June 20, 2006: Mom’s Birthday

My mother would have been 58 today.

My shift started at midnight. It remained warm even though it was supposed to drop into the 60’s outside. The rain that was predicted all day still did not come. I was hoping for it so that it might cool it down.

I finished watching Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express for which Ingrid Bergman won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 1974. My movie got interupted by a conference call that I had to be on for forty minutes or so. They loves conference calls at work. I can’t figure out why. It is impossible to figure out what anyone is saying and there are so many people that you can never tell who is talking or to whom.

I set to tackling a stack of mail that needed to be dealt with. It adds up quickly. And more bills than I had realized earlier when I was doing the bills. What a pain. I automated some of them to make it easier in the future. Boy am I ever productive. 🙂

A little after two I started the Doris Day and James Garner classic The Thrill of It All. Dominica watched it recently and said that it was really good. One of my favourite actors of that era, Carl Reiner plays one of the stars of the show in the show.

One of my all time favourite pop duets, Boy Meets Girl, have opened (I have no idea how recently) their own website where you can buy any of their four albums directly from the artists. Just last year they remastered their deput album from 1985 for its twentieth anniversary and made it available again. And they rereleased their 1991 album “New Dream” that was selling as high as $700 on eBay recently.

At four in the morning it was still seventy degrees outside and the apartment was closer to eighty. The fresh air was good and the bedroom wasn’t too hot since that is where the air was entering the house but the rest of the house was pretty warm. This is about the coolest time of day and about the best temperature that I can hope for in here. With no air circulation at all in half of the house there just isn’t much that can be done to cool it down. I decided that it was time to switch over to air conditioning in the hopes that it would be able to keep up for the rest of the day although I am not getting my hopes up.

At five I put in If A Man Answers with Sandra Dee and Bobby Darrin. Dominica has watched this one all ready as well. I am way behind on my movie watching. I had forgotten that Dominica had told me that this movie had adorable Boston Terriers in it. Watching it makes me miss my puppy even more. Five days until I see him again. After seeing Bobby Darrin in State Fair it is impossible to see him as anything but a big loser. The dogs are so cute but the movie itself is pretty weak. The characters are dim witted, manipulative and annoying. One of those “romantic” movies where you would only be happy if the couple end up breaking up because the last thing that you want is for them to be happy because they are annoying. The movie wasn’t awful but it wasn’t good. Not exactly a classic. Although it is sad considering how few movies Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin did (separate or together) that so many of them are so bad.

I had some more time to kill during my shift while I did paperwork so I watched some of Maverick with one of my all time favourite actors: Alfred Molina. Molina was really awesome in Chocolat. Here is an interesting point that I wonder if they really considered for the movie. In the movie every poker player getting into the All Rivers Championship Poker Tournament had to bring $25,000 and the final winnings were $500,000. Now it sounds like a lot of money but I think that people watching the movie forget just how much that really is. We are talking about seriously rich people here. If you were to consider the movie to be taking place in 1890 then the minimum value of $25K would be over one half million dollars in 2006 dollars and a maximum value of almost three million dollars. So the Maverick character is actually significantly rich. They point to this a little when he states where his custom tailored clothing was made but other than that you feel that he is just a poor western wanderer. The winnings of the tournament in modern money could be as high as fifty seven million dollars! This is one serious tournament. Now that is if you consider the movie taking place in 1890. If you push the date back to 1870 which is plausible the figures actually drop slightly as post-war America had reverse inflation for a few decades but nontheless the numbers are staggering.

Today I wasn’t nearly so exhausted when the end of my shift rolled around. I have gotten good at adjusting to the shift quickly. The sun was out in force this morning. It is going to be another hot one. I didn’t end up heading to bed until after nine in the morning.

I didn’t need a lot of sleep last night, apparently, and was up by two thirty in the afternoon. I felt pretty good so I settled into the living room on the computer. It must not be quite as hot out today as the air conditioning is keeping up, more or less, with keeping the apartment at a reasonable temperature. Once every four hours or so it will turn off for about five minutes. The sun is pretty bright, though, and is keeping the living room much warmer than the rest of the apartment which is, of couse, where I sit all day. I did figure out that we don’t pay for our water and that I can set up a fan to blow air through the shower and the ground water is pretty cold. So I have a makeshift air conditioning augmentation system with built it air filtration set up that seems to help a little. I don’t run it all of the time but it keeps part of the house a little cooler and it adds some moisture to the air that is getting sucked out by running the air conditioning all of the time.

I renewed two more domain names today that were about to expire. It is nice to be able to register them for nine years at a shot now. I have eleven domain names that I own currently and the first one that I have to worry about again is dominicamiller.com that isn’t set to expire until 2008 and most of them are around 2015. That is handy. I have gotten used to having to renew all of them every year and that means that on average I would have to log in and deal with them every month. That got to be annoying.

I did very little this afternoon. Just relaxed. I put a few movie images into the movie database, surged the web, did a little work for the office, etc. At seven I decided that my pizza yesterday was so delicious that I needed to get another one. But this time I figured out that I did not need to get cheesesticks because the cheesesticks from Papa John’s just aren’t that good and the pizza is really cheesy so I don’t need the extra cheese. When I get Domino’s I get the thin crust which is like a cracker with barely anything on it (it is really good but not very filling) so the cheese sticks are important. So I am learning.

I decided that Dominica and I were never going to get a chance to watch a lot of our DVDs together so I put in Red Dwarf Series VIII. I saw most of the eighth season some years ago but I can’t place where. But it was nice to finally wrap up watching Red Dwarf that I started watching sometime around 1990.

“I am so gorgeous that there is a six month waiting list for birds to appear every time I am near.”

“The future’s the future and, like your underpants, there is little chance of changing it.”

I talked to dad and Dominica tonight. Dominica says that her dental work is going well. Two days down and just one left to go. Tomorrow night she is going to see “The Care Bears Live” in Utica. How exciting. I miss everything fun 😉

In general I am doing pretty well with dealing with mom being gone. Subconsciously I think that it affects me more than I realize. My trichotillomania or trich is awful today. Really, really bad. It is aggrevated by the weather and the lack of good air conditioning. If I am warm all of the time it gets bad but today is exceptionally bad. I almost ripped out my entire left eyebrow before I even realized that I was having an attack. I don’t normally talk about my trich, I have had it for twenty years or so, but this is one of the worst attacks that I can remember. It is a constant battle for me that has been improving in recent years, in general.

I did some work on the movie database system tonight. Now you can enter “views” into the system so it is easy to register when a film has been watched. Very handy.

I put in The Game – one of the best movies ever. This is the movie that really shows off Michael Douglas and Sean Penn. This is amazing stuff. This is right up there with Romancing the Stone for Douglas.

Midnight and time to get back to work. The overnight shift is a strange world to be in.

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