Worst Birds Ever

I made a pledge to myself two years ago that I’d one day post something on my blog about the birds that used to crap all over my deck when I lived on the lake in Mission Viejo. Was transferring photos off the laptop today and came across the cretins: So infuriatingly not dead. They

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Injury Update: Trigger Finger(s)

There’s nothing like a medical condition that makes you feel old while at the same time emasculating you. Because it’s most common in women over 40. Anyway. Basically the tendons are swollen, such that if my left ring finger or right pinky is curled up, the middle knuckle “catches” when trying to extend the finger

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Cell Phone Photo Backlog Discharge

This is a bunch of photos I took on my cell phone (from December on) that I’ve never posted here. Seems like they usually have a different quality to them than my real-camera photos. I call that quality “graininess”. It’s a real word. Never saw the movie, but it was nice of them to get

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Photos with American Flags in Them

Here are pictures I’ve taken in the last 12 months that include American flags. They’re not necessarily great photos, they just have American flags in them. There are 50. If you can name the location of all fifty of them, I’ll give you a quarter. No fair looking at the image file names. You can

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Time Burglary and Not Pictureds

The best days are the ones when I (a) don’t go to Home Depot and (b) don’t need anything from Home Depot that I’m just kidding myself into trying to do without because I’m tired of going to Home Depot. FWIW: About the third day after I moved into the house, I started getting this

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A Day in the Life

Woke up, fell out of bed, comb+head, found my way downstairs and drank a Coke, etc., etc. Opened my garage door and there, between the door and the grill of my truck (parked in the driveway) was a dead bird. A sign, no doubt, an omen of things to come, namely: There was a cop

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My New (Used) Car: An FAQ

So I’m not necessarily *excited* about the car, but then again, it’s not a car I bought for the sake of excitement. It’ll definitely get good mileage. I bought it from a known source that I know isn’t trying to scam me. It was cheap enough that if it spontaneously combusts RIGHT NOW, I’ll recover financially.

Reading Angle of Repose While Moving Back East: The Sequel

Was reading Angle of Repose when I was in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago (the house-hunting trip) and realized where/when I’d last read it: when I was moving to NYC back in 2005. I remember sitting in the airport in Cincinnati (where I was making a connection on Delta) reading it and thinking it was

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Houses I’m Not Trying to Buy in Pittsburgh

This isn’t about Plan B. This is about my having looked at, like, seven houses today and most of them being variations on awful that I hadn’t necessarily considered possible. The sloped rooms and all. I mean, really. Here are the seven…

The House I’m Trying to Buy in Pittsburgh

Spent today looking at houses in the Pitt. It’s different here. For one thing, any house that seems too inexpensive for its specs is usually that way because the floors all slant different directions. I was in three houses today where — yeah. Felt like standing on a ship’s deck. The one I’m trying to buy is in the Lincoln Place neighborhood of Pittsburgh. I’m taking the offer paperwork over to the office in the morning.