what are youuuu doing here??!!???

That’s really only funny if you’re a Dark Shadows fan. We watched pretty much the entire series years and years ago, when they came out on videotape. Now they’re out on DVD, so we’re getting them from Netflix. It’s astonishing how sloooooooowly the storyline moves along. We just watched an episode set in the Blue Whale, the local bar that appears to be underwater judging by the weird swirly windows. One guy is demanding to know where another guy is because he was supposed to have left town but didn’t. The entire episode was pretty much:

Burke: "Where is Willie??"

Jason: "He’s leaving!"

Burke: "But has he left yet?"

Jason: "He’s leaving, I tell you!"

Burke: "Well, WHEN is he leaving?"

Jason: "He’ll be gone soon!"

Burke: "How will I know when he’s gone?"

Jason: "You’ll know he’s gone when you don’t see him anymore!"

Whereupon Baker B laughed so hard that he choked on his beer and I had to pound him on the back until he recovered.

Good times, good times. The best thing about Dark Shadows is that they NEVER stopped filming. Forgotten lines, miscues, sets collapsing, completely wrong doors slamming, candles setting curtains afire — the actors gamely soldiered on through it all. So it’s really really funny. AND very scary too – pretty impressive for such a overwrought, campy show.  

Can you believe my mother would not let me watch this show when I was a kid?? All my friends loved it, and I never got to see it. Baker B of course got to watch it, as his parents let him do anything he wanted to. Then he’d have nightmares all night.

It’s not been a very eventful week, actually.

I do have pictures of the Outback, though –

So far, the worst problem we’ve found is that is smells weird. It smells….kind of like coal actually. Or something very industrial. The woman my father bought it from didn’t take good care of the interior `and ended up taking out the rugs and putting down floormats, so it could be the mats. That just occured to Baker B tonight, and we haven’t tested this theory by taking the mats out yet. It could be worse – at least it doesn’t smell like something dead. And hey, it’s a free car. A little industral odor won’t kill us.

I also can’t figure out the whole four-wheel drive thing. Right now it’s in front wheel drive, because to put it in four wheel drive you have to open the engine and remove a chip. The previous owner showed me how but couldn’t get it out. She also said the Subaru place told her to leave it in four-wheel drive. So I don’t know why she put the chip back in. She’s a little odd. I guess I really need to call the Subaru place here and ask them – oddly I couldn’t find anything online about it, or in the owner’s manual.

I intended to post more pictures, perhaps of coal country (in keeping with the odd smell of the outback) or perhaps Flat Top, where I walked up the mountain to the tower recently. Since OD was down all last week I couldn’t do it then, and of course I can’t find anything on Flickr from home because dial up takes hoooooooours. And I only took the Outback picture today.  So I decided to go to a wireless coffee shop this afternoon and load up what I’d just taken and perhaps even do a quick entry and post some pictures while I was somewhere I could actually get to them in under three hours.

So I go to Black Bear, a bookstore/coffee shop/ wireless hangout. They have like two outlets, and of course five people are clustered around the two outlets, so I have to use my battery. Which has about an hour’s life, tops. I sit at this weird very tall table and start working as fast as I can. I have my computer bag on the other chair at the tall table, and all of a sudden this old guy comes up, plops his paper down on my table, plops his coffee down on my table, plops his computer down on my table, and starts moving my computer bag out of the seat. Turning it upside down so I’m not sure how everything in it didn’t end up in the floor, although it was probably because I jumped up and grabbed it and said, "HERE, I’LL do that -"

Okay, perhaps I was being rude taking up the whole table, although these are not big tables – there’s enough room for two laptops but you’re so close together that it’s kind of like you’re playing battleship. And there were plenty of other tables, although no empty tall tables. STILL, it seems to me like the thing for the Old Geezer to do would have been say, "Excuse me miss, but may I share your table?" To which I would have replied, "Why, certainly – let me get my computer bag out of your way!" Of course I would have been thinking "GREAT, there are fifty OTHER places for you to sit, do you HAVE to come crowd into MY space????" but I would have been outwardly gracious about it, of course.

Maybe he was from the Big City. When I lived in DC, if you sat at a table by yourself someone would sit with you. Because there were seventy trillion office workers and eight tables in the city. And I hated it there too but it’s just how things were done. And it is probably the same way in other big cities. So maybe he was operating by Big City rules and not by Small Town Get Out Of My Personal Space rules. I really think it was more likely that he was from Florida, though, since he was about 80 and rude. 

Black Bear is always a bad place to go for wireless, though – it’s always crowded, you have to buy a cup of mediocre coffee, there are only two outlets, and there is always at least one person screeching into their cellphone. It wasn’t until after I left that I realized I COULD have gone to the campus library, where there are scads of cushy comfortable chairs, outlets everywhere, people don’t invade your space, and it’s quiet. Even Panera would have been a better choice than Black Bear. Maybe I’ll remember it next time.