I’m tired of buying stamps. It’s not really stamps that annoy me. Or the buying of them, actually. Except I have to buy stamps to make my stamps usable, so called “makeup rate” stamps.

Around Christmas of 2005. I bought a roll of a hundred stamps, thinking “I won’t have to buy stamps for years!” A couple weeks later, the rate jumped two cents. You’d think that the woman would have warned me about the rate increase when I bought a ridiculous quantity of stamps. Or maybe I just looked like a savvy stamp user (I’m not, clearly). I had to buy 100 two-cent stamps (they wouldn’t sell me 97 of them). Now the rate’s gone up again, so I had to buy 36 one-cent stamps (because they get mad if you tape actual pennies to your mail).

I’m writing an irate letter to the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee, this is a seriously annoying practice. I can’t use my stamps fast enough. Yes, I know about the forever stamp, but it doesn’t make sense to purchase them until I use up the drawerful of stamps I’ve accumulated. Of course using three per bill payment is going to help, I’m getting rid of six stamps a month.

I plan on putting the complaint letter in the smallest envelope I can find and affixing 21 two-cent stamps.

Statistically speaking, if you have more than 16 friends (and I hope you do) then two of your friends will have the same name. If you’re like me, then you start to qualify the names so you can tell which “Paul” you’re talking about, so we have “Paul from back home” and “Paul with the white shoes”. Everything makes total sense that way.

When Vanessa said “Pam from the office” the other day, I was confused because I didn’t know she worked with a Pam. Well, she meant the TV show “The Office”, so suddenly we’re qualifying people as “Michael from the office” or “Michael from the TV show The Office”. Then I wanted to talk about a character from the original version of The Office and suddenly I’m saying Chris, the guy from the British version of The Office

When “John that I worked with” suggested collapsing proper pronouns and calling everyone (including his wife) “Chuck”, people thought he was nuts.

I’m not so sure any more…

I’m not much into fashion, for the most part my style is “Gap discount rack”. I can sort of tell what the trends are – I don’t know Vera Wang from Vera Bradley, but I know those quilted bags are popular.

When I saw a hoodie on sale at the Gap, I was excited. All the cool people are wearing them and this was designed almost like a cardigan with a hood, so it didn’t look silly on me (the sweatshirt hoodies with skulls printed are too young). Now I’m cool, layering a hoodie under my jacket!

The zipper is one of those annoying “dual-fob” types that can unzip from the bottom. I don’t know who would wear a cardigan unzipped from the top and bottom, but it looks ridiculous. The only think this zipper does is slow me down – I have an extremely difficult time getting the little tab past both fobs.

I didn’t realize how much work it would be, aside from the zipping issues. Now I need to keep checking to see if my hood is pulled out from under my jacket, instead of squashed inside like Quasimodo’s hump. Then I need to check that the hood isn’t inside-out, because that would be embarrassing. Then I need to keep an eye out to make sure that nobody puts garbage in my hood.

It’s too much work to be on the cutting edge of fashion…

Wow, it’s been a busy couple weeks, filled with all sorts of live music and shows. I just saw the Eels, who were simply amazing. E and The Chet are seriously talented musicians and I was happy they didn’t play “Beautiful Freak”, their big hit. I half expected it on their second encore, but it didn’t happen.

Speaking of talented musicians, Tony stunned me at his album release party. His next gig is Friday, May 2, 2008 in Hartford, Connecticut and you’d be a first-rate fool to miss it. Tony’s a fantastic performer, in fact the entire band was excellent.

At some point I also got a chance to see Johnny Hoy and the Bluefish which was a complete blast, the Avenue Q musical, and there was some Jazz brunch at SkipJacks

So much going on – I’ll be in New York for the weekend, some new computer gear is arriving for my next project, and I need to return the pink bunny suit.

Oh, and have you seen the First featured video on YouTube?

My friend Tony Brown is having his CD release party this Friday (leap-day!) which I plan on checking out. There’s a reception at 7:30, which will include champagne and cheese and there should be a couple bands opening for him. I think Tony will start about 11 o’clock.

I’m having dinner, but if anyone’s interested in meeting up at the club around 9 o’clock, let me know. There’s a $5 cover charge or $10 for a cover charge plus “free” CD. Yeah, that’s weird.

Tony Brown CD Release Party @ Midway Café
3496 Washington Street, Jamaica Plain

Tony Brown is an alternative soul singer-songwriter from Rochester, NY, living in Boston, celebrating his first solo recording, “Music for a Shrinking World”.

More detailed bio:

Tony Brown delivers his blues-peppered, funk-injected, alterna-soul pop/rock acoustically to fully-plugged. A Tony Brown show flows between a moody, reflective session to an upbeat hip-swinging party. His soul-stirring and versatile lyrical tones take the audience on a visceral journey. The integrity of his poignant compositions is grounded in searching, and in a love for music having been exposed to everything from Beethoven to Johnny Guitar Watson as a kid. Tony Brown combines elements of rock and soul to create a completely original sound – the emotion of Jeff Buckley with the power of vocals that fall somewhere between Seal and Van Morrison. Tony was lead singer of the band Ozone in the 1990s, which acclaimed by music critics for its “soaring U2 Bono-bluster vocals” (Gannett’s Democrat & Chronicle) and “pure vocal soul” (Freetime Magazine).

Sorry to take so long to post about the SuperBowl, I didn’t want to spoil the game for anyone that might have Tivo’d it and for whatever reason hadn’t watched it yet. Maybe they were staying on a foreign island or something. Like I was. But now I’m back in Boston with the cold and the rain and the snow. sigh

I don’t think the St Kitts natives cared about the game, they were more interested in how much beer people bought. For me this is two beers, so sitting for six hours in a bar isn’t very cost effective for the bar. It’s a great deal for me, though – cheaper than a movie and the Shiggity Shack gives free drinks to topless women, so there was plenty of entertainment.

Added entertainment was important since the commercials were so lame (I’ve already fired off an email to my congressman). I watched the game via satellite broadcast from a Puerto Rican TV station, so there was a whole different set of commercials than the lame ones in the US – all of them in Spanish. My Spanish is more rusty than my Elven, so you can imagine how fun it was to watch a guy line up his Bud Light beer bottles in a cooler (literally line them up, in an OCD way).

And “joke you might not want tell your mother” of the day: I was at an ATM and this elderly woman asked me to help check her balance. So I pushed her…

The Caribbean has a lot going for it, so far I’ve enjoyed the food, the weather, and the rum. What I don’t enjoy is the mosquitoes. I’ve discovered that mosquito netting works both ways – it can keep them in the bed. And they get hungry, with no way of eating anywhere except the Lee buffet.

The other thing the Caribbean has is pirates! I forgot about those Disney movies until I got down here and saw all the knock-off merchandise for sale. Pirated pirate merchandise amuses me.

When I grow up I’m going to be a pirate (once I figure out how to wear an eye patch with glasses).

And not just because it sounds like the French word for “fake poo”.

I’m still not sure why I can’t use a bar of soap to wash my hair. Or dishwashing detergent, it all seems pretty interchangeable. And it’s weird how little I really need, but how much I use. When I get to the end of the bottle, a couple drops seems to do just fine.

I mention shampoo because I just got a haircut and the first shower after a haircut, I fill my palm with shampoo then remember that I only need half that amount and try to pour it back into the bottle. I mention the haircut because I just got one for my new trip – I’m leaving this weekend to go to St Kitts!

So I have a ton of sunblock and a laptop packed an ready to go. I even bought a new camcorder to tape some scenes for my NEW SPECIAL SUPER-SECRET PROJECT.

You know what’s not going to St Kitts with me? My Tamagotchi, the little weasel up and died on me. Just to prove I would be an un-fit parent, I suppose. I swear I was feeding him and keeping him happy, suddenly he’s got angel wings. At first I thought that was a good thing, but nope.

For now, I’m going to stick with owning a kitten

Well, it’s the end of 2007 (play along, it was at one point and it’s still a new year as long as I keep forgetting to write “2008” on checks) and everyone is making their end-of-year lists. So here you go, a list of things I learned during 2007:

1) If you call it a noise, you shouldn’t be making it.

2) I don’t know Vera Wang from Vera Bradley, but those quilted bags sure are popular.

3) No stone throwing, regardless of your housing situation.

4) There’s a big difference between pilates and pirates – read carefully before you make assumptions about a woman’s hobbies.

5) Nothing is better than three monkeys in drag!

6) I must vote “Gail Lemily Wiggins for Cambridge School Committee”. Aside from me having a mother named “Gail” and the made up name “Lemily”, her last name is right out of The Simpsons. The woman sounds like she could be a character from Harry Potter and the Bureaucratic Nightmare.

7) Making fun of other people that may Google your site and send a nastygram is never a good idea.

8) There are no sitcoms about cheese. We had The Munsters and it was cheesy, but the show technically wasn’t about cheese.

9) I rarely have enough time, which means I rarely finish projects

10)

Seems like every advertisement on the web has some form of animated holiday thing. I’m not really complaining, just pointing that out.

I took next week off, so I get to tell my coworkers “see you next year” when I go home. I’m not bragging, just pointing that out.

I need to post more stuff on my site next year. I’m not really promising, just pointing that out.