How much TV can one man watch? I've been watching an Absolutely Fabulous marathon on and off since noon, despite the fact that I've seen every episode 50 times each. And I'm getting ready to watch a Degrassi:The Next Generation (or whatever it's called) marathon, a show I've just gotten into. (It's a good thing I don't smoke crack.)

Even though I have a satellite dish and can get over a hundred channels, I don't watch that much TV. Recently though, I've found myself watching ridiculous amounts of TV, and I'm not sure why. It's probably my sister's fault; she told me she turns her TV on when she gets home and doesn't turn it off until she goes to bed. Before she came down here I was using my free time to learn the finer points of cascading style sheets, and now I just watch TV. This morning I found myself watching Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

Whenever my sister comes down here we end up watching inordinate amounts of TV. For example: on Christmas Eve the miserable BBC America channel showed three straight hours of Changing Rooms, a show I don't even like. We watched it. Christmas day, the same wretched channel showed ten straight hours of Coupling, a show I like, and we watched it. Yes, ten hours of the same TV show, even though I've seen them all before. It wasn't exactely the most enjoyable way to spend my time.

The day after Christmas my sister left. The Tech TV channel showed a live eighteen hour marathon of Call for Help, and I watched most of it. And since then I've found myself on the couch, remote in hand, flipping through my hundred plus channels, looking for something interesting to watch. Or just something to watch.

I just thought of an idea for a new blog: porn blog. It'd be nothing but learned commentary about porno movies. Unfortunately I don't get to watch new porn anymore so I won't be doing a porn blog. And now that I think of it, this porn blog is a stupid idea anyway. Just forget I even mentioned it. I said forget it!

I've been a little annoyed with myself over the past week for not posting that much. A lot of people have posted a hell of a lot less than I have, so I don't know why I waste time getting annoyed with myself. But then I don't have anything to write about, so it doesn't matter anyway. I haven't done anything over the past several days except watch TV.

Dammit, dammit, dammit! Yesterday I put up a link to my sister's unfinished webpage, then last night she goes and takes just about everything offline. Typical. She hadn't touched it since October 2000, but now wants to revise it.

My sister isn't impressed by blogs. She has a webpage herself that's pretty amusing. Have a look and notice that not only is it not finished, but she hasn't touched it in over two years.

Everything around here has sort of gotten back to normal. The tree and decorations were taken down yesterday. The cards are in the trash. My sister's back in Richmond. And most of the food's been eaten.

I'm so bummed out.

I gave it another go and failed again to install Windows. Linux has this harddrive in it's grip and I can't get Windows to just bulldoze the Linux file system and replace it with a Windows file system. Am I going to have to buy a new harddrive? Honestly, the misery just never ends.

My Windows install didn't go well at all. In the end, after hours of tedium, I just reinstalled Linux--and I didn't even do that right. When, or perhaps I should say if, I get things straight I'll write a longer entry.

What'd I get for Christmas besides software of dubious legality? I got a chair. Yes, a chair. Hopefully the cushion will be a bit more forgiving to my hindquarters while I mindlessly look at junk online.

I also got three shirts, underwear, and money. Thrilling, no?

I've never missed a day on my blog before. How dull.

I'm going to spend the day trying to install Windows 2000. I was going to make my sister install this junk, but she weaseled out of it.

My sister was, naturally, a little disturbed by our revelation of total allegiance to the dark god, Cthulhu, but she soon calmed down. OK, we sedated her; what would you have done? Tomorrow we'll be sucked into a flaming vortex of depravity and murder, after all, it'll be Cthulhumas.

I've noticed most all of the blogs I regularly read have stopped for the holidays. I should be grateful for a few days off from blog reading, but instead I'm oddly annoyed. How dare they put their own families first instead of entertaining me with stories about their wacky lives. Such insolence!

I'm going to be busy for the next two or three or days, so I don't know how much I'm going to be able post things.

My parents are dragging my sister down from Richmond today. Little does she know we've all joined a death cult and we fully expect her to take part in our unspeakable rites.

Joe Strummer died. Crap. The Clash are one of my all time favorites, second only to the Velvet Underground.

I stopped by German Guy's blog to see if he'd finally updated. What I got instead was a message from one "Picasso Pete" informing the world that German Guy had killed himself. Does this mean I can take his link down without guilt? I didn't think whoever was doing German Guy would be able to sustain it very long.

Why would anyone learn the Klingon language? Or Esperanto? At one time I wanted to learn Esperanto, but I quickly lost interest. I'd rather learn a useful language like C++ or something. (Not to imply that I'd ever take the time to do something like learn a programming language.) When I worked at my last miserable job they brought in a lot of Mexican workers, many of whom didn't speak English. I viewed this as an excellent opportunity to finally learn a second language, and do it by conversing in the language with native speakers. This never happened. I bought a good book on learning Spanish, but I could never bring myself to speak one word of Spanish to any of these people. Then it hit me, I don't even like speaking English to people I know, so why did I think I'd suddenly want to start speaking Spanish with people I don't know? Ah, but such is the life of complete misanthrope.

I'm going to climb up on my high horse and rant about things I hate in other people's blogs. The first is huge background images loaded from servers on the other side of the goddamn planet. And it's always the same stuff: anime junk, Lord of the Rings, near lifesize pictures of boring Avril Lavigne (or however the hell it's spelled), etc. The second are the results of those stupid tests. You know, those things that say something like, "You are Hawkeye because you live in a tent, make moonshine, and perform surgery on people," or something equally useless. Some blogs have virtually nothing but these things and these pages take forever to load because each stupid image loads from a different server. The third thing I hate in blogs is no uppercase letters. Fourth is instant messaging shorthand: I'm going to lol!!! when i kill you becuz I h8 this moronic nonsense. And the final thing (unless I think of something else) is emoticons. I don't hate these quite as much as the other things above, but they still annoy me. They are useful though, since no one seems to be able to tell when anyone's kidding anymore. The only emoticon I really like is ( o Y o )

I was going to go on a rant about how I had no life, therefore no inspiration, blah-blah, etc., but then I went to Gretchen's blog and ended up having a nasty flashback. On her blog there's a picture of her dog lying on a bed, and the comforter on the bed is, I think, one made by my old employer, Dan River, Inc. I dealt with innumerable sheet sets in this same pattern for three miserable years and every time I see one of these old sheet set/comforter patterns I get a jolt. Once I was flipping channels (back when I could easily afford premium cable TV), I ran across a softcore porno movie where two people were fake-humping on a set of Dan River sheets. I knew the pattern on those sheets even more intimately than those two naked people on screen knew each other.

What did I do at Dan River? The set up was basically three assembly lines inside a large room in a huge warehouse. I was the link between the assembly line and warehouse. The people on the line would assemble the sheet sets, seal them in shrink wrap, count them, put them into shipping containers, and I, with my pallet-jack, would take these big shipping containers and line them up in the warehouse. I also had to put in new rolls of shrink wrap film, maintain the label machine, etc. Tiresome and boring. We also did runs where I stacked boxes on pallets and then lined them up in the warehouse. I had to memorize a fifteen or more box sizes and know what size sheet set went in what box.

I really hated this job.

Since my CD player was already broken, I decided to take the case off and poke around inside. (This isn't exactely a good idea, so I don't recommend it.) I actually had the thing working with minimal fiddling, but, naturally, when I put the case back on it stopped working again. I'm putting it out for the garbage men on Monday.