Has anything of interest happened to you recently?

And chowing down on Tums makes acid problems worse - your body overproduces.

It is very rare for me to get acid reflux -- it's now just when I eat certain foods. Like my favorite foods!

Next time post that you might be dying yourself! Hmph!

I went to the ballet with my brother tonight. Rush seats, so it didn't break the bank, and they were surprisingly well positioned.

We saw the ballet adaptation of Alice in Wonderland since we both love the book and it was actually really really good. The choreography was innovative and pretty hilarious in places. You don't usually see the audience laugh during a ballet performance but the Queen of Hearts' scenes were a big hit. It was pretty much the perfect adaptation. They kept the recognizable characters and did a lot of work to make the sets look similar to the illustrations, but took a few liberties with the story in order to make it better fit the structure of a ballet. They managed to reproduce the book's whimsical tone with a bit of a creepy edge to it. It was at its best when everything was very intense and manic.

I am so, so, SO jealous right now. It sounds perfect.

How did they express the long fall down the rabbit hole?

Thirty minutes ago, the smell of smoke woke me up. I nudged Quat. "Do you smell smoke?" We ran downstairs. The smoke was really thick. We started yelling for Quat's mom. Turns out she'd started the goddamn fireplace with the goddamn flue closed. Fucking hell.

I didn't get to sleep until 6:30 this morning, but boy am I awake now. Hopefully the adrenaline in my system will go away and I can calm the fuck down...

Jesus Christ. I've never been comfortable around fire places, I'm always convinced I'm going to wake up dead from carbon monoxide poisoning.

I hate fireplaces. Probably because my grandmother used to set her house on fire regularly with hers when I was a kid. They scare me.

This is why you get a convection insert. Not only is it safer, but for the first time in the lifetime of your fireplace it will generate more heating than it sucks out.

Lord. Well at least you're all alright, thank goodness.
I remember that happened once when we'd first moved into this house eight years ago. Mother started a fire in the fireplace, the house started getting eerily smoky. I told her, she said I was imagining things.

aaaand then the fire alarm went off

"Oooohhhohoho, I didn't open the flue! Ahaha."
"/shaking"

I'm sitting in a train and a drunk dude is asking me what I'm listening to and won't leave me alone. Interesting? Hardly, but super annoying.

Shit, really?

Well, they have a sort of nutcracker-esque intro where Alice's parents are organizing a garden party and Lewis Carroll is entertaining Alice and her sisters. The guests at the party are sort of real-world versions of the wonderland characters (woman with a baby carriage is the duchess, Lewis Carroll is the White Rabbit, Alice's domineering mother is the red queen, etc). There's some drama when a young gardener that Alice is friends with is fired by her mother for supposedly stealing a tart, and Lewis Carroll decides to take her picture to cheer her up. After the flash, he suddenly turns into the White Rabbit and Alice follows him down a hole.

The actual falling bit was a projected sequence. It's kind of hard to explain.

Here are some videos that give you a sense of what it looks like (you can see a bit of the falling sequence in the second video).







This is the sequence with the Queen of Hearts that I was talking about

Wegmans is a supermarket, the best supermarket in fact, and it is always crowded, always. Except the day after thanksgiving apparently. Stopped by on our way home from my in-laws and had the most pleasant shopping expeience ever. Ironic it was on Black Friday.

It is actually not busy on Saturday nights! (At least, the one I shop at.)

The Wegmans I shop at is located near Asbury Park, which is kind of the gay mecca of the Jersey Shore. If you go in there on a Saturday night you'll find all sorts of awesome couples doing their shopping. It's insanely busy and fairly entertaining.

That being said: supermarket business in general is down 30% on the day after Thanksgiving, relative to a normal Friday. Or so says my old man, who was a supermarket exec for a few decades and knows that shit. My local Wegmans is one of their top five stores (and possibly their number one store), so today it went from "insanely busy" to "somewhat busy" which was a pleasant change of pace.

Nebty, those dance sequences look amazing. I'm even more jealous now. I was especially impressed by the Red Queen, but the whole thing was fabulous. I hope they put out a full-length video at some point...

Actually, it seems that they have.

I know what I'm getting for Christmas!

Today I got a package from Amazon. Not really interesting, but this was special delivery I had completely forgotten about. A few weeks ago I followed a whim and requested all data stored on my person from several companies. According to EU law they have to give me a complete copy. Why did I do this ? Just for the sake of it, no real reason. Most companies were ...less than law-abiding. Amazon did send me a mail then telling me that they have to compile the info, which might take a few weeks. Today I got probably around 500-600 pages of dual-side printed paper. Pretty amazing, everything I ever ordered there or from the US Amazon. All my former address, all gifts I ever sent (and to whom). Cool stuff.

600 pages of orders records? They must love you at Amazon.

This month was incredibly tense work-wise; if a person is not called in to work at least once every calendar month, they are dropped from the system and have to reapply, which...pretty much means you have a slim-to-none chance of getting work again. By the time you've been dropped and reapplied, there have already been hundreds upon thousands of applicants.

I got called for a shift this morning.
Literally crying with joy.

Or they did until he asked to see them.

Glad it worked out for you. But if I may ask, what kind of job is this?

Why in the world would a company arbitrarily "drop" a presumably trusted and experienced employee for someone off the street that would need to go through the hiring process, need be trained, etc.??

Well, they opened service here in 2003 - and started with a nice PR gag where any customer with a valid university email address got 10 euro per review he posted online. I was working part time at a helpdesk...

Been a good customer since then. Amazon and I, we are BFFs.

Edit: I should also probably point out that my MP3 purchases are listed per song. Also, anything electronic (including kindle books) lists all manners of licences etc.
Edit 2: On second thought I might just as well admit that I have a reading problem. Not the usual kind, the 'buying books until you drop kind'.

Farnsworth: (I'm assuming you buy real books as well as Kindle books. Otherwise, discount this post.) It's too bad there's no thriftbooks.com for EU then! Though they might offer free international shipping over a certain amount. I love Amazon, but I find that Thriftbooks is typically cheaper by a non-trivial amount on most non-recent books.

Still, I'm happy to see someone else has a major paper book habit. I know a lot of people here read, though I suspect it is mostly eBooks now. When we moved we had more boxes of books than we did boxes for any other room or type of thing in the house. HEAVY... but so worth it when I'm reading them! :)

So, my dad is doing less than stellar. Last weeks surgery went fine, but yesterday he had his spleen removed. His blood doesn't coagulate well so he's got a drain in his abdomen. He's anaemic, has a couple of blood clots and fluid in his lungs, barely coherent and drifts in and out of sleep. He's going back on the operating table as I write this. Thing's aren't out of control, but not fantastic either. And then there's another medical issue (that I have sworn not to divulge) that they haven't even started on yet.

I've spent the last couple of days taking care of my mother. She's quite healthy, but needs eye drops four times a day for her cataract, and since she doesn't drive I've been staying at home (she doesn't like to sleep alone in the house) and driving her back and forth to the hospital.

Of course I'm not exactly in the happiest of moods and frustrated at my utter inability to affect the outcome. But I've realised that my job isn't really to sit next to my dad throughout the day (trying - and failing - not to look despaired), that's what my mother is there for. Not that I could do anything if I tried; my dad is getting excellent care at the hospital (nurses are damn cute too). My job is to take care of all the day-to-day stuff that has to get done anyway and be the solid rock for others to lean on when needed.

I've come up with one thing I can do though, with a little help from you guys:

The hospital doesn't have an e-card service, but I'd ask you lot to send my dad a little get well message via my mail address: krise[underscore]madsen at hotmail dot com. I'll print them out and give them to him. His name is Hans and he does understand English (actually, German and a little Spanish too). Your help will be greatly appreciated, thanks.

True. Amazon tends to be expensive. But I cheat anyways - there are tons of third party providers selling via Amazon. There are several that sell from the UK, and charge between 10 and 99 cents, plus delivery (3 euro flat). I'd be surprised if I payed more than 4-5 euro or so on average. Anything job-related is exempt, as are some cookbooks since they all would unfairly skew the result.

Hell yes. No clue how many I own at the moment, but I have one wall in my living room and a wall in the entrance corridor filled. Probably ca. 7-8m, 7 shelves. And a few boxes in the cellar. Moving is not fun, that is the only real disadvantage. At the moment books are more than half of my belongings by volume. But the kindle helps somewhat.

@krise - done. Sending all the good vibes I can spare.

Personally I prefer the IRC version

Can that become a thing so I can buy it?

I lost my wedding band. It has simply vanished into thin air. I wore it to Thanksgiving dinner, then when I came home I took it off along with my engagement ring and when I looked a couple hours later only the engagement ring was there. We've torn the place apart looking for it but it is nowhere to be found--and our place isn't that big! I'm still hoping it will turn up but I have NO IDEA where it could be.

Our house was broken into about 10 years back and my mother's wedding ring was stolen. Dad recently bought her a new one.

Chocolate pretzels, beer and Italian history/porn (The Borgias).

The only downside was that Elyscape told me I can't just willy nilly put JavaScript in my Java even though it's basically peanut butter and chocolate. WHY CAN'T I HAVE PEANUT BUTTER AND CHOCOLATE ASSHOLE?!

(ho ho ho HO, filthy comma omission, tots approps when watching Borgias)