Brrr! It's Cold in Here!

It's been said if you don't like the weather in Cincinnati, wait ten minutes and it will change. I suppose that explains the sudden drop in the temperature over the last few days. I swear it was just a week or two ago that I was running my air conditioner, and now I'm pulling out the extra blankets and listening for the familiar sound of the furnace kicking on.

Unfortunately, last night I was listening in vain. Guess whose furnace wouldn't light?

Not that it's a huge deal. After seeing the size of my Cinergy bills last winter, I had already planned on waiting until the last possible moment to turn on the heat. (Especially since I'm still being bombarded with doctors' bills that I have no idea how I'm going to pay.) I have sweaters. I have blankets. I have the Ugliest Comforter in the World. My downstairs neighbor also likes to keep the temperature in her apartment at sauna level, so that helps as well.

I wasn't aware of the problem until I got home last night. I'd returned from my first physical therapy session and was opening the latest bill-I-can't-pay when there was a knock at my door. My landlady was standing in the hallway, wearing flannel pajama pants with a thermal shirt and a flannel men's shirt over the top of it. (And yes, everything she was wearing clashed horribly. It's good to know that I'm not the only one who goes for comfort over fashion; some of my "loungewear" ensembles look like they were assembled by a colorblind schizophrenic living in a dark, dark cave.)

"Is your heat on?"

I explained that I hadn't even tried to turn it on yet. She fiddled with the thermostat. Nothing. "I'm trying to light the furnaces," she continued. "The first floor seems to be OK, but the second floor's not cooperating. I'll go try again."

She disappeared down the stairs. The next half hour consisted of her running upstairs to my apartment, turning the thermostat up to 80 degrees, cursing under her breath, and heading back to the basement to try again. Lather, rinse, repeat. On her last trip up the stairs, she brought a space heater.

"I don't know what's wrong. Yours is the only one that won't work. I'll try again tomorrow. And if it gets too cold, you can sleep in my living room."

I thanked her for her efforts and the space heater, which remained unused. I have an weird phobia about space heaters. I'm certain that as soon as I fall asleep, it will short circuit, catch the entire apartment on fire, burning me and the kitties to a crisp. (I think we've already established that I have irrational fears, right?) I settled for an extra blanket and a big mug of chai and fell asleep on the couch during the second quarter of the Packers game.

When I left for work this morning, it was 61 degrees in the apartment. The temperature is supposed to dip into the 30s on Wednesday night. Hopefully things will be fixed by then. I'm not looking forward to icing my ankle when I'm already shivering.

Speaking of the ankle, things are progressing slowly. I finally got the OK from my orthopedist to put weight on my right foot (with the boot and crutches), starting at 50% and eventually moving up to 100% without crutches. I'm at 100% with crutches at the moment, which means that I am allowed to attempt to drive my car this weekend. The emphasis is on the word "attempt" because I'm not too optimistic about my reaction times. My physical therapy session was pretty disheartening. The range of motion in my foot is pretty much shot.

Therapist: OK, now point your toes

Myopic: Um, I am pointing my toes.

Guess I won't be running off to join the ballet anytime soon. I don't think they'd want me anyway, given the fact that my legs are currently different sizes and my ankle is still considerably swollen. (Five centimeters larger than my left ankle, as a matter of fact. The therapist did some baseline comparison measurements yesterday.)

My physical therapy office is located in a Fitworks. I'm quite amused by the fact that they gave me a free 30 day membership to be used during my therapy. Yeah, like I'm going to be joining a Tae Bo class right now.

(Roger Mexico suggested that I should take up jogging or tennis. After I stopped laughing - me! jogging! - I explained to him that right now the thought of any high impact exercise terrifies me beyond belief. Even more than space heaters.)

I'm sure that I'll eventually make progress, but right now I feel even worse off than I did last week. At least then I knew what I could do and what I could not do. I'd come to terms with my limitations. Now all of the rules have changed, and I'm finding all kinds of new things that I should be able to do, but simply am not capable of doing. It's depressing as hell. (Add in a stack of bills equal to two month's salary that are due right now and other personal issues, and you get a full-blown panic attack. What a fun way to pass the time!)

So if you need me, I'll be hiding under a pile of blankets, feeling sorry for myself. At least I'll be warm.

The Coffee Filter War

"What mighty contests arise from such trivial things."
- Alexander Pope

As a rule, I don't like to talk about work here. Well, OK. I take that back. Weird animal questions that I have to field? Sure. The idiocy of teachers who don't know the school's address when booking a field trip? You bet. Wacky tales of animals running loose in the office? No problem there. But office politics? The less time spent dealing with it, the better.

This incident, however, was just so ridiculous that I had to laugh about it.

Apparently before I started here, someone in another department (we'll call them Department A) did something that irritated someone in my department. I have no idea what the offending action was; that detail has been lost to the ages. From that point on, though, it has been the policy of some of my co-workers to talk trash about Department A and avoid working with them as much as possible.

I personally have no problem with Department A. I really like the folks who work over there a lot. There are a lot of similarities in our daily job details and at times we get a lot of each other's misdirected phone calls, so we spend a lot of time transferring confused callers back and forth. (Well, and snickering about some of the more clueless ones.) The people who work there have been nothing short of professional and dependable; I can count on them to follow through when I request something. I've always thought we were all supposed to be working for the same organization, we should all have the same goals, and should put whatever petty differences we have aside and work together.

I guess that the warmongers in my department, though, consider my feelings about Department A to be naïve. I have been chided in the past for dealing with them firsthand in placing orders for college student ticket orders. Forget the fact that Department A has the ticket printer, and the Operations Manager said that I should fax all requests directly to them. The Chief Warmonger in my department decided it would be easier to email the orders to the Operations Manager, so he can print out the order, then run it upstairs to Department A. That makes perfect sense, right?

At a recent staff meeting, the Chief Warmonger also made a derogatory comment about the friendliness and organizational abilities of the head person in Department A. I would say it was an example of the pot calling the kettle black, except that the kettle in question is a happy shiny stainless steel model whose efficiency is something to be admired. (However, I have learned that trying to discuss anything where Chief Warmonger might have to admit misjudgment is a losing battle, so I just frowned at his comments and held my tongue.)

Which brings us to the latest brouhaha... on Friday, our department ran out of coffee filters. We have one of those industrial sized coffee makers (with the extra burners) which requires larger coffee filters. Running over to the nearest Kroger isn't an option; I've seen them available in office supply catalogs or in places like Staples or Office Max. Only problem is ordering office supplies around here can, at times, be like pulling teeth. (And trying to get reimbursed after buying something out of pocket is an exercise in futility most of the time.)

On Monday, the building housekeeper came downstairs to let me know about the filters. (She's been getting coffee for me in the mornings to save me from having to crutch upstairs.) I told her not to worry about it, but she went across the parking lot to see if anyone would be willing to donate to the caffeination cause. She returned a few minutes later with about 50 filters from Department A. I immediately sent a thank you email to them for making it possible for me to be awake enough to function.

This morning I was told that this small but generous gesture had fallen prey to the latest round of Office Politics. Our receptionist had sent the coffee filters back to Department A, choosing instead to raid the supplies of the overnight program's supply. When I asked her what happened to the filters we got yesterday, she gave me the following explanation (with editorial comments added by me):

"Oh, see I told the housekeeper that I had the matter under control. (What, putting off ordering filters and stealing them from another person's budget is considered 'under control?') But she went over and got some from Department A, and well, you know how much they hate us. (Yes, they hate us so much that they sent over a month's worth of coffee filters. That's what I always do for people that I don't like: help them out in times of need.) So I just sent them back and ordered some from the office supply place. The filters should be here tomorrow. (So, you just sent them back, indicating that we don't need their damn charity and further muddying the waters between our two departments. Nice work.) That just how the politics are around here. (Ah, so it's a politics thing, and I wouldn't understand. Whatever.)"

She was right in that aspect. I don't understand how people can act like this over something so petty. It was a handful of coffee filters, folks. I doubt that Department A had ulterior motives in sending them over. The refusal of them, however, makes our department look like a bunch of spoiled children. ("I don't want your stupid coffee filters. They probably have cooties.") And if Department A didn't previously have any animosity towards us, acting in this manner is a good way to create it, isn't it?

I suppose this is Life's way of reminding me to stop taking things so personally and so seriously. A lot of the challenges we face on a day-to-day basis are as inconsequential as coffee filters, but it's easy to blow things out of proportion.

There are bigger things in the world to worry about than whether we should accept a gift of coffee filters from a person we dislike. Right now, my plate's kind of full with much bigger things to be stressed about. Who supplied the paper strainer that keeps the coffee grounds out of my morning cuppa is way down at the bottom of my list.

But yet, I still feel compelled to write about it here....

Hail to the Thief, Indeed...

What I need is a good defense/'Cause I'm feelin' like a criminal

- Fiona Apple, "Criminal

Way back when, when Roger Mexico still lived a few blocks from my apartment, we used to spend a lot of time playing on the Internet. I had no computer at home, so looking up weird websites was a novelty to me. But every night pretty much ended up in the same way: he would set the computer to download a few songs he'd sought out on Napster, and we'd go do something else. (I later entitled a CD of songs that he burned from these late night pursuits 3 a.m. Napster Whore and decorated the cover with quotes related to his late night piracies.)

Given the fact that my computer and my dialup connection were too slow for effectively joining the peer-to-peer filesharing fun, I kind of missed the Napster revolution. In fact, the only downloading that I've done has been perfectly legal. After listening to a friend's streaming DJ gig in the chat room he frequented and bitching about the fact that he played the same songs every single week, I set out to prove that I could find two hours of new and interesting music, download it and burn it to CD in one evening. (I was using Zappagirl's Mac, so the dialup situation wasn't a issue.) A little more than two hours later, I had two brand new mix CDs full of bands that I'd never heard of, bands that I new very little about, and band that I liked that had made live versions of songs available to the public.

Flash forward to the present day. I now have a nifty somewhat-new laptop (complete with a CD burner), a DSL connection, and a spindle of blank recordable CDs. And rather than seeking out new music via Kazaa or some other fileswap service, I'm busy following the ensuing battles between the RIAA and the downloading public. Well, that and getting angrier by the second about what I see.

Yes, I realize that there are people out there that are abusing the system. There are probably people out there that are downloading everything they can get their virtual hands on, gloating about the fact that they haven't purchased a CD in the last three years and have thousands and thousands of songs stored on their hard drive. But for every one of those people, there are scores of Regular Joe Downloaders. Regular Joe Downloader isn't interested in intentionally screwing the RIAA. He just doesn't see the point in paying $17.99 for a CD that contains one song that he wants. He was on a message board last week, and he heard about a band that doesn't get any airplay on ClearChannel-owned radio stations. He'd like to find out if he likes this band without playing Russian Roulette at his local record store. He knows the name of a song that he heard in a club last weekend, but there are five different bands with a song by that title, and he doesn't know which song is the one he likes. He'd like to replace that CD that he lost when his car got totaled last month, but can't because Athens, GA Inside/Out has been out of print for some time now.

Regular Joe Downloader is using the system for all the right reasons. But because of Smug Bastard Downloader, Joe can't use the system without being considered a criminal and facing a lawsuit.

The RIAA has loudly proclaimed for some time now that they are fighting the filesharing system on behalf of the recording artists. Free sharing of music means that while the music is being traded and listened to around the world, the person who made the music doesn't see a dime of royalty fees beyond the amount made from the initial purchase from which the first mp3 was ripped. Because the RIAA is just standing up for those poor, poor artists.
Well, with the notable exceptions of artists that sell millions and millions of albums, the royalties don't add up to instant money in the bank. And frankly, the labels aren't all that concerned with artists that don't sell millions and millions of albums. Consider the fact that Karin and Linford from Over the Rhine live in my neighborhood. The band was signed to I.R.S. Records in the early 90s, and is currently recording under the Sony/Back Porch label. They're a critically acclaimed band with a small following. And they're living in a not-so-posh city outside of Cincinnati. Somehow I doubt they're living the high life.

Additionally, the albums that were released on the I.R.S. label were unavailable for quite a long time, since I.R.S. retained the rights to the recordings after dropping them (and folding shortly thereafter). But Regular Joe Downloader would still get slapped with a lawsuit if he had made anything on Eve available on a peer-to-peer network. Go figure.(Apparently, they did manage to get the rights to the albums back and are now offering them for sale on their website. Good for them!)

The RIAA is also quick to point out that downloaders are killing the music business, and point to the drastic drop in CD sales to support their claim. They seem to be unaware that the country has been in an economic downturn for several years now, and most people are more concerned with putting food on the table than buying new music. I know that I used to buy lots of music, but I've become more frugal in my purchases. I don't have as much pocket money as I used to, and I've gotten burned more than once on albums that had one song that I liked. $17.99 is an awful lot to blow on an impulse buy, especially when it's common knowledge that the production cost is considerably less than that. (We all remember that settlement that everyone was jumping on board for, right?)

Universal has taken a step in the right direction recently by lowering the price point across the board on their products, but will the other labels follow suit? Will this gesture be embraced by the buying public and result in increased sales? Time will tell.

And then there's the quality of music available today. Yes, I know I'm old, but the majority of the music that I hear on the radio these days doesn't appeal to me. (Which explains why I seldom listen to the radio, unless it's NPR. Now get off my lawn, ya damn kids.) I know that there's music beyond the Britneys and Justins and Linkin Parks and Creeds, but it's become increasingly hard to find. If Sony doesn't promote the artist and ClearChannel doesn't play it, chances are good that you won't know it exists unless you hear about it through word of mouth.

I recall when I worked for Best Buy a few years back, they had a tendency to promote the living daylights out of one artist and leave the others to their own devices. When the new Pearl Jam album came out, Sony shipped 600 copies of the new album, plus at least a hundred copies of each album and single in the back catalogue. I know this for a fact, because I single-handedly placed every price tag, sale tag, and security tag on every single CD that was shipped. (The album tanked horribly, we shipped back several hundred Pearl Jam CDs a few months later, and I've had nightmares about Eddie Vedder ever since.) They also dropped the price point on a few debut albums (Fiona Apple, eels, Primitive Radio Gods) in hopes of building a listening audience for these new artists. The results were mixed. Fiona Apple managed to do OK (but got more recognition from her anorexic underwear video), eels garnered a small following (but will probably never play sold-out stadium shows), and... Primitive Radio Gods? I only remember the name of that one song ("Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand") because of the long unwieldy title. The melody has long since slipped my mind.

But let's stop for a moment and consider eels. I didn't pick up Beautiful Freak without a listen, mainly because the album art creeped me out. I'd seen the video for "Novocaine for the Soul" and thought the song was catchy, but still wasn't ready to plunk down the money for the album. A year later, a co-worker recommended the album to me and let me borrow his copy of the CD. I bought it the next day, and it still gets heavy rotation at Chez Myo. How much sooner would I have purchased the album if I could've gone online and taken a few more songs out for a test drive? (In the same vein, where would the money that I spent on Bob Mould's Modulate have gone if I'd known ahead of time that the album - sorry, Bob! - didn't really appeal to me?)

After my little downloading experiment at Zappagirl's that night, I discovered that I like bands I'd never considered like The Sea and Cake, Air, and The Reindeer Section. My likelihood of purchasing music by these artists or buying concert tickets has now greatly increased. I look upon this as a promotional tool, but apparently the RIAA doesn't want me to discover new artists and possibly buy their music. They want me to listen to their artist du jour, and they want me to pay ridiculous prices for it. I never was one for force feeding. But if I don't follow the rules they set for me, I'm a criminal.

(Incidentally, my sister is a criminal by these standards. Hope Sydney doesn't get dragged off to jail because she downloaded that Human League song.)

In an effort to combat the free filesharing, the labels came up with their own models. Most downloaders (based on opinions voiced on various message boards that I frequent) wouldn't be adverse to paying a reasonable fee for the music that they download. However, paying a monthly fee for the service, setting unreasonable limits on how many songs one may download, and then further limiting how that download may be used by the person (inability to burn to CD or transfer to another computer or mp3 player, time limits on the song before it disappears from your computer) are deterrents to going the legal route.

I've heard tell that there are plans to make CDs unplayable on computers. How does this affect people like Roger Mexico, who uses his computer as his stereo? There was a story on the news today about "unrippable CDs." Does this mean that I cannot use my CD burner to make mix CDs for my own personal use? Have the laws of fair use been thrown out the window, like the proverbial baby with the bathwater? There are also murmurings that the recording industry will eventually release CDs that will only play on one media player, which will mean that the buyer would have to purchase a copy for the stereo, a copy for the computer room, a copy for the car stereo... look, no matter how much I like Radiohead, I am not buying four copies of Kid A.

I wish there was an easy solution to this problem. Apple seems to have hit upon a workable pay model, but I won't really be able to try it on for size until they unveil the Windows store. Some artists have music available for download to the public on their websites, some have made their songs available on sites like Amazon (although the songs there often are available in formats that are incompatible with each other... thanks, but I don't need a billion different players taking up valuable space on my hard drive). But I think that the RIAA needs to stop looking at internet music as a way to make a quick buck off the latest pop music remix available at the local Media Play, and think about ways that it could be used as a promotional tool, or ways to make out-of-print music available again. (Janis Ian thinks so, too, and is a lot more qualified than me to make statements about the way the music business works.)

Until then, I'm a lot less likely to purchase an album on a whim that will further line the RIAA's pockets. And I'll be damned if I'll ever sign the Filesharing Morality Pledge. Most likely, I'll just sit back and watch and wait for the eventual outcome, whatever it may be.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go listen to 3 a.m. Napster Whore and reminisce, because Johnny Cash's "Cocaine Blues" rocks my world.

It Could Always Be Worse...

I haven't posted in a week or so. There really hasn't been much to tell. I'm still on the mend from the ankle fracture, and I've reached the hurry up and wait stage of my convalesence. I go to the orthopedist, they take more x rays, the doctor looks at my ankle, says everything looks like it's progressing normally, and sends me out to the receptionist to make another apointment.

One of the incisions became infected a week ago. Thankfully I caught it early enough before it became a serious problem, but for a few days it was red and swollen and hurt like hell. The antibiotics seem to have taken care of that problem.

I'm pretty much off the Percocet (finally!), but still have some left in the event that anything flares up again. So how better to celebrate the liberation from the narcotics than a drink or two?

That was the plan for the evening. I'd had to work on Labor Day, which was actually a good thing. My phone doesn't ring much on holidays, so it allows me the opportunity to get a lot of clerical work off my desk. I wrapped up most of my end of the month duties, answered a few animal calls (raccoons on decks, bat with a broken wing, box turtle with a broken shell) and headed home a little bit before five.

Ahhh. It's Miller Time. Or Captain Morgan and Diet Coke time, as the case may be.

I'd settled in with a rerun of The Simpsons (while reading a message board or two) when Roger Mexico called. We'd been playing telephone tag all weekend, and we were comparing notes on good but disturbing films (Happiness, Apocalypse Now) and the weather (he was watching a huge rainstorm, and I wondered if it was the same one I'd watched when I got home from work) when...

WHOOOMP!

"Huh."

"What's that?"

"My power just went out. There is darkness at Chez Myo."

"Oh. Huh." He was silent for a moment. "Do you need to go change a fuse or something?"

"Roger, I'm on crutches and the fuse box is in the basement." The table lamp next to the laptop was trying to flicker on, reaching half power and fading back into darkness. "Besides, I don't think it's just my building." I glanced out the window. "The streetlight's out. So are all of the lights at the funeral home. I think it's my whole damn street."

"Shit, that sucks. What're you going to do?"

"I'll be fine. I've got my cel phone, and that has an alarm clock on it. I have a glass of water and my Captain and Coke. I've got smokes. My phone works, and I have excellent company on the other end at the moment. And I've got almost three hours of power on the laptop battery, which is good since it's the only light working in the place. Ugh. But I lost my wireless connection. Looks like I'll be playing solitaire until I fall asleep."

"Uh huh. And where is the bathroom?"

"Ummm... somewhere beyond the black hole that used to be the dining room. Guess I'll be finding out if I can balance a flashlight while I'm tipsy and on crutches." Luckily, there was a flashlight on the coffee table. Between the lightning strikes on the 4th of July and the Great Blackout last month, I'd gotten paranoid and tended to keep a few flashlights in easy to reach places around the house. It's that Girl Scout thing.

"It could be worse. You could've been in the shower." (Did I mention that I can finally shower? Mom and I bought one of those little plastic stools that go inside the bathtub. After a month of sponge bathing for fear of slipping and falling and cracking my head open, the simplicity of an actual shower - even one with mediocre water pressure - was pure ectascy.)

After some technical difficulties (the rainstorm was wreaking havoc with Roger Mexico's cel phone reception, and he had to call me back twice), we chatted for a while longer until he had to retire for the evening (he teaches class on Tuesdays, so he tries to be somewhat responsible on Monday nights). I hung up the phone and listened to the silence of my apartment. My laptop had gone to sleep, leaving me almost completely in the dark. My neighbors seemed to have taken the power outage as a sign to go to bed. Of course, I couldn't sleep.

It was quiet. Too quiet.

Great. I was thirty minutes into a blackout, and I was already going mad. Since there is usually some sort of electronic device on at my apartment, the void of no radio no television no internet was kind of unnerving. I switched my laptop back on and lost a game or two of solitaire.

And then, of course, I did have to go to the bathroom.

Managing the flashlight wasn't as difficult as I'd worried it would be. Dodging cats was another story. I made it to the bathroom just as the flashlight started to flicker. Oh no.

I crutched into the bedroom to get the little green flashlight I'd tucked into the armoire, and then realized I had no free hand to carry it back to the living room. And of course, I was wearing my black spandex non-exercise pants with no pockets. Oh well, desparate times called for desparate measures. I tucked the flashlight under the waistband and headed back for home base on the couch. It's not like anyone could see me. (Because it was a blackout, you see. And I was the only one there besides the cats.)

The power came back on while I was typing this, at 12:12 am. The problem was resolved in less than an hour. The worst thing that happened was I missed most of David Letterman. Pretty insignificant compared to all of you that were without power last month for days. I have a new appreciation for all of you and your resolve in a crisis, because I wouldn't have been able to handle it.

So now that power has been restored, I'm retiring for the evening. Hopefully the Captain and Coke will override the insomnia and I'll be able to drift off watching Conan O'Brien on the bedroom TV.

But I'm taking the flashlights with me, just in case. Both of them.