More from the couch
It’s funny what interests you when you’ve lost your job and can’t afford some of the luxuries that you once did. I’ve recently taken an interest in baking. If you have read any of my other posts I am battling a hoarding disorder by writing the things in my magazines on this blog. I’ve started with the Playboys. I’m having a hard time figuring out how to organize a blog so that it makes good sense for the reader and for myself. I always thought that I wanted to build a portal, but realized that a blog is exactly what I need. Everything I want all in one highly organized space. I had heard about WordPress before, but tried to download it and install it like a program. This just caused me much confusion and ultimately discouraged me from writing about anything at all.
I am a 37-year-old out of work career bartender. I live in West Michigan…..the nation’s leader in unemployment. At least we’re good at something right? Last night I attempted to make the Playboy Pizza Crust recipe (that I transcribed very poorly.) Hoarders beware! I did a crappy job of typing and threw out the recipe in the trash which got picked up yesterday. I realized this last night and for that I apologize. I cheated by using another recipe to see how much water to use and it came out alright. I don’t think my oven was hot enough and I took it out too soon. Later I baked a cherry pie after I turned the oven up a and burned it. I scraped the burnt crust off and it tasted great. Not a recipe worth typing though. Canned cherries and boxed pie-crust, but I leaned on the same cookbook that rescued me from my pizza crust mess. From that I learned to sprinkle sugar on top before putting in the oven. Overall I have realized that I need to buy a new oven if I’m going to learn how to bake. At least it’s gas. Oddly, I think I would rather buy that than a new flat screen TV. Maybe when I find a new job. There is a bar in Grand Rapids that’s cool enough that I’m going to shave off my beard before going in with my resumé. After that my friend Nick and I are going to see Agent Orange at Billie’s. I haven’t seen any music for a while so getting out of my little bake-shop will be nice. Nick just bought a house so he’ll be happy to get out of his nest too. Later this month my friend Ryan invited me to go see Govt’ Mule at The Orbit Room. I’m looking forward to seeing Warren for the first time since last summer. I just went into my bedroom to lie down for a minute and while looking at my bookshelf realized that blogging will be a good exercise in writing more succinctly as well as learning about HTML and file structure. I’ve been using my laptop in the living room, but it’s making my back hurt sitting hunched over. I’m going to have to bundle up and go back into the office and soak up the aeron chair. My office is surrounded by 8′ sliders that go out to my decks so it’s a very cold room. That computer doesn’t have any of my passwords etc. stored on it, but that’s the G5 with a 23″ monitor and Event studio monitors. It’s an older G5 without an intel-based chip but it’s still a Photoshop machine with lots of ram and it sounds great.
Last Halloween at the BH.
Congratulations to Floyd!
Hey, Floyd! We named a soda pop company after you…and put you on a bike…with a zeppelin harnessed to it and it has wings….You old Conch!
What me blurry?
A Nice Pair Of Pants
Howdy. Here you are reading about my pants……again. I’m listening to Rush. Their self-titled album. Nice. Tomorrow is Red Dock day!! Come visit or you are a queenapalooza!
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This is Bitchin’
Portasonic.com
Hey! I have a job. Running Portasonic.com. We just got it running today. We sell dj/producer equipment and software, Adobe, Apple, Video gear, keyboards, cables, whatever you could want for! We will probably be open for business by late this week. Right now we are just trying to get all the kinks worked out with the website. I finally get to work on a wordpress.org site. I can’t wait to go live, we are working hard to make sure that the shopping cart is ready to go and shakes hands with our bank, get business cards made, etc. FUN.
Photoshop User Inheritance
Congrats! If you are a photoshop dork like I am than you will be happy to know that I just scored a small pile of the magazine that the pros read. If anyone has an questions about how to use PS I’ll try to start posting some tutorial based on my studies. I’ve been working hard for the past two weeks trying to learn as much as possible so haven’t been cooking or blogging. Hopefully if anyone ever reads this will benefit from my toil. Here’s a link to an ad that I saw in PS User today for printing business cards really cheap. PrintRunner. 5000 for $64.95 is really cheap, I’ve paid more than that for 250!
How To Quit Drinking
My condolences if you have found this on your own. Let it be known now that in my opinion, drinking is just as much fun as sex, shopping, celebrity or anything else worth writing about. I choose liquor over cocaine, weed, heroin, heady drugs, pills, gas, or anything else that I’ve ever laid hands on. I will say that I went to my Doctor of my volition, knowing full well what he would say and what would happen. The only way for you to relate to me without meeting me is to understand a little about who I am, how I grew up and why I had to quit.
I am a 37 year old recovering alcoholic experienced with drugs of all kinds. I was a pro. I never took a day off. I lived and breathed for drugs and would stop at nothing to make sure that I got fucked up every single day. I will not censor what I write because I know that you are probably not seeking PG-13, Eddie Haskell type information. If I hadn’t called my Doctor out of sheer paranoia I would certainly have killed myself. I gave in when I found out that three of my friends were in trouble. One friend (maybe 33) was in kidney failure, one has pancreatitis (37) and the other, (57) kidney failure, liver disease and internal bleeding. I have hyper-lipidemia, cirrhosis would have been my fate if I hadn’t changed my lifestyle. My father had to quit when he was 36 for the same reason, so I was not surprised to hear my diagnosis.
I was born in Holland, Michigan in November of 1972. Four years before the hurricane- blizzard that cloaked us with snow. President Ford was in office and had attended the same high school as my Grandfather in Grand Rapids, which is the second largest city in Michigan second to Detroit. My Grandfather was a pharmacist and a boy scout leader for thirty years. He and my Grandmother moved to Holland thirty miles to the south when my father was born in 1944. He worked in a small pharmacy downtown when I was little until he died in 1981. My father owned part of a small drug store in Saugatuck, Michigan where I have lived my whole life. I grew up mimicking his every move, following him around the store and then at home. I wanted to do anything he did. I would ride around on my John Deere pedal tractor while he would mow our enormous lawn on his 1940′s Farmall Cub. I learned how to drive and mow the lawn on my own when I was about 8. I have always had a strange fascination with tractors, I even wrote about it after completing my Spanish final a few minutes early.
When I was ten or eleven I started working at the store as a stock-boy. I filled the vials, vacuumed the carpet, took out the trash and whatever else needed to be done.
–Superfly Productions :: Bonnaroo – Outside Lands – Jazzfest–
–Superfly Productions :: Bonnaroo – Outside Lands – Jazzfest–.
Man, I wish I could ship off to NYC and do this for a few months.
“Feelin’ Blue” is the greatest Creedence song ever.
John Fogarty had a truly remarkable way of speaking to the people who our president is reaching out to this evening. It really sucks that his approval rating is sagging so because it’s going to open such a huge door for the GOP. I think he’s doing a great job, at least the rest of the world doesn’t think that we’re all a bunch of douche-bags as much as before. I’m really not feeling the “Stimulus” myself other than it’s a great time to go back to school. I seem to slip between the cracks of most gov’t help. My bank won’t work with me about my mortgage because I make my payments on time, I don’t even want to talk about the credit card companies. Hopefully the Department of Health and Human Services can do something for us until I can find a temp job. I have a meeting with a career counselor tomorrow that will hopefully be fruitful.
Well, my 1:30 appointment was at 11:30 so that’s how that went. I was pretty inspired by the State of the Union address last night. I’m still poor, but I feel better about the future in general. I can’t believe I screwed up this appointment, I hope my case worker is willing to reschedule. I feel bad having wasted her time due to my own poor planning. I think I may have found another job though on a lighter note. There is a really cool restaurant looking for a bar manager, but there will be a lot of competition. I think that I have an edge though, my former boss’s partner did some work with the company and is going to pass my resumé off to some corporate guys in Chicago. It’s a really cool chain of hip bar/restaurants that are all over the country. It’s a bit of a drive, but it’s nothing out of reach. Just hoping for an opportunity to interview at this point. I’ve decided to get my ACE certification. It’s will be grueling, but it’s a subject that I have always loved. My appointment today was to decide if I can go back to school and study graphic design. I have to choose a an occupation that has a projected growth rate of 14.8% or greater and that creates 20 or more new jobs each year to be eligible for funding. Between that and pell grants, I can get my degree knocked out. So Photoshop school in the meantime. I was going to take the classes, but for $4,000 I can buy the Adobe Suite, a new laptop and study from home. I won’t have to drive either. I am perfectly happy hanging out at home being Mr house husband and getting my Adobe certs. I have to meet with a graphic designer some time this week to talk about an internship. I saw the guy on our local news. He got to do all the vinyl work for a police car in a movie that they are filming in Grand Rapids. There’s a new one every month it seems like. We have great incentives for film-makers in Michigan, I would love to get involved in that industry in some capacity.
Here’s some interesting Playboy stuff du jour. Miles Aldridge has a really dreamy site with a slide show of his work and some cool ambient music. Again I reiterate Olivia Munn and her show is great if you get G4, which leads me to revision3. This is the techy channel that I watch on my Roku, home of Pixel Perfect with Burt Monroy. This is the issue that eerily featured an interview with Billy Mays the month before he died.
Asian Carp Are Taking Over Medical Marijuana
Wow, lots of great news today. The Michigan senate is trying to undo our med-dope law that states that patients can legally grow up to 12 plants so that now you have to buy it from a pharmacy. That’s such bullshit, and this is coming from the son of a pharmacist. This is to protect us, of course. Everyone has to get their greedy hands into it and ruin what could have provided jobs for lots and lots of little guys in a state with no jobs. I guess the State of Michigan and the US government need the money more than our citizens do.
As for the Asian Carp that will start taking over our lakes? I was at Lollapalooza in 2007 when Pearl Jam closed the weekend down on that Sunday night. Eddie Vedder started bashing BP because they and their cronies in Indiana state legislature passed laws that allowed double the previous levels of toxic shit into our lake. He began chanting “BP leave our lakes alone” to the tune “Another Brink in the Wall pt. 2.” AT&T, who sponsored the event, and whose air-conditioned tent I greatly enjoyed, censored that part from the download. So thanks for the cool breeze, otherwise..Fuck YOU! I don’t know if anyone out there knows what asian carp are like check this out. They have been known to knock people out of boats and are an extremely invasive fish that could potentially ruin our multi-billion dollar fishing/tourism industry.
I signed up to ship out to South Florida today to do relief work for the Haitian refugees through FEMA. I’ll probably hear back in a day or two. A local temp agency is handling the recruiting here in West Michigan. If you’re not busy and want to help check it out. We’ll be working 12 hour days, but it will be worth it. I have to try to figure out how to get down there. I don’t trust the handy-van to make it that far and can’t afford a plane ticket. Maybe I’ll start a fund-raiser here in town. I just found out today that because I’m poor Michigan will pay for me to become an Adobe certified web-developer. Hopefully if everything goes well I can come home from Florida in one piece, get educated and all in time to make drinks this summer. I think I’m going to volunteer to do some work for cleanvibes this season too. I need to get out of here and see some music and clean up hippie-garbage. I haven’t been to Bonnaroo in two years, that’s two too many. I miss that drive down to Tennessee, stopping by in Claremont at the Jim Beam distillery. If ever you get a chance to check it out, it’s only two miles off the expressway. Time to get comfortable and make some dinner. I’m glad Conan is taking NBC to the cleaners and can’t wait to watch his last few shows. Leno sucks.
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