Shit's comin' together, man, but it's too late to go into it now. For now, I'll leave you all with my current desktop wallpaper.

What the hell -- I'm still in a really great mood, and I'm still unable to account for it. Maybe it's the whole honeymoon period of the new year -- I so want things to work out between me and 2004, to be much better friends than my rocky relationship with its predecessor allowed me to be with 2003. We just met, it still has that luminous glow about it, coupled with a tinge of hard-won experience -- I think it just might work out.

And I just added a sci fi section to my DVD collection, which makes for 2 whole sections now: sci fi and muppet. Dark City is the new one -- very cool flick.

Very sleepy, but I've been in an exceedingly good mood over the past several days. I've gotten back into lifting weights early in the morning at the local gym, which I think is helping out nicely. Just me and the very old guys who carry themselves like they used to be asskickers in their day, and others who are either super-dedicated or health-conscious insomniacs. I kind of got scared back into it, when I recently read that from age 20 to 50, the average guy loses a half-pound of muscle every year and gains a pound and half of fat. Which means I'm short 5 lbs of muscle, and I'm already just over the edge of overweight.

So anybody got any dire stats to scare me into becoming more financially responsible? "If you haven't saved $40,000 by the time you're 28, you'll die early early, broke, and infested with earwigs and weevils." Anything to curb the Starbucks demon inside!

The new year's been pretty dandy so far, although the Metro failed on the way home from a night job , stranding me in the parking lot of an auto parts store, which I believe was its way of telling me not to give up on it. The symptoms seem to indicate that something's going on in the fuel line, which isn't a very good sign, seeing as that in the fuel-injection era of Metros, the fuel pump and filter are both located inside the gas tank. Which could possibly mean that I can't mess with it myself. Dammit.

Janine and I spent Chirstmas and New Years with assorted friends here in town, had several good times, and drank a lot of Apple Pucker -- Christmas was the first time in a while I actually gathered around a piano and sang carols, most of which were requested by me from the Bing Crosby/Andrews Sisters songbook. I sang the part of Patty Andrews. Janine was somewhere between Maxine and LaVerne.

The wedding's taking somewhat definite shape, and is now planned for late June in Virginia. Janine wants to include some sort of plant in her wedding bouquet (a green amaranthus) that hangs down around her arms in these springy tendrils that swear-to-God looks like something summoned forth from the depths to occupy a flower bush. An excellent spooky-elegant flourish. Maybe I'll carve an elder sign in my top hat.