14 february

is valentine's day (svante didn't seem to think so on the phone today from sweden)

so upon amy's suggestion and our mutual derection we spent the day drinking mimosas, eating eggs florentine (amy's work) and having sex over and over again.

besides this sexual holiday, sex between us has been great - before today the last two times we had sex (once every other day or so) we have had mutual and simultaineous orgasms. whe-hew!

i wrote something about a weird hatewatch site on bud.com

otherwise i've been playing some games i have to answer 34 question forms about them which could earn me as much as $150 per form. the questions involve visiting fan websites and company press release archives, listing URLs, and extra dollars for original 1-8 paragraph reviews, humour or game narrative. it's cheap writing - it's a lotta research actually. if you want to do a good job. it's for some site i've never heard of. i hope they come through with paying me. right now they've asked me to turn in one game review every two days. it's pretty rigorous scheduling actually.

i was at web98 in san francisco and boston and in boston the space for the online lounge was hurting so i contact the conference-throwers and suggested some improvements. they liked the sound of my suggestions and took me out to lunch last week and so maybe i will be working as a consultant/planner for the online lounge at web99. i proposed more art, more communal spaces for individuals to present their web works - less big stage web personality rehash. in high school and at college i had a chance to do behind the scenes event planning and labour, i really enjoy throwing parties. so this will be a good opportunity for me to learn about party throwing for professionals.

i became restless friday that we still had no proper dining table - we were still eating on $2 home depot plastic chairs at a table we bought for our kitchen. so i drove to salvation army and was found by a quite classic looking chinesish black dining table with four chairs and two leaves.

i mentioned to egg that we should have people over, in part inspired by the table, and in part missing the business of a room full of my friends. so we invited first two people, then four people, then six people, finally 9 people, including Judah Rodgon, a fellow i've known since i was three who lives in palo alto and happened to call that day. and ryan shaw, who's contributed to bud.com but i'd never met. he came with elly. agro and kara showed up. wilner and ellen. kathy dropped by with tim but had to leave and only stayed 40 minutes to eat bits of carrot stuck in the gravy. tim called me chef boyardee. tongsue came and left with them she said to get high but instead went home for a midnight call from a boy who doesn't go steady with her anymore just sleeps over because a pipe broke in his house but sometimes he snuggles her and she really loves him. last week she asked for a ride to home depot and urban ore and she didn't buy anything but he came along and he bought stuff. i would have minded more but he said i was quite a competent driver when she complained about my last minute decision to take a u-turn. and brian, ix came who'd never been to our house before.

uncle jim gave me some cookbooks for christmas and a 16 quart pot for my birthday since amy and i had mentioned cooking to him quite a bit at graduation. two books by barbara kafka: roasting and soups. she's got a straightforward style with a lot of confidence and good verbal illustration - easy to follow and so far the recipes have turned out quite tasty. (wilner last night reported - "this meal was kafkaesque")

i'd been kinda tempted to roast a chicken since i got the roasting book, so with so many people coming over i roasted two. stuck 4 cloves of garlic, a lemon halved, and 3 tablespoons of butter in each of the cavities and stuck the birds in the oven at 500 degrees. halfway through i stuck some onions and carrots in the pan, like i seen my mama do, and damn the gravy that came out of that buttery bird, mixed in with all them roasted up chicken fatted carbonized veggies was like pure sin.

besides that elly was coming and she's a vegan so there was spinach sauteed with garlic, some shallot-mixed mashed potatoes, with vegan separated out and the rest milked and buttered a bit, steamed vegetables, and sundried tomato, mushroom pasta.

eleven people fit pretty readily at the dining table and it was a joy to see them and hear the witty banter and upraised spirits.

amy did an incredible clean up on the house (and paid for the groceries involved). having a party brings us together into a productive team. like she said, we may bicker or disagree or even pester and slap each other around, but we keep on working. as a result, parties are stressful, but afterwards our house usually looks its best! it's strange like that.

maybe one reason i haven't updated my website, between the bedroom and the kitchen, is my recent conversation with sonic:
i mentioned links.net and bud.com, she mentioned word-play and flank.com, some sites she's doing. she thought more people might read my stuff, here and on bud.com, if i had more design. you know, make it look like a magazine instead of just a personal web page. people will feel like they're reading something special maybe, like you took the time. there's a whole segment of people that won't bother with stuff if it looks unprofessional. at least loose the gray background!

so i've been trying to think about that openmindedly - on one hand i'm attached to simplicity in web design; say what you need to say with interesting visual allusions but don't spend a lot of time on the frame. on the other hand i realize that this is a challenge, an opportunity to grow, and i can remember the last time someone really challenged the way i worked over my personal website and i woke up the next day raring to go.

but nothing's come to me about this whole design thing. i hate frames - that seems the instant way to make your page less personal somehow. i need to like spend a weekend with photoshop and an opium pipe and realize a bunch of anti-aliased mechanico-organic images that compliment the hand-drawn style i've enjoyed to date.

usually what i do for new interface is find someone else and rip them off. can't think of anyone i like for my personal site, but for bud.com there's a million interface ideas dangling just beyond the point after which ix and i have tweaked-to-rest the bud.com backend.

so on we work and wait for the light,
and i had a dream:

after watching some betelguise:

we're sitting on parker's ray field and amy meets cam, richard and alan and they get along and i was quite happy about it.

later, hanging out with ben (where?) and i go to the bathroom. i pee for about 20 minutes during which time chandra eyes my penis as we chat. she leaves, i'm still peeing.
wearing some kind of necklace,
duncan is there,
looking in the mirror.
he's trying to brush his teeth. He puts brush to tooth and moves it but only the sound of brushing teeth comes out, he doesn't appear to be brushing his teeth in the mirror.
"Duncan," i say, "you can't brush your teeth, you killed yourself."
He's astonished: "Yeah, but i would have thought..."

then Wilson enters wearing a blue shirt with orange flames i had given him. He discovers i'm talking to duncan and then wilson can talk to duncan too. it's the rapid banter.

so now it's past one am, my hands hurt, amy's talking about finishing her web page another time. i look through my mp3s and there's nothing i want to listen to.

i need to format this page somehow - there's not so many relevant illos i see at this point. links, sure. but what's the quick way to make it look more magaziney? i think back past sonic's challenge to the snotty suckers and carl's current page. besides the fact that he has a better excuse for not updating his web site than i do (see his 2 february "ulcerative colitis" entry), he has all of his content in a width=240 column. it makes the page very long. it also makes for shorter trips for the eye to scan lines. so that's what i'll do for tonight.

i hope carl feels better. you could too.

muzik tonight, while writing - the sounds of amy eating instant udon from a big ceramic bowl.

yesterday