I am, generally, a grump (a long-weekend update)

Grouch. Crabby person. Troll (damn I need a good troll icon, much as I adore Pogo). But puppies and babies cause me to get stupidly melty. Disbelieve all you want - it's still true.

It's likely that the puppy in our house caused me not to become (even more) homicidal this week. The proximate cause was stress, most of which was due to Dreamhost forcing me to upgrade the Joomla installation that manages my personal site. That ate a lot of Friday night and Saturday. I have, by force of will and some amount of dumb luck, mostly bludgeoned it into shape. I applied a small amount of cash in place of many hours of work. It's still not 100% and I haven't been able to face down the rest of it, yet. I hate to think what would've happened if I'd had more than a handful of pages of static HTML and CSS.

I wrote and replied to a bunch of stuff in the Confessional. Two people there friended me here, which I think is cool. But some of that stuff stressed me, too.

Possibly due to stress I had an episode of achalasia Sunday night that scared the daylights out of me and Pygment (who dealt admirably well). I thought I'd have to go to the ER but the episode passed on its own. However, I didn't sleep well that night.

Pygment and I had planned to do stuff while the kids were at Guard Up Monday. She had to take her car up for work after dropping off the kidlets and the plan was for me to nap and recover while that happened. Unfortunately, the town chose that time to send a front-end loader to clear the snow mounds from our street. Holly had to let us know about this! So there was barking, and banging, and beeping every time it backed up. Then there were snowplows, which also needed to be barked at, and which also bang and beep. By the time Pygment got home I was pretty crispy and incapable of making decisions.

Looking at movies and showtimes - yes, there are several things out now that I want to see but no this is not a happening thing - we decided that the best course of action was to just head upstairs and do um-stuff, like one does with one's um-friends and um-wife, after which I passed out for about three hours. This rendered me mostly human, but meant the weekend was effectively over and I had done jack-all nothing of what I'd intended. Oh, I got in a run to Target and did a bunch of shoveling, but the taxes aren't even started and the site still isn't fully fixed and if I start thinking about this stuff my stress level will go back up.

I just want to hide under my bridge, thankyouverymuch.

Resquiescat in Pace Bob Casale

Reports are circulating that Bob Casale, one of the co-founders of Devo, has died at 61 apparently of heart failure. I am sad that one of the most inspiring and revolutionary voices of pop music is gone.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/devo-guitarist-bob-casale-dead-at-61-20140218

It's probably not 100% true to say that had I not discovered Devo I would not have finished high school, but it's very close. I had heard "Mongoloid" when it first came out, and Duty Now for the Future hit at a time when I was becoming acutely aware of how absurd the world truly was. All around me were adults who kept on pretending it was still the 1950s or at least some TV-idealized version of that decade. To have a band making music that broke molds and stereotypes and that at the same time embraced the fundamental weirdness of life while pointing plastic-molded fingers at hypocrisy made me feel like I was not alone. It made me feel, oddly enough, like there was hope.

Courtesy of da babe

and a little Photoshop, a new default icon. And maybe a tattoo?