The annual Spanferkel over at the Johnny K/Laura S residence was another success, despite all early indications to the contrary.

The day began ominously enough. The sky was blackened by thick, dark clouds that looked for a while as though they might hold back their fury and let things slide for once, but as I drove to Chicago to pick up Kortney at the airport the malevolent bastards spat upon me with a scattered spritz that quickly built into a full-fledged downpour. The entire ride to the airport was spent in an underwater wonderland, the windshield wipers keeping time to the music on my iPod while I dodged in and out of traffic that was moving somewhat less aptly than I.

But I was motivated; not only was I on my way to get Kortney (once again – I swear, at the base of our relationship is an air traffic control tower), I was also a bit askeered of being too far removed from a dump station (Flushing: it’s not just a town in New York) at any given point in the journey, what with a recent bout of intestinal difficulties that, as of that morning, had shown no signs of remitting.

But all was well. I met Kortney in the usual place and we drove through the tail end of the storm as it passed over us on its southeastern journey toward… well, wherever the hell it was going. And once we emerged from the storm, the weather remained gorgeous for the remainder of the day.

When Kortney and I arrived at the spanferkel things were already in full swing. There were scores (if not hundreds) of people gathered between five backyards. The tables were piled high with food, the beer flowed freely, and everyone ate and drank and was merry. The pig, as usual, was delicious – moist and tender and flavorful; maybe even moreso than usual, because Johnny K and Marie injected it the night before with a couple of different marinades. I brought along some cachaςa, limes and sugar to whip up caipirinhas as a way to remember my days in Brazil (and because caipirinhas are delicious!) but the aforementioned intestinal difficulties – or askeeredness thereof – prevented me from having much more than a sip. They must have been good, though, since 3/4 of the bottle disappeared by the end of the night.

And the good times ended, as all good times should, sitting around a fire, talking and enjoying everyone’s company as one by one, the fires around us died down and the neighbors went quiet.

But next year, I am going to eat and drink everything, intestinal percolations be damned! After all, that’s what Depends are for.

Right?

It has taken a lot longer than I originally anticipated to get my Gallery up and running again – and even now I only have maybe half of my albums installed – but through no small effort, it is coming along nicely.

I don’t really understand why technology seems to have taken such a sudden turn toward the dark side lately, though. When I first installed the Gallery program on my server, it worked like a charm. This time, however, I installed and uninstalled the program no fewer than seven (7) times before I finally got it to work, and even then it required completely wiping out every bit of infrastructure I had in place in order to start from the ground up. It’s really very disappointing.

And now, the laborious task of uploading thousands of photos has begun in earnest. As I said, at this point I have maybe half of the albums uploaded already. This is partly my own fault; if I were willing to resize the photos things would go a little more smoothly, but I have thus far refused to do that. I may change my mind about this soon, however, since some of my pics really are huge, and there’s no reason anyone needs to look at a photo that’s any bigger than 1024 x 786, or whatever the largest size photo happens to be. Or even 800 x 600, which is what I think the medium photos are.

Anyway, that’s where things stand now. I am struggling through this, and hope to finish it within a week’s time… but then again, the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley, so we shall have to wait and see.

And speaking of seeing, the Gallery can be seen here: The Picture Perfect Life of Saru-San.

Slowly but surely I am bringing this web site back from the phishing attack that crippled it a couple of weeks ago.

What you are now looking at is Part the First in the process. Of course, this page isn’t what brought people to my site – no, it was the Gallery that people were looking for. And that part? Ha. It’s completely fubar. And the sad reality is, I had it working at one point, but then the phishers came back, prompting me to completely obliterate the site and start from scratch.

How frustrating it is, getting caught up in someone else’s pathetic schemes. I wish them death. Slow, painful death.

With any luck, I’ll have it all up and running soon.