Week In Review.

Tuesday I was driving home from work and I hear this rattling sound as I was stopped at a light. The rattling was pretty disturbing, then I hear a loud POP sound. After that the engine temp started rising and the battery light went on. A couple of days later I had the car towed in to the Saturn dealership. The tension device that controls the serpentine belt had busted, plus the fuel pump mechanism was snafu somehow. I told them to go ahead and fix that and that there were a couple of other problems they should check out when they got that stuff fixed. My car had not been able to accelerate beyond 3-4 thousand rpm and it stuttered when driving. They took a look at this and figured the gunked up catalytic converter was the issue and so I asked them to go ahead and replace it. Hopefully all this shit will be done tomorrow (Monday) or sometime early next week...

In the meantime I have been taking RTD to work and it's gone pretty well. It takes me about 30-40 minutes door to door. Driving it took maybe 20-30 minutes. But I don't have to drive with rtd and when I come home after work I walk from the park and ride, instead of take the bus (which I do going in), so I get a nice relaxing after work stroll. Good exercise.

Bien Amigo Terry retired last Friday, 3/23/2007 and the gang had a gettogether at the Celtic Tavern downtown. I took the light rail in, met up with everyone there, and we sent him off with a few beers and shots. Good time and got to see a few people I hadn't seen in a while.

Since it turns out the RTD commute to Downtown is so easy, maybe I'll make it back up that way more often. I hadn't really been up there since last fall.

Overlooked Books.

Here are some fairly randomly chosen good works of lit that I think could stand to be better known:

1. Prater Violet - Christopher Isherwood's novel(a) about the 1930's London.
2. Inferno - Larry Niven's science fiction version of Dante's Inferno.
3. Night - Albert Alvarez talking about anything nocturnal - dreams, night shift work, etc.
4. Troilus And Cressida - Overlooked Shakespeare.
5. Muscle - Oxford graduate's memoir of becoming a bodybuilder in the 1980's in NY and LA.
6. When Kafka Was the Rage - Anatole Broyard's memoir of New York in the 50's.
7. Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammet Detective novel.
8. Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead - Eric Bogosian 1 man play.
9. New and Collected Stories - Alan Sillitoe Stories from 60's era London/England.
10. Philadelphia Here I Come - Brian Friel play set in Ireland in the 60's.

New Fave Thing

I downloaded (bought via iTunes) a few Lily Allen tunes on my iPod and I have been listening to them all the time since. She's my new fave thing. If you want to enjoy some ridiculously catchy tunes, look her up.

New Glasses

Started wearing a new pair last week. I was cleaning off the older pair I was wearing and I lost a screw (I was really taking these guys apart to be thorough) and so when I got home I started wearing this 'new' pair that I had bought a couple of years ago but hadn't started wearing cause the old ones were familiar and pretty much up to the job. It took a few days to get used to the new ones. It's a subtle difference. Things are a little clearer, colors are a little brighter. The fit is good and they are light.

Changing O' the Seasons.

This is the first rain of the year here in Denver as far as I recall. It was nice. I opened the patio door and the bedroom window and let the fresh air circulate. I had 'wash car' on my to - do list because it had accumulated a layer of salt and dirt and misc. crud on it and even I couldn't stand it anymore and I am a guy who damn near never washes my car. Now I won't have to though, it's quite refreshed...

I tried to take a picture of the rain, as you can see, but it came out kind of fuzzy. I haven't got the hang of taking night time or low light photos with the thing as yet. Still, you get the idea. You can pretend I took the photograph after looking at some impressionist paintings or something.

Aside from the 1st rain, this weekend is notable because official time changes at 2:00 am this morning and it's being done 3 weeks earlier than usual. Supposedly this will save energy because it will be lighter out during the hours most people are working. Why they don't just have this time standard all year round I don't fucking know but I do know that it's going to fuck people up because daylight savings time is something people's computers deal with automatically and when they changed the weekend this was done on, they created a software bug that may or may not be fixed - we'll see in a couple of days.