Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Installation
August 15, 2006

Yesterday, the Dish Network folks showed up early within their delivery window, installed better components than what their online ordering system forced me into, installed two dishes and all of the inside wiring (including running a new cable and phone line), and were gone within three hours leaving me with crystal-clear high-definition TV in four rooms.

The delivery of our new washer and dryer from Home Depot took a terrible turn this morning when I received a call from a woman saying essentially, “Your washer fell off the truck and we won’t be delivering anything to you today.”

Duality
August 13, 2006

Living in two houses is for the birds.

We’ve spent the past two days carting smaller breakable or odd-shaped things to the new house. We’ve put quite a few miles on Berta’s car doing it. We’ve managed to get a reasonable chunk of things into the house to start off, and the place is slowly becoming livable. And that’s the problem, really.

Just as soon as you start to get comfortable with the idea that you’re going to live there, you realize that, for example, there are no chairs. There is no kitchen table. The bathroom works, and it’s stocked with toilet paper (a terrible thing to be missing on the first day in) but there is no hand towel.

Figuring out which switch works which light is an exercise requiring patience. You’ll notice that some lights have switches with a little slider along the side, and others have a turning knob that toggles when you push it, and still others are just a glowing switch that doesn’t toggle as much as slowly make things get brighter and then snap into full brightness. You’ll also be disturbed by switches in your basement near wall panels that are sealed shut with paint that do nothing when you toggle them.

Comb, Brush
August 11, 2006

I don’t remember the last time I brushed my hair.

I mean, I don’t remember the last time I brushed my hair with the intent of putting it in order. I admit to maybe trying to pull a brush through my hair in mild curiosity, but never with intent.

Learning About Becoming an Assassin
August 10, 2006

I wrote a linklog post a while back that pointed to this “instruction manual” for being an assassin. I thought it was an interesting idea, even if the manual itself is lacking quite a bit. (And rightly so, because it shouldn’t be so easy to learn these things over the web.)

After a while, I started getting comments of people looking to become assassins. They were looking for training or something, I’m not exactly sure. I played along in my comments, telling them that they needed to find an “admission counselor” to get into our program. Obviously, they would not actually find such a counselor here, but they might spin their wheels trying to get into our exclusive (and reclusive) club.

Whether these folks have started taking this thing seriously, or are just playing along, I can’t say. It’s disturbing that there are so many reputed young people that have interest in this line of work. It’s disturbing that so many other folks seem to think they know anything about assassination. The comments both on the post and still in the moderation queue are replete with messages of, “It’s not like you see in the movies, fools.” As if those people even know. But why are these people even coming to my site based on a one-sentence link?