The Johnny Bacardi Show

This is gonna be a rambling post about a number of things with very little comics content, so bear with, please. If you wanna read good comics stuff, go to Comic Book Galaxy. Heh, my CBG plug for the day! Maybe I should put this on the LJ, but nobody reads that damn thing anyway (or at least I don't think anybody does, since I can't figure out how to attach a sitemeter, I've got no way of knowing) so it goes here.

Monday morning. We are currently dealing with the death-throes of Hurricane Dennis, where it was a threat to Florida and Louisiana but by the time it gets to Kentucky, it just gives us some much-needed rain. One of the benefits of living so far inland, I suppose. I looked at the local weather channel radar earlier this morning, and we had a real neat-looking spiral hurricane-shaped cloud formation right over the state. Comics geek that I am, I couldn't help but flash on the True Story, Swear To God: This One Goes To Eleven saga of Tom Beland and Lily and Hurricane Georges. I went down to the basement for shelter, but Mrs. B was having none of that, calling me names and reminding me that she has a busy day planned for me today.

Yep, I'm off work today. I'm off every other Monday, since my co-worker Leisa and I alternate Saturdays. Someone has to be there for late ads and to finish up for the Sunday edition of the Snooze. So you'd think that I'd be making some significant blog hay today, wouldn't ya? HA! This morning will probably be the only down time I've had this entire weekend. Today, I have a long-overdue doctor appointment at eleven, then the rest of the day will be taken up by various house-related activities, accompanied by Mrs. B, who likes to take off on my off-Mondays to keep me from doing anything I want to do, I mean spend the day with me "getting stuff done".

I'm kinda getting ahead of myself here- all this "house related activity" pertains to our current situation. We recently took steps to refinance our home, in the process taking care of some of our debtload, credit card and other wise, with enough left over to do some much-needed home improvements, such as a new roof, new floor covering, paint, kitchen cabinet and plumbing repair, possible blacktopping of the driveway, et cetera. Some of these have needed to be done for over a decade, but we just haven't been able to afford to do them. This will also result in our monthly bill-paying obligations being greatly reduced, which should make things a lot less stressful around Casa Bacardi. And, believe it or not, this makes my situation at the Low Paying Unrewarding Full-Time Job a little less odious to me as well. I'm still getting no personal satisfaction from it, and seriously bristle at being treated like a moron, but perhaps I won't be so inclined to grind my teeth as I drive to the bank to deposit my sad little paycheck.

After everything got approved and settled and checks cut and electronic payments made last week, we took our first steps on this journey Saturday morning, going to buy paint for the living room and dining room, along with some new bathroom fixtures. Saturday afternoon was spent painting. If you're used to a mostly sedentary lifestyle, as I am, you'll understand how wrecked I can get with just some moderate physical activity. Stopped before Justice League Unlimited came on, though! Good eppy, too, which answered some of my complaints from the previous installment. I knew Batman wouldn't sit this one out. And the Creeper got some extended screen time! No Gypsy, though. Hoped to stay up long enough to watch Samurai Champloo, but couldn't do it.

Anyway. Buy home stuff Saturday morning, paint all Saturday afternoon, TV on Saturday night. Go to bed tired and sore. Then get up at 5 AM Sunday morning because it's my turn to be the Ringmaster of the WLOC Holy Roller Circus. Or to put it less cynically, run the board at the radio station, play the religious programming and get the live preachers on and off the air until 1:30 PM, lock up and go home. Then it was back to the painting, and when we had gotten two walls done, we had to stop because the two that are left haven't had holes filled and sanded down, and we still need to clean the walls, too. And oh yeah, move the bookshelf and its contents that covers one of those walls, which means I have to transfer the contents, CDs, all my albums, and my run of Mojo magazine, somewhere else so I can take the sections apart and get them out of the way. THAT was a job, too. If you have a large record or CD collection, perhaps you can sympathize. I also had three comics boxes plus a stack of recent comics purchases taking up room and needing to be moved as well. By 9 yesterday evening, we had successfully relocated all of it, but now the house is extremely cluttered. More so than usual. But you have to break some eggs to make an omelet, as the saying goes.

And now, here I am on Monday morning, preparing to go to the doctor and trying to get a little blogging done. I'm sure we'll get back to the home improvement project when I get home, which means that I won't likely be posting anything else today until the new Diamond shipping list comes online.

Snuck a new CD in the shopping pile: the new Eels album Blinking Lights and Other Distractions. I saw Mark Everett & Co. perform "Trouble With Dreams" on Letterman the other night, and liked it- it was a bit of a throwback to his Daisies of the Galaxy album, which I love, specifically "Flyswatter". It's a 2-CD set, and I really haven't had a lot of time to digest it yet. I just finished listening to disc 1; disc 2 is out in my truck so I put in Larry Young's Mixed Bag 2 CD instead.

I finally got my contribution to that project mailed last week; hopefully everyone has theirs by now. I'd love to hear some comments on it, but nobody involved (including me, it seems) is in a hurry to do so on their blogs, so I guess we'll have to see how that goes.

I also finally got to see the end of the Steve McQueen flick Bullitt the other night; I had tried to watch it a few weeks ago but my cable went out with 15 minutes to go. It was a good film, with several excellent moments that weren't necessarily car chases, but it sure could have used a less convoluted script.

I'm enjoying (when I can stay up late enough- 11:30 pushes it for me a bit sometimes) watching reruns of Superman-The Animated Series on Boomerang. That was one solid, well-written and animated show, better even than the Batman animated show that preceded it. Of course, then later on the same team produced an excellent Animated Batman as well in its last couple of seasons. Now you all know I'm not the biggest Superman fan out there, except perhaps the really old Siegel-Shuster version, but I like the streamlined, strongly Kirby-influenced version that the Animated show gives us. In light of recent Unlimited events, though, it's definitely a Beetle-Max Lord moment every time I see Prof Hamilton.

I finished Neverwhere the novel yesterday- and it was very good, if a tad disappointing with its routine good-vs-ultimate evil resolution. Not handled badly, mind you, but I was hoping that Gaiman would take it in a less conventional direction and he just didn't- and the aftermath with Richard Mayhew was even more predictable. Still, intriguing characters and an imaginative setting, the kind of stuff that Gaiman is good at. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the comics adaptation. I got the feeling that many of these characters might have been first conceived with Sandman in mind...

As far as other comics go, I recently received the Holmes/Periphery/Cenozoic bundle from Omaha Perez that I think everybody else got a week or two ago (my fault, not O-P's...) and I've yet to finish them all. I'll probably comment on them in the next Last Call. That's it! Nothing else in the pipeline right now. Geez- here I am dying to get free stuff so I can hype the hell out of it, and I got nothin'. Sigh.

OK, I need to get in the shower now so this is all you'll get from me for a while.