We finished watching Annie Hall last night. It wasn’t too bad, although Woody Allen’s neuroticism was a bit excessive in my opinion. Cameos from a bunch of different actors including Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Walken, and Shelley Duvall helped add flavor to the movie. Slight spoiler: that’s an awfully quick way to waste several thousand dollars of cocaine!
This movie puts me half way through the AFI’s 100 Years… 100 Movies: 10th Anniversary Edition. Hooray for progress! Up next ought to be either The Best Years of Our Lives or All About Eve, though I could just opt for something that Netflix currently has available for streaming.
Yesterday, I crossed number 56 off my list: Hang new shower curtain rod.
It took about an hour altogether. Using my "wonder tool" (a Dremel) with a cutting wheel and a polishing stone to smooth the edges, I was able to make fairly quick work of cutting the tubes that comprise the rod to a good approximation of the dimensions on our shower/bathtub. It looks pretty good considering that it was a one-man job, including the measuring, marking, anchoring, etc.. I think I’m going to need to give it a bit more support, though; I’m wary of having an L-shaped shower curtain rod without some sort of support at the angle. Unfortunately, I’m not sure if there’s an accessible stud at the spot that I need it, so I guess I’ll need to check out anchoring options.
Last night, I completed number 24 on my list of 101 Things in 1001 Days: Go to a comedy club.
My brother-in-law and I went down to Liberty Center, which is a club of sorts hosted above a bowling alley, which was hosting Liberty Laughs last night and we met up with one of my friends and her date. The comedians were pretty good and, as far as I can tell, my brother-in-law also enjoyed himself. The comedians were supplied by First Laugh Entertainment.
I would recommend checking this place out for anyone who happens to be in the Fredericksburg, VA, area on a Friday night. Also, with your $10 paid admission, you get to bowl for free (excepting shoe rental) until 1AM (approximately three hours because the show wraps up around 10PM) and the 21-and-up crowd gets the cover charged waived for entry into the bar after the show.
Either my Google-Fu is weak, or there is no readily available comparison (preferably, non-biased) on the candidates in this year’s Virginia gubernatorial race. I cannot believe that out of the billions of web pages floating around the Internet that such a page does not exist. I have no particular affiliation with any major political organization and I do not believe in voting a particular way because [insert random talking head here] says to do so. In the past, I have refused to look at the candidates individual web sites; neither would I look at their respective political party’s web site, nor anything distinctly promoting either candidate. What I really want is a compiled list of the candidates proclaimed stances on the major issues, such as education and transportation. Of course, one really cannot guarantee the non-bias of a given list of anything political in nature, so I suppose I need to suck it up and do my own research.
Progress: 53/100
I rediscovered the Day Zero Project this morning thanks to my Delicious network and it got me thinking about all of the different things I want to do (and in many cases, need to do).
I can see great potential in my life for having a list like this one. I tend to stick to my plans a bit better when they are written down, so hopefully I will actually get a lot of things done. There are so many tasks that need completion around the house. Unfortunately, something always seems to come up and my ideas for projects are simply forgotten for the most part (others are merely neglected).
I’ll be following up this post with a list. I may be hard pressed to come up with 101 things, though. We’ll see. With luck, this will be the push I need to start getting things done!
What if researchers could reboot a misfiring immune system? That is the intriguing possibility raised by stem cell transplant specialist Richard Burt. He is pioneering a new treatment for autoimmune disorders, one in which patients’ immune systems are suppressed and then replaced with an infusion of their own immune stem cells, filtered out from their blood. These then grow into all types of blood cells, including the white blood cells of the immune system.
via Body Attacks Self; Body Protects Self | Stem Cell Research | DISCOVER Magazine.
This research is particularly interesting to me because of my wife’s recent diagnosis with Wegener’s Granulomatosis (WG), an autoimmune form of vasculitis. The current treatment for this debilitating disease involves some rather toxic medications, such as cyclophosphamide (a.k.a. Cytoxan) and prednisone.
I have decided to give this thing another go. I will attempt to update this blog weekly, at a minimum. Everything that I post here should also be viewable at my Livejournal.
New name. New look. Same old fool behind the keyboard.
Until next time!