as much as you try to plan …

there’s always that one thing that makes things that much more difficult. i accepted that i was going to get back from tour really early in the morning. i accepted that i was going to set two alarms and roll out of bed wearing the same clothes that i’ve been wearing for the last twelve days and go to work after only two hours of sleep. but, as i walked out the front door, i realized it was raining and that riding my bike to work would only result in getting soaked. it was an automatic, wet walk the few blocks to work and a day that stayed gray and was made only barely functional by caffeine. i had talked to people optimistically about having to work this day, but have the next day off, but what is actually in store is 3 days of work in a row, and no amount of answering e-mail or listening to internet radio is going to make that more bearable.

it’s strange to come back to bloomington but instead of running into friends excited to ask you about tour or tell you what they’ve been up to, to be grogilly staring into a computer monitor. still, the wet trudge to work brought some comfort in the familiarity of the sidewalk cracks and aging schoolyard, the bright paint of the bike project doors and the stupid apartment buildings.

bday party in louisville

i went to louisville for mike and billy’s drag birthday party with madeline and hannah. it was good to get out of town, though perhaps inopportune timing given that there’s a ton of stuff to get done for tour. it was nice to hang out with the louisville kids and to dress like a woman. madeline did far better dressing as a man, despite the last minuteness of her getup. transformed by an emporer cutoff t-shirt, a hyperrealist hat, and a thin, pencilled on mustache, the casualness with which she dropped dudish one-liners was crazy. when she played, as “mad dog”, it was amazing, alternating between dudish song descriptions like “this song is about my car” and her usual amazing playing. the part of the uncle murder ballad #2 where she sings “never shoot at moving things, just feels good in my hand, makes me feel more threatening makes me feel like a man,” made her burst into giggles which was real funny and nice. the party was marked by some akward dancing from me, some crazy sexy dancing from jamie, corey, and shakes, and some even crazier sexy dancing from a cadre of teenaged burlesque girls, and these girls who showed up from nowhere dressed in this amazing hip-hop thug getup. i drove madeline’s car back fast up i-65 and got to work two hours late, seemingly without consequence. i feel groggy now.

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i decided to walk up 7th street to work today. it seems like i always ride up 6th these days. maybe the change today happened because i was walking and 6th is less hilly and more fun to ride a bike on, or maybe, feeling better about other things, my subconscious didn’t need to direct me to walk one block closer, hoping for a chance meeting at an intersection.

i walked up the hill towards the elementary school. “walk faster,” i said out loud, my words freezing as they exited my mouth. i did walk faster, shivering, as if the cold were a bully waiting to pummel me from behind some bushes on the way to school.

heating problems

the heating guy from airtech came today. seemed to be in a rush. one thing that he noticed was that the thermostat was wired wrong so that the air conditioning was coming on along with the heat, so they were working against each other, not heating very efficiently. he said that the furnace would also need a thorough cleaning and that he would talk with the land lord to schedule that. I mentioned the duct problems to the heating guy and he said that they could check that out and give an estimate when they came to clean the furnace.

monitoring mysql

so it looks like the bottleneck for most indymedia installations is mysql. the mtop tool might be useful for determining when its neccessary to switch over to more static content or to do some kind of cacheing.

http://mtop.sourceforge.net/

this article seems helpful too:

http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/newsletter/2004-01/a0000000301.html