My car got broken into AGAIN. I am NOT making this up. Around the corner from where it happened on Sunday night, three doors down from my apartment. LESS THAN 48 HOURS AFTER REPLACING THE WINDOW. This time, the jackass (and I am convinced it's the same fuckhead) took the iPod power thingie and the cable for connecting the iPod to the stereo. Nothing else. This complete asshole has cost me $400 now (once I get the window replaced again) in less than 100 hours. This is unbelievable. I made a police report this time, but it's not like they can do anything. This total fucker is going to end up making me move my car into a garage, costing me a hefty chunk of change every month and eliminating a lot of convenience for me. AND HE DIDN'T EVEN MAKE A BUCK OFF ME. This is just fucking obscene.

I am very, very angry right now, in case you couldn't tell. I'm semiseriously considering staying up all night, hiding up on the roof, looking down on the street, watching to see if someone tries to break into someone else's car, and calling the police immediately if I do see it. Arrrrrgh.

Well, this is the strangest one I have. I'll wake up partway through the night, convinced I have houseguests. So I'll get up, turn on a light in the rest of the apartment, put on a shirt, shut my bedroom door, etc... This happens maybe once every two weeks or so, when I go to bed early, generally. Very strange.

Didn't happen - couldn't get the time off. So I'm home, even though I found a round-trip flight (direct flight, too!) for $557. Ah well.

In truth, they didn't get a t-shirt. But they did get two boxes filled with empty CD cases. I am not making this up. I keep all my CDs in those oversized CD wallet thingies, so I needed somewhere to put the empty cases. I had two lamp boxes that fit a ton of cases each, so, there ya go. Worked great. I hadn't brought them over to my storage closet yet, so they were sitting in the back seat of my car, and must have tempted some ne'er-do-well beyond the point of no return, because someone shattered my passenger-side rear window, rooted around in my car, opened my glove compartment...and took the boxes of empty CD cases. They didn't take my bike helment, or some ancient folding chairs that were also in the backseat, nor did they take any of the junk in the trunk (hey, I rhymed), at least not so far as I can tell. It was really just junk anyway, so if they *did* take any of it, I wouldn't shed many tears.

But I almost feel bad for the schmuck who walked off with my CD cases, when he goes into a used record store, expecting to make a few hundred books off the 2-300 CDs he thinks he made off with, only to discover that he's got...well, some CD pamphlets and plastic. Sure, it doesn't quite balance out the cost of replacing my window or the hassle, but at least it sucks to be him.

I went a whole day posting before I fell off the wagon again. Whoops.

I actually cooked yesterday - used an oven for the first time in 11 (!!!) months. I love my new apartment for that alone, though I really need to go pick up a microwave so I can, well, reheat the casserole I cooked last night.

So my friend Johnny and I have been kicking around the idea of going to Belgrade. No, hear me out - he's at business school outside of Paris, and both of us are big basketball fans, so we've been talking up the idea of going to the best basketball city outside of the States - and maybe the best basketball city in the world, really - and catching some Euroleague ball. Originally, we'd been aiming at doing that this October or November, but his schedule didn't look good and I looked likely to be able to score a free flight to Europe, and a hotel room in Belgrade, from work, but not until next June or so. But this morning, I get an email from Johnny - he finishes up his term next Wednesday and then has four days off...would I like to go to Belgrade?

So now I'm trolling cheap flight websites, seeing how unaffordable it would be to buy tickets a week ahead of time for a transatlantic flight. Answer: not quite as bad as I expected. I can get to Paris for about $1000, Amsterdam or London for around $700...I dunno. I'm gonna have to think about this, and quickly.

This is well-established. Here it is, a month or so since I last posted, many months since I posted regularly...so I suck.

I moved last week - I'm not going to give my exact address on here, but this is a very close location - that's Isotope, the only comic book store in the world with leather sofas (custom-made to fit the decor!) and free beer, and it's a very short walk from my new digs. My apartment's pretty small - I've actually had to put bookshelves in the kitchen, due to running out of any other available exposed floorboard, and I still haven't figured out where to put one of my endtables. Actually, the bigger issue there is that I have exactly one closet, and it doesn't even have shelves - another apartment I looked at, in the Sunset across the street from Golden Gate Park, had what I can only describe as a plethora of closets - 5-6, if I remember correctly, including *two* walk-ins. Here, I don't even know where I'm going to put a vacuum cleaner. Luckily, I will be renting a storage unit from my landlord, and it's only two blocks away, so the various boxes, comics, and other things that I don't really need right at hand will have somewhere to go, but cleaning supplies and the like remain a problem.

Also, the bathroom is off the bedroom. This is mildly inconvenient in some situations - if someone were to visit and sleep on the sofa, they'd have to come through my room to go to the bathroom - but the biggest annoyance to this is that I'm going to be getting a kitten in a couple weeks, and the bathroom seemed like the most logical place to put the kitty litter. And since I'm going to be sealing my room off from the cat (I'm allergic, but I believe that exposure will make that go away - however, letting the cat roll around in my bed probably would make things even worse), that takes away the bathroom option. Ah well. I'll figure something out.

Right, back to work. Gonna try to post every day or so for a week and see if I've actually got any interest left in blogging.