2000-08-11 - 11am or so

On the internal soundtrack: "The Grand Illusion", by Styx. Someone mentioned it in their journal, and I listened to the album all the time as a kid.

Poindexter was making fun of me last night for the weird music I have in my head. At the time it was Eddy Grant's "Electric Avenue". I like the song just fine, but the music I like rarely meets Poindexter's standards. Well, it's not like I choose this stuff. I've tried, sometimes, to "set" the soundtrack to something but it doesn't usually work.

I remembered that in the video for "Electric Avenue", when he sings "down" in "We gonna rock down to Electric Avenue", it looks to me (a hard-of-hearing lipreader) like "doan". So I speculated to Poindexter that he must not be a native-born American; perhaps Jamaican. (I don't know a damn thing about Eddy Grant and I was only 12 or so when his video came out so bear with me if this information is glaringly obvious to you.) From the stuff I see on the web he appears to be from the Caribbean somewhere, so I wasn't too far off.

Everyone's always so surprised that lipreaders can "see" accents. Try it in the mirror sometime -- see how different it looks when you say "I pahked the cah in Hahvahd yahd" than if you put the R's in there?

MY CLEANING FRENZY

Cousin S is coming to visit this weekend, with B and her daughter K. It should be a lot of fun. I went into a frenzied cleaning mode last night and scoured the kitchen and then went around cleaning up clutter. Once I start doing that I can't stop -- everywhere I go I pick stuff up and put it away or throw it out. Poindexter has to stand over me and look mean and yell at me to quit so we can go to bed.

I don't much care if the bathroom sinks are a little soapy and the mirrors have water splashes on them, but I can't stand it for very long when the house has piles of crap lying all over the place. I bet my mother would find that vastly amusing since I lived among piles of crap in my bedroom as a child at home and she could never get me to straighten it.

I guess as I got older, my tolerance for piles of crap went way down, although clearly I still have the tendency to make them.

Want to hear something ironic? When I was a kid, my mom made the beds every morning. She used to have to nag me all the time to make it. My feeling was: What's the point? I was just going to mess the sheets up again that night. Sometime after I moved out of the house my mom came around to my way of thinking -- now she only makes the bed when people are coming over. Ha!

OTHER NEWS

Well, G's daughter had her baby. He's a grandfather. We're trying to think up clever things to call him. His daughter was in labor for 16 hours! Agh! I told J here at work, who's always hinting that I should have children, that "I'll consider having one if you give birth to it!" He said that Poindexter should do the honors, and I said, "Poindexter's not the one nagging me to have kids!"

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