bruises and baseball cards

yesterday i got motivated to do some more cleaning. tossed out many boxes and a couple more tons of trash. the sewing room situation is much improved. and i changed out my air filters again, although that get a little ugly. this is what happens when your house tries to eat you:

that line across my stomach is the bruise i woke up with this morning on account of falling into the gaping hole that is the floor vent for my a/c. i decided it would be a really good idea to try and walk over it when the vent cover was off and because of that my house tried to eat me. i escaped. now if only i could blame that bruise on derby instead of my own stupidity. my current derby bruises are more painful but less obvious

but moving on. i found a number of super awesome things while rooting through the junk pile yesterday. including the newspapers that my parents bought on the day i was born (new york times, new york post, and the stars and stripes). looking over the headlines has lead me to believe that the world has always been a violent fucked up place, we just pretend it used to be less awful back in the day. plane crashes, bombs, kidnappings, hostage situations, military coups, natural disasters in far off 3rd world countries - plenty of those all over the headlines on the day i was born. same as any other day.

i also found lots of baseball cards that probably aren't worth anything. i don't recognize any of the players but i did find a couple that caught my eye. lou pinella managing the reds. i came to be a pinella fan when he was with the seattle mariners and i continued to love him when he went to the devil rays and i still like him now that he's in chicago. i think he's the baseball bees knees.

also found 'the big unit' when he was with the mariners (i was and still sort of am a huge mariner fan). i was told that randy johnson was supposed to be over his hey-day when i started watching him play in the late 90s but he is still plugging along. he played some awesome games when i was watching and then he went to arizona and helped them win big and i still had quite a bit of respect for him as a pitcher. but, as with so many of the mariner greats, the big unit proved that he too could be bought for oodles and oodles of money and turned to the dark side. as soon as one of my favorite baseballers signs with the yankees, well, they are as good as dead to me. fucking yankees.

where unwanted electronics go to die...

apparently, my 'sewing room' is more of an 'electronic graveyard' than i would care to admit. witness exhibit a: crappy keyboard that has not been out of the box for several years. back in high school it lived on the floor beneath my bedroom window, a pathetic replacement for the piano that my parents sold when i stopped taking lessons and we moved to a different house.

exhibit b: defunct stereo. back when having a three cd changer was still cool, this stereo was the replacement for an even older system that my parents had purchased when i was a wee tiny whose age was numbered in months, not years. i inherited this one in college and it served it's purpose just fine until i moved to new orleans, whereupon it decided that playing cds is a job for losers and it wanted nothing to do with me. it still works, as long as you only want to listen to tapes or possibly the radio (on a good day).

exhibit c: ye olde tv. okay, its not as old as some tvs in my family but it has at least a dozen years on it. a device that had seen better days by the time i inherited it (upon moving to NOLA). it's been living under the sewing table for more than a year now because i'm too lazy to get rid of it. maybe i'll paint a face on it and name him todd.

exhibit d: turn table. my old neighbors gave this to me for free at the big neighborhood garage sale last year. i thought that it would plug in to the above-mentioned stereo and i might actually be able to listen to some of the great records i'd picked up around the neighborhood. in the end, my neighbors got the better end of the deal and i got another peice of junk i can't use. but as long as i'm naming my useless electronics, this one is called bernice.