This weekend was… wow. Too much happened and not enough got done.

Friday night, as mentioned, I went to Jenn’s ten-year high school reunion. It was at McMenamins Kennedy School and I’m not sure that was the best place to have it.

For the uninitiated, McMenamins is a local brewery that buys up historic buildings and converts them into brewpubs and/or hotels. They do a dynamite job, too. Kennedy School is an old grade school that now houses rooms you can stay in, a theater, and a restaurant. It’s a nice place to visit and hang out, so you’d think that would make it a good place for a reunion. Not so.

They stuck us in the old gym, which wouldn’t have been too bad except the lighting was exactly wrong. They needed to either turn it up to be light enough to see by, or turn it down so it would be closer to a school dance. Instead, it was this sort of pseudo-twilight that made it just dark enough to be unable to read name tags but light enough for everyone to watch you squint at them and wonder who they are.

I hung out most of that time with Tony, Jenn’s friend Apryl’s husband. Tony is the bomb. He told me some stories about his high school reunions in Springfield, OR. Too funny. Anyway, that was the only real redeeming factor. I hope my reunion is not as lame as that, but I’m sure it will be.

I think my expectations were set slightly high. After seeing Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion more times than I care to count, I guess I expected things to go down like that. Trust me, that’s not what happened. It was just sort of lame. Like a bad high school dance.

So that was Friday night.

Saturday morning Jenn and I were at my parents’ house by 7:30a so we could have a garage sale. We went through all of our stuff, combined it with my parents’ stuff, and came up with actually quite a decent sized sale. We ran it until around 3:00p. My mom was sort of disappointed with the turnout for it; I guess more people usually show up. We choose to blame it on Oktoberfest - too many people out eating wienerschnitzel and not enough garage saling. Oh well. I came out $41.15 ahead and a lot lighter on the junk, Jenn got $9.00 and didn’t get rid of as much junk. My parents did all right with somewhere around $285 of garage sale proceeds. I wonder what it would have been like if we had a better turnout.

Saturday night at 6:00p Jenn and I went to Jenn’s grandma’s house for dinner in celebration of Jenn’s parents’ anniversary. We had chicken cordon bleu, twice-baked potatoes, and corn on the cob. It was a very good, quite tasty dinner, but, man, it was heavy. I haven’t eaten like that for a while.

Sunday Jenn and I had planned to do the laundry and clean the house - the stuff that didn’t get done during the week.

I should never answer the phone.

Jenn’s dad called up at like 8:45a and asked if we wanted to go to breakfast. Sure. He said they’d be at our place at 10:00a to pick us up. Cool beans, right?

10:30a they showed up. Four hours later, we were in Issaquah, WA, eating Krispy Kreme donuts.

Now, I love Krispy Kreme as much as the next guy - probably more, actually - but I really didn’t plan on being gone all day long in the name of donuts. We got home at 6:00p that night, exhausted, overloaded with sugar, and nothing done.

I should never answer the phone.

So today’s Jenn’s birthday and she’s at home on her day off doing the cleaning that we never got done yesterday. Happy birthday, baby! :)

I did see, while at the Issaquah, WA, Fred Meyer, that they now carry plasma televisions. I’ve wanted a new TV for a long time, especially one of those, but I haven’t gotten around to it, mostly due to price. They’re so exorbitantly expensive! But they had a pretty decent deal on a Panasonic 42” one, so I got motivated to research them since this Friday is employee double-discount day and I could potentially get 20% off the already low $5500 price tag.

After researching the sets, though, they don’t look like they’re all I thought they were cracked up to be. Most are just monitors, which means you have to get a separate tuner box for them. All of them have fans, which it seems, according to the reviews I’ve read, can be noisy. Not all of them are HDTV compatible, which I feel is a load of shit because if you’re going to pay that much for a TV, it’d better be HDTV compatible and maybe even serve you a drink while you’re watching the crystal clear picture. Not so.

Thus, I’ve continued on my quest and discovered the Sony KV-40XBR800

• a 40” beauty that is HDTV compatible. Love it. It’s a tube TV, though, so it’s not going to be hanging on my wall any time soon, but it’s just awesome. I wanna see it in person, and I’m sure I’ll be forced to buy it. I’m going to see what Fred Meyer can do for me on THAT set.

Tonight’s Jenn’s 10-year high school reunion, and I’m not going to lie to you and tell you I’m stoked to go. I’m not. I didn’t like my high school experience, so I’m not expecting to love hanging out and discussing other peoples’ experiences.

There is a redeeming factor, however.

See, Jenn’s got this high school friend, Apryl. Apryl’s cool and all, but she’s not the point here. (Not to belittle Apryl or anything; love her to death and all, but that’s not where I’m going here.) The point is, Apryl married this guy, Tony, who is a total kick in the pants. We’ve hung out with them and I just have the greatest time talking with this guy. I think we just work on the same wavelength or something. He’s just really cool and fun.

So I’m doing my best to look at this less as “Jenn’s High School Reunion” and more “Trav and Tony Hang-Out Time.” Maybe we can ditch and go home and play PS2. Heh.

I found a cool volunteer job that I totally would dig on over at YouBored.com - they are currently in need of a movie reviewer. I think I could fill those shoes, no problem. Hey, you’ve seen the work right here on this site. No problemo for the old Trav, if you know what I mean. And maybe I could get a little extra traffic in here, too. The only issue is that they want one person to do ALL the movies, and I don’t have time to do that. So I’ll drop ‘em a line and see if they might want a person on the side. Maybe they can split the job into two pieces. Can’t hurt to ask.

I’m reading this book Nymphomation by Jeff Noon, and I must say I’m sucked in.

I’m not sure what it is about Noon’s writing that gets me. Honestly, the first time I read his stuff, I was irritated that it was so confusing and difficult. He writes in sort of a weird, future dialect. He uses words that aren’t really even words… or he’ll use words in different contexts, making adjectives into nouns (in the book, a “puny” is a form of currency). It’s sort of hard to follow until you really immerse yourself in it and almost start thinking like you’re part of the culture he’s writing about. Then it somehow just makes sense.

I got sucked in by Vurt, which is a book I think everyone should read because it’s just so cool, and then Pollen, the sequel to Vurt. My understanding is that Nymphomation is sort of a prequel to Vurt. I know they’ve already referred to stuff in Nymphomation that has a certain significance in Vurt, and I’m only about 80 pages in, so I’ll have to assume that it is, in fact, a prequel.

I’m thinking the whole Vurt thing would make a good movie, but it would have to be directed by Terry Gilliam. I can’t imagine it otherwise. Very British, and very fucked up.

Speaking of Terry Gilliam, I see in his filmography on IMDb that he’s making a movie of Good Omens, a favorite book of mine. Hopefully he can do it justice, but, thinking about it, that sort of book seems perfectly fit to him. I’m looking forward to seeing it.

Jenn and I are going to have a garage sale at my parents’ house this Saturday, so we’re going over there tonight to help set things up, price items, and get things ready. Tomorrow night is Jenn’s high school reunion, so we have to finish it all tonight. I’m sort of used to the garage sale ritual - I’ve done it a bazillion times before. Hopefully we can just get rid of some of our stuff we don’t want and maybe make some money at the same time. If you’re in the area, stop in and buy something.

I was very bad just now.

I’m really not in a position to be buying anything, but after writing up my diatribe on wondering what ever happened to The Shamen and Pop Will Eat Itself, I went searching around and came up with a place called the Global Electronic Music Marketplace. It’s sort of like half.com where sellers from all over can unite in one big marketplace, but the beauty of GEMM is that it focuses specifically on the music part of things. I did a couple of cursory searches and found so many things I wanted that I couldn’t contain myself. I ended up buying a couple of PWEI CD singles that I’ve been looking for forever and a couple of 12” vinyl singles for stuff I didn’t even know existed but really hoped did. (I’ll convert those to CD later.)

Maybe now I should start looking at DJ turntables.

Maybe I should just quit while I’m ahead.

I’m going to start right off and be the overly insensitive asshole that I probably am.

I am beyond tired of hearing about the September 11th attacks.

This in no way implies that I don’t respect the efforts of the people involved with the rescue and cleanup, that I don’t feel bad for the losses that occurred, or that I don’t understand the impact or the magnitude of the event. What it implies is that I’m the kind of person who would rather continue on with life and fight for improvement than continually regress and mourn.

The media today is eating this up. The radio’s talking about it, the TV’s talking about it, it’s in the newspapers, on web sites…

Have you ever said a word so many times, over and over, that eventually the word sounds funny to you and you almost forget what it means? That’s September 11 to me. It’s lost all meaning in the larger context because I’ve been so bombarded with it, so beaten with it, that I really just don’t give a rat’s ass anymore.

So, I’m pissed off. I’m pissed off that no matter where I go, I can’t escape it. And just as folks should definitely have the right to mourn their losses, I should have the same right not to have to listen to the whining.

All right, I’m done. For now.

Went to see Stealing Harvard last night on sneak preview. Eh. It was pretty funny. I laughed in parts. It’s not as funny as I’d hoped it would be, but it was good. Jason Lee totally carried the movie - Tom Green was sort of funny but ended up just coming off as irritating in many parts. Leslie Mann is hot, so that was an upside, and, of course, Megan Mullally is always entertaining (and hot, even when she plays white trash). In the end, though, I was glad to have gone to see it for free. It’s a rental at best in my book.

And another band I’m curious to know what happened to: Pop Will Eat Itself. Loved these guys before, still love ‘em. What happened?