On Saturday I drove up to visit my friend In Ocala. We had nothing on our agenda, just drove around and got some food and visited some stores. Tried to visit a museum, but it was closed. What kind of lame museum closes on Saturday. Since no one was there I decided to check out a couple of primitive huts that were assembled in a field nearby.
I thought they were pretty neat because they were constructed out of the palm fronts you find all over Florida. It was interesting to see how they were put together in such a way to cause the rain to flow on the outside. I went inside to see how the frame was assembled, and I was a little disappointed to see the frame was held together with nuts and bolts. Oh well, they still looked neat.
Me chilling out in a hut.
My friend K chilling out in a hut. She's so pretty.
Bored, we did some tree climbing.
K did not get very far.
I got a little farther, but I decided that any higher and I would just fall off. My fall from the roof fresh in my mind, I decided not to.
Some crazy old ladies in Downtown Ocala.
After My visit I buzzed on home, took a brief nap, and then went Down Town Orlando to meet some friends. It was crazy down there. I showed up early enough that I manage to get a spot in a parking garage, however they quickly filled up. The rest of the night pretty much became a blur. I recall:
A girl in a goth outfit, except her clothes and the streamer things in her hair were all green and white. It was neat.
Shoving a red blinky light into a cherry so that the cherry blinked happily. I'm not sure what happened to it.
Drunkenly and loudly calling some girl 'mean'
Mixing too many kinds of booze. I had rum, vodka, midori, whiskey, and a shot of something really nasty that tasted like Black liquorice. I am not sure who gave it to me. It was foul.
Eating a massive Italian sausage as I stumbled to my car. That sausage would hunt me all night.
I shoulda took a cab home, but I took the east west and that's a quiet road so I made it OK. I spent most of Sunday huddled under the blankets. It was cold and bright out and I had a hangover. I did not roll out of bed until noon, and then it was only because I was hungry. Since my house was barren of food I wandered over to the food court at the mall and got some of the MSG-laced Asian chicken that the Asian guys running the 'greek' restaurant served me.
I also got a couple of mall pretzels to snack on later. Mall pretzels do not microwave well. I think the microwave causes some sort of vulcanization like process that turns the pretzels into rubber.
On the way home I stopped in the video store. I wanted the first season of the HBO show 'Rome' which I have been watching on and off. The show seems really good, however since it's the middle of the second season I have no clue what was going on. Alas, they were out of the video, so I ended up buying 'Justice League' season one. I spent the rest of the day vegetating to that.
Justice league is a great cartoon, and I was surprised at the number of episodes I had not seen before. I am also amused by the semi-cursing that they put into the show. While no character actually curses, they instead start a well-known phrase and then get interrupted before they are finished. Such as:
"You son of a.." (explosion)
"Go to..." (face kick)
"You piece of..." (robot explodes)
And so on. There is also a surprising number of sexual references for a kids show, particularly when it comes to wonder woman who is drawn particularly juicy in this series and the viewer is constantly reminded that she grew up on an island with no men.
Anyways, I like the show. Because I am a geek.
I am excited this week because Thursday I am going to the Suwannee Spring fest, which is four days of music and camping. I have never been to this, but it looks like it's going to be fun. The weather looks like it is going to be perfect, warm days and cool nights with little if no rain. I'll have a full account of that adventure when I get back.
Yesterday my old roommate from College, who is also hard of hearing, clued me in on a new product that is out, a closed captioned telephone.
It looks pretty neat. You call someone on the phone, and when the other party talks a captioning of what they are saying appears on the telephone screen. This is not voice to text, it actually in the background connects to a tdd relay service, and there is someone sitting there actually listening to the other conversation and typing in whatever they say. I find this to be a little weird, that someone in some other state is actually sitting there and listening to my conversation, but I would probably get used to it.
Best of all, I can get the telephone for free from the Government because I am hard of hearing. The only drawback is that I would have to get a landline again. I only use a cell phone now. I was happy when I originally got rid of it, because it was one less bill. However, I think having a captioned telephone would probably be worth the extra money. I wonder if the telephone can work with Vonage.
Regardless, I should not pass it up. After all it is free.
2026 Update
Dialing back to March 2007, where palm-frond huts, a blinky cherry, and a sausage haunted one man's entire weekend.
Nineteen years later, this post reads like a dispatch from a lost civilization. You wandered into a video store to buy Justice League on a shiny disc; now the entire concept of a store full of plastic cases feels like a museum exhibit, and the Justice League is just one subscription away if you can tolerate four different streaming services arguing about it. You had a landline available to make a government-subsidized captioned telephone work; now we all carry captioning machines in our pockets and still refuse to answer calls. I also love that the mall food court served MSG-laced Asian chicken from a Greek restaurant—these days every mall is half empty and the food court has been replaced by a dozen identical delivery-app ghost kitchens. And of course the weekend ends with a quiet-road drunk drive, which you wave off like it was an overdue library book. The blinky cherry was the least dangerous thing you ingested. Honestly, the nuts-and-bolts in the palm hut were the most wholesome technology in the whole tale.
“2007 Ed, after mixing rum, vodka, Midori, whiskey, and whatever black-liquorice nightmare a stranger handed you, what made you trust the 'quiet road' logic instead of the sausage's clearly better judgment?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2007 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, that's a fair question, and it ranks right up there with my other great decisions, like climbing a tree after falling off my own roof. You have to understand, at that point the sausage and I were not on speaking terms. It had already started its nightly haunting, and I figured the east-west was basically empty, a nice quiet stretch where the only thing I could hit was a deer or a gator, and neither one would judge me. The sausage, on the other hand, was clearly planning mutant revenge in my gut. I shoulda listened to it, honestly, but drunk Ed is a stubborn cuss. He thinks quiet road equals safe road, and somehow that made sense after rum, vodka, Midori, whiskey, and whatever foul licorice curse that stranger handed me. Next time I'll let the sausage drive.
