I’m proud of Beth. Sort of.

After a hard night of drinking and smoking and card-playing and carousing into the wee hours last night, and after sleeping ’til 1:00 in the afternoon today and then drag-assing around the house all afternoon moaning about how lousy she felt, Beth announced that she wanted to go to the gym. And we did, and she lifted her weights and put in her time on the treadmill and sweated and made everyone around her drunk with the tequila fumes coming out of her pores. On the way home she announced that she felt much better and was glad we had gone to work out.

“I feel all healthy now,” she said. And then she said, “I’m going to stop at 7/11. I need cigarettes.”

Two steps up, one step back.

Beth and her friends have been getting together semi-regularly for 15 years or more to play cards. They play a game they call “Grenouille,” which nobody new to the group has ever heard of it before. Beth apparently taught it to the group after having learned it from her boyfriend John-Pierre when she lived in Cadaques, Spain. The boyfriend didn’t have a name for it so Beth named it after him: grenouille is French for frog, the boyfriend was French, his nickname was “Froggy,” et voila — game name! I did a little webcrawling and found this game called Oh Hell, which is pretty close to Grenouille, but has a less amphibious name.

The game itself isn’t really all that important, though, it’s more the hanging out and joking and drinking various adult beverages and smoking various non-tobacco products and cracking themselves up. There are in-jokes aplenty, notes from past games to howl over, and, as always, adult beverages and non-tobacco products. And merriment ensues.

We hosted the game tonight and three of Beth’s best friends came over: Kelly, Les and Todd. I usually don’t go to these things with Beth but I joined in tonight since it was happening at my house. Being a relative outsider, I was a topic of much discussion, especially after I hung a BA at Beth and invited her to “kiss my ass” at one point. Les and Todd said I have a “perfect gay ass,” Beth says I’m a “top,” and there were a few half-joking offers for a three-way, which was a nice invitation but wouldn’t have been all that much fun for me since it would have been with Les and Todd.

I played cards with them (and lost) and stayed sober while they got all Joe Walsh on me (“The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get”), smoking their herb and doing shots of tequila and generally fucking themselves up good. They went through two bottles of tequila, at least one six-pack of Corona, three pints of ice cream, several buds of non-tobacco product, six orders of take-out Chinese food, and got louder and louder as the night went on. And much fun was had by all. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Beth that drunk before. It was fun to see her having so much fun.

And because I’m such a giver, I documented the evening for you with my digicam. Check it out:

(Or you can check out the slideshow.)

I poured Beth into bed an hour ago and I think she was passed out and snoring before I made it to the door when I left her there. And then I cleaned the kitchen. Being the designated driver is even less fun when you don’t need to drive.

I had a sad thought about my dog Billy tonight. Ol’ Bill has lived his whole life ’til now without getting any, and since he’s been “fixed” for years he’ll never get any in the future, either. He will never ever ever have sex. Ever. At all.

No wonder he barks at everything.

Billy, displaying the plumbing he’ll never use.

Ha. Check it out: Pie Gizoogled. Ha.

Well, it looks like deadpan’s move went pretty smoothly. Everything looks like it’s working and nobody got hurt. I don’t think I cursed once during the process. I didn’t even throw anything. Amazing.

I ended up going with Total Choice Hosting, as suggested by my close personal virtual friend Susan Dennis. I ended up paying less for more there and now there’s a lot more space for deadpan to spread out in — 850 mb rather than the 150 mb we were squeezing into (and out of) before.

So to celebrate all the elbow room I now find myself with, I’m posting a video I wanted to post but couldn’t because I was running out of space. My dive-buddy Bill shot it during a dive we did back in December at Catalina Island’s Casino Point dive park. We’re near the glass bottom boat, if you followed the Casino Point link and looked at the dive park map. I’m the diver you’ll see in the video, and the school of fish was even thicker than it looks. Click on the pic below to check it out. (11 mb)

This is the first entry at deadpan’s new home. Will it publish correctly? Let’s find out. Cross your fingers…

Deadpan is on the move. I bitched two months ago about how “my host is toast” and asked for suggestions for a new one and now I’m moving. This will be the last post at the old host. The next one will be at deadpan’s new home. I hope.

Cross your fingers.

Beth says it’s all about networking and I guess she’d know, seeing as how she’s turning into the queen of it. So okay, fine, I’ll network all eleventeen of you in:

I’m looking for a job.

Yes, it’s true, the life of leisure is getting old. Also, the severance check is running out and unemployment won’t cover my heroin habit and you have no idea how hard it is to get a lap dance when you’re paying with food stamps. It’s all about money, apparently. Who knew?

So if any of you superfantastic readers happen to know of a training gig out there that you could tip me to, well, don’t be shy about it. Or basically any kind of gig. I’m getting to the point where I can’t afford to be picky. Baby needs a new pair of shoes and daddy needs to be able to buy them for her.

Regarding my last entry about reverse-ordered archives: If I’m gonna bitch about it, I guess I should tell you how to fix it, too.

If you’re using Movable Type, do this:

1. Go to your Editing Menu and select Templates.
2. From Templates, select Date-Based Archive from the Archive-Related Templates section at the bottom of the page.
3. In the code of the Date-Based Archive template, find the following text:

div class=”blog”>
MTEntries>
$MTEntryTrackbackData$>

4. Change the MTEntries> line to MTEntries sort_order=”ascend”>

• (Note: Each of those lines — everything I listed in italics — should begin with a “<" -- I had to take it out to write this entry because it wreaked havoc with my blog's formatting. I can't very well lecture you on how to format your blog when mine looks like crap, can I?)

5. Buy me something pretty as thanks for helping you get your blog right.

I’m still working on how to do this in TypePad, but I’ll post it when I get it, GraceDavis. For everyone else: if you’re not using some version of Movable Type, then you suck and you’re on your own.

Class dismissed!

You keep a blog. Admit it, you do; most people who read blogs also write them. So explain to me, then, what’s up with your archives? If I click on your December link, for example, why am I staring at December 31 at the top of the page and have to scroll all the way down to get to December 1 at the bottom? You don’t really think I’m going to read it backwards, do you? You know I’m going to start at Dec 1 and work my way up, right? Which is just wrong.

My archives don’t work that way and yours shouldn’t either. Mine are configured such that when you click on December you end up with Dec 1 staring you in the face, and then you scroll down for Dec 2 and then down for Dec 3 and so on. As Evelyn Wood intended. The only page on my site that’s configured backwards is the entry page, and that’s so the most recent entry is the first one you see — because that’s the one you want to see. Everywhere else is configured so you can read it naturally.

Go fix yours. Now.