I’M FREE! For the past month and a half, my voicemail box (Voice mailbox? Voicemailbox? How do you parse this phrase?) has been completely, utterly, ridiculously chocked full of entertaining voicemails. I had YEARS of saved messages rattling around in there, and Verizon finally put its foot down and cut me off. Since April 16th, no one has been able to leave me any new voicemail. Oops.

But I’m finally free. I went through and recorded every message onto my hard drive and gleefully deleted it (thank you, keypad number 7!). I’ve been procrastinating a long time (uh, a month and a half or more?) about doing this because there didn’t seem to be an elegant solution to the problem. I finally rolled up my sleeves and did it the simplest way, and what do you know? It worked.

NOW IT GETS REALLY BORING UNLESS YOU HAVE A VX8300,
SO QUIT NOW WHILE YOU STILL CAN

For Googlers searching for a tutorial on how to save LG 8300 / VX8300 voicemails onto the hard drive, I’ll explain my oh-so-low-tech solution. The problem, you see, is that I tried to make it much harder than it had to be. If you record the voicemail as a voice memo (press clear on your screen until all the numbers go away, then use the menu and select record as you listen to your voicemail. The record option won’t appear if there any numbers on the screen, for some bizarre reason), and then use a data cable (for me, an old LG VX6000 cable that I filed the bumps off of) to transfer the file to your computer using BitPim, you’ll quickly realize you can’t play the file. It’s a .qcp file, and none of the audio decrypters I downloaded could handle that particular format.

You can download QualComm’s PureVoice software, but Verizon appears to use some sort of proprietary format that isn’t decryptable with the software. I think the problem is that the phone is in EVRC mode, and I’ve never found directions on how to switch it.

Supposedly you can send these saved voice memos as Pix Messages to your email address, which will then automagically convert it to .wav or something, but that’s inconvenient if you have a lot of voicemails. The phone will only record about 2 minutes of voice memos, and at 25 cents per Pix Message, it doesn’t seem worth it if you have a lot to send.

ANYWAY, technological difficulties have made me postpone this task forever, because in order to hear my new voicemails, I’d first have to listen to/resave all of my old saved messages first. It was completely annoying, and so I’d never listen to my new voicemails.

LONG BORING TECHNOBABBLING OVER, DIRECTIONS FINALLY:
1. If Windows Sound Recorder’s 60 second limitation (Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Entertainment) will be a problem (like the 5 minute voicemail I had where Alan toured his new house for the first time and described it to me), download and install Audacity, which is a nice piece of freeware that will allow you to make longer recordings.
2. Plug a cheapie microphone into your microphone jack. I think mine probably cost $5.
3. Turn on speakerphone on the VX8300 (the little speaker button under the CLR button).
4. Hold the microphone up to the weird little round speakers on the side of the phone’s hinge.
5. Press Record on Audacity.
6. BOOYAH.

Devastatingly simple, yet highly effective. Who knew? I never thought I’d get good enough results with the microphone (I deemed this method “Officially Ghetto”), so I spent way too many hours researching EVRC and .qcp files ad nauseam. The audio quality is reasonable enough and you’ll FINALLY BE FREE FROM YOUR VOICEMAIL.

My only complaint with the sound quality is that I wanted to perfectly record my sister’s especially lovely voicemail rendition of “Happy Birthday” for posterity, but I suspect she’ll be glad to know that my copy is only of speakerphone + cheapie microphone quality.

(Special thanks to pages 13-14 of David Allen’s Getting Things Done for inspiring me to finally shake this stupid weight off my shoulders. It’s too bad it took a SELF HELP BOOK to make me do it. The whole GTD craze deserves a post of its own sometime, but I’m too busy not getting things done to write it.)

Every now and then, I indulge in a little fetish.

I find it way too fascinating to look at pictures of what people keep
on their desks and in their bags on Flickr. I spend even more time looking at
productivity pr0n. Obsessively annotated photos make my toes tingle. Ogling this sort of orderliness soothes the chaotic beast within.

Today is HOT, hotter than Hades, hotter than an oxy/acetyl torch, hotter than a nuclear apocalypse*, and I want need a Slurpee. There’s just no other way to survive such blistering heat.

(* If I had one of those cool widgets that showed word frequency on this blog with bigger letters for the most-used words, I suspect apocalypse would register high on the list. I seem to find occasion to use it in every post.)

Anyway, I call my mom and ask if she’d mind picking up a Slurpee for me on her way home. “I’ll pick you up a Slurpee,” my mom agreed, “but you’re not allowed to whine that you’re too full to go out to dinner afterwards.”

TEEHEE. Ooops!

I have this terribly annoying habit where I love drinking pop and Slurpees, particularly in the afternoon. The problem is that I have absolutely no appetite for dinner afterwards. My nearest and dearest have caught on to this foible, and have shown remarkable patience.

Scene: 2:00 P.M. in the parking lot of a shopping center.
Kiki: Hey! Know what sounds good? Let’s go to get smoothies!
Alan: No. We’ll never get to eat dinner if we do that.

Scene: Afternoon in the mall. Kiki meets back up with Alan, carrying a 40oz Mountain Dew.
Alan, in a resigned, yet good-natured voice: Guess this means we won’t be having dinner tonight, will we?

SORRY EVERYONE!

I think I could lose weight by subsisting solely on Diet Caffeine-Free Pepsi. I’d never be hungry, and I’d be consuming 0 calories. Somehow I don’t think this is a good idea.

It’s time to go out to dinner. I wish I had an appetite.

I have a relative getting married this weekend. While this wouldn’t normally be a problem in and of itself, the sad fact of the matter is, I haven’t bought a dress since 1998. That was the year I went to prom, more on principle than out of a strong urge to wear a corsage and dyed-to-match-the-dress purple shoes.

Anyhow, I needed a dress. Before getting into the car, my mom and I checked on the chickens. Inexplicably, the nearsighted chicken I oh-so-cleverly refer to as “Whitey” or “Blindy,” depending on my whim, had found her way to the outdoor portion of the coop. Whitey has never really been outside before, because she can’t seem to see very well, and has a hard enough time finding the food and water, let alone the out of doors.

I considered putting her back in the coop, in case she was getting thirsty and couldn’t figure out how to get back inside, but decided I should let her have her moment in the sun, and if she was still out when we got back, I’d carry her back inside.

Anyway, we get to the mall and begin trying on dresses. If you’re a dude, and have never had to shop for a dress, consider yourself lucky. There are few things worse, in my opinion, than having to try on a bunch of dresses. First of all, who really wants to wear a dress? When you wear a dress, you have to comport yourself in a semi-ladylike fashion. You have to walk carefully, and sit carefully, and generally not run amok as one sometimes find occasion to do. Dresses majorly cramp your style, man.

Secondly, you have to wear all manner of annoying undergarments. Slips? Tights? Give me a break. I encourage you, should you be of the XY chromosome persuasion, to purchase a pair of nylons and try walking around for 5 minutes. Who honestly came up with the idea of pantyhose? Who thought it was such a good idea to wear constrictive plastic?

Shopping for dresses is tricky. In the fashion world, there isn’t really any kind of compromise between slutty or muumuu. You either showcase half of your chest and/or thighs, or you wear something so baggy that it makes you look much bigger than you really are.

Anyway, I had quite an ordeal, trying to find something vaguely inoffensive. Add to these requirements the fact that I like wearing loud ’60s patterns, and your choices dramatically decrease. Basically I grabbed armloads of dresses and hoped that something would fit.

Once inside the dressing room, I began the struggle to actually put the darn things on. With dresses, you either have to tug them on like a shirt, or pull them up like pants, depending on the cut. Sometimes you’re faced with an impossible decision: a dress whose neckline is too small to fit above the hips, or pull down over your elbows.

This happens more often than you might think, at least to me. As I tugged a brown cotton sundress over my head, I realized I was stuck! I had pulled it over my head, but was at a loss for what to do with my elbows, trapped in the constraining bodice. I couldn’t pull it down, and my arms were too confined to take it off! Help! I was trapped half-way in a dress in a J.C. Penney fitting room!!! A momentary wave of panic washed over me. What would Houdini do? I didn’t really want to invite my mom or an employee in, considering my half-clad state, but I was totally and utterly stuck.

Taking a deep breath, I wriggled my arms around until I could tug the offending dress back off. “How’s it going in there?” my mom called over.

“Fine, except I can’t figure out how to put on this dress,” I grumbled. “Let me know if you can figure it out.” I pushed the dress over the doorway at her.

“You have to pull the side zipper all the way down,” she explained. “It was only half way unzipped.”

FUCKING DRESSES.

I continued trying on dresses, feeling a lot like Goldilocks in search of her perfect breakfast cereal, when my mom returned. “The sky looks really weird right now,” she said informed me. “It’s navy. I think we’re about to get a bad storm. Are you about finished?”

I hurried up, tossed her the least onerous two dresses, figuring I could decide later, and met her by the register. The sky was indeed navy, with a purplish tinge. We waited for the world’s slowest prom dress shopper to count out a handful of twenties, and by the time we were rung up, the sky had turned grey. As we hurried through the mall to Macy’s, where we had parked, a voice came on over the public address system.

“Please seek shelter in the nearest store,” the voice intoned.

Wonderful. We peek out the window at Macy’s, and are confronted with what appears to be Tropical Storm Wilhelma. The rain is pouring so hard, and at such an angle, that it appears nearly white outside. There’s pretty much no visibility, and the wind is howling.

“Shopping it is,” my mom announced, realizing there’s no way we can drive home.

As we turn to poke around in the shoe department, the voice returns over the speaker. “There’s been a tornado spotted a mile away, near the airport. Please take shelter in one of the restrooms.”

We spend the next half hour elbow-to-elbow in the bathroom with a bunch of women and three dudes. Good times!

Finally, a clerk shopkeep receives a call on her cell phone from her husband, informing her that the tornado had passed into the next county. We all spill out of the restroom and hop into our cars. Driving home was a little stressful, with the POSSIBILITY OF IMMINENT DOOM and all, but we finally made it back.

Guess who’s still sitting outside on a perch, completely miserably sopping wet?

Half an hour of blow-drying later, she’s looking much more like her normal self. We’ve booked her four-star accomodations INSIDE THE HOUSE, in one of the bathrooms, to pamper her after her hard day. Poor little chicken!

Slowly drying. My apologies for the inclusion of the world’s ugliest pink toilet, one of the few things we don’t like about our new house.

Anyway, here are my tentative dresses. Are these at all weddingy? I think I’ll wear the green one.

I should have been born in the ’60s.