soooooooon

soon

soon

yes, soon, very soon, it will be time. this would be a more emphatic post if my left caps key weren’t stuck but oh well, whatever, insert your own imaginary emphasis here.

vangroover, i’m leaving you.

assuming, that is, i can get all this crap packed up and thrown into storage. by tuesday.

at this point, for long, boring, paperwork-related reasons, my co-op and i have both had enough of one another. the showdown at the boardroom corral is on tuesday, and at that point they have, as i understand it, three options:

  1. evict me as of then and there, leaving the co-op legally responsible for the packing up and safe storage of my stuff. i do not think this will appeal to the board, but who knows, gordon might be there and swing the vote in favour of ‘toss her out on the street’ not knowing i have an offer of a free room at a b&b.
  2. accept my notice that i am leaving, which must by the rules be 90 days minimum. this doesn’t suit either of us very well
  3. work out a compromise whereby i have till the middle of february to pack all of this stuff up and get it the hell out of dodge.

because god knows, i am not going to get this entire apartment packed up by tuesday. ain’t happening. particularly not since yesterday i basically spent in the fetal position curled up in bed having a nervous breakdown.

so right now i am looking for two things three things:

  1. a truck, preferably 17′ or so for all my stuff, to move the stuff out once it’s all packed up
  2. a place to store it, reasonably priced and safe.
  3. someone, anyone, to help me pack. yes, it’s a hellava mess, and thinking ahead as i do, the power is off so it’s cold and dark, too. woohoo, party time eh? but i will buy pizza. and beer.

once that’s all done, pizza bought, beer drunken, i will be hitting the road via Greyhound limousine and doing some visiting. if i have the organizational skills to get my passport, i might come visit my friends in Yankistan or points south, or far east, particularly given what Raj says about the cost of living in Thailand. might hit yellowknife again, provided i get a ticket home lined up first, not like last time.

thank god i have one of those jobs that can basically be done from anywhere with an internet connection.

as for a more permanent landing pad, i have leads on a couple of very intriguing locales up in the Interior, on the reservation. if those don’t work, the island will be my next stop for sure. maybe even The Islands, who knows? Every single night since making this decision i’ve had dreams about how it’s the right decision; dreams of kayaking through the woods on a crystal stream, telling people how happy i am to be out of the city, dreams of riding across foothills of snow covered mountains, explaining how i used to live in the Big Smoke. that sort of dream, night after night. this is clearly the right decision, but the only question is, how to get the goddam packing done. thirteen years is a lot of history to put in boxes.

to say nothing of the fact that the boxes have to sit on a layer of styrofoam, because the carpet is soaked through thanks to the leaks in the building.

 

2012 in review for the ol’ raincoaster blog

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

About 55,000 tourists visit Liechtenstein every year. This blog was viewed about 340,000 times in 2012. If it were Liechtenstein, it would take about 6 years for that many people to see it. Your blog had more visits than a small country in Europe!

Click here to see the complete report.

SUCK IT LIECHTENSTEIN!

Julian Assange Yay

At Least SOMEBODY is happy for me

Breaking: the Space/Irony Continuum

Stupid People

Stupid People

Headline of the day:

It’s Not OK To Be Shitty: Guy Fieri, BuzzFeed, And The Tyranny Of Stupid Popular Things

on… Continue reading

Two Christmas Stories

Darwin and Charlie Brown

Darwin and Charlie Brown

It’s a Christmas Tradition on the ol’ raincoaster blog to re-post this, the greatest Christmas story ever told (sorry, Jesus!): A Christmas Story, by Sarban. It is long, but if I can spend several hours typing it in, you can take an hour or less to read it. I recommend accompanying it with a bottle of Zubrowka and a box of Kleenex.

UPDATE: here is a link to the story that actually WORKS!

A Christmas Story
By Sarban (John W. Wall)

I will tell you a Christmas story. I will tell it as Alexander Andreievitch Masseyev told it me in his little house outside the walls of Jedda years ago one hot, damp Christmas Eve….

For our second selection, we have the entirely awesome Simon Callow reading one of Charles Dickins’ non-cloying stories, “The Christmas Tree,” a marvellous, metaphorical memoir. I’ve stolen this one from the Guardian.

Greatest YouTube Comment in History

Spencer Cox would have liked this comment

Spencer Cox would have liked this comment

Or, probably, in the future as well. In all of recorded time and space, in fact. And just think, Nick Denton, if your place hadn’t become a cesspool of festering Deadspin lunkheads, you could have had this on your site.

In response to an AIDs denialist in the comments on the video of Spencer Cox from the previous post:

mabonwy 16 hours ago

Oh, honey. Spencer’s toenails were better than you. They had a higher IQ, more credibility, and a better likelihood of being remembered with fondness. Spencer is now redecorating the halls of Valhalla while the best thing you can think to do with your completely unjust continued life is to troll YouTube, forsooth, in order to eke out tiny shreds of the attention you crave but can gain no other way. Because you have nothing to offer the world. You are wholly contemptible. Go pour salt on yourself.

Selah.