BOOT! EDGE! EDGE!

I had an entire 70-screen PowerPoint presentation all prepared to impart on Pete (I call him Pete) how much I respect and admire and enthusiastically support him—and how we’d make awesome duet partners at the piano—but there was a bit of a time crunch so we were able to jam on only six piano concerti together. But still. I JUST MET PETE!

Gah! I look 1,000 years old here. I think Pete's photo-taking lady must have hit the wrong filter when she grabbed my camera to take our pictures.

Books I have recently purchased, in alphabetical order:

• Debussy: Favorite Piano Works
• DO NOT LAUGH IT’S FOR BUILDING DEXTERITY AND TECHNIQUE YOU PERVERTS
• Gershwin: Three Preludes for the Piano

The lamp at night ... plus some show posters that aren’t officially in any permanent spots just yet ...

There will be light

My prize liquid-mercury lamps—the only good thing to come out of a dumpster-fire rebound relationship when I found them on one of the little shopping sprees we took together because at least when I was using my credit cards I was interacting with something capable of sustaining a healthy, mutually meaningful, not-shit-crazy-psychopants relationship—are finally out of storage and placed where I’ve long been envisioning their deep-glimmer awesomeness against my new rich-people-blue walls.

And ... meh.

Maybe it’s the relentlessly cruel sunlight screaming through those tiny windows that’s killing the mood. Maybe my freshly Liquid Golded shelves need to tone down their competing shimmer with a healthy layer of dust. Maybe the lamps need a few little knickknacks to tower over in an act of passive-aggressive alpha-lamp dominance.

So ... the four important takeaways here are: 1) another bedroom wall is finally touched up and inspected and back to being hidden behind furniture, 2) I got more crap out of my storage unit, 3) meh, and 4) all this hard work is HARD.

I just sang Happy Birthday to this cat

Stabby the Cat will MESS YOU UP

And I’m busy rehearsing at rehearsal for the show I need to rehearse so I can’t save you.

Well, shit

Rob ran with me this morning and I said up front that I needed to run at my normal human pace and not his jet-fueled-kitten-screaming-down-a-hallway-at-3:00-am pace, but as we ran I thought I could tell we were slowly ramping up to the sound-barrier breaking point and I psyched myself into stopping just shy of 2 1/2 miles so I wouldn’t cough up a kidney. But I think all of the GPS satellites must be broken because when I downloaded our run from my watch to the app, it somehow mistranslated our Olympian 4:00 pace to a quite reasonable 12:10, which is silly because I can run at a 12:22 pace just fine and only a total wimp couldn’t bump that down to a 12:10 pace without a problem.

So the key takeaway here is: Running rots your brain and warps your perception of time and space worse than a Bill Barr testimony.

Here are two pieces of furniture that I’ve Liquid Golded to a brutal sheen and pushed back to their expertly trimmed baseboards and rich-people-blue walls

But I can't decide if the Dr. Seuss art is whimsically ironic or cluelessly age-inappropriate for a man in his dotage. The panels would fit perfectly between the mirror and the soffit (with some AP Geometry measuring to make sure they’re centered and even and level) and I have nothing else I could put there. I AM SO TORN.

Ninja level: Expert

Bitch Kitty was the chair of the furniture committee, but it folded.

So Mom has these plump little awning-stripe pillows sitting in the chairs on our vast, kingdom-beholding portico

From the street they look soft and inviting. Up close they feel preternaturally puffy and slightly hard, not unlike a taxidermied warthog. I both love and hate them, just like with Justin Bieber and high-end vinyl siding. But they’re water-resistant and I’m sweating like a warthog running from a taxidermist, so here we are.

Anywho, my short little run was going so well at the two-mile turnaround that I decided to keep going and do my usual three-mile route, which through the magical mystery math of GPS running watches clocked in today at 3.06 miles. Which makes me .06 thinner and .06 hotter. Please alert Justin Bieber.

I’ve been wide awake for no reason since stupid o’clock this morning

so I pulled up some blue tape and Liquid Golded some furniture and shelved some books in my bedroom and now I think I’m going to go for a short run so I can be good and exhausted by the time I get to work. IT’S A FOOLPROOF PLAN!

Nevermore

This little fella is either cawing proudly or screaming into the existential void of worm-eating avian futility (the windows are double-glazed so it’s hard to hear for sure) as I sit at my desk in comfort sipping blueberry-passionfruit sparkling water and munching on mass-produced chocolates.

Rob is a dick

Well, technically he’s a Rob. But he pushed me to run an 11:09 pace this morning, which is so much faster than the 12:22 pace I ran three days ago that I choked at 2.04 miles and we had to walk the last 0.96 miles home. And now my elevated heart rate is going to make me sexier and sexier as the day goes on. WHICH IS A TOTAL DICK MOVE. Typical Rob.

It’s way too late on a Monday to go running. But it’s way too nice not too.

And I’m way too old to pull off daffy faces in selfies.

This is totally immature but I’m totally too tired to care. Good night!

Two corners are spackled and caulked and painted and trimmed and edged and touched up and DONE!

I’ve also scrubbed my furniture and drenched it in glossy layers of Liquid Gold before putting it back. And I rehung my freshly painted door on its new classy brushed nickel hinges all by myself. BEHOLD MY MANLY DECORATING POWERS.

I had to use a high-contrast filter because it doesn’t photograph well ...

But long, long ago on a hot, hot day, someone set a credit card with the numbers 100 (shown here turned about 75°) on this dresser and the 100 part of the card melted into the varnish.

If I can somehow get the rest of the numbers, I’m going to DISNEY!

CRASH!

You know when you’ve had a great day and you’ve fixed your broken lamp and you bought a new bulb for it and as soon as you get it screwed in you have big plans to touch up your baseboards so you can start moving furniture against the walls but instead the bulb flies out of your hand as you’re screwing it in and crashes to flesh-shredding dust all over your floor and by the time you get it all (you hope) cleaned up your great day is now your dejected night and you’re in zero mood to paint baseboards so you just whine about it all online and go to bed?

Shit.

Well, shit

In all my fun Cedar Rapids Pride Festing I never took any pictures. But I rocked my rainbow couture with hundreds of lovely rainbow-clad people from all over the LGBTQ+ spectrum along with more lovely friends than I can count. And when I just left, I passed a woman on a motorcycle parked next to a requisite bitch-crazy hate preacher. She was reviving her engine at full rev to drown out the goat-fucking vomit he was trying to yell into his sad little bitch-boy megaphone while a huge circle of us perverts blew bubbles at him. They weren’t ribbon-festooned gift bags of flaming shit, but it was a lovely start.

#LoveWins #ExceptForBitchBoy

Blech

I think my sweaty T-shirt weighs more now than my entire body did when I started my run. It’s oppressively humid this morning, and thank goodness I ran before all the shadows disappeared because the sun isn’t playing any games with its death rays of skin-boiling heat.

I ran a little farther than normal—emphasis on “little”—before I turned around, but my running watch registered the net benefit as only .01 mile. (.01 miles? I wish I knew a decent writer who could tell me.) Anyway, we’ll treat that .01 as the teaser at the end of the credits to entice you into thinking there will be a sequel.

Now, TO THE SHOWERS!