Life has been hectic. My car got broken into two Saturdays ago while I was at Theatresports, the front passenger window smashed. It was rotten timing because it was raining and I had two guests I had to drop off in addition to Elizabeth, so all three had to cram into the back seat (since the front was covered in shattered glass) and we all had to deal with the rain coming in.
I always take care to make sure there’s nothing visible in my car that can even be remotely construed as worth stealing, and sure enough it didn’t even seem like anything got stolen, until we discovered that my $2 phone charger was missing (and not the $10 bottle of Excedrin or anything else of even marginal value)… the working theory now is that they saw the line running to my stereo and didn’t see where it ended, and imagined there might have been an iPod or something similar tucked away at the other end. In which case, lesson learned… but what scares me is that this was a truly random incident, one which I had no hope of preventing. It’s hard not to feel violated, since the cost of replacing the window doesn’t come anywhere near my insurance deductible, so the only thing you can do is drop the $300 or so on a replacement.
(I will mention, though, that it pays to call around. The first autoglass place I called said they couldn’t get any replacement windows for a car as new as mine, and that I would have to go to the dealership. The dealership near me quoted me over $400… but when I called a different dealership, they referred me to a different autoglass place that had no trouble getting the window, and came all the way from Tacoma in their van, right to my condo to do the replacement on-site, for nearly $150 less.)
In the same vein of window-trouble, I was recently having trouble with my glasses… I was having blurred vision, especially in the evenings. I kept thinking my glasses were unclean, and would obsessively clean them, only to still find my vision blurred. I suddenly got worried that perhaps the problem was with my eyes and not the glasses themselves. I booked an appointment at the optometrist as early as I could, and she (thankfully) found nothing wrong with my eyes, and discovered that the protective coating on my lenses had fragmented in a kind of a lattice pattern. She sent them to the lab to be serviced under warrantee, and so I’ve been wearing an old pair for the past week or so. I just recently got them back and them seem improved for the most part, although I still have trouble focusing my right eye in certain directions, which I think may just be a problem with the lens that I’m stuck with. Every day I give more consideration to the surgery…
It’s been an eventful couple of weeks for materialistic things. My new barbecue finally arrived, and after much frustration I have it almost entirely put together. I couldn’t assemble the side burner, though, as the valve was extremely tough to get positioned correctly and I wound up breaking the casing on it and disconnecting a couple of wires. So I attempted to contact the warrantee company and in spite of the initial setback of being given an out-of-date website and phone number I was eventually able to reach them, and they were very obliging about sending me replacement parts that should arrive in the next week or two.
The grill itself is quite sharp-looking, but heats up a lot slower than my previous one did. Here’s how it looks:
Also, the company that installed my blinds sent another guy out to finish the job installing a skylight blind on my largest atrium window. It was a very custom and complicated job as the angled blinds are usually vertical, but my window is too wide for any vertically-closing blind to work. So I came up with the (rather clever, in my opinion) idea of using a horizontally-closing blind instead. It very nearly didn’t work, as the blind was drooping out of its track, and I was coming to terms with the idea that I simply wasn’t going to be able to get coverage of that window. But they finally tightened it sufficiently to get it working, and it actually looks pretty decent:
I finally got my hands on some photos from And Then There Were None. They are quite excellent, and I’ve added them to my album. Here are a few selections:
Cannibal opened yesterday, and we are already having a lot of fun with it. It’s pretty much the same show as last year, with a few new faces and a couple of new jokes to boot.Be sure to come see it, especially if you missed last year’s production. I finally got my hands on a DVD from last year and it is a shpadoinkle show!
Dan.
