This is the Spanish Language cover(?) of the National Anthem. Besides being weird and cool as a musical reinterpretation of the song, i think it's a great idea. like the blog i got this from says: why would we want to criticize people for their american pride?

I'm going to go a step further and remind everyone (our president included, apparently), that we have specifically chosen NOT to have a national language. originally, this was to avoid divisiveness between immigrant groups (remember, we're all immigrants here). changing our stance now would be just as unjustifiably divisive.

current tune: gratitude - feel alright
amazingly enough, this weekend i will not be spending this weekend baking my skin on the altar of some music festival. i will, however, be MIA, as usual for this summer. this weekend it's the wedding in indiana, coupled with the going away party for M and C.
monday we should hear from our landlord as to whether any 1 bedroom apartments in our building will be available for october. we originally moved into a studio when i was on a K2 salary (low and unreliable) and melanie had not yet recieved her EAD card, so she couldn't work. Now melanie has her employment authrization, and i have a better paying job from a stable firm. however, changing the address that USCIS/DHS has on file for you is neither easy nor reliable. so we've been trying to stay in this apartment until our "green card" interview.
We decided that moving within the building would be okay, since that puts 3 levels of failsafes to ensure we get correspondance from USCIS, since we can ask whoever moves into our apartment to leave any mail for us. (lakeview post office doesn't seem to do so well with forwarding mail).
However, our lawyer, the new one, who is interested in our case because we pay hiim hourly, got tired of waiting to hear from USCIS, and used his liason contact to inquire about the scheduling of our interview, since "he knows of other cases filed after ours which have already had an interview scheduled". we hadn't been worried, since we were still ahead of the date posted on uscis.gov. Apparently USCIS agreed with our lawyer, though, since they sent out an interview notice the very same day for mid-october.
so that means if no apartments become available, we should be able to just lease our current apartment month-to-month until we get the green card, which isn't so bad. my main fear is getting locked into another year with the world's tiniest kitchen.

in other news, if you've been looking for me online and wondering why someone with an always-on internet connection isn't online, it's because i'm giving up on trillian. it's been having a tendancy to crash, leaving an unkillable process. unfortunately, that crash has been causing the media center software to not function properly until i restart. which has resulted in failure to record "Rescue Me", which is simply unacceptable. I've been trying to install gaim because it's free and Free, and it uses the same GTK+ libraries i'm already using for xchat, GIMP, and ethereal. however, it's been refusing to launch. once i get that sorted, i'll be back online.

smoking outside our wedding 

so i'm just trying out this hello/picasa thing.
also, i forgot to mention that we are in the process of hiring a new lawyer. because we really got sick of our old one, with his not really knowing anything. you hire a lawyer, because you think they'll know more that what you can get out of uscis.gov and google. but it seems that some lawyers don't even put in that much effort. so now that the girl works for lawyers, and has actual reasons for choosing one lawyer over another, we switched to one her boss recommended. we'll see if this does any good, or if "i don't know" is the only answer they teach you to give in law school.

current tune: nothing. i forgot my headphones this morning.

yesterday i failed to mention how absolutely excellent my wife's taste in music is. it's one of the things i really liked about her when we first started talking. she was already listening to ani difranco, tegan and sara, the avalanches, death cab for cutie, and such before i met her. when we started talking, she was open to every suggestion i had of good music. which resulted in her listening to bright eyes, coheed and cambria, mirah, notwist, pinback... it was great. and she had all sorts of music to show me. AND we make great mixes together. exhibit A. (out of order, since MSN spaces are still beta) a mix for my cousin for a christmas gift. compiled in under an hour. she's just that awesome.

in other news, everyone sucks.

immigration is being retarded again. since we never got the EAD card from them, even though they said theymailed it in november, she had to apply for a lost card. what that should really say is RE-apply. they seem to have no ability to just look it up and see that she's approved. they have to ask us for the date of her original fingerprinting. they need new pictures, because apparently they're not organized enough to just go find the original ones she sent. so now she has to go for new fingerprints tomorrow, and get new pictures today. it's beyond stupid.

also stupid is that jon's being questioned by dupage county sheriffs at every turn. during SGchicago's girls night out, we were meant to go see tony's band but jon got stopped for speeding. apparently... his license wasn't valid? wtf, mate?. so i stayed in and played more video games, since his girlfriend bailed him out. i passed level 6 on halo2, and i'm blasting through 7 pretty quickly. it seems i've gotten over some sort of hump. or figured out some better way to play, without actually being aware of it. i do find myself jumping over people a lot more, though. which suggests that playing UT2004 with a controller is helping.

i also watched bourne identity, which was interesting in a purely technical way. acting wasn't really a big part of that film. might've been better as an animated film. i also rented "the village" which was good, even if it did bite "the brotherhoood of the wolf"'s style. except with a "psyche, it's 1997" cheeseball at the end. Le Pact de Loupes was far better with staying within it's conceit.