I'm much better now.

Continued from my New Year's escapades here.

I slept for about 10 hours yesterday, and was a little bit less delusional after that. Having gathered my strength, I went out and started by unplugging the stereo, then trying the tv again. The purple spot was gone. I didn't check my email till much later, but huge thanks to Jennifer and Paul, since they emailed to let me know that it was the stereo. Even though I'd figured it out by then, it was reassuring to know I wasn't the only one who'd run into the problem. Plus, if I hadn't figured it out by then, their advice would have saved the remnants of my sanity.

Anyway, I gave up on any simple solutions to the Living Room Problem. So I unshelved every book. and every toy. and every knickknack, and I shoved furniture around, and found an arrangement that was functional and looked nice, and I reconnected all the electronics in a systematic way, testing each connection before moving on. Oh, and I kept the stereo wires further from the set. And then I dusted and vacuumed, and reshelved the books and crap, and I know the details are dull but I need some appreciation for the fact that I spent a large portion of yesterday and today tidying. But everything looks lovely now, and you can see the TV from all the chairs, and everything is where it should be, and I feel very satisfied and accomplished. Which is a nice way to start the year. And my living room is gigantic! I could waltz in there without moving the furniture. Well, okay, I could do the box-step. But that's all I remember about how to waltz, so it works out fine. If I feel the need to break into a waltz for some reason, I'm set.

Originally I was thinking of doing this as a kind of Adventurer's Diary, but I ran out of ideas pretty quickly. It did keep me entertained during the Great Reshelving though. I kept a little running commentary in my head:

Day Three: Making progress, but feeling of doom lurks over us all. The Animaniacs toys mock me. Running out of coffee. Removing books from tall bookcases is dangerous work -- several have come close to falling onto my head. One did: "Destiny: A Chronicle of Deaths Foretold." Wish irony could be more subtle.

There was a lot more, but it stopped being funny around there. Assuming it was funny at all. It's probably funnier if you're doing something really dull for an hour or two. Most things are, really.

Oh, and speaking of irony, the fact that I've gone through all of this effort just as I'm thinking about moving? I know. But if I do move, it won't be till at least March, and maybe not till several months after that. Plus, I might not be able to afford the hypothetical new place I'd be moving too. So I think it was still worth all the effort.

I need to talk a little bit about the other tv now. The one in my bedroom. Since that's now the one I can see from the computer. As I mentioned, it's surprising how many channels I can pick up with the antenna. And I found the Nintendo and hooked it up, so whee! One of these days I'll finish Starfox. Yes, it's a SNES. Don't laugh -- if it would work on this TV, I'd hook up the Heathkit "Pong" that's still at my mom's house. Tell me that wouldn't impress people. Anyway. I was flipping through channels while typing this up, to get a clearer idea of what channels I can get. The best news is that I get CBS very clearly, which means I can watch Letterman from bed, and then go to sleep. Which is a big deal, because it might help establish some kind of normal bedtime routine for me. Other things I've seen while typing this:

• A long ad that consisted of "Satellite of Love" playing for a while, which eventually turned out to be a station ID. Apparently channel 50 is very proud to be part of the cable world, or something.

• A montage of the year in sports. I had the news on, okay? Anyway, I'm only mentioning this because the music for the montage was Metallica's "Nothing Else Matters." Minus the vocals, of course. But doesn't that seem a little bit odd? Which reminds me that earlier in the -- oh wait, I mean: last year, one of the local stations ran ads for their news team that featured the Cure's "Love Song" (again, minus vocals) as the background tune. I think it was the same channel, so I'm guessing that their ad design crew is made up of twenty-somethings.

• I'll stop talking about music selections now. Um... Oh. During the weekend I think I found a 24-hour Tae-Bo channel. My upstairs neighbors were dropping unabridged dictionaries on the floor, or something, so I woke up quite early one morning. I turned on the tv and a Tae-Bo infomercial was running. Then I fell asleep again for a couple of hours. And when I woke up, the Tae-Bo was still happening. That's a lot of Tae-Bo. I can't find it now, so I guess they gave up, but I did run across an infomercial for some kind of diet system. One of these days I'll pay attention to the channel numbers, but it seems safe to assume it was the same channel, right? So I think it's an all-infomercial channel. That's awesome. Well, okay, I guess it's horrifying, but it's useful to me, since if I ever have trouble sleeping, I can tune to that station and it'll knock me out.

• Ooo! And finally, I just discovered that a local PBS station is showing The Prisoner! Unforuntately, tonight's episode is "The General," which is not one of my favorite efforts. But it's better than the other Tuesday night options.

Sin City, Revisited

Please note: In a shameless ploy to generate interest, portions of this entry may have been augmented by the same people who edit "reality-based" television shows.

A TWoP Summit! Hooray! I'd been vaguely contemplating a to Vegas for about six months, and once the official dates were announced I decided to stay a few extra days, and tried nagging other people into joining me. With limited success, because my friends are No Fun. Or maybe they're financially responsible. I get those things confused. I'd also spent about six months trying to get a spare key to my apartment. It can't be done. I don't know why. Since I didn't want Scooter to starve to death while I was gone, I ate him for Thanksgiving dinner. It was the humane thing to do.

Wednesday, 12/4

I had at least convinced Johanna to come along, although she stubbornly resisted my demands that she serve as my valet. The plan was that she'd come over to my place sometime Wednesday night, and then we'd stay up till 4 AM when the stretch limo would pick us up and take us to the airport. That ensured we'd get a head start on being exhausted.

You may have heard that there was a teeny bit of snow predicted for the east coast on Thursday. So while I wasn't getting much done at work that day, I was also obsessing over the weather forecast. I eventually convinced myself that our flight was so early (7 AM) that we'd probably be in the air before the worst of it hit. And I also figured that I couldn't do anything about it, and fretting wouldn't help. It does help pass the time, though. After a hard day of double-checking all of the cell-phone numbers on my list of fellow TWoP folk, I went home, took a nap, and started packing.

Johanna had a cold. I'm not really blending that fact into this story seamlessly so that you'll be surprised when it becomes important, but it's true, unlike much of this. (No, I didn't eat Scooter. There's not enough meat on a chinchilla. There is enough fur for nice earmuffs, though.) Johanna turned up around 10. We gabbed, discussed the weather, watched the snow start to pile up, debated whether we wanted to go out and get a midnight breakfast at Perkins, determined that the Perkins was, in fact, closed, debated going to IHOP instead, and finally decided against. Johanna sniffled. We watched The Weather Channel and some Blackadder, or at least I did while Johanna napped.

Thursday, 12/5

Around 3 AM, Johanna woke up and started to seriously question whether she could go. She was sad. And sick. Really sick. Poor Johanna. She was afraid she'd start puking on the plane and never, ever stop. She felt that bad. And I wanted her to come, if only to prove to skeptics that she does actually exist, but I didn't want her to be miserable on the plane, and spend the entire time sick in bed. So she finally decided to bow out, and then became even sadder because, with all the snow, she was pretty much stuck at my place until the next day anyway. Do not believe any rumors you may hear that Johanna doesn't exist. And if any actresses come forward with stories about how they were hired to impersonate someone named Johanna for a few days, you should view their claims with great skepticism. Even if they do show you a lengthy quiz testing their knowledge about Eminem and Ben Affleck. It's all lies. Lies!

The limo was only a couple of minutes late, so I wished Johanna, who is not imaginary, well. Although not so well that she'd suddenly feel perfectly fine in three or four hours, because how much would that suck? Anyhow, I rode off into the snow and very quickly decided that Johanna had chosen wisely, because if she was all ready feeling ooky a two-hour ride on snowy roads in the middle of the night wasn't going to help at all. There were several inches of snow by then, and while they we saw plenty of plows and sand trucks, it was falling too quickly to stay on top of. Yuck. It was a pretty miserable drive, and I spent a lot of it watching the road ahead vigilantly, as if I could do anything but watch in horror if something bad happened. Occasionally I tried looking out the side window at the pretty falling snow just to distract myself from how I had no control over my fate at that point. It worked marginally well.

Got to BWI about two hours later. Coming back, the same drive took a much more reasonable 40 minutes, which should give you some idea of how bad the roads were. Got wanded (hello, nurse) because my boots and bra clasp set off the metal detector. The bra clasp, mind you. It wasn't an underwire bra. The BWI metal detectors are so sensitive that you can't even hum Metallica songs near them. Not that you would. But they were very speedy about determining that I wasn't going to poke the pilot's eyes out with the hook-and-eye fastener, and I got to the gate only a little late. We boarded very quickly, and the flight was packed -- I suspect with people who were trying to get out ahead of the storm. The joke was on them: de-icing took two hours. No, it really did. Some of that was sitting in line, and then when it was our turn to be de-iced the de-icer was running low on colorful goo, so it had to go back and refuel, and then the whole process had to start over. I would have been a lot more miserable, but I was so tired I slept through most of it. If I hadn't overheard someone saying it was 9:30 just before we took off, I wouldn't have known. Well, I'd have suspected something when we got to Las Vegas three hours late, but you take my meaning.

I slept through most of the flight, too, so the ingenious "stay up all night" plan actually worked rather well. And getting in at noon wasn't that bad, since I was still one of the earlier arrivals so it's not like I was missing anything. Plus, by the time I got to the hotel, they actually had a room ready for me and I could check in and go straight up. Johanna and I had decided to splurge a little, so my room was gigantic and contained a couch, a swimming pool, and a helipad. And that was just in the bathroom! Oh, and there was also a great bathtub, as others have mentioned. I'm 5'7"ish, and not particularly petite, and it was very comfy. I'm not big on baths because, while I appreciate the concept of just soaking indulgently and relaxing, in practice I get bored after a few minutes. Of course, if we'd splurged even more and gotten the room with the TV in the bathroom, I guess that would have solved the problem. The point is, the tub was nice enough that even I gave into the lure and took a bath, and enjoyed it immensely. On the downside, the much hyped computer with internet access was very nice in theory, but the one in my room didn't actually work. Several calls about it had zero effect. That was kind of irritating.

Okay, I'll stop going on about the room. But it was nice! After showering off the residual sleepiness, I had lunch with Aaron at a place where the waiter thought we wouldn't know what bread plates were unless he explained the concept. There was a break for naptime, because we're all getting old, and then we hung out with other TWoP folk who were trickling in. A bunch of us had dinner at P.F. Chang's (exotic!) while Niki and Beer Josh (who earned his name) went to see some belly-dancers. After dinner we learned that Sars and Couch Baron had finally arrived, so we went up to harass them and heard the story of their epic journey. Alex Richmond made an appearance, but then dissed us in favor of going out with Gustave to lasso some cowboys. There was a rodeo in town. I'm not actually lying about that, whatever you may think. Um, and then we discussed further plans for world domination and speculated about whether the subliminal messages in the recaps were effective mind-control devices, and after we paid off the cops to close down the strip so we could have a few drag-races in those goofy electric cars they rent, we went to bed.

Friday, 12/6

After the previously mentioned luxurious bath, I roamed the mall at the Aladdin, and got some stuff I can't talk about because they're highly classified Christmas presents. In the course of my wanderings, I was selected to view some upcoming television shows and share my opinions of them as part of some market research. Aaron opined that I lied in the screener, because I said I hadn't ever been interviewed about my opinions about a TV show, but I think that's technically accurate. I briefly tried to track other recappers down, because how much would it skew their research to have a bunch of recappers comment on this stuff? Alas, I couldn't find anyone I could convince to join the wackiness, so I steeled myself and braved the horrors by myself.

The "previews" consisted of clips for three upcoming shows. The first was Bunim-Murray's latest, Starting Over. In which a group of women who want to change their lives agree to -- can you guess? -- live in a house full of cameras together. Half of the preview consisted of clips of Bunim and Murray rhapsodizing about how wonderful they are, which leads me to believe that the show won't have anyone on the edge of their seats. The other half of the preview consisted of clips of the actual show, which pretty well confirmed that theory. The second show, Case By Case, did have a vaguely interesting concept -- it's a daytime talk show about court battles, and they actually had the lawyers there to argue instead of just the clients, which seems like it could lead to something more interesting. But it didn't. The clips they used were about that California case with the woman who was killed by her neighbors' dogs, and the part that seemed promising (considering the legal aspects of the case, instead of just saying "This person is evil, and that person is stupid,") failed to occur. And the host was obnoxious. The final show was Fergie! Wow. To be fair, she is fairly charming as a host. But the clips were of her charming the audience, and then a montage of other people talking about how charming she was, and then her being charming some more. I'm still not sure what kind of show it actually is. Is it a "talk to 'real' people about 'real' problems" likeOprah? Is it more like Regis & Kelly where they gab for half an hour and then have a couple of celebrity guests? I honestly have no idea. And so, having typed a few nasty comments about all of these offerings into the shiny computer, I was handed $20 and sent on my way. It was a lot like recapping, actually. Needless to say, after the promotions department saw the wit and erudition I displayed in my commentary, they called me back for an interview, and, to make a long story short, I was hired as the new president of NBC. I don't want to give away my plans for the 2003 season, but you should expect to see a lot more chinchillas during February sweeps. On every single show. The one on Passions will actually be a were-chinchilla, and the shocking twist will be the discovery of who's been turning into a chinchilla during the full moon and gnawing everything in sight.

Let's see. There was some more hanging out, and then a bunch of us trooped over to the New York, New York for dinner. Hm. And then... it's a bit of a blur, frankly, but I'm sure that has nothing to do with the capsule Kim dropped into my drink. There was some discussion about people who annoyed us, but all of that was just hypothetical and those weren't threats; they were just jokes! It is a lucky thing that Pamie and Stee drove out, because the trunk of their car is quite spacious. It's also lucky that sand is fairly easy to dig in. Although the whole thing would have gone a lot faster if Aaron hadn't insisted on making sure the hole really was "Six Feet Under." I do remember that after we returned to the hotel, Keckler slapped me a few times and demanded to know what the suspicious stains on my jacket were. "Strawberry Daiquiris," I insisted. Luckily Sobell wasn't around to demand samples for analysis. There was some more perfectly normal chatting that in no way involved any alibis, and then we all went to bed. I did have some strange dreams that night that featured Glark waving a pistol and screaming, "This is what you get for double-posting!" but I'm sure that was just because I was tired.

Saturday, 12/7

Our big meeting and dinner was Saturday night, so, as usual, we spent a lot of time preparing our costumes and masks for the occasion. Everyone else seems to be too embarrassed to mention it, but yes, to ensure anonymity we disguise ourselves whenever we all gather in public. And sometimes in private, but that's really just to humor Omar. Apparently some people thought my feathered headdress was over-the-top, but they're just jealous. We discussed Official Business and signed the posters that TWoP posters had so generously paid for, and broke under the pressure of having to be witty while everyone watched, and cried and rocked in a corner muttering, "I'm not funny. I'm not funny!" Well, not everyone did that. Okay, fine, it was just me. Shut up. Sobell gave me comics to distract me from my crisis, and Miss Alli tut-tutted and brought me ice packs. Shack escorted me back to my room and made sure there weren't any sharp objects handy, and then we talked about how funny it would be when Firefly was cancelled, which cheered me up immensely.

That cheered me up sufficiently to go to dinner, and... holy god. So much food. There were lobster tails and giant shrimp and oysters, and that was just the appetizer tray. We ate and ate and ate. I sat at the self-appointed Geek Table, with Shack and Sobell and Keckler and Ace and Sep and Ace & Sep's long-suffering boyfriends, who endured conversations about RPG's and Madeline L'Engle books andStar Wars and Lord of the Rings and, well, it was pretty darn geeky. In a shocking turn, we were not the noisiest group at the restaurant, and I for one was humbled by that experience.

After dinner, the plan was to digest for a little while and then head out for karaoke. The only flaw in that plan was that we're all old. Well, maybe not all of us. But when we regrouped, a lot of people offered excuses about being "tired" and "exhausted" and "very, very sleepy" and "having to catch plane early the next morning," and the lack of enthusiasm won the evening. Which was fine, since lord knows I don't sing except to scare people, although Shack and I had planned to imitate American Idol with him as Simon and me as Paula. But I hadn't planned out any insane non-sequitors to declaim, so it's probably for the best that we didn't go. Instead, many people went to bed, and those that were still vaguely awake hung out in the TWoP lounge and gossiped till all hours while slave-boys fanned us with giant fronds and midgets rubbed our feet. So it wasn't really too bad.

Sunday, 12/8

After checking out, a bunch of us met at the Starbucks (mmm, mochas) before departing. I got there early, so was diligently readingAn Instance of the Fingerpost while half-expecting Vegas Stormtroopers to march up and demand to know what the hell I was doing entertaining myself in a way that did not require spending money. Luckily they were probably too busy with all the cowboys, so I was able to read without harassment. Other folk appeared, and there were goodbyes and hugs and so on. Yay, hugs. Not only am I old, but I'm suffering from "failure to thrive" syndrome. It's sad. I trooped off to the Stardust, where I tried to scrub away the stains of debauchery and chinchilla-related crimes with only modest success. On my way, I did not go to review the Tropicana to see if it had any "As seen on Angel!" posters I could be amused by. Not because I didn't want to, but because I was confused and thought they'd gone to the Flamingo. Which definitely didn't have any mentions of Angel, but that makes more sense in retrospect. And then some other stuff happened, but that's another story.