and suggested eating as well. This sounded like an excellent idea, since I hadn't eaten much of anything all day, save a piece of toaster stroodle at mom's place. We arranged to meet at Pizza Hut and go from there.

Since Zan Lynx had to drive all the way down from the Flagstaff Compound in the mountains, I had some time to kill. I didn't really feel like going home only to be there a few short minutes, so I embarked on another mission: CompUSA. Parts needed for the resurrection of Dagobah.

I drove there in short order, and began to cruise the aisles. A hard drive. Since I planned to NFS home directories from Argo, I didn't really need much space. Just something to boot from, and maybe store a few local programs. The smallest drive they had was 20GB. I looked at all the different drives, and compared prices, and had an ingenius idea: Why get a 20GB drive, when you can get twice as much space for $20 more? I found this logic unrefutable, and picked up a 40GB drive.

100 megabit network card: Simple choice, and cheap. Keyboard: Found a suitable cheap one with an AT style plug. Mouse: I was surprised to find a Logitech brand optical mouse for only $20. I hoped this wasn't a sign that their quality assurance department was on the way out the door, but since I had no evidence to support this besides speculation based on the lowered price, I snapped it up in a heartbeat.

After buying all this stuff, I realized that I still had some time to kill, so I foolishly walked into temptation and visited the Best Buy across the street. Shrek was in the new release display, and was temporarily marked down to $16.99. This was a title I had sort of been planning to buy anyway, but encountering it for that price immediated the purchase. I browsed around a little before heading to the checkout.

I arrived at Pizza Hut slightly earlier than the agreed time, and saw Zan Lynx pull in and park just before I got out of the car. Perfect timing. We both ordered big medium pizzas, I also ordered breadsticks, and consumed nearly all of it. I had a few breadsticks and one piece of pizza left to take home. And a full, satisfied stomach.

We considered which theater to go to. I reported that the newly opened Flatiron Crossing theater had been very crowded when I went to see K-PAX the night before, so Zan Lynx suggested we go to the "old" AMC 24 theater. Any stadium seating multiplex opened within the last five years has such good sound and picture that they are virtually indistinguishable anyway.

Whet we arrived at the theater, both of us ended up parking in the overflow area across the street. I realized the inevitable first, and after circling the close-by parking area a little bit, I went straight to the overflow. When I got to the ticket counter, I called Zan Lynx, and he reported that he was still looking for parking. I suggested going where I had gone to park, and while he parked, I bought tickets.

It was 2015. I got tickets for the next showtime: An hour later , at 2115. When we went in, we were directed to the back of an enormous line that had formed all the way down the big hallway. We got in line and hung out until they opened the doors.

We got a seat near the right edge, but close to the center on the front/rear axis. Good enough, considering the circumstances.

As expected, the Episode II trailer was shown just before the feature. There wasn't much substance to it though. Just a few very quick shots of the characters, accompanied by audio of Darth Vader's breathing.

Monsters Inc was greatly enjoyable -- a compelling character drama, both thought provoking and profound in its philosophically shocking implications for the future of humanity's relationship with other parallel dimensional species. As I'm sure all are aware, I pondered these things in great depth as I wrote the movielog entry about it, so I don't think I need to go into it any further here.

After the movie, I arrived home with an armload overflowing with hardware goodies. Just after I had walked into the door, and was preparing to set it all down, the box at the very top of the stack slipped off and fell to the floor. It flew open, and out came the contents. Breadsticks, And a cup of red sauce, Splattered all over the carpet.

DOH!

I paniced, and did my best to act quickly. Squirted some dish soap on it, wet some paper towels, and started scrubbing. To my relief, the sauce came out without much trouble. In my haste, I had created another problem. Soap. Lots of it. It always seemed to suds up, no matter how many fresh paper towels I threw at it.

I went down to the car, got some more appropriate cloth rags out of the trunk, and began a very long and repetitive process of rinse and scrub, rinse and scrub, rinse and scrub. But always more soap would come seeping out. I learned a lesson that night: NEVER apply dish soap directly to the carpet surface (unless you have soap specifically designed for it, in which case it wouldn't be called dish soap).

After an hour of that, my hands were utterly withered, the soap had been diluted somewhat, and I pronounced that some soap residue wasn't going to kill the carpet. If it proved to be a problem after drying, I could rinse more of it out later. I listened to a little music, and went to bed dead tired.

Sunday morning, I got up for a little while, played a game of Kohan, and went back to sleep. And slept. And slept. And slept. I didn't get up until past noon.

I finally got up and took a shower. I turned on the tv, changed the channel a few times, and began working on Dagobah of the dusty interior. After getting at least a little of the dust clot cleared away, I plugged in the new hard drive, made a woody boot floppy, put it in, and powered up.

Once powered up, the chip fan started to make a very disturbing buzzing sound, so I powered down and investigated. I took off the fan and tried getting every bit of dust I could off it, but it still buzzed horribly when I powered back up. I tried running it without being clipped into the chip, which caused the buzzing to become intermittent.

Oh well. Next problem: The BIOS reported that I needed to configure the options (probably due to the hard drive), so I attempted to do so. Annoyingly enough, the hard drive's manual didn't have any specs regarding tracks/heads/cylinders. Its instructions simply said to run the BIOS auto detect, and everything should work. Dagobah was not working. It would not recognized the drive. I concluded that the drive was way too new for Dagobah's BIOS, and the specs might even be out of Dagobah's range even if they were known.

Back to the drawing board. I got to thinking. Dagobah is an ancient, ancient piece of hardware. Even if I somehow manage to get it working, it would be unbearably slow on most modern software. But now, I have half the requisite parts to build a brand new computer anyway. I decide that that's exactly the course I ought to follow. A new motherboard, processor, memory, video card, and case are all that's left. The new plan: Prepare for the construction of Moya.

That's all I'm saying about that right now. More info to come when I figure it out. Meanwhile, there are now a mess of parts strewn across the livingroom floor. Oh joy.

Again, I reached a point where my brain felt like it was going to disintigrate from the inside out if it had to endure another second of MTV (also known as The Britney Channel) or any of the other slop that supposably passes for entertainment in some circles. Time to get out and buy groceries.

And buy groceries I did. The true sign of an "adult" is walking up and down the aisles of the store, pushing this thing called a "cart" in front of you. I bought many, many items to supply the Lair with food which will hopefully last longer than a week this time.

After getting that home and putting it all away, I was feeling quite restless, and not quite hungry yet. I decided it was time to check out the gym available for use. I put on some shorts, headed down to the building, entered my code, and was granted access. There was nobody else present, which made it perfect for exploration without worry of embarrassment.

My goal was very simple: Burn of some of my excess nervous energy, work up a good sweat, and possibly get my muscles slightly sore. I started with the treadmill. I started it up on some default fitness test program, but I wasn't really interested in all that crap, and awkwardly coerced it into letting my walk at a nice comfortably brisk pace for a while. The astoundingly boring WWF was running on the tv. I finally spotted the remote, but didn't retrieve it immediately since I didn't want to interrupt my pace.

After a few minutes, I couldn't stand it anymore, got off the treadmill, and switched it to fox, figuring that would be a safe bet for Sunday night. They were running a commercial, so I got back on the treadmill, hoping to see something like Futurama or another of those cartoons. When the commercials finally ended, it was just my luck that they would be airing some crappy baseball game. Doh.

Got off the treadmill again, flipped channels around until it hit something that looked interesting. That turned out to be FX, which had an Ally McBeal rerun. I continued my workout, not paying much attention to the tv except to tilt my head up every few minutes, but I was glad there was something at least semi-worthwhile on when I did.

Did the treadmill for a while, and then the exercise bike. I wasn't feeling up to the weights on this night, so I called it good enough, and decided that I really like this gym.

Back in the apartment, I decided I was hungry for spaghetti. I had spaghetti in good supply, but no kettle to cook it in. Time to bite that bullet right in the ass. I drove to the nearby Target, and didn't like anything I saw there.

More driving. Wal Mart. I found a cooking set which was both a decent price and had the kettles I wanted, so I bought it, and took the opportunity to restock my Gatorade while I was there. (I am a Gatorade addict.)

I remembered that I had forgotten a few things during my first run to the grocery store, so I also went to King Soopers to pick up some salt, pepper, parmesan cheese, and matzos. I also grabbed some discount halloween candy just for the hell of it.

I returned to the Castle Lair with my additional supplies and kettles, and made my first use of the the stove to cook myself a delicious heaping plate of spaghetti and sauce. While it was cooking, I prepared tho audio video system for watching a film. (More remotes to switch everyday, it seems. lol.)

When everything was perfect and ready, I carried my plate of spaghetti and cup of gatorate into the living room, and found Dagobah's parts in my way. I put down the gatorate, and started pushing hardware out of the way with one hand while I prepared to situate my plate on the shelf with the other. And it tilted. A great mass of spaghetti slipped, and landed face down on the carpet.

Doh! DOH! Double DOH!

"Aw shit." I believe those were my exact words.

King klutz number 1 for the weekend. This time, I took care not to go squirting soap willy nilly all over the floor. I calmly filled my bucket with water and an appropriate amount of soap, took out the rags which were at that very moment tumbling around in the dryer, and set to work.

When I finished, I concluded that this apartment must really have the type of stain resistant carpet advertised in those commercials. 1 round with the soapy rags, and almost all the red was gone. Second round, and it was gone. You'd never know a half a pint of sauce had been spilled there. Then a couple of rinses, which weren't nearly as monstrous this time.

I was very glad I had made twice as much spaghetti as I really intended to eat. I filled up another plate with spaghetti, which had cooled a bit but still tasted wonderful, and watched my movie.

I must have been in a wierd mood when I ordered from Amazon last week. Based on the evidence at hand (that's all I have to go on, since I have no short term memory), I must have wanted to get my Angelina Jolie fix without having my intelligence insulted by 2 hours of plotless drivel (or so I hear) in some not-so-ancient ruins.

I'm not sure whether Gia qualifies for a movielog entry or not. I think it leans toward the "not" side, since it was never exhibited in theaters, but the movielog policy does not have a clear ruling with regard to this particular subject. Anyway, I watched it.

Like watching a human train wreck. An almost stereotypical story of the short life of a sympathetic celebrity gone junkie. This one was especially well played. Very sad. In execution, a notch above most Monday-night-sap movie material, although it does fall into the same general category. Certainly edgier than anything on broadcast network tv. It was worth watching, but I find myself wondering why I (sort of) bought a copy with the gift certificate. Well, it was good enough that I'll probably watch it again sometime. Besides, why rent a movie when you can buy it for 3 times the price? :)

I am quite tired. I'd be even more tired if I hadn't gotten all that extra sleep over the weekend. I'm sure I will be tired tomorrow, because this rambling has gone on very long. Time to shutdown the lava lamp, blank the screen, and get a precious 5 hours of sleep. Bon voyage!