Today, Kris and Julie went to their boss' ice skating party, and afterwards went to a bar. Something happened at the bar that really pissed Kris off. Apparently, while he was standing there talking to a co-worker (guy named "Chris"), some woman walked past him, turned around to face him, and made a face at him. This, for some reason, put him in one hell of a bad mood. After he got back, he ranted about it for many minutes, questioning her authority to not like people, and wondering what he ever did to her. That must have been some face she made. I asked Kris, during the rants, if that was all she did. Yep, only made a face. I didn't know Kris was sensitive to that, and I've been watching for nigh 15 years. I'm baffled.

I've been getting a lot of things done lately. I blame this on my decrease in web browsing and game playing. I applied to many, many places during this past week, more than I had in the past 8 months. I sent out email! Well, some email. I'm getting better at it, but it still requires a clear head (unlike this). I recorded Brandon's vocal parts for recently written music.

An interesting thing about Brandon and his vocals is that none of us ever criticize them. Some days he'll be just downright awful, missing notes by miles and getting off beat, but no one will mention anything. If anyone else makes a mistake, one of us will say "Hey, you messed up. Dork.", and if we were recording, we retake. Brandon seems exempt from this, but I'm not sure why. Originally, he was very shy about singing, and didn't want to do it at all. We encouraged him, sticking with him through a few pretty obnoxious demo recordings. We were all conspicuously bad, though, so there wasn't room to point fingers. Now, it's as if we're still handling him with kid gloves, trying not to scare him away. I didn't realize it until Kris (alcoholed) said so, but we're all in the habit of not saying anything to Brandon when he messes up. Recently, there's been much less opportunity, as Brandon has improved much, but on Saturday he did a really bad take and I didn't say anything, silently noting that I'd have to redo the tracks.

Brian now has an internet capable computer. On Thursday, he went and bought a monitor, final piece of his slowly coalescing Pentium clone. ("blah blah, it's not a pentium clone, it's an IBM clone") (Ha! It has an AMD K6 chip. Pentium clone!) I could not stop myself from going over there to watch it change from a pile of semi-compatible parts to a working window into the present. Actually, if I hadn't been there, it would probably still be a pile of semi-compatible parts. After low level formatting the HD three times (the first time, unnecessarily) and staying up for six hours, we got everything installed and working. Except the modem. I went back today and got the computer to believe in COM2, making it possible to dial out, which is the very next thing we did. Someday soon, Brian will have an account somewhere, and email. Actually, I didn't touch his computer much at all. I just sat behind him and provided audio tech support for six hours. He did all the typing/mousing in the hope that he'll learn more that way. I myself learned a lot about hard drives during these hours, after going to the Maxtor website to fetch the appropriate Low-Level software. (Maxtor's low-level formatting software doesn't mention the word "Format" in any of its menus. Probably to avoid confusion with the more common high-level format)

Brian aspires to be a professional web designer, making more money than he does as a pizza hut guy. I did mention to him that the 'profession' was saturated, but I think his fast-talking skills might do him some good in actually reaching his goal. ("fast-talking" can be a euphemism for "bullshit-spewing")