Je ne parle pas français

Wonder why the format of the front page is all messy.  Maybe I’ll try and figure it out.  Of course, maybe I won’t.  Don’t know how long it’s been like that… I’m a slack-ass.  I know it.

I know I may have mentioned this once or twice before… but we live in New Jersey.  In case you are really bad at geography, New jersey is located in the Northeast of the United States.  You know, by New York, and Pennsylvania… not too far from New England…  There is only 1 state (New York) between us and Canada.  You get the picture.  We’re not near Florida or Arizona or Ecuador.  All that being said… IT SNOWS HERE EVERY YEAR!  This should not come as as a surprise to anyone.  We are in the part of the world where snow happens.  In all the other parts of the world where snow happens, the local governments take action to ensure that life does not come to a grinding halt at the first sign of fluffy white stuff on the ground.  However, that is not how we roll in NJ.  Everything here seems to be aimed at making it as difficult as possible to function with anything more than about 1″ of snow.

Oh yes, most everything is ALREADY closed tomorrow, and there’s not even a DUSTING of snow.

At least I can walk to the QuikChek to get a $2.99 sub sandwich for lunch tomorrow… since the roads will likely not be plowed.

Snapple was on sale at ACME… only $6.99 for a 12-pack.  I’m super thankful for that.  And Melting Pot had a cancellation for 7:45 tonight, so I get to go out for fondue tonight.  I’m thankful for that too.  Of course, there are other things, but for now we’ll leave it with the silly, shallow things that are at the forefront of my mind. 

So, I’m trying another test… This time from my iPad. We’ll see if this one works any better than the one from my iPhone.

For some reason, the post that I wrote last night on my phone had a delay in posting. I could see it when I went online, but there was a future time of about 3 hours set for it to post, and it was in a “pending” status. I’ll see if I can figure this out… As apparently blogging has become ULTRA important in my life, and I simply must be able to post to my blog on the go!

It’s more that I just want it to work, because I’m slightly geeky.

Frank is on his way home with Mae. She is here visiting for the rest of the week. I would liked to have taken some time off to hang out with them… But as I’m only in week 2 of my new job, it didn’t seem the wisest of ideas. Although I am meeting them in the city tomorrow night for Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. I hope it’s good.

And speaking of hopes… This time slightly dashed… The Indigo Girls just released a Christmas album. Not really very good. I’ll still buy it, but I had greater hopes for them.

So I can use the WordPress app on my phone to blog on the go. Clearly I will use this SO VERY much. I mean, I have so much to say that I write a blog entry nearly daily! I’m sure that having the ability to make a blog entry from my phone is not likely to increase the frequency with which I post… But it was free, so I downloaded it. And I’m kind of a geek… So I have to be able to do it, even if I don’t actually do it.

All I really want to do, is watch the old seasons of Pop Idol and Australian Idol. They aren’t on DVD, and although they are available to watch online, it tells me that because I’m not in either England or Australia, the program isn’t available for viewing. WHY? Show me commercials, I don’t care. I just want to see if the shows in England and Australia are as entertaining as ours. And the few DVDs I can find are just focusing on the winner or the top 10. NO. I want to see the whole thing. Someone should just pay for me to go to Australia for several weeks, so I can get caught up on Australian Idol, AND kick someone in the shins until they start up Project Runway Australia again.

OK, or maybe I could just get a job as the Mega-Millions winner, and pay for it myself. Maybe.

So when I read about the integration of a social networking feature in iTunes 10, I was pretty excited.  I’ve found some really cool music using last.fm, and I thought that the new Ping service through iTunes would be something similar.  It would show music that my friends were listening to, it would show me people who had similar tastes in music, and I could see great things they were listening to, and find new music.  I thought I would at least be able to find people.

I’ve only been able to find zero people.  3 people have found me, so I followed them back.  Then I glommed onto one more that a friend was following… so now I have am following 4 people.  That’s a sad showing for a service that supposedly has 160,000,000 users worldwide.

I tried searching for a few people from my phone book… but to no avail.  And I have to type their names in, and then scroll through the results?  There is no way to look through my address book for registered users, or integrate with any of the existing social sites, like Facebook or Twitter.  I can’t even search for people who have similar tastes in music, or live in a specific area… So, I can’t find anyone on Ping.  So that’s pretty much a bust right there.

Then, when you DO finally find someone, it really just shows you what they bought from iTunes.  Granted, that is slightly interesting, but not enough to warrant the process of logging into iTunes frequently to see what the 4 people on my friends list have bought.  Show me what they are listening to.  Along with what they have purchased, show me their top 10 artists, songs, albums, etc…  You are linking to iTunes which keeps track of all that stuff, so where is it?  Unless there are some significant improvements in the way this thing works, I can see it going the way of Google Wave.

On a somewhat related note, I stopped at the Apple store in Short Hills yesterday.  I didn’t think I would like the new iPod Nano, but I kind of do.  I think I might want one… I KNOW I don’t NEED one… that doesn’t change the fact that I would like a green or orange one (just in case some random person would like to purchase one for me).

Last night, as i was browsing the world-wide interwebs… I decided that I would attempt to find any information on a pending Lisa Gerrard tour for 2010.  One can always hope that there is a show in NYC next week that I just somehow missed knowing about.  There wasn’t.  AND the best I can find regarding a tour are some dates for LAST September in Poland, Germany, and the Netherlands.  This will do me no good, as A) I am in New Jersey, not Europe, and B) I have yet to master time travel.

BUT, I did find that she had released two new albums since last I looked.  So I bought them online.  The first is Come Quietly, and the second is Departum, a collaborative album with Marcello De Francisci.  I’ve spent the day listening to both of them.  I like them both a lot.  I like all of her albums a lot.  But I’m still drawn to The Silver Tree.  I’ve listened to this album a good trillion times since I got it.  I don’t know what it is about it, but I love it.

Of course, once I started with the Lisa Gerrard, I had to look to see if there was anything new from Brendan Perry… THERE IS!  He put out a new album earlier this year called Ark.  It’s much better than his first solo album, which I only kind of loved.

And it’s been a perfect day for listening to Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry.  It’s nice and cool, and it’s been raining all day.

I know.  Lame post.  But I feel like I should make SOME sort of entry on here.  We do OWN the domain name, I should use it for SOMETHING.

I was actually going to post something tonight about how hot it is upstairs, when I saw that the last post was still sitting there in DRAFT status.  So, faithful reader (yes, I mean YOU Frank), don’t think that I’m going all cri-zazy and posting 2 entries in one night.  That just doesn’t happen.

BUT, to get back to the point of me coming into this section of the blog-o-sphere was to bitch about how hot it is upstairs.  It’s like New Jersey just hates spring.  We rarely get one.  Either it’s cold or it’s hot.  There is very little in-between.  So we went from having the down comforter on the bed Friday, to having the fan going all night, and sleeping with nothing but the sheet.  I suppose I’ll have to break down and put the A/C in the window this weekend.  Of course it will probably be cold this weekend, thus making me put off the installation of said A/C… which means it will get hot again on Monday.  That’s just the way my luck rolls with things like the weather.

We are having a full audit done of the house on Wednesday to see what it would take to get a new furnace WITH central air installed in the house.  I’m sure it will cost a fortune, but I’m thinking that it may just be worth it.  We’ll see.