FuzzyCo

For the past few years, FuzzyFest has involved some sort of public performance aspect. This year, not so much. Erica is taking me on some fun adventures tomorrow and then we're having a little thingy thing on Saturday. The details of such? You know, I get this a lot these days:

Friend: Fuzzy, you didn't come to my birthday party/baby shower/grave-robbing!
Fuzzy: So sorry, but, um, I don't think I was invited.
Friend: Of course you were! I put it on Facebook!
Fuzzy: Ah. I don't check Facebook because I am an old man who drives a horse and carriage and lives in a rock.

So my thing on Saturday? The opposite. I did not put it on Facebook. Electronic mails were sent. If you perhaps think that you should have been invited, maybe you didn't read your email because you were on Facebook, or perhaps I don't have your email. Fix that, please.

Because of a thing and then a thing, I guess we haven't been checking our home voicemail for several months now. So, if you called our landline and left a message, we never got it. Sorry. We fixed the thing, so call us and leave a message!

Movember and Decembeard 2011 from Fuzzy Gerdes on Vimeo.

After Movember comes Decembeard. (The first half of the video is Movember, again. I think I'll just keep building the video up and up as long as I keep remembering to take the daily photo.)

On Decembeard 9, Erica and I headed out to Ossining, New York for Christopher and Katie's Sending Ceremony from their Maryknoll Lay Ministry program. But first, as soon as got there Erica's work colleague Karen and her husband Ira took us for a hike up the West Mountain in Bear Mountain State Park. We had a great view of the Hudson River and Bear Mountain and got to hike along the Appalachian Trail for a good mile or so. And I'm super proud of Erica—the trail was quite a bit harder than we were expecting and despite her continuing knee problems she soldiered through the whole thing.

There's something about starting with a full mustache and growing out a beard under it that feels very Old West or Hobo or something to me.

What comes after Movember? Decembeard!*

Starting with the full mustache** helps, of course, but it's also the case that my chin hair is a little darker than my lip hair (ha! a moustache is lip hair!) and so by day 3 of Decembeard I feel like I've got something respectable going on, whereas it took two weeks or so into Movember before my mo' looked like anything.

* I took a little poll on Twitter to ask the very important question: Beard-cember or Decembeard? Or the whole hog: Beardecembeard? Foresman was the only one who got back to me and he voted for Beard-cember. I've been trying it out for a week and I think I'm going with Decembeard (sorry, Chris). It just flows better in my brain somehow.

** All through Movember I used the Commonwealth spelling of moustache because that's what makes sense of the abbreviation 'mo', but now that that's over, I'm returning to the more comfortable (to me) American spelling mustache. I knew you were wondering.

Hey, I did it! I… grew some facial hair, in a slightly different configuration than normal. Many thanks to my brother for letting me hijack his official Movember entry and to all of you who donated—Claire and Steve and Dan and Kate and Jodi and Eliot and Emmanuel from the LA office. It's not too late to donate.

Here's a little plug for my brother's work's output: if you'd like to have a photo of yourself with a moustache without actually growing one, Stachematic Camera is an iOS app that will automagically add 'staches to your photos.

And here's what it looks like to grow a moustache in 30 days (video generated by the helpful Everyday app):

Movember 2011 from Fuzzy Gerdes on Vimeo.

Next? Beardecember!

Thanks to Claire Zulkey and Steve Delahoyde, you can see that transition between days 24 and 25 (and right before Thanksgiving and our annual family photos, no less) to the dorktastic Movember moustache I've got now.

The whole family kind of went moustache crazy, to the point where I kind of wish Disco and I had worn fake moustaches like everyone else -- you can hardly see our blondey little mo's in this shot:

The offer still stands -- go donate a couple bucks to Movember through my brother's page and I'll have a dorky little moustache in my family's Thanksgiving photos, rather than the luxious and rakishly handsome thing I've got going on right now. Don't you want to help fight cancer and make me look like Ron Swanson?

(Also, I guess this was V-neck t-shirt week at work. Hope you got the memo.)

OK, so here's the deal. Movember is all about making yourself look ridiculous to encourage people to donate money to help fight cancer. But I've let you all down. The moustache I've grown is too cool. I've got the soul patch, I've got the droopy horseshoe parts to the moustache. All around, it's too close to the beard I usually have. So let's fix that, with money. I'll shave off the soul patch for a $20 donation and the droopy parts of the moustache for $25. Go donate through my brother's Movember page and either leave a comment there or come back here and leave a comment so I know what your donation was for. I'll make a little video of the shaving.

(Heck, for a $100 donation I'll shave off just one of the droopy parts and go to work like that for a day.)

I'm taking my daily Movember photo with the helpful iPhone app Everyday which both reminds me at the same time everyday to take the photo and provides some helpful guidelines so that my head is in the same place every time (facilitating making a little video at the end of the month). This time I'm in my office as usual, but I flipped 180° by sitting in my visitor chair.

Penny Arcade does Movember as well.

I used to see a lot of shows here in Chicago. But lately I've gotten my old-man on and, as I joke, I barely make it out of the house to shows I'm in, let alone see anyone else's. But this weekend we're making up for lost time. Last night we went and saw the closing night of Amanda Rountree's The Good, the Bad, and the Monkey. Tonight we're seeing Jin and Joshi: Race Card Sharks and the Kiss Kiss Cabaret. And Saturday night we're seeing Impress These Apes Season 6 winner Jo Scott's Thankful and Sean Cusick in Urlakis and Cusick. Five shows in three days. It's kinda raddichio.

Movember!

Monday night (which was Movember Day 14, but I think this has basically evolved into "using the reminder of posting a Movember picture to do some regular blogging") I went to ComedySportz to film Dan Telfer doing a set at the 100 Proof stand-up show there and stuck around to do four minutes myself at The Chaser, the open mic that follows. Would you like to listen? A small note: don't you hate when comedians do physical comedy bits on audio-only recordings? Well, I started out my set by accidentally unplugging the microphone from its cord and fuddling it back in—that's what's going on at the start there.

As an mp3: Fuzzy Gerdes Stand-up at The Chaser, November 14, 2011

Movember Day 10 (Thursday, November 10th to normal people) started out in Los Angeles. LA traffic is so clichedly bad that picking an evening flight time home is tricky. If you take a 5 pm flight, you have to leave the office by 3 pm at the latest. If you take a 7 pm flight, as I did, you have to leave by… 3:30 or so. I got out of the office at 4 pm and then spent 45 minutes going the mile and a half to the freeway. I can also see where the cliche of the person do 3 or 4 tasks while driving comes from in LA: if you spend a big part of your commute going 2 miles-per-hour, you probably can safely drink coffee, work a Blackberry, and read a comic book all at the same time. And once you've done that for an hour or two, you figure you're pretty good at it even if traffic does pick up to 20 or 30 mph.

Long-drive-short, I made it to the airport in just enough time to run through my preflight checklist: fill water-bottle, check; visit the restroom, check; pick up a Wolfgang Puck sandwich-to-go; check. I got it all done in time to enjoy a fine Red Trolley Ale at the bar right beside the gate and slid over to join the line while they were just finishing the "Ultra Gold Platinum Premium" boarding. I was met at the line by my old friend Brian Goodman who had even more-so just made it to the airport. He was in LA with Shaun showing [REDACTED] to [REDACTED] and it was nice to see him for a few seconds.

Movember Day 11 was marked by my first evening off in what seems like forever. Which was good, because Erica and I had a lot of TV to catch up on. A lot.

Saturday, our friends Andrew and Mike were in town doing a show at the House of Blues. Many thanks to them for hooking us up with passes—I could get used to the whole Opera Box over the Stage thing. Also thanks to them for introducing us, and everyone else at the HoB, to Moon Hooch. These guys are an amazing three-piece composed of two saxophonists and a drummer and they usually perform down in the New York subway. A lot of their music sounds like someone has sampled some old polka or jazz album into a funky new dance track, but it's really them live performing it all. Also cool is that because they perform in the subway, their songs mostly don't have names but just numbers that they use hand-signals to communicate to each other. Low 4 (all four fingers pointing down) is a great intro to the band and their sound.

My dentist, it turns out, is open on Sundays. So when I needed to schedule a filling and crown-prep, why wouldn't I choose a Sunday afternoon appointment? Answer (for the future): because I'm terrible at remembering to eat on a weekend morning, and so by the time I was done with 2 1/2 hours in the chair, I was exhausted and starving, but couldn't get down anything more solid than a milkshake. My sweet wife made me some soup out of thin air when I got home and kept me from expiring. They really beat me up—I still feel like I have a walnut embedded in my cheek.

See, this is the face of a man not smiling very big because of his swollen cheek (my right, your left there in the photo). But man, that moustache is coming in pretty good, huh? My brother has put some photos of his manly visage on his Movember page.

Also a busy day in LA, but a couple of bright spots today. At lunch, the trainer and I got lost trying to find the food court at the mall across the street and stumbled onto a small farmer's market. I got some California BBQ for lunch and it was dee-lish and a pretty good cappuccino from Cafecito Orgánico (who have a nifty Cafe O Muerto design - I didn't need to buy a pound of coffee, because I've got Tonx waiting for me at home, but if they'd have had shirts at the stand I would have bought one).

And then I did get away from the office in time tonight to go catch Dan Telfer at Meltdown Comedy. Dan's got a few shows left in his LA whirlwind tour, so if you're local check him out. Also, if you love Dan or worms, you can purchase that great poster directly from the artist for a measly $10.08 US. (It's an even $10 in Canadian. WAIT - did I just support a Canadian!? Shaky fist at you, Canada, for continuing to produce talent.)

Also, shaboom! One of you listened to me (I'm assuming--none of my brother's charming but deadbeat friends have any money) and donated $50 to tie Disco for the lead in his fund-raising group. Now, that's a tie, so someone should quick go donate another $6 to be safe. Heck, make it $46 and be really sure that a Gerdes stays in the lead. Because, that's how it should be, right?

Hello from LA. After a long day of training and meetings, what's better than driving across town in LA traffic to pick up a server? Nothing, I guess. I'd been hoping to go catch one of Dan Telfer's LA shows, but tonight's was sold out anyway, so don't mope too much for me.

Movember!

I was in Tennessee the day before, back in Chicago for a day to take this photo, and then on a plane and went to bed in Beverly Hills. I am the luckiest unlucky guy: two LA visits in a row, my hotel has been overbooked. And both times it's worked out well. Last visit the hotel put me up a couple blocks away for one night and then when I just mentioned the incident when I was checking into the first hotel again--really, not complaining, just talking about it in a cheerful manner--they moved me to a corner suite with a patio and a jazzuci tub. This time, I've been moved for all three nights I'm going to be here--but to the hotel I really wanted to be at, most convenient to my business here, but which was more expensive than our corporate rates. So, win.

Hey, my brother has fallen to #2 in his Movember fund-raising team. Would one of you handsome folks pony up $11 to put him back into the lead and justify our ridiculous faces?

We hiked up a real trail to a summit! Eliot cooked ribs in an actual fire pit! Movember!

Day 5, still in Tennessee. I really am shaving my chin, but the stubble there is darker than the ever-so-slightly longer whiskers in the moustache area.

Today I took my baby moustache up to the top of Chimney Tops in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee. Erica was super hardqore, making the 1,700 ft ascent nearly to the summit, even with her still-sore knee.

Movember greetings from Pigeon Forge, Tennessee! My brother, the one who's actually doing Movember, used to live in Knoxville and my visit here has nothing to do with him, but there you go.

This is also, I just noticed, my 3000th post here on this blog. Now, there are a lot of throwaway posts in that number and a time where I was having Delicious post links I had bookmarked and so on and so forth. But on the other hand, before I installed MovableType, I used to keep a sort of proto-blog on the home page of FuzzyCo where I'd manually keep four or five "news items" and when I'd add a new one at the top, I'd just delete the last one. So there are bunch of what would be blog posts that just disappeared into the ether. So, anyway, milestone. Hooray me. I'm not saying that you should go start with March 1997 and work your way forward to the present day, but hey, it's only 3000 entries.

I'm still shaving pretty far out from the whole horseshoe area to give myself plenty of options once you can finally see a moustache instead of just scruff.

Movember!

Normally, if I was going to grow a moustache, for a role or a bet or something, I'd just grow a full beard and then shave off the beardy part. But part of the point of an event like Movember is to go through all the embarassing parts of having a weasly little moustachlette on your face for a couple weeks. So already at day 2, there are choices to be made. I want to get into the spirit of things, so I want to keep the beard areas trimmed. But I don't want to cut too far into the moustache areas and end up with a splotchy or too-thin moustache. And what kind of moustache am I going for, anyway? I mean, I'll probably end up with the Ron Swanson by default, but it's fun to dream. I have pretty light-colored beard hair, especially when it's short, so it's a little hard to even see where I'm trimming at this length. So this morning I sort of waved the electric razor around my cheeks and throat and tried to stay well away from the lip area.

Yesterday, I looked like this:

which is, to an order of approximation, what I usually look like. Today, I look like this:

Does it freak out your sweet wife if you go into the bathroom as a crazy caveman and then come out a smooth-face face-guy without any advance warning? Answer: yes.

I've decided to do Movember, where by "do" I mean grow a moustache during the month of November and direct you to the fund-raising page of my brother who is actually participating in the men's cancer charity called Movember. Please do donate via him (and as always we encourage letting cancer know what you think of it).

So last month I did a photoshoot where I shaved off my beard and was clean-shaven for the first time in years. I thought about staying clean-shaven for a while, but Erica intimated that she'd rather I grew my beard back and so I started not-shaving right away. I've always said I can grow a beard fairly quickly, but I wasn't exactly sure how long it would take--so for a week I kept thinking I should document the growth. The compulsion was too strong and after a week I shaved down again, set up a little home studio and started taking a photo a day. About half of these Erica took and the rest are self-portraits with the timer (all the blurry ones are surely in the latter group).

I was going to go all wild and completely natural, but after just a week the neck beard was too itchy and so I started my normal beard-grooming. This is also the point at you can safely say that that's a beard and not just heavy scruff, so my future claim will be that I can grow a beard in a week. The whole project ended when I decided that I needed a haircut this weekend and the barber offered to trim my beard as well. It had been at the back of my head to maybe go for a nice, thick Grizzly Adams, but "yes, please" was out of my mouth and that was that.

And you know, thank goodness that I have a wife whose reaction to "hey, I put a masking tape box on the wall and some tape on the floor to mark my feet positions and where the tripod goes" is "Okey doke". That, and "we should stick the cats up there".

Other lessons from the month: I guess I really like plaid shirts and striped sweaters. And I forgot to mark off the vertical angle of the camera, so the whole thing sort of drifts downward (which I corrected for the video above).

Oh, and that cathcy tune in the video was composed by Phil Schuldt of Blackout Dates and SDS Trio for a different FuzzyCo web project that's coming Real Soon Now.

P.S. I was halfway through this project and the iPhone app Everyday was released which simplifies a lot of the process of taking photos like this and making little movies like the one above. Even if you're not interested in doing such a thing, check out the great intro video on their site.

Congratulations to my best friend on finding a wonderful woman who is willing to overlook his many and nearly-irredeemable faults.

So, this is a little weird. Usually I share everything with y'all, but I did something pretty big two months ago and hadn't blogged it yet. And it's not like I was hiding it in my day-to-day life—it's very visible to people who see me in person. But for whatever reason, I teased about it on Twitter and then… radio silence. Not to beat around the bush: I got a Chicago Flag tattoo on my left forearm.

I'm not a life-long resident of Chicago. My dad was in the Air Force and then worked for the DOD and we moved around a lot when I was a kid. When people ask where I'm from, I usually say "all over", or if I'm feeling a little more verbose, I rattle off the list: "Missouri, Maryland, Missouri, Maryland, Australia". When we came back from Adelaide, I went off to college in Indiana and ended up living in Greater Lafayette for an extra seven years after I graduated. And then, among other things, I got tired of driving up to Chicago every weekend to take classes at the Annoyance and moved up here in June of 1999.

As I started to approach ten years in Chicago, I started to think about getting a Chicago flag tattoo. I set myself a goal: not just live here for ten years, but also accomplish a major athletic endeavor in the city. Originally that was going to be the Chicago Marathon, but when that didn't work out, I ended up doing the Chicago Triathlon, which I think counts just fine.

I love this city, but I do also particularly love the flag. It's simple and clean, but also unique. Stripes of color and stars—you've seen that a thousand times before on flags. But check out those stars—they're a six-pointed star you won't see on any other flag. They're not Stars of David—those are made of two equilateral triangles. The stars get a little chubby in some implementations (the patches on cops' shoulders are probably the worst in that regard) but the original design is fairly pointy stars, with 30° points.

And you want symbolism? We got symbolism. The three white stripes are the three big sections of the city: North, South, and West. The two blue stripes are our water (there are various attributions of which is what, between Lake Michigan, the various branches of the Chicago River, and our canals). And the four stars are for major events in Chicago's history: the founding of Fort Dearborn, the Great Fire, the World's Columbian Exposition, and the Century of Progress Exposition. There was talk that if we had gotten the 2016 Olympics we'd have added an extra star. There are even, supposedly, meanings for each of the points of each of the stars, but that's stretching it a little, I think. "Salubrity"? Really?

The flag is also endlessly adaptable. I've seen dozens of designs for various organizations that replace the four stars with the logo or some symbol for the group.

But the design does present a few challenges for a tattoo. The fact that the top and bottom are both white to the edge—do you enclose the design in a black outline to indicate that? My favorite part of the design is the stars, but if you keep the original proportions, they're actually a fairly small part of the design. And I wanted to have this be my first really visible tattoo, so I had to figure out where that meant on my body.

I ended up deciding on the forearm, and on doing all four stars spaced equally around my arm. I reduced the blue bands to thin stripes and I decided that the white could be implied.

I have a nautical star on my thigh that I got 6 years ago and I'm still really happy with how crisp and clean it looks, so I wanted to try and have that artist, Rodney Taylor, do this one as well. And in a happy coincidence, Rodney was no longer at Tatu Tattoo, but is now working out of Speakeasy Tattoo, which is owned by Patrick Cornolo, who did my second tattoo.

I was having some trouble getting ahold of Rodney and so on Saturday, October 30, Erica and I stopped by Speakeasy to see if I could track him down for an appointment. We ended up chatting with some folks (and saying hi to Patrick, who remembered my tattoo!) and decided to just go for it (after all, I had already completed a second triathlon since I had decided to get this tattoo, and I sat down with Tine Defiore to get inked.

The tattooing went about as well as it always has for me. I think this was my longest tattoo session—we were there for two hour and a half hours and I did fade a little near the end, but managed to rally and make it through.

You want symbolism? I've got symbolism. The four stars, for me, are four of my big Chicago events: moving to Chicago, marrying Erica, doing those Triathlons, and getting this tattoo. That's right—I've got a recursively self-referential tattoo. And there's a bit of scarring in the blue bands, which I'm not going to lie, bummed me out a bit. But then I realized: that's my time in Chicago. It hasn't all been perfect. But the end result is something that I'm proud of.

[A bunch of pictures and two very bzzzy videos on Flickr.]

(Oh, and since it's winter, I haven't had it out in real public much yet, but I'm already getting ready to explain this tattoo for the rest of my life. The first day I was back at work after getting the tattoo, a co-worker who is a lifelong Chicago resident asked "what is that, an Israeli flag?" Oy vey.)

Hey, Erica and I are headed out on a vacation. A real, adult, no-shows-to-do, no-family-or-friend-obligations vacation! We're going to be in Hawaii for two weeks. So, things will be even quieter around here than they have been lately.

Normally, I'd be just a bit cautious about blogging that, you know, the whole "some super criminal is going to use your out-of-town Foursquare check-in and an accidentally geo-tagged photo from your house to come and rob you blind." But right now we have a vicious attack rabbit staying with us, so the house is even better protected than when we're at work all day.

Also, we've been enduring a low-grade, but steady, comment spam attack here on all the FuzzyCo Empire websites. So that we don't get overrun while we're gone, I'm going to switch all of our websites to require moderation, so any comments you leave won't appear until we're back.

See you in a fortnight!

On rather short notice, I have a new mobile phone number. If you have my 917-hoodle-etc number, toss it. If you need my new one, send me an email. Thx.

Toobin'? Anyone? Anyhoodle.

So our friend Stephanie wanted to go have an outdoor adventure of multi-day camping and such, but between everyone's schedules she just couldn't make it happen, so it got whittled down to a day of river-drifting-in-intertubes. And even still with schedules and threats of inclement weather, the guest list narrowed itself down to Stephanie, Noah, Amanda, Erica and me. Which turned out to be perfect, because we all fit in one car and so shared the same terrible jokes all day.

We drove up to Albany, Wisconsin and rented some inner tubes and cooler-tubes (the same size tubes as for people, but with a plywood bottom) from our new friends at S&B Tubing and Canoeing. The day was pretty foggy and then overcast until just when we arrived in Albany when it opened up into a gorgeous day.

It's about a 2 1/2 hour float from Albany to the pick-up point at the Sweet Minihaha Campground in Brodhead (about 8 miles by car).

The river was quite full of other canoers and tubers—we were rarely out of sight of another group or two. And despite several warning signs in the S&B shop that all land along the river was private property and that we should always stay in the river, we passed plenty of groups parked on various beaches along the way, some even with campfires. Erica points out that we don't know that it wasn't their land. True enough.

But even with all the traffic, our little clump of tubes was mostly to ourselves and we had plenty of time to drift, watch the sky, eat snacks out of our cooler and drink a couple-three beers.

(I've got this terrible little camera I picked up a few years ago, a Che-ez! Foxz2—the pictures are usually blown out, and the drivers are Windows XP-only, which is annoying in my Mac/Windows 7 setup—but it has a waterproof case, so I brought it along on the ride and snapped a few photos.) And Stephanie bought a disposable waterproof (film!) camera and took a roll.

How many of my friends are involved in this present? Johnny and Anne took a photo of me by Greg and inserted it into the beer label designed by Phineas. Thanks to all, however unwittingly, involved.

You're supposed to keep your résumé up to date every year or so, even if you're happy at your job. I was just reminded of that because I'm going for an acting audition tomorrow that wants me to bring my IT résumé (it's a longish story). So I was trying to get my résumé up to date tonight and realized that I haven't touched it in 5 years, and even that wasn't a very good update. So step one was just chopping out huge swathes of obsolete technologies that I had proudly listed I was fluent in. WebStar, anyone? 4D First? Yeesh.

FuzzyFest (which is to say, my birthday party) is tonight at my house. The short story on invites is that if you already know where I live, you're invited. See you there!

It's my fortieth birthday today and I have plenty of things I want to say about this milestone, but we're kind of slammed at work today and we're going out for a little dinner tonight (there's a bigger thing on Saturday at our house -- if you know where that is, you're invited :-) so I don't have time to capture all my thoughts right now. I'll just say that this is generally a time in one's life when you fugure you're on the road to a certain level of maturity. No one knows that better than my wonderful wife, which is why she got me these hats from The Crow's Nest:

It's my boringest tradition! In 2009 I did:

• 25 improv shows
• 6 comedy shows
• 3 standup appearances
• 5 storytelling shows
• 0 theatrical performances
• and 1 "other" shows

for a total of 40 shows.

I also read 41 books, saw 60 movies, and played 11 video games all the way through.

I biked 672 miles, swam about 23 miles, ran 379 miles, and completed a couple of 5Ks and the Chicago Triathlon.

I posted 1,811 photos on Flickr (331 of which were comics for my 366 Cartoons project), posted 1022 tweets, and made 497 blog posts here at FuzzyCo and another 13 at the Chicago Metblog.

Numbers from 2008 and 2007.

By now it's tradition: I've got some lists and charts and numbers I post each year, and since I'm not going anywhere tonight I can post my list of every city I spent the night in during 2009, with an asterix indicating multiple, non-consecutive stays.

Baltimore, MD
Biloxi, MS
Brooklyn, NY*
Chicago, IL*
Columbia, SC
Indianapolis, IN
Mattoon, IL
New Orleans, LA
New Stanton, PA
New York, NY*
Norfolk, VA
Phoenix, AZ
Round Rock, TX

Past years: 2008, 2007, 2006

Erica (and Parker) entered a video contest sponsored by Apartments.com with the subject "Roommate of the Year". They've reached the finals of the contest (yay!) and now it's turned into one of those annoying things where we have to ask you to go and sign up and return once a day to vote for her as the best. Don't you hate those kinds of contests? I know I sure do. But, we could win a year of free rent plus $10,000. So… Go vote! (Oh, and the video is pretty funny, too. She totally deserves to win.)

Update: Erica on the video.

Please welcome the newest member of the Gerdes household: General Sherman the Betta. His name has everything to do with his rather serious expression and this poster by Phineas that I've finally framed this weekend. Erica has already given him several nicknames, so we'll see what sticks.

The new rule around Team Gerdes is that if one of us says "We should …" and the other person says, "Yes, we should." then we do our best to just go do that thing.

So it was that this last weekend we found ourselves driving down to Kankakee River State Park, about an hour and a half south of where we live in Chicago, and riding horses.

It was $25 each for an hour-long guided ride, and it was well worth it. We rode most of the way in quiet, just soaking in the sounds and smells of the woods around us. The State Park Stables are run by Camp Shaw and everyone we dealt with was a peach. Afterwards we had a beer and lunch at BrickStone in downtown Borbonnais and it was a great topper to the afternoon.

At work today, some nice folks* got laid off which made the mood weird, as it always does. But no time to mourn, because I was off to another job where I'm editing some video game footage into a trailer. The trailer will have a contest associated with it, which puts some odd constraints on the way I'm constructing it, but I'm really happy with the second cut I just finished and for which I'm waiting, even as I type, to render out. The necessity of using Avid for this trailer puts different constraints in differently odd places -- oh sweet Final Cut how I miss you -- but miss you I will not for long, because when I get home I need to cut together some Goof Gang footage that Steve has asked me for for, well, probably a secret and I may have said too much already. Oh, not really, it's just that nothing will come of it, as it always does, until that day when lightning does strike. And then I need to get some sleep, for tomorrow I Layer Tennis. Noon CST, kids. Append #lyt to your twitters to discuss my awesomeness.

* No offense to the fine ones who've gone before, nor the folks today for whom I lack linkage.

So, I had a birthday party on Friday. It must have been fun, because as we were going through the photos tonight there were some things that I didn't remember happening. Good times. The things I do remember happening include:

Getting three pies from Hoosier Mama Pie Company. I love their motto -- "Keep Your Fork, There's Pie!" And I love their pies. We got an apple, a key lime, and a peanut butter. I think my favorite was the apple, but they were all good. (The pizzas were from Apart Pizza, who we also heartily recommend.)

Making all my friends do shots of Malört. My goodness, it's amazing that my friends still speak to me (and the photos make my party look a little more grim than it really was). We went through most of a bottle at the party.

I set out a pile of paper and pens and asked my guests to draw a cartoon of me. A bunch of people drew a bunch of great cartoons (you can see them at the end of this set). They're all awesome, but I want to point out the Coraline-inspired Other Fuzzy, Shauna's comic book, and me bopping everyone on the head with Malört.

In a number of the cartoons, I'm wearing a number 7 football jersey. That's because, as pictured above, Shaun gave me a number 7 Pittsburgh Steelers jersey (that is, quarterback Ben Roethlisberger) right at the start of the party. Shaun didn't give the jersey because I'm any sort of fan of the Steelers or Mr. Roethlisberger. It's because…

So during the Super Bowl party we had at Shaun's house a couple of people noted that Ben Roethlisberger looked a bit like me (like my "giant, bloated cousin" someone said). I didn't see him much in the game without his helmet on, so I wasn't sure what he really looked like, but whatever. The day after the game, I was looking at my Flickr stats (as one does) and noticed that a random picture had gotten 243 views the day before. Oddly, it was just the Now Me half of the Young Me, Now Me diptych I did last year -- the photos pick up views every now and then, but usually as a pair. I followed the referring stats and found that all the hits were coming from a Cleveland Browns fan forum where 'Chase1996' had posted that:

I was using StumbleUpon this evening (great plug in BTW) when I Stumbled on this Flickr page....is it me, or does he look remarkably like Ben Roethlisberger?

Browse through his photostream...several pics of him that I think pass for Ben....anyone else agree?

And that is why Shaun thought I needed a #7 Steelers jersey.

My low-key birthday party and you're invited. Details in a previous post.

Before receiving a staceyrebecca Joystick Finger Puppet

After receiving a staceyrebecca Joystick Finger Puppet

You can plainly see the difference. I suggest you get your own staceyrebecca-brand finger puppet. Or even better, do as I did and get given one for your birthday. It shouldn't be too hard to arrange. I mean, people like you, don't they? You're very likable.

The above face changes could also apply to before-and-after Hot Doug's for lunch, shopping at The Spice House, getting a great package from my parents, and eating at The Publican for dinner. It's been a great birthday. (Please join me Friday for my more-inclusive celebration.)

Happy Birthday to me, obvs, but a very Happy Birthday today as well to Don and Tim and tomorrow to Tricia, Lawrence, Karl, and Josette. (There are so many of us in this two day stretch, I feel like I'm missing someone. Sorry if you're my dear friend who I've forgotten today or tomorrow!)

FuzzyFest (my annual celebration of me!) has kicked off in the best way possible: with fried chicken and art.

This morning we helped -j-j- move into her new place and afterwards we were hungry and just down the street from my favorite for fried chicken, Crisp. We found miracle parking just around the corner and on the way to the restaurant we saw a new funky little store. In the window were some super cute paintings -- repurposed art with cute robots painted into landscapes. By the time we were done with our lunch, the store was open and we were able to a) find out the name of the place ("Haystack") and b) purchase one of the paintings. So we now own the left half of "Emerge" (above) by Andy Andy Andy. (Here's his Etsy shop.)

(Shirt designed by Chris Bishop.)

It's my birthday and I'm having a party!

Friday, Feb 6, 2009*. 7 pm til late.

There will be (good) pizza and beer and wine and Malört and whatever other drinks we dig out of the liquor cabinet. And pie. And maybe we'll play some board games or I'll make everyone draw a cartoon of me or something weird like that. Or you can just swing in and tell me how awesome I am.

We have two cats, so if you're allergic stock up on the Claritin (tm).

It's at our house, way up in the frozen north. I love all of you out on the internet, but, um, yeah, I'm not putting my address here. Shoot me an email if you can't remember where I live.

It's an open invite, so if you're talking to someone and say "Are you going to Fuzzy's party?" and they'll all like "What party?" and you're like "Awk-werd." you can just say "oh, you must not have read that blog post -- you're totally invited." and they'll say "Awesome!"

* I know some people care -- my actual birthday is Tuesday, February 3.

As I said last year, you make a chart like this and it seems a shame not to keep it up to date each year.

In 2008 I did:

• 54 improv shows
• 16 comedy shows
• 3 standup appearances
• 7 storytelling shows
• 15 theatrical performances
• and 7 "other" shows

for a total of 104 shows.

I also read 35 books, saw 61 movies, and played 9 video games all the way through.

I ran a paltry 7 miles this year.

I posted 2219 photos on Flickr, posted 783 tweets, and made 345 blog posts here at FuzzyCo and another 82 at the Chicago Metblog.

Numbers from 2007.

I like lists. I do. I know they're lazy ways to generate content, but I like the organizing and the feeling-like-I'm-getting-something-done. And I think doing something for three years makes it tradition, right? So the next few posts will be some of my now-traditional year-end looking back lists.

Here's every city I spent the night in during 2008, with an asterix indicating multiple, non-consecutive stays.

Charleston, MO
Chicago, IL*
Hollywood, CA
Kenosha, WI
Los Angeles, CA
Redmond, WA
Round Rock, TX
Vicksburg, MS
Wisconsin Dells, WI

Compare and contrast with 2007, 2006

Happy Thanksgiving from everyone at Team Gerdes HQ. If you're reading this, it's likely that we're thankful we know you.

I hew close to the rule "Don't Blog About Work". But, goodness, look at this fellow who seems to have anonymously written about a workplace that has no identifying details and yet the situation somehow speaks to me...

If you've talked to me lately and asked some ordinary social non-question like "how are things?" you've gotten TMI from me -- complainy, complainy. (Sorry, Chris, for dumping on you just tonight.) And that's very different than the usual Fuzzy-plan. Usually I strive to be relentlessly cheerful. I don't want to be fake, but it's usually worked for me in the past that if I talked positive, I could be positive. Lately, I've been down -- which isn't bad thing. But the bad thing is, I think, that I've been throwing it at people.

Tonight I was driving home and The Wombats' Let's Dance to Joy Division came on. It's a fun song, but the lyrics really struck me tonight:

Let's dance to Joy Division,
And celebrate the irony,
Everything is going wrong,
But we're so happy.

So, yeah. I need to dance around stupidly a little more. Things have been hard (though, they're getting better! Until they get worse again!) but that's no reason to be a grumpy gus. I've got the greatest wife in the world and a lot of fun stuff going on. And I've got my health (usually). And two weird cats. And a bunch of good TV to watch. Whee!

My experiences with marathon training last year convinced me that gradual athletic training really works -- I went from being a non-runner to making it 18 miles. Factor in that I'm a sucker for an internet challenge, and I just had to try the Hundred Pushups thing. Simply, it's a six-week program to train to do a hundred continuous pushups. I've just started the second week of the program and I can tell a difference. Soon I will be a giant muscle man! (Or... be able to do a few pushups.)

The only quibble I have with the program is that their charts are just a hair confusing. You do the inital test and that puts you in a "rank" which you immediately ignore. Just remember the number of pushups you could do from the test and that tells you which of three columns to look at when you look at the chart for each week. What they call a "level" on those weekly charts, I'd call a "rep" ("level" has nothing to do with the "rank") -- just figure out which vertical column you're in based on your initial number of pushups and then do that number of pushups in each repetition with the prescribed rest in between.

The problem is that this cat is too cute. She's one of the Mississippi cats, brought up from Erica's mom's place because she has a few too many cats at the moment. The three other cats have all gone to great homes -- Shannon has this little lady's momma cat.

The problem is that I've given her a name -- I'm not going to share it because that would make it real, but trust me, it's a clever name. And if I keep calling her this name and staring into those little kitty eyes, I'm going to want to keep her and then we'd have four cats. Four cats is too many cats for an apartment in Chicago.

The problem is that you haven't said you want to adopt her yet. Get on the stick, people! She's about a year old, fixed, has all her shots. She has a sweet disposition and likes being petted and scratched behind the ears, but she also seems to like just sitting and staring out the window.

You know, I love her more and more every day. Which is pretty astonishing, because I already loved her a lot.

I owe a bunch of people Christmas and Birthday thank you cards, but I owe one more to some anonymous person. I got a book in the mail today that must be just for me, but I have no idea who sent it. The Importance of Being Fuzzy - and Other Insights from the Border Between Math and Computers. So thanks, anonymous friend. I will, I'll shamefully confess, probably never read it, but I'll proudly display it nonetheless. (I can put it next to the copy of Life and Erica that I got Erica for Christmas.)

The 365 Days project challenges you to take a self-portrait a day for a year. I've been thinking about attempting it for a while, but I've sorta been looking for a good start-and-end date. I missed New Year's Day (not, perhaps, a good sign for the project) so I've decided to do birthday-to-birthday, inclusive. Add in the fact that this is a leap year, and I'll be doing my own personal 367 Days project.

I've got some ideas for fun kinds of self-portraits to take, but to keep it realistic, I've also set myself some rules:

The day isn't over until I go to sleep. I anticipate plenty of post-midnight "brushing my teeth and... ooops haven't taken a self portrait today, yet." Which leads to...

It's OK to suck. This whole thing is going to go down the tubes real fast if every picture has to be great. I'm going to start off with (as above) some crappy camera-held-at-arms-length photos just to get myself in the habit of taking one a day.

Failure is an option. If I miss a day, eh, it's a self-imposed goal. No one is going to cry over missed photos. If the whole thing does go down the tubes, oh well.

So day three of FuzzyFest 2008 was the big day -- my actual birthday. And I have to say it was a pretty great day. Erica and I met up with Shaun at the Little Corner Restaurant for my favorite breakfast (pork chops with two eggs-scrambled, raisin toast-buttered, grits, coffee -- 7 points in the Ordering Game). After breakfast, Erica surprised me by whisking me away to a massage and pedicure. On the way home we stopped at Metropolis and had a nice conversation with one of the roasters about their different blends and picked up some coffee for home and Erica's office. We made the tiniest effort to straighten up the house and then went out to dinner with some friends. Everyone came back to our place during the snowstorm for pie and coffee and kitty wigs. And then Noah stuck around afterwards to show Erica and I how to remix songs in GarageBand. How can you beat a day like that?

Thanks to everyone for all the kind emails and text messages and phone calls and Twitter shoutouts and Facebook wall writings and MySpace comments.

Day Two of FuzzyFest 2008 was both productive and chill. I knocked out two different video projects (links to come -- one has to wait for the client to post it, the other is secret until mid-day tomorrow), we went to a baby shower for Dan and Vicky, and I ran tech for Sickest Stories. But we also found time to knock out the last few episodes of Season 2 of Arrested Development and have a delicious breakfast and dinner. Tomorrow -- more meals with friends and pie. Pie!

FuzzyFest has kicked off this year with a great lunch with some of my workfriends at Bandera. The terrible weather we're having today actually worked in my favor -- I had been a little worried because Bandera doesn't take reservations for lunch and they're often pretty crowded. But today they were half-empty. Thanks, snow storm.

Thanks to the new bar at the Chicago Comedy Company Theater and Lillie's desire to have as many legal bartenders as possible, Erica and I are now Illinois BASSET* certified bartenders. Thanks to a two-hour online course and test we know all about Illinois liquor laws, how to cut off intoxicated customers, and how bad alcohol is for lil' fetuses, etc.

The online course was as laughably bad as you might imagine. Typos abounded: you should always check a "diver's license" because it might be "faudulent". There were videos about dealing with customers that I'm pretty sure were filmed in Wisconsin, for two reasons. One, in a video suggesting that you could "slow down" heavy drinkers by suggesting food or a glass of water, the girl responds to the suggestion of food by ordering some "cheese balls". And two, the actors' natural friendliness and affability is evident in every scene. In the one about cutting someone off, the 'drunk' says "I'd really like another drink" and when told "no" responds with two minutes of apologies about getting so 'crazy'.

One neat thing about this certification, other than the nifty certificates we got to print out ourselves at the end of the course, is that it marks the checking-off of a to-do item Erica and I have had since the start of our relationship. Back when we doing the chatting that turned into flirting that turned into going out, one of our recurring topics of conversation was Erica's casting about for a second job. She was thinking of picking up a bartender job somewhere and wasn't sure what sort of training or certification was required. I did the research and discovered that those hundreds-or-thousands of dollars 'bartender schools' are not required -- in Chicago you just need your BASSET license. So I offered to pay for the class and test for her birthday and take the test with her. Circumstances changed and we never did take the class, until now. So, oddly, sitting around on a Saturday afternoon taking online quizzes was somehow romantic.

* Beverage Alcohol Sellers and Servers Education and Training

While I was off getting other people custom cartoons, Erica was conspiring behind my back to get me a custom Laugh-Out-Loud Cats!

Well, it hasn't actually been a whole year since I had my LASIK surgery, but I had my 'one year' visit yesterday, ending my official follow-up period. My flaps looks great, I'm seeing 20/20 and from now on, my doctor said, my eye care is as though I'd never had LASIK -- an eye exam every two or three years. As I (rapidly) approach 40, presbyopia is going to kick in sooner or later and I'll need reading glasses -- ah, glasses, my old nemesis, you never remain far away, do you?

Anyone had a good experience with an oral surgeon in Chicago? Team Gerdes is looking for a recommendation. Leave a comment or email me, plz. Thx.

I've been doing this for a few years now -- constructing a quick year-in-review by just taking the first line of the first post from each month. It's obviously very superficial, and touches on few of the really big things that happened in my life year, but it's nearly tradition around here, so I'll let it stand.

January 2007: I saw the charts that Anil Dash and Tim Bray made of their blog archives, so I made one, too. more

February 2007: So I'm in rehearsals for this play. more

March 2007: I think the two things that mark this as a Hiaasen book for younger readers is that the cast isn't quite as huge as usual, there's no sex, and the ending is much more unambiguously happy. more

April 2007: Okami is, if nothing else, the most gorgeous video game I've ever played. more

May 2007: Lastlast weekend the Chicago Neutrino Project bundled into three cars (plus Dan down from Michigan and Alison flew up from Texas) and drove over to Oberlin, Ohio for the Oberlin Improv Conference. more

June 2007: Still in Mississippi. more

July 2007: Where all my Canucks at? more

August 2007: Well, there's that, then. more

September 2007: This morning I wandered around downtown Chicago taking pictures of the cast of WNEP's Soiree DADA as they... DADAed. more

October 2007: The Hot Kid exists at the intersection of Westerns (it's set in Oklahoma), gangster stories (it's the 30s), and true-crime fiction (in a touch of meta, one of the characters writes for those sorts of magazines). more

November 2007: The last-last time Erica was in Mississippi, Tricia gave her a "Ghost Hunter" camera to bring back -- a disposable camera that automagically* inserts "ghosts" into your photos. more

December 2007: Part of the reason I was so hard on Cascade Point, I've realized, was that it's in my least favorite segment of speculative fiction -- the future as a simple mapping of the past* -- the starship version of a tramp steamer is even called a "tramp starmer", which really rings hollow to my ears. more

You make a nifty chart like this one year and it seems a shame not to keep it up to date:

Black Butte Ranch, Deschutes County, OR
Chicago, IL*
Charleston, SC
Columbia, SC
Kenosha, WI
Las Vegas, NV
Oberlin, OH
Phoenix, AZ
Portland, OR
Salt Lake City, UT
Vicksburg, MS*

Here's every city I spent the night in during 2007, with an asterix indicating multiple, non-consecutive visits.

Compare and contrast with 2006

Whenever someone mentions that they're thinking of doing some therapy or counseling, I tell them, "I have a little saying about therapy. It's: 'therapy's great!'" I'm dumb, but I want to do whatever I can to help remove any stigma from f'ing going and getting some help for what ails you. You don't have to wait until you're dying to go to a regular doctor -- no one will look at you weird if you go in to the doctor to deal with some joint pain or a nagging cold or such. And just so, you don't have to be full-out crazy to go get some help from a professional about mental issues. If nothing else, having someone's whose job it is to listen to you complain -- what could be better?

I did some therapy a few years ago here in Chicago, not to fix anything major, just to kind of figure out where I was at. I figured some stuff out, and got some good tools for just dealing with things better. (My guy was great, and if you're looking for a recommendation in Chicago, I've got one. Especially if you're a guyish-guy. My guy had a bunch of baseball analogies and stuff that I could tell were aimed at making 'I'm a manly man, why am I in therapy' types feel more comfortable. Almost made me wish I cared about baseball.)

Heather Armstrong posted something really powerful today about her own experiences with therapy and brain-fixing drugs and says the same thing -- if you need help, go get it. Ain't no shame in that.

Thanks to everyone who offered help finding a new place. I'm happy to announce that we've signed a lease on an apartment. It's another of our Big Crazy Moves, as we'll be moving about half-a-mile northwest of our current place. (Our last move, you'll recall, was one-half-block south on the same street.) We'll be living on Magnolia Street, which is apropos as Mississippi is the Magnolia State. We've even got a two-week overlap between the leases, so we'll be moving between September 15 and 30. We're getting a lot of things on our wish list, including spaciousness, in-unit washer-and-dryer, and the peace and quiet of living west of Broadway. Look for a house-warming party when we're all unpacked in, say, April or so.

Hey, we're looking for a new apartment in the Edgewater area, if you happen to know of any. Now, we're not just looking for any old place -- we're trying not to think of it as running away from this place (although, we are, kinda) but as moving towards a better place (come to the light, Team Gerdes...). So we'd like to stay in this area, probably. The cats are coming with us, of course. Two bedrooms. Spacious would be great. Lots of storage. In-unit laundry and parking would be big pluses. We're leaning towards second floor and up. Sound like somewhere you know?

Update: Thanks, we're set.

Erica and I got married a year ago, on July 29, 2006. We celebrated by taking a day (and-a-half) trip to Kenosha, Wisconsin.

July 29, 2006 was also the day that my friend Anna Dufair died. She is missed.

Fuzzy Gerdes is really easy to find, but if any of my pre-college friends were trying to find me, they'd be looking for Erik Gerdes. So I thought I'd leave a little Google-bait here with some biographical info that might help people find me.

I'm not the one other Erik Gerdes in the U.S. who is now a doctor in Illinois and who went to Case Western Reserve. Neither am I any of the 16 Eric Gerdeses. But it probably doesn't hurt to put "Eric" on this page for people who can't remember how I spell my name.

I went to 3rd through 9th grades in Columbia, Maryland and attended Talbot Springs Elementary School, Owen Brown Middle School, and Hammond High School. If I had stayed in the US I would have been Class of 1988.

10th through 12th grades I went to Pembroke School in Kensington Gardens, South Australia. I attended one trimester at Adelaide University and then came back to the states and went to Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. I graduated with a degree in computer science in Class of 1992.

Some friends of mine that I've tried to find, just to bait their names, include:
Cate Rogers
Danielle Poulos
Eric Fisher
James "Murph" Murphy

If I'm the Erik Gerdes you're looking for, you can email me or check me on MySpace or Facebook if that's more your speed.

Lawrence came to visit 100 years ago (in internet time, anyway) and it was very nice to see him. The end.

P.S. We went saw this and this happened.

I had my three month eye checkup and everything is fine. My flaps, as before, are perfect. I've still got halos at night, but I think I'm just noticing them less (and my doctor keeps saying he's confident they'll get better with time -- which he's been saying from the start). I can see 20/20, albeit not as crisply as with my glasses. My eyes still get tired after 3/4 of a day of staring at the computer. And a bug flew into my eye the other day, which is something that never happened when I wore glasses, so that's a new experience of post-LASIK eyes. Whee!

For her birthday, some of Erica's friends got together to get her a house-call massage (from an old friend of hers, as it happens). And Erica figured that since Nia was going to be at the house anyway, that she'd give me a nine-month's anniversary present of a massage as well. So what could be better than waking up on a warm and sunny Sunday morning to get a massage in your own living room? Well, I'll tell you what's better -- I'm not really a fan of that standard wind-chimes-and-flute music that's common to the massage and spa world, so I asked Nia if I could pop in something of my own and I got my massage to the Kings Of Convenience's Versus. Remixes of gentle Norwegian pop is, seriously, one of the most relaxing things I can think of.

And congrats, Steve and Becky.

These numbers are not that impressive (except for that Max Speed -- the Geko glitches like that every now and then), but it's my first ride of the year, and so I share so that it will be more impressive when I get my speed up in a few weeks.

I have this crazy idea to run a Marathon this year. I'm not sure why -- I don't really like running. But it seems like a such a iconic "life achievement" that I kind of feel like checking it off. Annnd, the Nike + iPod kit could make it all a giant numbers game, which I do totally love (see the photo above).

I had my one month checkup today -- my doctor says that my flaps are fine, I'm seeing 20/20 (although not crisply - that should come with more healing), and that it's normal to still see halos at night (50% of people see halos at one month, he said, and 10% at 3 months). So again, more patience, use artificial tears, and blink completely.

Since I don't need my corrective lenses any more, I sent some of my glasses to my godkids, who were able to put them to good use.

One of the reasons I chose to do my LASIK at Northwestern was that their office is two blocks from my work -- so if, at anytime during the day I got, say, panicky about something in my eye and whether it was my flaps coming off or whatever, I could just walk over there and have them check it out. Which I did this morning. So, yeah, my corneal flaps are not coming off.

I had my one week followup visit today. My corneal flaps are "perfect", my eyes are "on the right track", and I can clean my eyelids of the goop left there by the steroid eyedrop I was using.

"Blink completely," is advice my doctor gave me about working at a computer, post-surgery, but it keeps resonating in my brain like it's some important life lesson. I'm not sure what it means other than its literal meaning, but yes, blink completely.

Last night I woke up in a panic twice because I had unconsciously put a knuckle up to my right eye to give it a good rub. I think (I hope) I got as far as applying a gentle pressure before the higher level "you're not supposed to do that" thought processes kicked in.

Halos certainly make the city at night look more exciting.

I ordered a pair of cheap glasses with flat lenses so that I can, if desired, be the 'old Fuzzy' every now and then.

I was a little worried about my fight in Rogue 8 (no contact sports for 2 weeks, my care sheet says) and I was a little tentative at fight call on Friday. But we didn't do the fight on Friday (it's in one of the optional scenes) and on Saturday it was fine.

I'm rather surprised, given how eye-phobic I am, but even after this short amount of time I've gotten really good at popping eye drops in. Drop drop drop. I'm a freakin' eye drops master.

I'm realizing that I need to be patient. Which I'm not. For the last 30 years, if my vision was blurry, I put on my glasses and, instantly, everything was clear. Now, everything is just a little blurry all the time and there's no glasses to fix it. (I tried putting on my old glasses and, woah nelly, that's blurry.) Patience and rest, Fuzzy. (Oh, and maybe don't watch so much TV -- I just finished Season 2 of Doctor Who and now I'm barreling through Torchwood. (How did Captain Jack get off Satellite Five and back to the 21st Century? Is this known?))

For the record (and because I'm terrible at remembering this sort of thing) my prescription was right eye -4.5, left eye -3.5. I went to the Northwestern Laser Vision Center and my doctor is Dr. Basti. I've been telling people that I went to Northwestern because of their "world class reputation," but a big part of going there was that it's a few blocks away from my work (I'm laaaazy). I chose to do IntraLase (meaning that they cut the flap in the cornea with a laser instead of a tiny blade) and Custom LASIK (which means, as far as I can tell, that you pay them to do a more complete job. Seriously.). Your mileage, as always, may vary.

Yesterday morning, Erica and I got up and had breakfast and took the train down to Northwestern. (When they were telling me how I should prepare for the surgery they said, "Eat what you normally eat for breakfast, because we want you to have something in your stomach for the valium." "I normally have a cup of coffee for breakfast," I said, "so I'll make sure to eat something.") There was some paperwork to fill out including, oops, the consent forms listing all the possible hideous side effects. They had given me copies of those months ago during the initial consult and, really, you don't want to be reading those for the first time minutes before your procedure. I also had to pony up several thousands of dollars. I've put the money away in my Medical Flexible Spending Account at work (pre-tax! taken out of my pay check in manageable chunks!) but I have to pay upfront and then get reimbursed from my FSA, so I had signed up for financing (12 months interest free!).

So once I'd signed my life away, they gave me a valium and then, after we'd waited in the lobby for just a little while longer, they brought us into an exam room and then things started happening pretty quickly. I had just sat down in the exam chair when they popped me back out and took me into the procedure room. They laid me down on a special chair and gave me a teddy bear to hold onto (and that teddy bear got squoze, I tell you). Numbing drops in the eyes, and then Dr. Basti put a disk right onto each eye in turn and cut the flap with the IntraLase. (It's the pressure from that disk that caused the pretty noticeable clot in my right eye, not any of the lasers.) Interestingly at this step, I'm not sure if it was from the pressure or the laser, but everything was black and I could see little tiny dots of color, almost like static. It was, in the midst of all this somewhat frightening procedure, pretty cool.

Then, for each eye again, Dr. Basti put an ocular speculum (as Kenner pointed out tonight, wouldn't it be fun to hear Sean Connery say that? Ocularrr Speculuuum.) in the eye (think, though much nicer than this, A Clockwork Orange) carefully pulled back the flap and then let the laser pop-pop-pop away part of my eye to (customly) shape it. Then he gently laid the flap back down and went on to the other eye. And then I was out of there. In all, I was in the procedure room less than 20 minutes.

We took a cab home and I went right to bed. ("I just got up, I don't know if I'm going to be able to... zzzzzz.") I got up an hour later to have a quick panic attack and then slept for most of the day. Erica gave me a little blue dog to hold onto that she had used when she had her major life-changing elective surgery, and she stayed home from work all day to bring me glasses of water whenever I woke up and answer people's email all day about how I was doing. My sweet Florence Nightingale. Last night she watched A Prairie Home Companion and I lay on the couch facing the wrong way and listened to it -- it was much like listening to the radio show. ("I don't know if I'll be able to get to sleep tonight, I mean I was asleep all day and... zzzzzz.")

Today I slept late and then went in for my 24-hour checkup. "Looks fine," was the official prognosis. My right eye is seeing much clearer than my left, which makes everything a bit blurry and disorienting, but I went to work afterwards and I was able to get some stuff done. And I can see well enough to type all this. And lights at night have nice big halos around them. Hmm... I'm sure there's more, but it's time to rest my eyes. Gotta let them heal.

FAQs:
1. No, it never hurt. It was freaky, but there was never pain.
2. That white stuff in the corners of my eye is from the steroid eyedrop I'm using and I can't wipe it away because I can't touch my eyes for a week.

The laser robots did not burn a hole through my head. But, as my sweetheart is reminding me, I should be asleep right now (doctor's orders) and certainly not staring at a computer. Thanks for all the well wishes from the well wishers.

To mark his 40th birthday my friend Lawrence is blogging 40 quotes that have some importance for him. Today's quote harks back to a time that was milestoney for me as well -- the first time I was a professional actor, the first time I (co-)wrote a piece of theater of any real length, the first time I bought a 50-lb bag of popcorn.

My sweetheart is giving me two great gifts for Valentine's Day.

For one, she let me order a new iPod. My last one broke months ago and I've been limping along with some half-ass solutions (an old 256 MB MP3 player, my PSP, etc). I'm pretty sure it's just the harddrive, but as I went to order a replacement, it was going to be in the $100+ range and I'd still be warranty-less. So, I'm getting a brand-new black 30GB iPod. Video! 2 years of Apple Care!

And for another, tomorrow on Valentine's Day itself, robots are going to shoot lasers at my eyes.

Which is to say that I'm getting laser corrective surgery. In my eyes! Lasers!

I am simultaneously excited (I've been actively planning this for a year and a half now) and terrified (I use my eyes a lot). I'm very confident in the procedure and the staff at Northwestern Laser Vision Center, but the most important question is "will I still be as cute and lovable without my geeky glasses?"

As a follow-up to his interview of me, Bilal has answered my questions.

Lawrence and Emma and Simon breezed through town and I was able to join them for lunch at Union Station. I am fortunate, indeed, to have such delightful godchildren.

Bilal Dardai (playwright, Neo-Futurist, married man) is doing one of those things -- the Interview Meme -- on his LiveJournal.

Rules are as follows: You comment on this entry requesting an interview. I respond with five questions. The questions will theoretically be tailored to you based on what I know of you (or want to know). You copy and paste those questions into your own journal, and write the answers, along with these rules. Anyone wanting an interview from you continues the game by requesting an interview from you.

So here are the questions he asked me and my answers to the same:

1) You always strike me as a very even-tempered individual. Have you always been as such, or did you have to actively cultivate this demeanor? Is there anything that can get you truly, truly angry?

Yes, yes, and yes. I was going to say I've always been pretty calm, but I realized that "neurotic" would probably be a better way of describing the demeanor of my youth. I've been actively pursuing sanguinity for a number of years now (FuzzyCo motto #6: Therapy is Great!). But get me tired and grumpy or show me great injustice and you'll hear some cursing. I'm not proud to admit it, but the number one thing that really gets me swearing-and-shaking furious is frustrating sections of video games. I have, to my shame, flung controllers.

2) Is there any job/career besides your own you've always wanted to try?

In my youth I wanted to be a forest ranger.

In my adulthood I've wanted to try everything. And I do dabble in a lot of different things. I used to be a handy-man for rental units, and a bookkeeper for a headshop, and a graphic designer (all at the same time). These days I do a little programing, a little web design, a little photography, a little video-editing. And there are seriously times when I'm on the train and there are the ads that the CTA is hiring train repairers and I really wonder how long it would take to get trained in hydraulic systems repair and what it would be like to have that job. Could I be a cop? A teacher? I think about that all the time.

3) List your five all-time favorite video games; defend your choices if you think they need defending.

In alphabetical order:

Galaga
Karateka
Monkey Island (the first three)
Samba de Amigo
Tony Hawk (all versions)

4) Is there a show you've produced that you're proudest of? How about a show you've performed in?

In the summer of 1995, my friend Matt Martin decided he wanted to direct No Exit. I was already producing a bi-weekly 'coffeehouse' music event at the Wesley Foundation (the Methodist Campus Ministry), so we somehow managed to convince people that Sartre's examination of hell would be an appropriate summer production for The Wesley Players. It was my first time producing theater, and I was the technical director as well, so I'm proud that the show went off at all. But I'm also really proud that we sold out our entire run* and that we came in on budget and made a tiny ($5) profit.

I think I'm proud of all the times I've taken risks and gotten on stage and done something new (new to me, anyway).

* To increase the claustrophobia for the audience, we put the audience on stage and built a stage on the floor -- so we only had 35 seats. And our run was three shows in one weekend. So 'sold out' was 105 patrons.

5) In a best case scenario--that is, you went when you wanted to, how you wanted to, and everybody was okay with that--describe your funeral.

Goodness, what a question. We've been trying not to think about funerals in the Gerdes household, but here goes:

When my grandma Ahlrichs died, she wanted (and we had) a memorial service, not a funeral. Her body wasn't there (in fact, it was in rural Iowa, so the nearest crematorium was hours away and she was somewhere in transit while we were having the service. It was, at some level, just a big family get together and people kept saying (and then catching themselves), "we should do this more often." So, something like that. Oh, and play Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy's I Only Have Eyes For You.

With a collective "No way!" we discovered that our friends Patrick and Jenny also went as Timm Gunn and Heidi Klum for Halloween. And Jenny just started working at the Goodman, where Erica worked for 5 years. So, basically, we're the same people, just time shifted. Which is great, because they're awesome people to be.

Congrats to Beth and Kyle on the arrival of Pierce Alexander Kolbe, 8 lbs 9 oz and 21 inches.

Yeah, we got him that hat. The drool is all Izzo, though.

We're back in town, rested and refreshed from the honeymoon -- the first honest-to-goodness vacation I've taken in years. For the next few days, all the activity will be over on the wedding blog as we post pictures, wedding and honeymoon stories, pictures, and more. And pictures. Thanks to the digital age, we've got lots of pictures.

Dammit.

I'm getting married in 13 hours! Whee!

Hey, if you're coming into town for our wedding, please let us (and others) know your itinerary, so that meetups can happen.

photo by Erica Reid

Our friends' lives are very baby-ful right now, and on Sunday we got a chance to go meet one of these new little new people: Faelyn McGuire.

Our friend Caitlin exactly nails the essential nature of Erica:

I just had lunch with my friend Erica. She is, hands down, the nicest person I know. Its like she's made of snow ponies and pixie dust. Like she'll take your hand and you'll be transported to a magical world made of candy and dream-sparkles.

Happy Birthday to my one true love. I asked this guy if he wanted to say "Happy Birthday" also,

but he's just sitting there eating a calzone!

Luke, Amelia, and Nana (that is, my mom). Photo by Don Gerdes.

Today at 3:30 pm Luke Anders Gollub was born to my sister and her husband. He's huge: 9 lb 7 oz. Congrats Heidi and Marc (and Amelia and Jake) and happy birth-day Luke.

Katie and Christopher have the latest news about Erica's dad.

... but I don't want to make a big deal out of it.

Ha ha ha, that is a lie.

Of course I want to make a big deal out of it! Whee! It's my birthday!

It is also Don Hall's birthday and Tim Whetham's birthday. And Joey Bishop, Morgan Fairchild, and Nathan Lane. And no longer with us, but James Michener (probably), Norman Rockwell, and Gertrude Stein were all born on February 3, also.

So... come see my show tonight and I'll probably be having a quick one at the Spoke afterwards. And then come to my party tomorrow night. Yay!

Am I allowed to say that we had a terrible New Year's Eve? Nobody at work seems to know what to say when I respond to their cheery "How was your New Year's?" with an honest, "Terrible, actually."

It started out all right -- we got a bunch of errands done during the day and then laid down to take a nap, foolishly forgetting to set an alarm. Fortunately, we woken up by a phone call from Erica's mom just in time to get dressed and get to Dan and Victoria's wedding. They got married in a very touching ceremony (I have photographic proof) and then we all headed to the reception.

Where I proceeded to get rather violently ill. Erica had had a couple drinks, so our rock-star friends Ryan and Laura drove us home. Erica took care of me for a few hours until she started to show signs of the illness (food poisoning? stomach virus?). The rest of the night is a blur of trips to the bathrooms, snatched moments of sleep, and the thumping of Now That's What I Call Music Vol. 7 coming from the party that raged in our downstairs neighbor's place until 6 am. Oh, and the smoke -- they smoked so much downstairs that it was smoky as a bar in our place.

Anyway, thanks are also due to Kate for bringing us a morning delivery of Gatorade and popsicles and Shaun and Kristen for the evening delivery of more Gatorade and BRAT. And to Danny O'Brien for posting the make-it-at-home recipe for ORT on his website so many years ago.

So... Happy New Year!

My favorite Canadian, my brother-in-law Marc, is now a US citizen. Whee!

Mom says: "We went to San Antonio today to Marc's naturalization ceremony. It was great. 460 people from 66 countries became US citizens. Was so glad I got to go."

As a side effect of moving FuzzyCo to Dreamhost earlier this year, I had this domain ericaandfuzzy.com just lying around doing nothing except pointing to FuzzyCo (which wasn't very fair to the "ericaand" part of the domain. And then Erica and I announced our engagement. So what better to do than start a wedding blog? Nothing, that's what.

Our friend Frankie Janisch has had a rough couple of years. A former performer and business manager at the ImprovOlympic, his real passion was food (though he combined both loves in his Taint shows and his stints on the Food Network.) Back in 2001 he opened his own restaurant and small theater -- Frankie J's on Broadway (with the MethaDome Theater -- named after the methadone clinic the space was for a while) -- and immediately ran into trouble with the Sheet Metal Workers Union. And then there was the ongoing, would-be-funny-if-it-wasn't-my-friend, fiasco of trying to get his liquor license on a dry block.

Well, after giving it the good fight for far longer than most of us would last, Frankie J's has been closed for the last couple of months. Shaun had a drink with Frankie last night and wanted me to pass this along:

Frankie is doing well. The restaurant and theatre closed. Yes. All the bureaucratic paperwork and city rules and "shenanigans" going on in the city caught up with him. He thanks all the well wishes he has gotten. He is avoiding e-mail and phone for a while. But he hears about the support and is grateful. BUT Frankie is not gone. Frankie will be back in the spring with more and bigger things. Watch for things coming this spring.

Thanks for the kind words from Chris and Noah and Hixx and Dan and all the folks at the Chicago Improv Network and all the commenters here and all the emails and the card from Kate R. and Jose for being too excited to type so he called as soon as he read the news here.

I left off that last post a little abruptly... I had to go run meet the plumber, who, once again, did not show up. Sigh. So then we had to go to a free gin and gadgets event and drink a bunch of gin. Whee!

So, to answer your first question, Fall 2006. We still need to pick/find a venue, which will influence the exact date.

And I like to say "we've announced our engagement" rather than "we're engaged now" because we had decided a few months ago that getting married would be a grand idea. But we thought it would be good to wait until after the move and we got things more settled around the house and our lives before we announced anything. And we wanted to go get a ring, but there just hasn't been time...

So we were going to visit my family in Texas for Thanksgiving and we decided that it would be good to tell them while we were down there. Saturday night at dinner we did just that and everyone was very happy and Mom had a great time introducing Erica as my fiancee at church the next morning. Monday morning my dad took me aside and asked if we were having an artist friend design a ring or some other big plan like that. No, we just really haven't had time. "Well," he offered, "would you like your grandmother's ring? She never had an engagement ring, but it's her 40th anniversary ring. It'd need to be resized..." Would I? And how!

I carried the ring around with me all afternoon in my pocket. I thought about keeping it a secret until we got back to Chicago and making a big production of it, but I knew I couldn't wait that long to share it with Erica. So when we got back to my parents' house from lunch, I asked Erica to come sit with me on the backporch. It was just a little chilly (for Texas, that is -- it was probably 65° or so) and we cuddled up together on a lawnchair and my mom brought us out some blankets. We just held each other and talked about things for a while and then I asked her to reach into my pocket (I wasn't trying to be cute, we were all crammed together in that lawn chair and I couldn't reach into the pocket myself). She reached in, but all she was finding were receipts. "What am I looking for?" she asked. A little box, I said. Well, she knew right away what it was and she was, I'll say, delighted. And I was, too. And then we took a nap :-)

I think we got the best of both worlds -- we had mutually decided on getting married (I really think the whole "waiting for him to pop the question" thing is ridic.) but I also got to surprise Erica, if not with a proposal, with a ring.

Delightful... that's what it is. Erica makes me happier than I ever knew I could be, and so I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, but this gives me a chance to announce that to everyone, and that fills me with delight. Yay! And then we get to get married! (Well, next we get to plan a wedding...)

Well, we had a great time in Austin, and I took a bunch of pictures of cute nieces and nephews and brothers and sisters, but the big news is that ring above -- Erica and I announced our engagement to my family. We were going to wait until Christmas to tell her family in person (and so I had to maintain blog-silence -- Hi Tricia!) but she couldn't wait and so we called them last night.

Super thanks to Noah (first one up), and Robin and his two friends (Kate's friends in town for SOFA, helped out just because), and Dan, Victoria, Ryan Dee, Ben, Rebecca, Leslie, Mel, Brandi, Shaun for the truck, and Jin (Sunday clean up crew). They all helped turn the picture above into... well, the same sort of pile of boxes, but half a block south. (Minus the Galaga stand-up -- that was the one thing of Shaun's in the dining room.)

We're making excellent progress unpacking, and we'll have you all over soon.

"Party" probably more in the sense of "search party" or "Scott directed his party to push on for the South Pole," but we'll certainly have beer and pizza.

Saturday, October 29. Exact times still flexible, but since we're moving half a block, it won't be hard to find us at one house or the other. If you participated in the Great Moving Disaster of Feb '04, rest assured that Erica and I are already packing.

Update: I've gotten at least one confused email -- this is a daytime help-us-carry-boxes-and-couches "party." What most people would just call "moving".

And after staying up late with Andrew, we slept in a bit on Sunday morning and then went and signed a lease on a new place. Erica and I are moving half a block down the street from what is now Shaun's place. Moving party soon. Very soon.

No Change, which is good.

From Austin, Mum Gerdes reports that the town is full of Austin City Limits attendees and Houston evacuees, and so the town is out of food and gas, but that otherwise everyone is fine.

From Vicksburg, Momma Reid reports, "I'm here in Chicago!"

Erica says: "I just talked to mom, and they got their electricity back this morning, which is quite a relief. They had a couple of rough nights--mom slept outside last night and dad has been sick from treatment and the heat. One of the people staying with them is leaving today to stay with one of her kids; the couple staying with them may be there for a while, cause they don't have a place to go home to. But they are staying strong. Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers--they do work!"

Katie posted an update on Erica's parents, the summary of which is "they're OK".

(Chicagoans should read "Erica's parents" for "Chris' parents" in the post.)

Dagnabbit

One of the first things of Erica's we moved into the house was Parker. It's been interesting as the cats get adjusted to each other. Mustapha, as expected, wants to be friends with Parker, who is slowly warming up to him, and Latte... well, I guess Parker is lucky Latte can't use a knife, otherwise she'd probably shiv Parker in the sunroom.

It's been a little worrying that all three cats seem to be eating Parker's weight loss cat food. Neither Mustapha nor Latte really needs to lose any weight. I hauled each cat onto the scale to check out where they were:

It's such a tidy geometric procession of weights, it's a little weird. I think I'll stop using pounds and just talk about the cats' weights in terms of Lattes, as in "Parker weighs about 4 Lattes".

Oh, and thinking of other made-up units, I'll point out that the house is steady at a CCI of 1. (CCI = Cat Craziness Index. Having any cat makes you crazy, but how crazy is determined by dividing the number of cats in the house by the number of people. If you say "do you mean humans, because cats are people," multiply your CCI by 2.)

It's Master Disco, now! (My brother successfully defended his Master's Thesis this morning.) Congratz, D!

Cue the elephants. Assemble the brass band. Let's get a parade started -- I have ordered bookshelves.

If you've visited the house in the last year (which is to so say, ever since we moved in) you know how big a deal this is. Last year when we had to move out of the old place rather suddenly, one of the casualties was 5 or 6 bookshelves -- the books went into the storage unit, but the bookshelves were left at the old place.

When we moved into the condo, we decided that the room that would, for most people, be a dining room would be our library. And the boxes of books got stacked in that room and I started a search for the perfect shelving system to maximize the use of space in that room. Well, a year later and I realized that the perfect was never going to happen, and that I was using the space in the least efficient way possible as long as it was filled with boxes. So I went to 57th Street Bookcase & Cabinet and ordered a pretty good bookcase solution. In six to eight weeks, we'll have a usable room. (Bum-bum-bump-a-bum) (That's the brass band starting up)

A neat thing about our modern internety-webbly world, is that sometimes you can get little questions answered, little connections made. A couple of weeks ago Florida Cracker posted a picture of a giant carving of "Remember Duane Allman" on a roadside in Vicksburg, Mississpippi and wondered about the story behind it. Somehow, one of Erica's friends came across the post and left a comment that he knew part of the story, because he knew that Erica's dad was one of the "sculptors" of the carving. He passed the link along to Erica's family and now Erica's mom has added to the story. Maybe we can get Erica's dad to write up a complete account of the saga of Remember Duane Allman.

Update: Florida Cracker's update with a bigger picture
Update 2007: The Vicksburg Post did a big story on the carving, which prompted more memories and photos to be dug out.

Here's me and some friends on July 23, 2001 near the top of Mount St. Helens. (The banner, which someone else had made and loaned us for our picture, lies. This is near the top but not at the summit. Mary and I were the only ones from our group who made it to the summit that trip.)

Mount St. Helens has been grumpy for some time and had a big burp today.

1. Total amount of music files on your computer:
   
   According to iTunes: 34474 songs, 106.3 days, 165.02 GB. I just completed merging my collections from 3 different harddrives, so there's probably 10 GBs or so of duplicate songs in there that I need to weed out (thanks iTunes' Show Duplicate Songs feature).



2. The last CD you bought was:
   
   Andrew Bird's The Mysterious Production of Eggs. (Lemon Jelly's '64-'95 and Latyrx's Album came in the same box from Amazon, but The Mysterious Production of Eggs was the last one I added to the shopping cart.)



3. What is the song you last listened to before reading this message?
   
   Hmm... here I'll have to confess that I read this meme a few days ago and saved a draft post with the questions until I had a few minutes to get around to answering it. Before sitting down to write this, the last song I heard was Sarah Hudson's "Girl on the Verge," from Epsiode 4 of Project Runway, where they design a rock-star outfit, because Erica and I were catching up on the early episodes we'd missed before the big finale on Wednesday.



4. Write down 5 songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you.
   
   
   • "Romper Stomper" -- Dogrocket. My friend Phil, of R. Buzzy, recorded an album and a half of nifty cut-and-paste-and-sample songs that I just keep listening to over and over. I love them all, but I've used Romper Stomper in a couple of video projects because it's so upbeat.
   • "1999" -- Asylum Street Spankers. "Life is just a party and parties weren't meant to last."
   • "Low And Sweet" -- Green Keepers. Sometimes a song, usually a cheerful one like this one, just gets stuck in my head and I listen to it over and over over. A sweet little electro-swing number.
   • "Jump Around" -- House of Pain. This is the official Bare theme song, partly because it's one of the few songs Shaun and I can agree on.
   • "I Only Have Eyes For You" -- Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy. I think this is my favorite song ever. The way it builds. The slow, sassy, subtle horns. Damn. I put it on just now and the first 30 seconds just get me, and then it keeps going and building for 10 minutes more.
   • P.S. You can see all what I've actually been listening to on my AudioScrobber profile.
   
   
   
5. Who are you going to pass this stick to? (3 persons) and why?
   
   We have to pass it off? Umm... Kittyloaf, because she's my meme-buddy. And Erica, because she cares about music a lot. And, umm... everyone on the Chicago Metroblog, for no reason at all. Whew.

[saw it via Warren Ellis, did it after I saw it at Laurenn McCubbin]

And speaking of birthdays, Erica's parents noticed how taken I was with the Illinois Monument, so they gave me this Illinois Monument jar (a giveaway from the Vicksburg Bank Centennial) for my birthday.

It's filled with peppermint bark and pecans, which are not 100 years old.

I spent my birthday out-of-town and so did Kate, so for the last couple of weeks I've been trying to organize something with her to have a joint birthday-in-Chicago thingy. She's been really lame about getting back to me, so I had pretty much written it off. Turns out, she was avoiding the issue because Erica had organized a surprise birthday dinner for me on Friday night.

Surprise!

It was in the Pope-room at Buca di Beppo, and OK... I knew something was up, and when we got off the train at Belmont and started walking south I remembered that Erica had asked me out of the blue a few months if I liked Buca. But I was expecting a table with 4 or 5 friends, not 16 people jammed around a huge table with a lazy-susan-mounted pope bust. I got to sit in the throne-chair and drink lots of 3-liter bottles of chianti. (Like Mark said, "You can tell it's good, because it's cold.")

Thanks Erica, thanks friends, thanks pope.

Once a year or so I start to think, "why do I go Starbucks et al and pay so much for so-called "good" coffee. Coffee's just coffee, right?" And then I go, like I just did, and get a cup of the free coffee in the lunchroom.

Blech! Ick! What horrible, horrible stuff!

This is a hard choice?

Damn Andy Ihnatko, 17th most beloved technology pundit, for proving to me how much of a geek I am.

Today, Andy described a 1954 movie which, evidently, contains the most erotic moments on film, ever, and gave us the heads up that it would be on Turner Classic Movies this evening at 5:30 PM (EST).

And my first thought was, "but that's when I have the Tivo set to record the World Juggling Federation competition on ESPN2."

Sigh. Whatever pretentions I make to urbanity and suaveness, and when push comes to shove I can't decide between sex and juggling.

And then I remembered that Shaun has a Tivo, too, and I could tell it, over the internet, to record the movie, and then later transfer it over our home network to my Tivo. Which is it's own whole set of geekiness.

I am doomed.

I'm sitting on a plane on the runway at LaGuardia, a victim of the warm weather you've been having for the last few days while I've been in drizzly, chilly New York. (Chicgao is 61� right now, but the temperature drops 30� over 150 miles and that steep difference is causing extreme weather all over Illinois.) We've been on the plane for two hours so far and we won't have an update about whether or not we'll head for Chicago tonight for another hour.

But at least I'm better off than the guy sitting behind me. He's been talking on a cell phone to a friend of his his sister, psyching himself up for a conversation with his girlfriend(?) where he's anticipating her blaming him for being late on purpose, and then getting mad because she'll have to pick up the rental car they need to get to his sister's wedding tomorrow. Which he can't pick up because he lost his driver's license in Mexico. (Lost, or lost?) He just said, "I might as well just get up and announce to everyone on the plane that this is my fault, because that's what Shirley*'s going to say."

----

We taxied back to the gate so that people who wanted to get off the plane could do so. Most of us decided to stick it out -- the weather can't be bad forever, can it?

Meanwhile, the guy behind kept up a steady cycle of calls to his sister, American Airlines (to check on the status of our and Shirley's flight), and phone and text messages to Shirley. His calls to Shirley started out very cautious and conciliatory, but eventually he got a little agitated and he left a message that started out, "well, I guess your battery must be dead because I can't imagine why you'd have it off...". And then his next call to American revealed that her plane was still in the air, so he immediately called her back to apologize to her voice mail.

The unkindest cut came when he tried to call the hotel they're staying in tonight in Chicago to authorize Shirley to check in without him. First he navigated a series of national reservation numbers to the hotel itself to someone who could help him (I heard the start of his explanation over and over as he started to explain the problem to some new hotel employee. "Well, Chad, I'll be arriving very late this evening...") only to have his cell phone cut off after the third re-explanation. When he finally reached the appropriate employee they wanted him to fax over some sort of authorization. "Ma'am, I can't fax you anything - I'm stuck on a plane."

And then, just as the captain announced that we were leaving the gate to actually head for Chicago (three hours late), Shirley called. The conversation seemed to go as Guy Behind had feared it would. "No, don't do that. Don't do that. Don't do that. Either wait for me or pick up the rental car. There is no third option. ... I don't have a driver's license. I do not have a driver's license. There is no third option. It's very easy to get to the hotel and my sister can direct you. No, she's up. I've been talking to her and she's ready to help."

I guess Shannon hung up, because then he called his sister to ask her to call Shirley. We were poised on the runway at this point and the flight attendants were announcing that we needed to have all electronic equipment off while he was talking to his sister. "Please call Shirley, she doesn't want to bother you because you're getting married tomorrow..." "Excuse me sir, that needs to be off." "... so please just call her..." "Sir, that needs to be off." "Bye. ... Do you think it was necessary to strike me?" "(inaudible)" "Because that was kind of bizarre." "(inaudible)" "Yes, you are sorry."

And then the plane took off.

----

You know, I don't know if this story is interesting to anyone else, but for the five hours I was stuck on the plane it was a mini-soap opera that was pretty much the only thing (other than Mario vs. Donkey Kong) that was keeping me from going crazy.

Anyway, as soon as we landed Guy Behind was on the phone again. And Shirley had screwed him! She had taken a cab down to the hotel, who hadn't let her check in (despite Guy Behind's earlier phone calls). I haven't really mentioned how calm Guy Behind was through all of this -- he was agitated, but wasn't going to blow his cool. And when I saw him at the baggage claim I was surprised to see that he was wearing a tie. Did he wear it the whole 5 hours? Crazy cool, Guy Behind.

Guy Behind waiting for his bag, shot with my the crappy camera in my phone

And sadly, that's as much as I know of the story. Guy Behind took off from the baggage claim and went back upstairs as I was headed to the taxi stand. Good luck, Guy Behind. Have fun at your sister's wedding.

I've been having one of my periodic "What, again, was the point of doing this theater stuff?" moods, combined with an (un)healthy dose of "people the same age as me are much more successful than I am". And if I don't know what my goals are, then how can I compare myself to anyone, even in an unhealthy fashion?

Of course, I have a lot of fun being on stage. And that's likely reason enough. But then I feel like if I planned out some of the ways and times I get on stage, I could increase that fun, but I'm a little bit of a loss about how exactly that will out pan out.

And then I have to wade through conversations like I had with one of my New York-based coworkers at lunch who can't seem to grasp that just doing it for fun might be enough and keeps giving me off-the-wall suggestions of the ways I could be making money with this comedy stuff. "There's a market for cheap sitcoms!" "Ummm... OK. I'll keep that in mind."

So let's just throw here some links to some stuff I've been thinking about in association with this stuff:

Danny O'Brien asks the musical question, How many people do you need to be famous for? looking at the notion of thinly distributed fame.

Ani DiFranco on success

Hugh MacLeod's How to Be creative

Dave Eggers on "Keeping it Real" (or here)

Jesus Jones' Mike Edwards on cashing in vs. selling out

It's not that we don't know how to party, this year we just didn't want to share our party with anybody else. So Erica and I rang in the New Year with Univision on one TV and Katamari Damacy on the other, 2 bottles of lambic, and champaigne & PomWonderful for the toast. And then at midnight the Tivo auto-switched to record a terrible reality dating show and we settled back on the couch to laugh at the misfortunes of others.

Raza Obrera wear orange overalls and have a harp player who dances around with his full-size harp the same way a guitar player does. And it is for spectacles like that that Erica and I watched Univision ring in the new year.

I walked into the room tonight while Erica's mom was reading the last post. A potentially endless vortex of posting about reading about posting about reading about...

And I sent Tony a picture of me reading his book and he posted it and linked to me and I'm linking to him and around it goes.

There was BBQ today. A little too much -- we had it for lunch and I'm still having BBQ burps.

And we were finally in a place today where Erica's dad said, "This is what Vicksburg is like." Gingerbread lattes and model trains that run around the ceiling, evidently.

Saw a hundred things today that if I were by myself I'd pull over and take a picture of. But I was not by myself and I wasn't driving so I just watched them go by outside the car window.

I guess we left a mess of weather back up in the midwest. Kate couldn't make it home to Ohio because all the flights were canceled.

And there's probably a couple dozen of the many, many who read Tony's site who will have clicked over here because, hey, why not, and here's my one chance to impress them with how cool I write and I'm going all cheese-sandwich. But that's where I am today -- just grabbing five minutes by myself (Erica's family is great, and I'd say that even if Erica's mom wasn't going to read this tomorrow (vortex!), but I spent alllllll day with them and there's just a limit, you know) to chill out. So, hey.

I had just hit -publish- on that last one and Erica and her mom came into the office and said, "whatcha doing?" and I said, "taking care of some sketchfest stuff and doing a little bloggy" and Erica's mom said, "oh, did you put something new on your website? I always read your website." And they stood over a shoulder each and read the post. Instant audience.

Hey y'all from Mississippi. I'm in the land of dial-up here, so I'll keep this fast because I'm keeping the phone busy while I'm typing this. But I'm reading Tony Pierce's How to Blog, which is totally putting me in the mood to type fast and think later.

Erica's parents picked us up in Jackson and we went out to eat at a place that did everything as a variation of gyros (which is to say that all their sammichs were wrapped in pita bread) with lots of outdoor seating, vaguely mediterrean decor, etc. I was just starting to think, "so this is what Jackson is like," when Erica's dad said, "this place doesn't feel like Jackson at all." We did a whirl-wind, drive-by of the places Erica lived and worked when she lived in Jackson and then drove home to Vicksburg.

Did someone have a sale on monuments or what?

And straight off to a memorial for the father of one of Erica's friends. He's a great guy (Erica's friend) but this is only the third time I've seen him. Better circumstances could certainly be found. But he really is great (Erica's friend) and at the point in the memorial when the pastor asked for people to get up and share their memories and nobody was for a minute I thought of standing up and saying, "I'm just the friend of a friend of the son of this man, but if the father had a tenth of the generousity and friendliness of the son he raised, then he was a great man." But then, thank goodness, some actual friend of the father stood up and got things started and I didn't force myself on these strangers. And I got all misty-eyed during "Lord of the Dance" (well, I always did like that hymn -- those Shakers sure could write catchy tunes).

And batter fries and black-eyes peas for dinner. Could there be BBQ in Fuzzy's future this trip? And Erica's parents got some Stewart's Key Lime soda for me! What sweeties.

Some people get sick when they travel. But I'm always ahead of the curve -- I get sick before I travel. I got a cold two days before I went to Texas for Thanksgiving and now I'm sick again just in time to head down to Mississippi for Christmas. (Yes, I'm meeting Erica's parents. Oooooh.)

Erica and I had a great Thanksgiving in Austin (well, Round Rock/Pflugerville) with my family. I have super-cute pictures of my super-cute niece and nephew I need to share with you. (Yes, need.)

And Kenan installed iTunes Watcher and then scrapped that and set up with Audioscrobbler and I thought, yeah it'd be cool to have a lil' thing on the sidebar here that says what I've been listening to, even if it means finally learning a little PHP to make it happen, so I got myself an Audioscrobbler account just in time for their servers to all blowup. So, OK, maybe iTunes Watcher is more suited to my needs, anyway... and the whole Thought Anomalies website was down (it's back up now). Grrr. Just frustrating. (What I have been listening to, I'll tell you, is a bunch of Pete Miser. Oh, and this morning Accordion Tribe's Boeves Psalm came up on random on my iPod and I rewound it and played it 4 times in a row. (I originally found it at Music For Robots.))

So I gave up on iTunes for the moment and I thought I'd work on being able to post to FuzzyCo from my Treo. I found a ton of scripts and it took me a couple hours to figure out that each one did about 85% of what I wanted and that I was going to have to pick one and modify it to suit my needs and by then it was time to go have dinner with my honey. So all together a frustrating time. Why aren't things exactly arranged for my convenience!?

And then Shaun and I are busy working on our sketch show for Chicago Sketch Fest (Sunday, January 9 at 5:30 pm!). Except that he's been out of town and sick and I'm sick and about to go out of town.

Oh yeah, I'm gonna be in Philadelphia all next week. I'll be in training all day, but I have Tuesday to Thursday night free. Is there anything fun to do in Philadelphia?

Work is busy enough this afternoon that I'm not going to go get a real lunch, so I grabbed a Maruchan California Vegetable Instant Lunch from the breakroom vending machine. Evidently, in California when they think of vegetables they think of carrot shavings and six freeze-dried peas.

A variation of this keeps happening to me with friends I haven't seen in a while -- I'll run into someone on the train and start to share a story of some cool thing that happened to me recently and they'll interupt because they've read it here on FuzzyCo. By sharing my stories with strangers, I'm ruining them for telling to my friends in person. And what am I without stories. Nothing, I tell you, nothing.

From an email from a friend of mine on active service in the military:

"Also, this election is killing me. And four more years of George W. just might."

Back in, oh, 1996 or so, the Crazy Monkeys made the cover of the Lafayette Journal and Courier's weekend section. My friend Josette let me know that a photo of me, cut out from that cover, has been on a bulletin board in a chemistry classroom for several years.

So both Erica and I have been thinking about getting new tattoos for a while. She's carrying around a Renee Locks birds design in her wallet, waiting for the right combination of paychecks and time to get it on her shoulders. And I've been working on (in a much more of a thinking-about way than a working-the-trackball way) my Great Wave Off Kanagawa design for my right arm. But for me, at least, there's a dangerously ADHD-sort of desire to just being doing something to my body. And I had been thinking of another design that would simple enough to carry around in my wallet.

(When I get complicated designs I do what I advise other people to do - I carefully design the tattoo and I research the artist and make an appointment. But I have also walked into tattoo shops and said "put this on me." (I can say, however, that I've never really gotten flash inked onto me -- all my impulse tattoos are simple stars.))

Anyway, back to this tattoo idea: Erica has a tattoo on her back that's a five-pointed nautical star, with each of the two-colored points representing her or one of her friends in some complicated system that I don't even pretend to remember ("this point is Christopher - he's green=earth and yellow=banana"). Her point is grey and purple (wind... and grapes?) so I decided to get a nautical star that was all grey and purple.

I think it's pretty common knowledge that getting someone's name tattooed on you is a pretty easy way to guarantee that something terrible will happen to the relationship fairly quickly ("Wino Forever", anyone?). But even pessimistic old me feels safe with a star.

And Erica's dad has just had a permanent colostomy for his colo-rectal cancer, so Erica had decided to get a pink star tattoo (approximately) where her dad's stoma is as a tribute to him. A stoma-star.

Friday night at the Metblog meetup we both realized that we had that rare thing for theatre people - a weekend night free. So we solicited tattoo shop suggestions from the table. Susan's tattoo was from Tatu Tattoo, she'd had a good experience, and it was close.

Mini-review! Tatu Tattoo (1754 W North Ave, Chicago - 773-772-TATU). Tatu Tattoo is a bright, clean shop with, the night we were there, about 5 tattoo artists and a piercer working. There's a large selection of flash mounted on the wall but, unusually, no portfolios laid out for any of the tattooers. Everyone was really polite (they kept calling me 'sir') (it seems odd to mention that, but I've been in a number of tattoo shops that seem to take a pride in being rude to their customers). Every artist there is an independent contractor, but they do take credit cards.

Anyway, there were two guys free - Nex and Rodney - so Erica and I got our tattoos at the same time (that's why there are more pictures of me-Erica's didn't take very long so she came over and took photos).

Oh yeah, before you go look at the pictures... like I said, we didn't plan on going and getting tattoos until dinner. I don't think I would have worn yellow-with-red-stars underwear if I thought anyone was going to see them. But at least I provided plenty of amusement for Tatu Tattoo's patrons that night.

I just gave a jump start to an ice cream truck in the parking lot of our hotel and the ice cream guy gave me a lime slushie for helping him out. Helpfulness is yummy.

Last night, Erica and I were having a late supper. On several recommendations we had gone to see Playtime at the Musicbox. It was great, by the way. I usually have an attention span of about 3 seconds, and I complain and complain about how slow old movies are, but I sat enraptured through long slow takes of very little happening at all (and other shots where so much is happening that you're not sure what to look at).

Anyway, we didn't even start cooking until 11 pm. I threw some burgers on the grill and grated some pepper jack (Tillamook pepper jack, which is also great. I remember when Tillamook cheddar showed up in Chicago a few years ago and I'm happy that more varieties of Tillamook are available here now) over some torilla chips and stuck them in the oven on broil.

And we got talking and yakking and I flipped the burgers once and, hey, I almost forgot about the nachos.

When I opened the oven door, cartoony flames shot out half a foot in my direction. AAAAAA! I slammed the oven door shut. Whadda I do? Whadda I do? OK, turn off the oven. Done. OK, let's get that pan out of there. Turn on the sink and grab some hot pads and open the oven door again. Flames! AAAAA! Slam. Now smoke was starting to bubble out of the burners on the stove. And the smoke alarm went off. Well, good to know that works. Fire extingusher! OK, it's got some sort of seal on it, good thing this isn't an emergency, I'd be dead by now. There, got it. Open oven door. Whoosh. The fire's out but there's still smoke everywhere.

And now there's another alarm going off out in the back stairwell. Great. Did I set off someone else's smoke alarm? And now the smoke alarm on the oven starts going off. Great job, oven. I set up a fan to blow the smoke out of the kitchen and sure enough in a minute the smoke alarm in my place went out. But the alarm in the stairwell was still going. Great. We all just moved into this building and I've been trying to make a good impression on the neighbors. A loud alarm at 11:30 pm is probably not the best way to do that.

I went out into the stairwell to look. There was a loud mechanical bell alarm in a box at the bottom of the stairwell. There were no switches visible to turn it off. The four units in my building all have alarm systems that the previous owner had installed and Shaun and I hadn't bothered figuring it out because we didn't plan on using it. But I guess the fire alarm in my unit had triggered it. But how to turn it off? I went down into the common area and found a box labeled "Norshore Alarm", the same name as on the security system in our unit. Amd it was even clicking in rhythm with the alarm. And it was locked. But it had phone numbers on it -- I ran back upstairs and grabbed a phone. "The number you have reached has been disconnected." Crap. (I didn't try this until today, but the "Contact Us" link on their website is also a 404. Good job, Norshore.)

When in doubt, brute force is always an option. So I took the alarm box apart and disconnected the alarm. It took a really long, loud time to get all the screws off the cover plate. And of course I took all the screws off in the wrong order so the alarm fell inside and the box and made different loud klaxons. But, finally - silence, blessed silence.

Oh, and the burgers? Erica saved the burgers.

P.S. If you have an oven fire, don't actually bother opening the oven. Just turn it off and wait for it to burn out.

P.P.S. I just realized that my little oven fire was literally a three-alarm fire.

Sammy overheard one side of a cell phone conversation on the streets of New York:

"Yeah, I got the third callback for Blue Man Group. No, I haven't seen the show, I'm on my way there now."

I often park my motorcycle like this. I don't even want to know if it's legal in Chicago. I see lots of other people doing it and I only park between two cars when there's plenty of room -- both because I'm polite and because I don't want a car knocking my bike over trying to get in or out of a parking spot.

And, seriously, parking is one of the main reasons I ride a motorcycle in Chicago. It takes 15-20 minutes off any journey that involves trying to find parking. It took Shaun half an hour to find a parking spot near our house last night.

So... on Saturday night my friend Paris Green asked me to come take some pictures at the Belmont Burlesque Revue. I showed up at The Playground just before midnight and parked right out front, about 4 feet in front of a big old Buick with custom plates -- "WAKE UP 9".

A few minutes later my friend Beth came inside and said, "the guy whose car you parked in front of is all worked up about how close you are to his car. I told him me had plenty of room on both sides of his car. He asked if I knew whose bike it was. I said I did, but that it was irrellevant because he wouldn't have any problem getting out. He asked if I worked here. I said 'no' and that I was going to stop talking to him because the whole conversation was ridiculous. The kicker was that he said he wasn't leaving yet. Gah!"

Beth didn't say so explicitly, but I assumed that the guy had gone on his way following his conversation with her. So I wasn't thinking about him at all a few minutes later when an older man walked slowly across the front of the stage towards the bathrooms. He was walking slowly and rather hunched over, but wearing a brightly patterned short sleeve short and a bad wig. "Wow," I thought, "burlesque shows sure draw out some creepy audience members." He was peering around looking for something and it looked like he was either looking for the bathrooms or trying to peek into the dressing room where the girls were changing. "Creep," I thought, "he's probably trying to peek."

Some of the guys from the show were hanging out back by the dressing room and I heard Mark say, "Can I help you, sir?" A short conversation ensued and then Noah was leading the man towards me. "Fuzzy, you're parked in front of this guy..."

Gah, indeed. I instantly decided I didn't want to repeat Beth's conversation, so before Noah was even finished with his sentence I had grabbed my keys and headed out the door. Fortunately, the cycle started right up (nothing more embarrassing than a non-starting motorcycle when you're trying to be snotty) and I zoomed the bike 30 feet down the street and parked 5 feet behind a different car.

"Sorry to be a problem," I said to the guy as I headed back into the theater. Dammit. I really wish I could be a jerk sometimes. "That's alright," the creepy jerk mumbled.

And the show was delightful (how does Tomas swallow that balloon?).

And of course when we walked outside after the show, WAKE UP 9 was still parked in the same spot. I shook my fist at the sky. "Damn you, creepy jerky mumbly guy, where ever you are."

We hopped on the bike and headed north. And there he was! Standing on the corner of Halsted and Roscoe, right out in front of Roscoe's, his floral shirt gleaming under the street lights, just standing and staring his little hunched eyes straight out into the street, surrounded by the swirling gaiety of the 1am happy boys of Boystown.

I had 5 seconds to yell out something mean or sarcastic or wittily biting. And I choked. The light changed and off we zoomed into the night. Good night, creepy jerky mumbly staring guy, good night.

It's my new decadence -- combine in one bowl: H�agen Dazs Chocolate Peanut Butter (which is chocolate ice cream with peanut butter ribbon) and Ben and Jerry's Peanut Butter Cup (which is peanut butter ice cream with peanut butter cups). It's got it all: chocolate ice cream, peanut butter ice cream, chocolate chunks from the peanut butter cups, real peanut butter, and that peanut butter-flavored-mush that's inside the peanut butter cups. It just screams, I got your "you got your chocolate in my peanut butter" right here, baby.

Andy Ihnatko had just been talking about it, and then I ran across Joy's states-she's-visited map and there was the link and I started clicking states I've visited and...

I was surprised. Somehow it didn't feel like I'd covered so much of the country. 40 states. So only 10 to go. And they're in two easy clumps (except for Alaska, and I even have family there, though vague plan after vague plan to visit them have fallen by the wayside over the years). Seems doable.

Oh, and here's that link if you want to make your own map.

Surely I'm not the only one who's ever wondered if Col. Crunch out-ranked Cap'n Crunch. If Col. Crunch is in the Army and Cap'n Crunch is in the Navy they're equal in rank.

Of course, Cap'n Crunch isn't even a Captain, he's a "Cap'n".

From the Cap'n Crunch FAQ:

2. After years of adventuring, why isn't the Cap'n an Admiral yet?

It is a little known fact that the Cap'n WAS an Admiral at one time. After a tremendous outpouring from his fans, the Quaker Oats Company decided to promote the Cap'n. But Admiral Crunch quickly became bored with his desk job at Crunch Headquarters. And after a small mishap with the Crunch Berrie and Crunch Biscuit machine (at the hands of two recently promoted new co-Cap'ns) he decided that he was truly the best one suited for the role as the Cap'n. He soon requested his old position again, and he went back to being the best Cap'n that Crunch Headquarters has ever had. He is much happier now!

6. The Cap'n has three stripes, does this mean that he's a Commander?

Actually no. The rule set forth by Crunch Headquarters states that anyone who is in charge of a ship assumes the title of Cap'n. So far, no one's taken charge of any ship better than Cap'n Crunch so he is the only one who officially holds that title.

So Cap'n Crunch is a "Cap'n" in some paramiltary organization run from "Crunch Headquarters". Creepy.

And I'm just assuming that Col. Crunch was really in the Army. Maybe he's one of those Southern gentlemen who just uses the title as an honorific. You know, like Col. Sanders. Judging by the arrow stuck through his hat, though, Col. Crunch has at least seen some combat.

And why can't I find Col. Crunch on the Popsicle site?

I met a man in alley at midnight last night to sell my roommate's motorcycle.

Unfortunately, at least for the story, my roommate knew about the sale, the man was very nice, and he paid me with a certified check.

I'm sitting in downtown Denver waiting to go see ACME's new sketch show at Bovine Metropolis, starring my dear friend Kerstin Caldwell (something I didn't realize until this afternoon). That show will be followed by On the Spot, hosted by Carl "Comedy Legs" Wedell. And exactly right now I'm missing my second Chicago Comedy Co. show at the Playground back in Chicago.

There are horse-drawn carriages here. Most of the drivers are dressed in Western gear (plaid short-sleeved shirt, jeans, straw cowboy hat) but one guy is dressed in a big studded-leather-and-puffy-sleeved shirt outfit I'd have to describe as RenFair Pervert. One of these things is not like the others...

From Tony Pierce, the political honest bloggers-only quiz, then from Kitty Bukkake the blogging addendum:

"do you have the guts to take the honest bloggers-only quiz?"

1. which political party do you typically agree with? Democrat.

2. which political party do you typically vote for? Democrat.

3. list the last five presidents that you voted for? Clinton, Clinton, Gore.

4. which party do you think is smarter about the economy? Democrat.

5. which party do you think is smarter about domestic affairs? Democrat.

6. do you think we should keep our troops in Iraq or pull them out? Out.

7. who, or what country, do you think is most responsible for 9/11? Al Qaeda.

8. do you think we will find weapons of mass destruction in iraq? No.

9. yes or no, should the u.s. legalize marijuana? Yes.

10. do you think the republicans stole the last presidental election? Yes.

11. do you think bill clinton should have been impeached because of what he did with monica lewinski? No.

12. do you think hillary clinton would make a good president? Good? Maybe. Better than Bush, for sure.

13. name a current democrat who would make a great president: Dean would be a great president, I still think.

14. name a current republican who would make a great president: McCain, I guess.

15. do you think that women should have the right to have an abortion? Yes.

16. what religion are you? Raised Lutheran, then Assemblies of God (Pentecostal), then Episcopal. Now, atheist, though I just asked my mom to pray for someone. Go figure.

17. have you read the Bible all the way through? 50% or so.

18. what's your favorite book? Winnie-the-Pooh.

19. who is your favorite band? R. Buzzy

20. who do you think you'll vote for president in the next election? Kerry.

21. what website did you see this on first? Kitty Bukkake's.

the honest bloggers-only quiz Kitty Bukkake addendum:

1. Do you try to look hot when you go to the grocery store just in case someone recognizes you from your blog? I always look hot. I can't help it.

2. Are the photos you post Photoshopped or otherwise altered? Most are adjusted for light levels in Photoshop (the new Shadow/Highlight adjustment is my new best friend, especially for theater and concert photos) and sometimes cropped. I rarely add or remove elements.

3. Do you like it when creeps or dorks email you? No, who would?

4. Do you lie in your blog? There are plenty of times I leave things out. I shade the truth sometimes.

5. Are you passive-aggressive in your blog? Nope.

6. Do you ever threaten to quit writing so people will tell you not to stop? Nope. Don would be the only one who'd care.

7. Are you in therapy? If not, should you be? If so, is it helping? I was. It was very helpful.

8. Do you delete mean comments? Do you fake nice ones? No and no.

9. Have you ever rubbed one out while reading a blog? How about after? No and no.

10. If your readers knew you in person, would they like you more or like you less? More.

11. Do you have a job? Yes.

12. If someone offered you a decent salary to blog full-time without restrictions, would you do it? Sure.

13. Which blogger do you want to meet in real life? Danny O'Brien

14. How many bloggers have you made out with? Three.

15. Do you usually act like you have more money or less money than you really have? More.

16. Does your family read your blog? I don't know.

17. How old is your blog? October 2001, so almost three years.

18. Do you get more than 1000 pageviews per day? Do you care? No and a little bit.

19. Do you have another secret blog in which you write about being depressed, slutty, or a liar? No.

20. Have you ever given another blogger money for his/her writing? Yes. I love to buy books by bloggers.

21. Do you report the money you earn from your blog on your taxes? No, the $45 a year I make from Amazon Associates remains scandalously unreported.

22. Is blogging narcissistic? But of course.

23. Do you feel guilty when you don't post for a long time? A little.

24. Do you like John Mayer? He's OK.

25. Do you have enemies? I think there some people who don't like me. I hope they don't hate me enough to call me an enemy.

26. Are you lonely? Sometimes.

27. Why bother? Why bother blogging? To promote my shows. To show off my cats. To keep my friends up to date on my life in a lazy way. To satisfy my exhibitionism. So Don will get off my back. Why bother with anything? Because it's fun! And even when it isn't, the experience of experiencing anything is better than not experiencing anything.

Today same-sex marriage is legal in Massachusetts. Hoo-ray, I say. I've been married (and I'm not anymore, cie la vie) and I've married couples (well, a couple) and... John Scalzi says it better (he often does):

I celebrate your weddings, and I offer the greatest gift I have: That you receive in your married life the joy I have had in mine, and that you share that joy, every day, with an open and loving heart.

I'm selling my car via ebay. Cheap!

Zabeth and I were chatting about fan sites (I figure FuzzyCo.com is just a big fan site about me, that I happen to run) and she was saying that all I needed was some fan art. Thoughtfully, Noah Ginex sent this along. I'm not sure if I really have red glints of pure evil visible deep down in my eyes (I'm not trying to say I don't have pure evil deep down inside, I just didn't think it was visible) but he's the artist.

1974 Datsun 260Z
2 seater (converted 2+2)
85,000 miles

For a 1974, this car is in great shape. Very little rust on the body, new tires a couple of months ago, super-cool leopard print seat covers, etc.

In July 2003, something blew a big hole in the engine. I bit the bullet and had it replaced with a (supposedly) low mileage engine from Texas. All the work was finally done in September 2003. Well, then in January the engine started making a terrible noise when I was just out of the parking lot. I turned around, headed home, and I've only just gotten it back over to the garage. It turns out there are pieces of metal in the engine and it would need another one. I'm not going through that again.

I'd like to get $1000 for the damn thing.

Thea Lux's "one lady show" Will Sell Out for Money opens Thursday night, April 8, at 10:30 pm. Not Thursday night, April 1, at 8 pm. Not that I was at the Playground last night on the wrong day at the wrong time or anything.

Here's a panorama Noah took at the beginning of the day as we were loading up the stuff from Canal Street Storage (nice space, friendly employees). You can see Amanda in her car on the left, Shaun and Patrick putting some random pieces of furniture in the pick-up and is that a shadowy Fuzzy in the U-Haul?

So, the move went great. We got everything in one day -- all the stuff from storage, and from both our current residences, and a bonus couch from Kate (who was moving the same day). We even got done in time for Shaun to house manage at The Playground and me to perform there with The Mighty.

Big FuzzyCo thanks to Amanda*, Ben, Homer, Jenny, Megan, Merrie, Noah*, Patrick*, Phillip, and Taryn* for helping us move. (* indicates Medal of Honor of doing 2 shifts.)

Now I just have to unpack everything.

My friend Lawrence has started a new site called Happy Jawa Film Review, specializing in reviews of Star Wars fan-films.

I just bought a house! Well, a condo. Well, half a condo. But still, I just bought half a condo! I can get my stuff out of storage! I don't have to have my desk in my bedroom anymore! I get to pay a mortgage! I get to pay mortgage insurance! It's all madness!

Peg writes:

Mary and Lee are proud parents! Their son was born March 2, 3:58AM ..... Mary was AMAZING, and Lee held her up the whole way...sometimes literally! Baby Davis is 9lbs 9oz, 21 whopping inches, a big boy with lots of dark hair. Photos...

Update: the baby has a name... Graham Bertram Davis.
Update-er Lee has posted photos

Congrats to my co-worker Kyle and his wife Beth -- Paige Katherine Kolbe was born at 2:23 PM on Saturday, 2/28/2004, weighing 8 pounds 7 ounces and is 20.5 inches long.

Update: Photos...

My friend, and fellow National Velveeta alum, Scott Starkey, is in the Lafayette Journal & Courier with a story about the publication of his first game, Mother Lode of Sticky Gulch.

Update: The Purdue Exponent got in the act, too, with an article about Scotto's new game. In delightful Exponent fashion, the reporter just made some of the stuff up (e.g. Scotto was inspired by German games, but hasn't ever been there).

So... I moved last week. But not in the manner I would have liked nor, no offense to George et al, to the kind of place I was hoping. How rushed was this move? I don't have any pictures of the move. If you know me, think about that for a second. I have photos of everything.

I moved to Chicago 4 1/2 years ago, and I've lived in the same place on Kenmore the whole time, with a succession of roommates. The first four years my landlord was a nice, but crazy (the numerology! those gold balls on the fence! the light fixture with "diameter"!), German man named Bernd.

We were on very friendly terms, but every April he was very formal about getting me to sign a lease for the next year. This year, however, he never mentioned it. I wondered what was up, but I didn't bring it up when I saw him, because Shaun and I were looking at buying a place and being lease-less gave us the most flexibility about moving dates, etc. In September we even found a place and signed a contract, but the seller pulled out at the last minute because her Belgian work visa wasn't coming through.

Soon after that we found out why Bernd didn't bother getting a lease from us -- he had sold the building, as well as the two connected buildings (18 apartments altogether) to Venter & Associates. We received a letter from Bernd telling us where to send our rent checks and the building super told us that the sale meant "no change" for anyone. But fairly quickly, the other residents (including that super) began moving out and then workers started showing up and gutting the empty apartments.

At this point it was obvious that we were going to have to move out sooner or later, but we were still looking for the perfect place to move to, and based on our sketchy understanding of Chicago housing law we were pretty sure that even without a lease the landlord would need to give us 30-days notice to move out, so we figured, you know, why not wait until we got that notice and then we'd have 30 days to plan, pack, and move.

Over the last few months, all of the other residents had moved out except for us and two new Romanian guys on the first floor of our building, who were relations or acquaintances (or something) of the landlord, who were acting as caretakers (or something). (Radu and Kris were nice guys, but there was a small language barrier, and little was ever explained to us.) There were a few small problems with the heat (too hot because the system was trying to heat up the other empty, doorless apartments) and the water (only hot water for a few weeks, only cold water for a few days) but everything kept getting fixed. And the work on the other buildings kept stopping because they hadn't secured any permits to do the work, so the police kept stopping by to shut them down (usually leaving an extra-dangerous mess in the back parkign lot.)

On an expedition to the basement of the adjoining building, where the hot water heater is, we did discover a flood of water from, evidently, an over-enthusiastic sledge-hammerer. I began to have paranoid fantasies that the same could happen to our apartment, because they were beginning to gut the third floor apartment above us.

Two weeks ago, on a rather cold Friday night, the water pipes coming into the buildings froze. And since radiator heat needs water, the heat then turned off. Radu told us that the landlord "didn't care" and tried to fix the problem himself with a blowtorch and that heating tape. Over the weekend we tried to contact the landlord ourselves, but only got voicemail at his office. We went out and got jugs of water, and a heater for the living room, and hunkered down (I had numerous kind offers of couches and spare rooms, but I had some sort of stubborn impulse to not be driven from my home.)

On Monday morning we contacted our Alderman, whose staff was very helpful and got right on the case. They were evidently able to contact someone, because Monday night some guys came and began banging around down in the basement. Eventually, late Monday night, the water and then the heat came on. It was still very cold in the apartment, so I huddled under my quilts in the living room and went to bed to the sound of clanking radiator pipes.

When I woke up in the morning, the house was a reasonable temperature, so I was in a good mood until I walked to the back of the apartment and discovered that in Shaun's room a Horrible Thing had happened. For some time there had been a small leak in the radiator in Shaun's room, but since the heat never came on full force for more than an hour or so, he had been living with it by draping a towel over the pipe and occasionally opening the window. When the heat had run continously all night, the steam had also spewed all night. When the steam hit the still-cold air, it had condensed causing it to, in effect, rain in Shaun's room all night. Everything exposed was covered with water and the carpet was soaked.

I called Shaun and we decided that we had to move right away. If we got out by that weekend, we wouldn't be liable for February rent and could legitimately ask for the security deposit back. So instead of 30 days we had 6.

Just to raise the bar a bit, I got food poisoning on Wednesday and spent Thursday sleeping on the couch. I think I worked up the energy to pack one box that day.

The rest of the weekend is a blur of U-Hauls and packing and carting boxes to-and-fro and the incredible helpfuness of Amy, Dan, Jin, Kate, Homer, Megan, and Sean.

Moving highlights:

• Sledge-hammering my old entertainment center to get it out of the apartment without having to move it all at once
• Throwing bottles of condiments at the wall of the adjoining building (I swear, the ground was already covered with broken glass -- I'm sure we made no difference to the safety of the place)
• Collapsing into sleep on Saturday night and waking up a few hours later with a terrible stutter
• Shaun wearing the skin on his hands down to raw flesh carrying boxes
• Listening to Amy, Dan, Jin, Kate, Homer, Megan, Sean and Shaun each note how much stuff I have
• Shaun's room brcoming more and more swamp-like as the week went on
• The UHaul battery dying on Monday morning, and then starting just fine later in the afternoon
• Finishing

And finish we did. Monday night Dan and I put the last UHaul load into the storage space I'd rented (Dan is the Storage Stacking Master). I have a room in George Eckart's apartment and Shaun is shacking up with Beth. The cats are at Beth's and it's dumb, but I miss them. We're looking to move... somewhere... soonish.

Today I did the OctaSketch at Chicago Sketch Fest -- 4 groups of 5 actors and a director each put together a half-hour sketch show between 9 am and 8 pm, when the show went up. It was a blast.

My group was Thea Lux, Jeremy Sosenko, Aaron Walters, Adam Yencho and me. Our director was John Hildreth. We were... Dynamite! I took pictures!

"Show? What show?"

"I was in improv troupes in Chicago, as is everyone, in Chicago." -- Neal Pollack

I went out to the Lincoln Tap Room with a bunch of people from the call-back tonight, notably Erica and Homer. "Notably" because we talked about the concept of "getting on someone's website" and Erica said, "oh, you'd link to my very out-of-date headshot on the ComedySportz site" and so I shall. And Homer is notable because he's Homer. And he once won $10,000. But don't bug him about it -- he was in college and he spent it all a long time ago.

My friends R. Buzzy are playing a show January 24 at the Beat Kitchen. The show is a party to announce their new distribution deal with Veronica Records, which is very exciting. Until now, if you wanted a copy of a R. Buzzy album, you had to come to a show. Now you can sit in the safety of your underground bunker, listen to a few mp3s, decide you love R. Buzzy, and order a CD. And then come to the show on the 24th. (It's good to get out of the bunker every now and then.)

My friends Karl and Maria stopped in on their way back from Indiana to Minnesota. For some reason, I thought Navy Pier might be a good place to meet. It was packed to the gills with children. It was a bit over-whelming, especially since I've spent most of the holiday in my apartment.

It did, however, let us get a photo-booth picture. Which always rocks. This one spit out double-prints on pre-preforated paper, which solves the eternal photo-booth question of who gets to keep the pictures. Except that there were three of us, so we still had the question. I got one copy, so I assume that Karl and Maria spent the rest of their drive home fighting over who got to keep the other half.

This is my backyard:

For once, a mess is not my fault.

I've lived in Chicago for four years now, and I've gotten along pretty well -- same apartment, nice (though crazy) landlord, reasonable number of parking tickets, no big hassles. Recently, I think, the city itself woke up and realized that I wasn't having a real big city experience. So I've been fighting a mechanic who over-charged me $2000 in September (I finally got it back today!) and my car wouldn't pass emissions inspections and our building got sold to someone who was going to gut-rehab it into condos. Only, they didn't have permits. So the city gave them a stop-work order. But not before they had gutted enough apartments to create that mess in the parking lot behind the building. And there's no cold water in the bathroom (water comes out -- but it's hotter than the hot water). And so on and so forth. (Oh, yeah, and the city shut down the two theaters I do most of my shows at.)

Yay, Chicago!

[This entry has been sitting on my hiptop in a "Drafts" folder since, I guess, October 28. Fight Club is tonight and next week is the last Fight Club. Dan would really like anyone who's ever been to Fight Club to try and make it next week.]

Fight Club, that Dan Izzo-created rehearsal group I've been going to, keeps trucking along. Last night was supposed to be the last night, but it's been geting such a good response that Dan extended it through November.

One great thing about FC is that there's been new people every week. This is fortunate, in part, because one of the rules of FC is that if it's your first time, you do the first scene. So far, then, we haven't had to deal with exceptions to the rule.

Fight Club has a lot of rules (Rule 1: No Egos, Rule 2: tell anybody you want about Fight Club, Rule 3: we start talking at 10:30, start improvising right at 10:45 and stop at 11:30, etc.) but really it's about the improv. I'm learning just by watching people and their choices. And the freedom to try things out is remarkable.

I saw the Incubator shows last night just before FC and I was struck, as I often am, by the excitement people bring to their first endeavors in this art form.

This last weekend was chock-full of theater, most of it pretty good.

On Friday night, KW and I went to check out "Job Opportunity." It's a play that takes place in an actual car being driven around Chicago -- at most 4 people, sitting in the back seat, can see each performance. I found out it about from a Tribune review where the Neutrino Project was name-checked. I'm happy to report that it's great. We were the whole audience (which was nice, because I can imagine the back seat would be crowded with 4 people) and we were quickly immersed in the efforts of two friends to deliver a mysterious package. The use of actual Chicago (in fact, mostly my neighborhood) adds quite a bit to an already-good play. (The Tribune review doesn't seem to be online, for some reason, so check out the Reader listing.)

Saturday afternoon, we went with a high-school friend of KW's and his wife to see Naked Eye's "Nickel and Dimed" (a play based on the book by Barbara Ehrenreich). We had a nice pizza lunch at Lou Malnati's, I had really enjoyed Naked Eye's "The Idiot Box," and I'd heard good things about the book, so I was ready to enjoy an afternoon of theater. Sadly, I was disappointed. The production was well-produced and the cast was all very capable, but I found the play preachy and clumsy, and I found the character of Barbara very unlikable (KW had read the book and said that didn't reflect the voice of the author).

So, then I was off from criticizing the work of others to seeing if I could produce some worthwhile theater of my own.

Let's just start with the fact that Saturday's Neutrino Project 30,000 was the smoothest setup we've had so far. The 3 Penny schedules us as though we were a movie, so we have a very short amount of time after the previous movie lets out to blow into the theater and get our entire, complicated technical setup going. Oh, and my iBook, which does the credits for the show, had a harddrive crash about an hour and a half before the show. Did I panic? Nope, we just grabbed a small white board on the way out of the house and did the credits the way the New York Neutrino does.

On top of that, the actual show was great. Todd Leibov joined Ben to create the live score -- Todd and Ben have done all the Cinema 2.0 shows together, which is a similar enterprise for them, so they were able to really attack the score. This was Ben's 9th Neutrino Project as musical director, so he was getting pretty agressive with the sampler -- sampling lines of dialogue and layering them over the scenes and transitions.

I was a runner for the show. I was theoretically an actor for this run, but in the end I'll only have done 4 shows on-screen. I've run twice (once planned, once to fill an emergency need) and shot twice (same thing). I think I'd love to be in the Neutrino Project as an actor if someone else was producing it -- I end up running around until the last second and it is tricky to switch gears into the mindset to be the best improvisor I can be.

After NP30K, I stayed to help transition the equipment for "Dr. Obvious". My friend Kate Parker is producing a new show at the 3 Penny right after NP30K, and she's renting a bunch of my equipment to do her show. "Dr. Obvious" is inspired by Mystery Science Theater 3000. Which is to say, the show features 3 performers on microphones talking over a movie (in this run, Schwarzenegger's The Running Man). Which is to say, it's an exact rip-off of MST3K.

Given that, it's a pretty good rip-off. Kate, Dave Colan, and Bob Ladewig are all quick and clever and they've come up with a fun show. I saw it at a tech rehearsal earlier last week and I was quite amused.

I am sure that the show will inspire some marketplace-confusion between Dr. Obvious and Cinema 2.0 (unless I'm flattering myself that anyone knows about either of our shows). Here's your quick guide to the two shows:

Cinema 2.0:

• a FuzzyCo/WNEP co-production at WNEP Theater
• improvised
• a new movie every month
• closest pop-culture reference point: What's Up Tiger Lily?

• a 3AM Idea production at the 3 Penny Cinema
• scripted
• the same movie for the run
• closest pop-culture reference point: Mystery Science Theater 3000

So anyway, after I helped get the gear set up, I headed over to WNEP to catch opening night of a new run of Angry White Guy Reads the Paper. I didn't make it, but there's a plug, anyway.

I did make it to WNEP in time for Sickest Stories. For a change, I had nothing to executive produce about the show -- I wasn't in it, I didn't have to do tech, I just hung out at the back of the theater and watched. Dee-lightful.

And that was the weekend -- Sunday I had an abortive computer-fixing appointment, so I spent a good chunk of the day playing Morrowind. I... no, I don't think I'm going to try and make the argument that that's theater.

KW is part of Crain's (a Chicago business magazine) "40 under 40: Chicago's Rising Stars". Who-ray.

An oldie but goodie, from back when I didn't have a beard and did have poofy hair: Happy Halloween!

2 am, leaving a bar alone because KW is in Monteal, it's raining, feeling like a cab is an extravagance, running through intersections then hugging buildings, Chiyoko on the iPod (so beautiful, so sad), almost missing the El station because my head is bowed to the rain. Home. Alone except for the cats who ruined my dinner and broke a bowl. Sleep. Tomorrow can only be better.

(Though, Mexican Wrestling Macbeth was great.)

Working backwards, the reason I couldn't go pick up my FFFF topic on Friday night was that I was at Schadenfreude's extravaganza of a show at the Athenaeum Theater. Schadenfreude wanted to document the show like crazy, so they had five camera people with six cameras shooting the show from all angles. I was on random-backstage-nightshot patrol, which was great because it was low-pressure and meant I could get a bunch of still pictures, too.

KW was one of the Balcony Bits Players, so we kept dashing past each other in the dark. She got to be a tiger and kill Roy in a sketch, whoo-ray.

Neal Pollack's band, the Neal Pollack Invasion, was the opening act of the show. Because I wasn't doing Schadenfreude-documenting yet, I got a ton of good shots of the band. I like taking concert photos and I have to say that the lighting in the Athenaeum was a jillion times better than in most rock venues. And, I'm a fan. So, yay.

After the NP30K show, Dan Izzo, who's the new producer of The Sickest F***in' Stories I Ever Heard, said he was feeling ill and asked Shaun if he could deal the game that night. Shaun was running the marathon on Sunday morning (he finished, btw) so I poked my executive-producer head in and took over.

Usually the line-up at SFSIEH is a mix of unrelated people, but this month we the cast of WNEP's current main-stage show, Let There Be Light. The show was, I can humbly say, delightful. I had come with a couple stories in my back pocket (figuratively) but in the end I just kept the poker game going, chewed on my Strawberry-flavored Swisher Sweet, and kept out of the way of the sick, sick stories that the boys were throwing around.

I've been going to a... well, I guess I'd call it a rehearsal group, for the last month. My friend Dan Izzo organized it and it's variously called Fight Club or the Manifesto or "that Tuesday night thing". Last night was the most challenging night for Dan's rule that we always start right at 10:45, with the Cubs still tied at that point, but we stuck to it. We even had 6 people, despite the game.

It's been great to just do some improv just for the sake of doing some improv. No pressure of being "good" for an audience, no notes from a director. Just trying stuff out and seeing if it works, if it feels right.

Well, I have a temporary crown, anyway. Oh, my poor mouth.

The next Fast Forward Film Fest has been announced. The info's not up on their site yet, but registration for teams is open now at Atomix Cafe (1957 W Chicago). Topics will be given out Friday, October 17 at 7:30 pm at Atomix, and then the films will be shown Saturday, October 18 at 8:00 pm at open-end gallery (2000 W Fulton).

Aye, it be Talk Like a Pirate Day, me mateys. So grab ye a pint of grog and a copy of Scurvy Dogs and get ready for thee weekend:

Tonight, some see The Mighty at The Playground. We be funnier than a one-legged monkey stuck in a crows nest.

And I would be remiss in my Exec. Producerness if I didn't mention that the Megan Pedersen-produced Belmont Burlesque Review Revue will be opening at WNEP as part of the Around Midnite Series this Saturday (9/20) at, duh, midnight. Bonnie wenches, all.

(silly picture from the Hero Machine)

Saturday night was the season opener of The Sickest F***in' Stories I Ever Heard, the show's third season as part of WNEP's Around Midnite Series. I'm the executive producer of the whole series (which mainly means I check-in with the producer of each show and see if they need anything, which they rarely do) and I had to fight to keep Sickest in the line-up this season, so it was good that the opening night went well, both in terms of attendance and content. (Not a big fight -- just a logical and reasoned argument or two.)

The concept of the show is simple: 5 people play real poker on stage (with real money) and tell real stories from their life. Mostly, gross or obscene stories. It's such a simple and delightful concept (created by Shaun Himmerick and Don Hall) that versions of the show have been produced in New York, Toronto, Seattle, Boston, and Memphis.

("Sickest" trivia: the official name of the show is written "F***in'". I like asterixes.)

Here are some other cards games I like, that are very unlike poker:

• 1000 Blank White Cards
• 5 Card Nancy
• Hello, Tarot

Friday night, KW and I went over to the River West area to see an art opening for one of her Ragdale buddies, Candice Eiseneld. The first Friday after Labor Day is the start of all the galleries' fall season, so the place was kind of a mad house. But if you're looking for free wine and crackers, River West on a First Friday is your ticket.

I like my apartment -- I've lived there for all four years I've lived in Chicago. I've had a variety of room mates (oh yeah, Mustapha's back!).

Saturday I spent a good couple of hours rearranging things in the living room to make it a little more livable. And then walked out the back door to have the upstairs neighbors tell me that the sale of the building last month was, in fact, a move to condo-hood and that we had to move out soon. ("An unspecified date" she said, but we don't have a lease right now, so our unspecified date could be any 30-days-notice away.)

So... Shaun and I are looking for (a) new place(s). If you know a nice place to live in Chicago, let me know.

That show I directed? About gay guys? And frat guys? And stuff? It's on New City's "5 Shows to See Now" list this week. (OK, it's #5. Whatev. Like you're so cool.)

K. and I went out to Arlington Heights to see the Second City Tourco show at the Metropolis last night. From what I understand, it's the first time a Tourco show has done original material, so I was interested to see what they'd come up with. Many funny bits is the answer.

I was there with several Sirens, and Bob Kulhan, so Molly invited us to join the cast for their improv set. She introduced us as "an improv group all the way from Laurel Springs, New Jersey -- Quibbles and Bits!" Comedy gold. I did a prat fall off the audience suggestion of "Fall" and I think I bruised a rib. Must work on the physical comedy.

We're watching the Tour de France in our house. Which is to say, Shaun is watching the Tour and I can't not watch the TV if it's on, so I am, too. I knew I was finally hooked when the TiVo screwed up taping stage 15 (a real nail biter, let me tell you) and I made the effort to go to the web to watch the video clips. Man, I need to get on my bike, more.

In the end, The Science Project went rather well -- counting movies we made in rehearsals at the Museum, we made 18 short films and most of them are pretty good.

I was all set to junk my car, but Ray at the garage convinced me to put a new engine in. He even offered to help me fix up some of the fiddly bits wrong with the car. ("I just love those old cars, man.")

And the terrible, terrible thing turned out OK. Maybe even (in a round-about and horrible way) a good thing. Huh.

Terrible, terrible night last (for reasons I won't share - so there). I got up at 4 am to get the tapes and DVDs ready for the Science Project for today (the tapes I theoretically could have gotten ready before this week, but I can't make a DVD of the day's shows until the day is over).

And now I'm sitting in a parking lot of a nursing home in Northlake, just off 290. I was on my ways to another west suburb for day-job-work and my car blew up. The operating assumption is that I've blown a rod (I found a cool chunk of metal inside the engine that I can't even figure out where it came from).

AAA just called me back to follow up on the tow truck that's an hour late. Boo.

My car certainly has its quirks -- it doesn't like to start in cold weather, no power steering, failed the Illinois emissions test rather spectactularly. But it's almost as old as I am (1974 Datsun 260Z just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it) and I'm not feeling so hot all the time myself, so I can sympathize. I hope it can be saved (OK, almost any car can be saved. I hope it can be saved for less than the cost of the car itself).

In happier news, Nick Green of the Chicago Reader reviewed Fratricide and said nice things. He said I gave the show a "crisp precision throughout". Cool. Glad to know it.

OK, they've promised me the tow truck will be here in 20 minutes. I didn't eat any breakfast this morning (and now the K key is popping off this keyboard. Great.). OK, I'll stop complaining. Hey Man, life's a bitch, lemme buy you a beer (ha! Fratricide call-back! But you didn't know that because you haven't seen the show yet!)

Ah, I see the tiny broken piece of plastic on the k key. I'll leave it off and try to super glue it, I guess. I wonder if you can buy just one replacement key for an Apple iBook? Or if you happen to have a spare k key lying around, send it my way, would you?) (How do you keep typing k if the key is broken, Fuzzy? I'm typing right on the little rubber button that sits under platic key top. I imagine if you were a better typist than I, you could take all the keys off and let the keys massage your fingers, like those sandals with the knobby plastic bottoms.)k

UPDATE: It's a hole in the engine. It'll be a couple grand to get a newish engine. Poop.

My best advice to a young producer/director? Learn to delegate, so you aren't sitting on your office floor at 2:30 am the night before a show, cutting up quarter-page flyers. I'm just saying...

The New City came out today and Nina Metz has given Fratricide what can only be described as a rather nice review.

"interesting and often very funny", "amazingly novel", and "wholly worthwhile" are, I believe, the pull quotes from the piece.

The line she references about listening to Dave and shopping at the Gap was an ad-lib by Brian that Homer asked him not to do anymore, because it pooches a joke in a later scene (so don't come to the show just to hear that line). And my name is spelled "Fuzz Gerdes" in the review for some reason. I mean, some of my friends do call me Fuzz, and so I guess I'm glad that Nina feels so close to me that she can call me that in public... (I think I'm batting 1000 for nitpicking-about-details-in-good-reviews).

Opening night of Fratricide went well. Homer packed the place with friendly faces, so we'll see how the show is received by a more strangerly audience next week. And I guess there were press in attendance, so we'll see if reviews come out.

I don't think it's traditional for a director to give the producer a gift on opening night, but Homer was so stressed through the process of writing, producing, and acting in this show, that I wanted to give him something. Video games play a recurring role in the show and Homer mentioned that his favorite video game system was the old Atari Lynx (an early handheld gaming system). So I tracked one down on Ebay (actually, the tracking down wasn't the hard part, it was winning an auction. I lost 6 or 7 auctions for Lynxes before I won the one I gave him).

Fratricide opens tonight at 10:30. If you're a Ben Taylor-fan (and who isn't), he'll be there... pushing "play" on the CD player. (Ben joined us at the last minute when we discovered that Noah would need about 3.5 hands to run all of the sound and light cues. Noah is talented, but not a mutant. Well, not that kind of mutant.)

Everything came together beautifully at our last tech run through and I can heartily recommend this sketch show that my friend Homer wrote and I directed. Especially if you like mean-spirited and self-loathing humor about young men, some of whom are gay.

Also, Bare has a show at the Playground tonight at 8:00. We're up first, followed by three delightful groups.

And Don and Jen are getting married tomorrow. Unlike the last two items, I'm not mentioning this to try to entice you to the event (oh, yeah, by the way, that's what I was trying to do with the above two items -- entice you to come to the events. I'm not typing for my health, here, people.) but rather to delight you with the notion that even a hideous monster like Don can find love in this world.

I'm used to having my ears be all clogged up -- sinus problems, you know. But just before the 4th, it got really bad and I decided it was worth a trip to the doctor. I probably had an ear infection. Or ear cancer. Or something super-serious.

Ear wax. "Impacted Cerumen." Oh.

So, a visit to my friendly (really) otolaryngologist and his little vacuum cleaner and voila -- I can hear. I can hear everything! Everything sounds really weird. I have to wonder how long I've been not hearing things. High-pitched sounds are especially loud and a lot of things sound very echo-y. My own voice sounds funny to me (as K. said, "it's sounded that way to me for awhile, I'm glad we're finally on the same page now.")

I stoppped by the Virgin Megastore last night after work to try and get a Game Boy Player. No luck on that front, but Poi Dog Pondering was doing an in-store performance to promote their new album. Damn, but they make me smile so hard my eyes were hurting.

I bought the album and got it signed by everyone in the 200-person band. Yay!

I want to be the Frank Orrall of improv. Always evolving, tackling new projects, surrounded by people having fun and having fun doing it.

Shaun, Beth, and I just got back from Omaha, Nebraska and my friends Matt & Trish's wedding. We took tons of pictures.

We went straight to a rehearsal for The Science Project when we got back to Chicago. So now it's off to collapse-land.

It's late, I'm sick, and I'm in Omaha. Oh, and I'm wireless on a stranger's net connection for the first time ever. Thanks, gardien35.

Why am I sick? Oh, the usual surviving on four hours of sleep a night for weeks leaving my body defenseless and unable to stave off the tiniest of germs. Saturday was a prime example: Shaun, Beth and I drove an hour up to Des Plaines for a motorcycle training course we were taking, spent the day riding around a parking lot on motorcycles (p.s. even dressed in full safe riding gear and a helmet, don't forget to put sun screen on your nose and neck. Ouch.)

Then we drove back to Chicago, got dressed as pirates, went to eat at Frankie J's and then to the Playground Prom. Prom, of course, means you're up until 3 am, minimum. A few hours sleep, then off to ride more motorcycles. So... I got sick. But I passed the class and I have my class M endorsement on my license now. Woo-oo!

Omaha? My friend Matt's wedding. The first of several weddings this summer. Just getting here was an adventure -- I ended up taking a one-way flight on Southwest while Shaun and Beth drove. And the bachelor party is tomorrow night, so the crazy-quotient of this trip can only increase.

OK, gotta go to bed. Lots more to write about, like Fratricide and the bad DVDs I bought tonight and then how we ended up at the Midwest's largest indoor family fun center wasting time playing classic video games, but the Nyquil is kicking in. So I'm off to snooze city.

R. says she thinks I "have this desperation to keep yourself busy to the point of weirdness", that when "you stand still you think you don't exist". Really I just keep saying "yes" to too much. Really.

Things I've said "yes" to this week: staying in Chicago (well, I said "no" to NYC), directing a sketch comedy show (more on that soon, I'm sure), making dubs of a 100 different tapes for 100 different people, and remembering that I said "yes" to a fast filmmaking project a few months ago. That project is turning out to be much more complicated than I had thought.

When I do the Fast Forward, for example, I'm only screwing over myself and a few of my close friends if what I turn in isn't great. It's very freeing. But with the way this Challenge is structured I'm responsible for the success of writers and actors I've never met before. Eek.

I had a busy night last night -- right after work there was a "roast" for our retired Executive Editor, Arthur Kretchmer, who had that position for 30 years. Two highlights of a packed evening -- the best steak I've ever eaten (we were at Gibsons) and a woman jumped out of a cake. Well, popped out -- there wasn't much jumping. I've never seen that, except in movies and cartoons. I was curious, so I asked the person who organized the cake/woman/popping -- did she supply her own cake? No. He rented the cake and then hired the woman. Noted.

After the dinner, I ran off to see 2 Skinnie Js at the Bottom Lounge. The roast had gone on a little longer than I thought it would, and I had left my ticket to the show at home, so I was worried that I was going to miss part of the show. I did miss the opening band (sorry Bicycle, Tricycle) but I got there just in time to see the whole 2SJs set. It was a kick-ass show. Too bad they're breaking up. Quick! Become a 2SJs fan, before it's too late.

I've only really gotten to know Arthur over the last year or so, as he was preparing to leave. And I became a big 2 Skinnie Js fan just in time for their farewell tour. Sigh.

My friend Meat Kitten has a new site up called Kittyloaf.

I've made a quick web page of links to information about what I'm calling "Fast Art" -- events where people make something artful under abnormal time constraints. I'd appreciate pointers to information about other events.

I just took the "Voice Your Choice" poll on the Fox Chicago site and it seems they are subliminally trying to encourage us to go after Iran.

I found out about Neighborhoodies from an Onion ad back in November and I've been a proud owner of an "Uptown" hoodie since shortly thereafter.

So when I found out that Michael needed people to show up for a Fox News piece to promote Neighborhoodies in Chicago last night, I was happy to do so.

It turned out to be a combo piece on Neighborhoodies and Windy City Fieldhouse, who do "team building" exercises. So they divided us hoodie-wearers up by neighborhood (West Side vs. North Side) and had the WCF people run us through sack races and walking-on-a-pair-of-planks-with-ropes and so on. About 3/4 of us were improvisors, which was probably great for their piece because everyone was hamming it up. (The rest of the people seemed to be ad sales folks from the newspapers that Neighborhoodies advertises in.)

So at least a few seconds of me will be on The Bottom Line segment of Fox News Chicago, next Friday (May 2) at 9 pm. Uptown!

Please note: if you ask me to help you with a video or sound editing project, please do the prep work that I ask you to do before you show up (log your takes, pick your shots, listen to the songs, whatever).

Three this week. Three! I swear, soon I'm gonna get mad enough to say something to someone's face.

I usually wear my watch, but I forgot to wear it tonight for some reason. I ran tech for the Vidiocy short film contest tonight, and as I was leaving, everyone was thanking me for sticking it out until the end (which I had to do to take my equipment). I wasn't sure why until I got in the car and saw the clock there. It was 2:30 am!

My advice to the next round of Vidiocy contestants is to take the ten minute limit as a extreme limit, not as a goal. Thanks.

I've been saying the phrase "house concert" a bunch lately, and most of the people I say it to say "house what?"

My friends in the band R. Buzzy wanted to do a show for their Indiana friends who find it hard to make it up to Chicago for a late night show, so they decided to have an acoustic show in band member Matt's house at 8 pm on a Saturday. And they asked Bare to open up for them, to fill out the evening. Back when we started Crazy Monkeys our philosophy was "anytime, anywhere" and so we said "Sure".

And then Saturday, Shaun got stuck in San Diego. So I ended up doing the show by myself. I've done a solo show before, so that was no problem. I did a solo version of our current "Pagent of History" form. The 30 people there (and let me tell you that 30 people in a living room feels like a crowd) ate it up with spoons. So, yay! And R. Buzzy was really good. It was great to really hear a lot of their clever lyrics, which can be so hard in a bar. I still like to hear them rock out, but it was a cool evening.

This happened on Wednesday, but I've been busy enough I haven't had a chance to post it until now -- I went over to the Virgin Megastore after work to see if I could pick up one of the new backlit Game Boy Advance SPs (I'm addicted to Advance Wars right now, so backlighting is important because... it just is, OK?) As we turned the corner into the video game/video area there was Ron Jeremy, hairy as all get out, signing copies of Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy. There were, oh, 2 or 3 people waiting to have their copies signed, and it was on sale, so it seemed like a shame not to grab a copy (as well as a copy of the first season of Futurama) and have it signed (just Porn Star, not Futurama).

I had to spell "Fuzzy" for him. We'll chalk it up to how noisy it was with the TVs blaring in the video section.

If you're like me, you've got a busy weekend planned. What will you (meaning me) be doing?

• Attending a co-worker's "hey, I just quit" party after work
• seeing Chicago ComedySportz for the first time after living in Chicago 3 1/2 years
• video-taping Jennifer Ostrega's show at the Single File solo performance festival at The Playground tonight at 10:30
• helping out with the Incubator auditions Saturday afternoon
• watching the ever-delightful Adrienne Frost (Daily Show) do her solo show Zero-to-Life at the Single File solo performance festival at WNEP Saturday night at 7 pm
• attending the first Belmont Burlesque Revue, a special presentation of the WNEP Around Midnite series (which I'm, cough, cough, executive producer of), midnight on Saturday
• performing with The Mighty Sunday morning (yes, morning) at 9 am at the LAUGH benefit at ComedySportz
• performing with Bare an hour later at LAUGH
• attending a read-through for an independent movie Sunday afternoon
• attending Cinema 2.0 (this week -- 1/2 price! Robot vs. Aztec Mummy!) Sunday night at 8 pm at The Playground
• drawing a suggestion at the Vidiocy drawing Sunday night at 10:30 at ImprovOlympic
• falling over
• ohhh... the weekend's not over 'til we say it's over -- seeing closing night of Fairy Tales Are Not For Children Monday night at WNEP (7 pm) and then running to the Silly Faces DVD release party at the Playground (I'm a silly face!)
• falling over again

I just got my Mouse Beard Fred t-shirt in the mail. (Hey, wait, why did I have to buy a shirt featuring a character I created?) It's excellent timing because the heating in the building evidently hasn't caught up with the suddenly warm weather here in Chicago and my long-sleeve shirt was tooooo warm. So now I'm stylin' in a shirt featuring a caricature of me if I had a big beard with a mouse living in it.

Sorry if you've sent me email in the last few days and I didn't get right back to you. I just got back from Las Vegas. I'd like to say I'm rested and tan, but CCC had me in my hotel room all day, editing video like mad. They worked me like a dog, I tell you. A dog!

And I'm sick. Poor little me. Cough, cough.

But, I won $20 at blackjack (my first time ever -- ain't never had one lesson!) and the show went well. Worth it? You bet. (Bet. Get it? Vegas. Gambling. Oh, why do I bother with you people?)

OK, it's true - I'm a super geek. I'm typing this entry on my new Danger hiptop (technically the 'Sidekick' from T-mobile, but Danger just sounds so much cooler). Will always-on Internet change my life? I'm sitting 2 feet away from a regular computer right now, so we'll see.

I got my first door prize last night. The back wheel of my bike was already screwed up from almost getting hit by a car a few weeks ago (just slamming on the brakes and then bouncing around from that bent my back rim all over the place) and now my front wheel is squeeking. I was a little scraped up, but I made it to the read-through for EFG's new show The Odds. (I'm not in the show, I was just helping out -- but it's a very funny show and you should go see it in November.)

I've been playing around with two new film cameras I bought recently (a Holga and a Lomo), and I've posted some shots

For some time I've been thinking about getting another tattoo, and I finally decided to get one for my birthday this year. A friend of mine had recommended Amy Justen at Chicago Tattoo, but when I called to get an appointment, it turned out that she was leaving the country for six weeks the next day. Patrick Cornolo of Body Basics had gotten lots of good reviews on the newsgroup, so I decided to go with him. As soon I got off the phone from making the appointment, a friend who was over said "Patrick Cornolo? He did some cover-up work for me a few years ago. He's a really nice guy." That was a good confirmation-of-good-decision-made.

I mailed Patrick the design and took a day off work to go up to Chicago.

My new tattoo is the alphabet, lower case Goudy Old Style, as an arm band on my left arm.

On Friday, February 5, 1999, Liz and I drove up to Chicago. Everyone at Body Basics was very pleasant, and Patrick turned out to be very nice. Here's a bunch of pictures (click on the little picture to see a bigger picture):

A trip report by Fuzzy Gerdes

So anyway, this last weekend (Feb 28-Mar 1, 1997) the Crazy Monkeys went down to Bloomington for the Great Bake-off, an Improv Festival hosted by Pumpernickel. The performance space was in the John Waldron Arts Center, a wonderful facility that's right across the street from the Wild Beet, a wonderful non-smoking, vegetarian friendly, bar, coffee shop, and restaurant.

We performed on Friday, the first real show by the new Crazy Monkeys, and it went quite well. Friday night Greg and Elizabeth of Pumpernickel let us stay at their house and they were gracious hosts.

Saturday I led a workshop that was a learning experience for both students and teacher (I think I'll do a lot better the next time I give a workshop like that).

Saturday night, after Odd Scrod's performance, we snuck out of the JWAC and headed up the street to Skinquake.

Our friend Michael Sims, who has done several of Liz and my piercings, works at Skinquake as a piercer, but we were there to see Brian Passwaiter, a nice man who turned this leg...

into this one...

Cool, huh?

It's the day after and it doesn't itch hardly much yet (which I'm told it's going to do) and I'm super glad I did it.

Love,
Fuzzy

Two of the other Deadbeets, Amy Jo and Maria, also got deadbeet tattoos, from a very nice artist in Minneapolis who's name I forget right now. They got theirs a few months ago, but this past Beetmas was the first time we'd all gotten together with tattoos. Maria designed both of their tattoos -- Amy Jo's has a braid to match her hair.

We're up to four -- to mark his 30th birthday, Robb got a beet tattoo on his ankle also.

I found out at Beetmas this year that Kyle's had a beet tattoo for some time. Pictures when someone gets theirs developed.

Also, I got a second tattoo.