Reason #27 to be smug about your Prius.

http://jalopnik.com/5118297/tech+savvy-prius-owner-uses-hybrid-to-power-house-during-snow-storm

Win.

Truth in pricing...

This and this sort of thing really piss me off. If a government agency doesn't bill you correctly or makes a clerical error in processing, it's their own damn fault. You should not be responsible for their mistake unless the mistake was clearly obvious on its face (for example, being charged $400 total for tuition when you should have been $4,000).

There's a law on the books in most (if not all) states that if they charge you a higher price at the checkout than what's posted they have to refund the difference, plus sometimes an extra percentage as a penalty. The same goes for you, government. You quote me a fine, or a fee, or something like that, that's the price I'm going to pay.

Home is where...

I haven't lived in too many places. 

When I was small, I lived in a smallish house (that's not the right house, just the right street) in a suburb of Chicago. I remember it in broad strokes and events. Entry closet with a mirror where I made lifesavers spark. Living room where I damaged my upper lip. Dining room where I was told the birthday invitations had gone without stamps and no one would be coming to my party. Where my parents looked at me with worried faces as half my face swelled after an extremely unlucky bee sting.

Kitchen with gas stove -- we made omelets while tornadoes whistled through Chicago. My bedroom -- oddly I don't have many memories of it other than Sesame Street. Upstairs, my parents' room and the nursery. A basement: Dad's study with a computer and shelves and shelves of thick books. A stone floor on which my parents placed a bicycle for me to find.

The place I've called home for the longest period of my life (and many times still do) is on the north side of Madison. Suburban, larger and newer than the house in Oak Park, with a lawn and an attached garage, it was the American dream for my parents, and it is the place I identify most strongly with.

In college I lived in one dorm room for two years -- though shared with two different roommates. The first year was marked by tension and unease, the second I had more influence on the contents and presentation. I spent a summer subletting a basement room in a newish house which I never felt right about.

And then the Mills house. A year for personal growth and discovery, or something. A year in which friendships were strained and ruined over some of the smallest things I can imagine. A year in which I moved bedrooms, discovered my irrational fear of centipedes. I took our landlord to court, took out the trash, and took out my frustrations on some drumheads.

Mills came close to being a home, for awhile. It had the sort of space I needed. I contributed furniture and possessions to the common space. Second semester, my bedroom had enough room to walk around in (and I will always be appreciative to the roommate who agreed to switch with me). But it was always a battle. A battle against mold. A battle against bugs. A battle against roommates who had somehow changed from good friends into enemies.

The next year, I moved into a smaller apartment on Dayton Street. I had big dreams for Dayton. Here was an apartment with some CLASS. And here were some roommates I had known for years.

Did it turn out that way? Nope. The previous tenants ruined the place. The jacuzzi was broken and the landlord never fixed it. The centipedes returned in full force. And one roommate left and subletted his room. I holed up in my room, most of the time, going through the daily routine but just passing time while things happened around me and to me.

I think about all of this because right now, once again, many of my life's possessions are in boxes or scattered around floors and closets because I've just recently moved.

When I first came to Richmond, I was tired of the college life. For reasons which I'm sure I'll write about later, I felt that I had never really gotten the right stuff out of college and at that moment I wanted something completely different. Something new, something nice and clean and bug-free.

So I ended up in Wyndham -- a suburb of a suburb. The Maple Bluff of Richmond, except the shrink wrap was still on the mansions and the man-made pond struggled to maintain a water level.

Here, I thought, was something good. Here was a place with the space I needed. An attached garage. New appliances. No bugs. I checked each problem I had with previous apartments off in my mind (mold? sufficient outlets? a place to park? functioning plumbing? shower pressure?). On the surface, it reminded me of my parents' house in Madison, and I decided that's what I needed.

I was so very wrong. Yeah, the space was nice, but I couldn't use it to satisfaction -- any attempt to play drums would be quickly stopped by an angry mother with a crying infant. My neighbors were families and my neighborhood lacked soul.

It was sterile. And although it reminded me of my previous home, it was not home and couldn't serve as my home. It focused my mind on what I didn't have -- both in the present and in the past.

Even when I lived on Nova Way, my neighbors weren't my own age. There were a few kids a grade ahead of me and a few kids my sister's age, but no one my own age. With one parent commuting and another one stressed out at her status as practically a single mother, I spent most of my time alone reading books or teaching myself computing through play. It didn't help that the bee sting gave me a nice unhealthy phobia of the outdoors.

So when I found myself in a place that reminded me of that other home, spending my time in a similar fashion (reading books, screwing around on the computer, and generally being a hermit), I revolted.

It was a large internal struggle. Certainly I could come to some sort of compromise? This time I had friends in town whose couches I could crash on. It would be expensive to leave and take a long time.

But I knew what was coming at some level before too many weeks had passed; some boxes never got unpacked.

So now I'm here in the Fan. An old house, with bugs (though not centipedes, just roaches... much easier to exterminate) and drafts and random water damage and all of that shit.

But there are PEOPLE here. I can go walk outside and see people from all walks of life. My downstairs neighbors are in a similar place in life. Most of my friends from work live within 10 blocks. I can go out and drink without worrying about making it home.

It has its downsides, of course (what place that I've moved to hasn't had big problems I've discovered after moving in?). There are roaches -- hopefully my landlord will come through and they will be exterminated. My couch didn't fit in the apartment and had to be hastily sold to a friend (again, something I won't ever forget)

This place has potential. The kitchen is nice. There's room for my instruments. There's space in my bedroom to pace and think. The morning comes with full light in every room.  At this point, it's a case of committing. I have an opportunity to put some soul into this space -- not just make it a storage zone for all of my shit (which it is right now). 

In the past, I've measured my commitment to a place by the amount of work it would take to get all my possessions packed and removed to another location (I can do it in a day if I have help). Now, I want to measure it by the experiences I have as a resident here. I want to feel like this is home and that means I need to define it by the positive things that happen here.

(If anything, my parents' home was mine because of everything that transpired in the basement of that house, not the fact that it housed my bedroom)

I'm sure I'll move out of here at some point, whether to another place in the Fan, another neighborhood in Richmond or another city altogether. And at that point, I'll curse myself for spending time getting this place polished up and assembled properly. But right now I have the motivation to make this place mine.

I hope I can go through with it -- this is not a trivial task. I'm missing a couch right now, and refuse to get one until after the exterminators have done their thing. I can't cook too much yet. In two weeks I'm going back to Madison for two weeks, and I may find my honeymoon to this location has ended.

I've often said that your living space says a lot about you. How you clean, how you furnish, how you stock and store and organize. But there's more to the picture. Your living space says a lot to you as well. It's not a one-way street. It's a conversation, hopefully between friends. And that's why despite the roaches, despite the awkward laundry, despite the small refrigerator and old floors and slight water damage, I feel better here.

The story of my relationships...

...is captured perfectly in today's XKCD. (Especially in high school)

The keys dropped into the slot with a final clang...

... and so ended my short stay in Suburbia. I've been thinking a lot about the moving process and doing some meta-analysis of why I decided to move and I hope to write it all down here at some point over the next couple of days. Not sure when I'll find the time, what with all of the boxes I have sitting around here but I think the thoughts are important ones.

At least to me. :-P

Like snow in California

Those who have driven in my car know that one of my favorite possessions is my XM radio. In my opinion, they do a terrible job marketing this thing, because it is just a fantastic service. Now, it's true that I mostly listen to the Comedy channel (and let me tell you, that ALONE would be enough for me to pay the monthly fee), but my tastes rotate. 

For months, I've been content to listen to people making dirty jokes. But Fall is here, and with the change in season comes a change in taste. I want music, I want chord progressions and interesting lyrics and in particular, I want to hear stuff I've never heard before.

This was satisfied for awhile with the purchase of an LP from a local (well, Virginia Beach) band called "Tokyo" which opened for Oppenheimer a month or so ago -- but there's just so many times that you can play a five-song album before you get a little bored with it.

A good friend proclaiming that it was "bland" certainly hastened my boredom.

In terms of discovering new music, XM does me proud. Every time I surf through the 15-20 channels dedicated to the various forms of "rock," I see artists and tracks I've never heard of. I often find myself exercising my short term memory as I frantically try to store the names of artists and songs in my head to download (and yes, pay money to) as soon as I get to my destination.

The other main benefit of XM is the quality. It's not great, certainly not CD quality, but better than you'll get from terrestrial stations (and better quality streams are available online). So I can, in fact, turn up the volume and hear some sort of vibrancy in the music that traditional radio is missing.

And really, what is the point of listening to music if you can't hear the highest highs and the lowest lows?

Perhaps now you can possibly understand my frustration when I turn up a song that is particularly groovetacular and I hear a loud annoying buzz somewhere to my right. At first I believe it's just something loose on the dash or in one of the pockets.

Nope.

Busted a speaker. This can happen for many reasons, but if I had to choose one, I'd have to say it was due to my awesomeness.

Or just the fact that I like to play music pretty loud with factory speakers.

So I'm left listening to the radio at a totally reasonable volume -- that is to say a totally unreasonable volume for me -- until I find the time to get my car into the shop and fixed up.

Bugger.

Mission Statement

I've had a lot of different web presences in the past. My internet identity started out with a Geocities account back when they assigned web addresses based on the idea of communities with streets and house numbers -- I was on 3976 Maze street, Times Square.

Or something.

After I grew bored of working with frames and bullshit banner ads (and when the technology became available) I eventually got myself a Livejournal and fully bought in to the emo-teenager lifestyle. I never wrote poems on my Chucks (I never even owned Chucks to begin with), but I did write long diatribes about how Terribly Horribly Awful my life was.

Mmmmmmm, diatribes.

In college, I finally bite the bullet and bought space on a REAL server and a domain name -- keatnet.net. I had (and still have, to be honest) grandiose plans for that address, but instead of the Awesome Keaton-based Community I dreamed, it became more of a storage facility -- holding little gadgets and files for me as well as some subdomains for my various hobbies.

I wanted to start a new blog there, with full control over the features and the layout and everything... but come on -- a domain name based on a take-off of my NAME? Who DOES that?

Oh. Right. I did.

Again.

Well, this one has a history, at least. Last year I wrote a column for The Daily Cardinal called, you guessed it, Miller's Genuine Drafts. It was at least partially funny and so here I am again, writing some random shit into the ether.

There are, in fact, "deeper" reasons. I'm not sure what direction I'm going to take this piece of my online identity. I've been following politics very closely and it'd certainly be nice to have an outlet for some of those thoughts that isn't Big Orange or the comments section of CNN. On the other hand, the election is soon and who knows how much interest I will keep after then -- I imagine I'll still follow politics but then again I used to be obsessed with the Starcraft ladder.

There are also other things that happen in my life that I can certainly use an outlet for. Though I'm pretty sure divulging Trade Secrets will get me fired faster than you can say "what's in your wallet, a pink slip?" but day-to-day tales of the Office life are probably kosher.

Probably.

So it'll be a mix, a range, a variety, if you will. Some days you'll get the politics, others I'll be detailing my experiences trying to make a decent meal without spending hours at the stove.

And I'm sure it won't be too long before I'm off discussing the pleasures of a good ironing.

Tonight I'm in a political mood, but I'm not going to go off into some liberal manifesto right now -- it's coming, I assure you -- so I will leave you with this.