Super Bowl

Well, I don't care about either teams in the Super Bowl. But I love the Super Bowl. So I don't have any other options. Gambling it is!

Just Because

Chronicling the minutiae of everyday life and molding it into an entertaining 500-1000 word post is not that easy. It takes a lot of effort, which frankly isn’t one of my strongest attributes. That’s why, despite my obvious and considerable talents, I can barely muster more than two posts a week. But I also have legions of fans to appease so I’m going to break out everyone’s favorite super lazy blogging style: Bullet points!

• Occasionally something comes along and enriches your life in ways you didn’t even know were possible. It’s like a void that you weren’t aware of is filled with joy. That happened to me recently when I was introduced to my new favorite blog ever (thank you Jessie). I never knew how much I needed a guy berating cute animals in my life until I had it, now I don’t think I could live with out it.

• On a similar note: sometimes you don’t realize a need for something until it’s too late. For example, say you haven’t had a car in a couple of years. Then you buy one and a few months later an ice storm hits. That’s when you realize you could use an ice scraper. This is a problem when your car is frozen in a block of ice like a woolly mammoth. Luckily I’m an engineer so I reek of ingenuity; these instances are my time to shine. I used a spatula, it was brilliant. Basically I’ve made the ice scraper completely obsolete.

• There are things that make me sad and there are things that make depressed. The fact that Paul Blart: Mall Cop is the #1 movie in America three weeks in a row falls into both of those categories.

See, I probably could have made three individual posts out of those but who has the time when TV has been so good lately. Maybe I’ll write about that.

The Gambler

To me there really is nothing more glorious than waking up on a weekend morning with nothing to do and doing just that. Laying around all morning drifting in and out of sleep, catching up on your Tivo then rolling out of bed at the crack of noon. That’s living if you ask me and that’s exactly how I spent last Sunday. About midmorning I started to get a little bored though, not bored enough to actually get up and do something with my life mind you, but bored none the less. Occasionally in cases of extreme doldrums such as this I’ll turn to online poker. There are free tournaments you can play in that I’ll use just to pass the time when I have nothing better to do. When I logged on to the poker site though I noticed that I had $5 in my account. SCORE! From time to time the poker Gods will give you free money to encourage you to deposit more of your own money to lose to them. Trust me, it’s effective. Anyway, I was pretty pumped to be able to play with real, free money instead of fake money. In the last two days I’ve turned that $5 into several hundred dollars, because I’m good at poker. I don’t say this to brag, it’s not that impressive, it just got me thinking.

I’ve spent the first half of this week working outside doing more bridge inspections. It’s terrible; you might have noticed it’s been a brutally cold week. I still can’t feel my toes. I can already see what I’m going to be thinking about tomorrow. I mean after I get over the thoughts about how I didn’t pay $130,000 for college to hang out underneath of bridge while my balls freeze off. I’ll be thinking, in two days I was able to take $5 and turn it into almost as much money as I will make the first two days of this work week doing something fun instead of doing something awful. Why would I not just quit my job and gamble for a living. And inevitably my mind would drift off to what my life would be like as a professional online poker player. Here’s a hint, it involves a wireless connection, a pool, and spreadsheets.

Why don’t I do it you ask? Well I’m really not as good as I imply first of all. Secondly, it’s stupid and impractical. I mean, you probably won’t be surprised to know that $130,000 in schooling comes with some pretty massive student loans.

So what’s the moral of this story? Sometimes I daydream about what I’m going to daydream about in advance.

Seriously...

I don't even care how this looks. This goes against everything my blog is about but I'm posting it anyway. Mostly because I didn't have anything else today, but also because this is the cutest f'ing thing I've ever seen in my life, and I'm enriching your life by sharing:

I can't even handle looking at that it's so fucking adorable. It's so cute that I want to get a kitten and then break it's leg so I can have one of my own. What?

Where's The Fire?

Like most people who work in large office buildings I try to ignore fire alarms as long as possible. When an alarm sounds everyone just sort of mills around until enough people have decided to take it seriously that everyone leaves. I work on the 25th floor and there is no way in hell I’m walking down that many flights of stairs unless there is a grave emergency.

Unlike most people I like to get into work early. Mainly so that I can leave early, I enjoy the fact that I’m already home from the gym by the time most people are leaving work. The added bonus is that I get to fart around for an hour or hour and a half before most of the office starts showing up to work. It’s great, I don’t get why everyone who can do this doesn’t. I mean I’ve figured out a way to work a normal 9 hours, be home by quarter after 4, and really only actually do 5 or 6 hours of work a day. It’s genius really.

There is however, one instance when these two ideas conflict. When the fires alarm goes off at 7:20 in the morning it happens for a reason one would assume. They don’t run fire drills when there are only 12 people in the building. Not wanting to die in a blazing tower inferno myself and the 2 other people in the office at the time evacuated. Walking down 25 flights is not the ideal way to start the morning though so we decided to ignore all safety precautions and take the elevator. Well the elevators weren’t working, perhaps some sort of automatic shut off when the alarm goes off, so we had to take the stairs. Eventually we make it to the bottom. At this point I was pretty tired and pissed off so if there wasn’t a roaring fire I was not going to be happy.

So what caused the alarm to sound? The elevators weren’t working. So not only did we unnecessarily walk down the steps from the top of a 300 foot building, the elevators were broken and we couldn’t use them to get back up.

Dammit.

Happy New Year? The Jury is Still Out

Things got pretty weird there on New Year’s Eve didn’t they? They did, you’re going to have to trust me on that one. I’m not going to get too into it because, well, I’m just not. If I wrote about all the dumb things I did under the influence than it would consume all of my time. While I’m sure it would provide endless entertainment to the readers, I unfortunately have a job so I’ll keep it to myself, and of course all those who bear witness. Anyway, the culmination of the weirdness took place in my bedroom at the end of the night, whenever that was. The result of which was to wake up Thursday morning to find that my closet door (which was already kind of broken) has fallen off the tracks into my wall, ripping the light switch clean off. It was quite a scene. I also noticed in the mess that I had managed to remove a blazer, sweater, dress shirt, and under shirt all at the same time. They wear completely intact in a ball on my fall as if I had just jumped out of my clothes in one move. It was amazing. I may or may not turn into Superman after my 11th or 12th vodka tonic, but that’s another story.

Consequently I had to replace the light switch in my bedroom*. Now, I’m fairly handy around the house (you can smell my super manly pheromones from there can’t you?), but I’m no Ty Pennington. Except that sometimes I get a little serious and misty when thinking about all the hardships those families on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition have had to endure (See: manly). Anyway, it’s a pretty easy process; the only issue is that it includes electricity. I have no business being around electricity. Once when I was around 8 or 9 I tried to unplug the dryer and ended up getting shot across the laundry room and my left arm turned black.

I managed to restore the light switch to working order (with the exception of the light and fans switches working in reverse) but I feel like I’m not out of the woods yet. Let’s all just hope that I don’t kick off 2009 with a tragic electrical fire. If so I might need to borrow some pants, I don’t have a closet door to shield my clothes from the flames.



*Never under estimate the importance of light. Getting dressed with only the TV to illuminate things is difficult.