Today I made banana nut bread because the bananas were lookin’ a bit ripe. Then I did the dishes and found the kitchen, and then for no reason I can put my finger on, I decided it was time to clean out the dining room.

“Dining room” is in itself a misnomer — it would better be named “that room behind the livingroom that you have to cross to get upstairs, which is part dining table we never eat at, part office, part library, part place dog pisses on the carpet when it thunders, and part generalized dumping ground”. But that’s kind of long, so we call it the dining room.

The dining room is the catch-all room (obviously) which is inevitably the answer to “yeah, but where do you want me to put this?” on the first floor. (On the second floor it’s the spare bedroom.) It’s got all my writing equipment, most of my drawing stuff, filing cabinets, the scanner, all of our books, all the pictures, and at the moment a large (completed) jigsaw puzzle. And that’s clean.

Before we got this far I had to file months of paperwork and shred literally years of receipts, statements, paystubs, etc. I usually do all of this in April when I do the taxes but somehow it didn’t get done this year. In order to do all of that, of course, I had to put away and/or throw out tons of stuff just to reach my desk and the dining room table. (In our house, at least, those are two separate and distinct piece of furniture.) And when all the putting away and filing and stuff was done I had to clean off the bookshelves.

That was probably the trickiest part. We have six stackable bookshelves in different sizes and styles (resulting in only four actually-stackable bookshelves) and when I started they were overfull. Paperbacks were stacked two deep on all shelves and double-stacked on the top shelf. Hardbacks were double-stacked. I managed to clean out enough useless books (Windows 2000 MCSE books, for example, since a cert in 2000 is currently useless) to single-stack the hardbacks, but the paperbacks are piled on the floor in an unobtrusive place because until I buy more bookshelves there’s nowhere to put them. Bookshelves will likely be my next major purchase.

Anyway, we took out five bags of trash and shredded paper, two bags of newspapers and magazines, and two boxes of books, so I’m sure the trash guys are going to love me Monday. But for the first time in months it’s mostly safe to walk through my dining room and I don’t have boxes upon boxes stacked in every corner. And there’s a satisfaction that comes with purging all the build up and the garbage that just can’t be beat, except possibly with the satisfaction of waking up the next day having slept like a rock due to the extra exertion the day before.

I am a happy camper.

There’s so much idiocy on the Internet right now that I’m just going to run a bit of a comic bonanza for the next few days. They’re so stupid-easy to put together that I don’t feel right holding them until the next scheduled updates (Sat and Tues) so we’re running a Friday, Sunday, Tuesday schedule so I can get an extra one in there.

Today was a beautiful day, with weather in the low 70s and a clear blue sky, both here at home and up in New York City, where Nighthawk and I spent the day. We’d purchased tickets on a bus trip through our day job to go see Les Miserables.

I’ve always had a bit of an odd relationship with Les Mis. Most of my friends were on a field trip (of one sort or another) that saw the musical in high school, so I’ve been surrounded by the music for a long long time. My best friend and her boyfriend both saw it and loved it, and I had such a good time sitting around at her house listening to it that I went out and bought the full four-disk CD set in college — for a musical I’d never actually seen.

So today was the first time I’ve had visual images to go with the music I’ve been listening to for a decade.

But that wasn’t the only first…. today was, in fact, the first time I’ve been to New York City. Oh, I’d been through it — I’ve visited family on Long Island, and going through NYC is the fastest way to get to Connecticut — but I’d never been in Manhattan before. I’d never stood in Times Square (which, by the way, had so many screens that I thought I’d stepped into a sunnier version of Max Headroom) or been on Broadway or 42nd Street, or any of that before.

In summary, it turns out that if you’ve been on the boardwalk of any major beach on the east coast, you’ve seen most of the stores that also have locations in the theater district, only at the beach the buildings tend to be less than five stories and there are usually fewer people even in the busy season than in New York, and well, I now understand why Elton John sings that unless they see the sky, but they can’t and that is why they know not if it’s dark outside or light.

Oh, but they do have restaurants of every type, shape, and flavor crammed into every space available, so if it doesn’t have a theater, and it doesn’t have a store, it’s got a restaurant, and if it doesn’t have all of that it’s either a road or a table where they’re selling dubiously-sourced trinkets.

So with all these restaurants to choose from, where did we eat lunch? The Hard Rock Cafe New York — because to top it all off, somehow I’d never actually been to a Hard Rock before. I had the tee-shirt (thanks to my brother’s trip to England and France in HS) and heard all about the overpriced food, but hadn’t actually tried it.

It was good. I don’t think I need to eat a ten-ounce burger on a regular basis, but I certainly had no complaints about the food, or the service.

As for Les Mis, I was totally enraptured by the musical, and the fact that I knew all the words and knew what was going to happen didn’t lessen the effect at all. I didn’t go to see Les Mis in New York to catch up to my friends – they were all side effects to seeing an awesome show, and if none of them had happened we would have still had a wonderful time.

Still. I find it kind of amusing that it took me 12 years to catch up.