Maybe next time I will discuss my new favorite house-related problem: we need to get a pole or something in the basement, because the shoddy 70's workmanship that gave us such hits as Hold On, Why Are My Shoes Floating Away (basement floods) and Wait, Why Are The Walls Cracked Like (old house shifting)That has manifested a new issue... The Top Floor Is Slowly Falling Down (one day my upstairs room will be my downstairs room). There's a guy coming to look at it tomorrow.

For one thing, cluttered homes tell us more about the personalities of its occupants than do homes stripped to their carefully arranged essentials--it's the optional, extraneous items we leave lying around that bear the stamp of our quirky inner selves. -- A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder - How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and on-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman

In the age-old tradition of telling people you are going to do something in an effort to shame motivate yourself into doing something, I am going to post pictures of my ridiculously messy room and then clean it!

Since I am always working on the weekends, my manager decided to give me this entire weekend off. I left work at 7:30 yesterday and don't go back until 11AM Tuesday morning. That gives me somewhere in the vicinity of 87.5 hours of time at home. Now, subtracting somewhere between 8 and 10 hours per day for sleeping, that brings us to somewhere between 63.5 and 47.5 hours... hours in which I have nothing to do (save for watching Kings tomorrow at 8 and trying to watch the race sometime around that same time). I don't care about the Fourth of July, so it's not like I have a cookout to go to or anything. My plans for the three day weekend was "to stay home, maybe watch some tv, do some painting, sleep... you know, the usual." Instead, I am gonna clean. I can't spend three straight days in this squalor. So, I will clean it, and catalog my progress (I'd say "or lack thereof", but no... there will be progress!) Okay, enough with the yapping, on to the cleaning! Now, where are those trash bags?

On an unrelated note: Oh man! I am in the middle of the last episode of the second season of Mad Men (which I will most likely be talking about in my next post. Not just the show, but something really cool and show-related that I found but can't discuss until the show is done) and now I am mad that I will have to wait forever and a day to see season three. I am not sure what's gonna go down in the last 20 minutes, but I hope that at least one of the characters I hate gets what's coming to them! I am assuming they will not, but man, with so many unpleasant people doing so many unpleasant things, someone needs to get something!

We got there right around the time doors opened, but the crowd was rather small. Unlike last time, there was actual security involved, with all of these extra serious cops/security/whatever making you go through a metal detector, then using that wand thing. I failed the wand twice.. once for 80 cents in change, once for my Biden button. Those guys were not the friendliest. Then we had to walk the Volunteer Gauntlet, with their clipboards and their sign-up sheets. They are like the outside-of-the-polls fliers people, only more spread out,a nd slightly more tenacious. Anyway, once we got past all of that, it was time for the big show! Only with a whole lot of pre-show waiting. Oh how I love a good "standing around outside in the cold doing nothing for two hours"... only I don't. But it was worth it in the end though, so I will not complain. So, how was the event? Follow the cut!
( Be advised. I took a lot of pictures. I repeat, A LOT OF PICTURES. Seriously. Many, many, many pictures. )

Here is a link to this newspaper guy's Twittering of the event. He was Twittering while I Was still in the bed! This lady on the news said people started lining up at midnight! Midnight?! As the young texters say... GTFO! MIDNIGHT!? It did not start until 12:15PM, and "doors" did not open til 10. Midnight is just craziness. And, because my pictures are what you'd call "not so great", here's his Flikr photo stream. More pictures at: John Ford, ateichman, wjarrettc, CityViewGreensboro and biden_daily

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Rules!
1) Open your top 25 most played songs on iTunes. (Wait! I just now see that I read it wrong! I did the "random shuffle" thing. Oh well, this took so long that there is nooooo way I am starting over! Plus, my 25 top played consists of not that many groups, most of which I don't even know what they look like. This is due to my love of the fanmix.)
2) Post pictures of each band.
3) Once the band has been guessed, edit with an upload of the song! This way we can ALL SHARE THE LOVE!

Cold Open: "Deserve aint't got nothing to do with it." - Snoop
Big old stakeout. Dozerman in the weeds having issues (what else is new?), Sydnor on the eyeball. Lester at HQ. Partlow and associates (Muscle on muscle?) up in some warehouse. It seems that everything is finally in play. The code has been cracked. The final piece of the puzzle has been found (and it was Cheese) and everything is ready to go. This usually happens in the next to the last episode of the season. I like that, as it leaves one ep left to show how things wrap up. Most cop shows do the Big Arrest in the final ep, and then you end up going "Yeah, and then what?!"

Penultimate: next to the last. Only one more to go. This is the one that will set everything into motion for the last push. Next week is the white flag episode, the end of an era and all of those other cliches. One hundred and fifty minutes left.

( And how many words? I don't even want to think about that. )