NBC Dateline: To Catch a Predator
Yes, the subject is horrendous and some of the things that this dude asks his “fourteen year-old friend” to do are just mental, but if anything, skip ahead to about 5:45 in the video and watch the dude get arrested by … wait for it … a tree monster!
Comic gold.
I’ve been waiting for this week for a long time!
The next 7 days should be nice, relaxing, refreshing – insert adjective of your choice here. Mom is down to visit until Friday – the first time she’s been to Florida since I moved here back in 2003 – so it’s fun to finally show her my new home and how things are going at the warmer end of the country. After getting Sara’s car fixed today, we picked Mom up at the airport and pretty much just had a little dinner before bed. Tomorrow she’s going to help me salvage / re-pot the plants that are still alive out on the balcony, and then Tuesday & Wednesday we’re going over to Disney World for a little vacation inside a vacation. After today, I’m afraid that the time is going to go by a lot faster than I thought – I suppose that it always does – but in the meantime I’m just enjoying having the family around my neck of the woods for a change.
Lori – you’re next!
Anyways, I took all of next week off from work so that I could spend as much time with my Mom as possible while she’s here, and I think the time away is really going to do me a lot of good. I’ve been so stressed around that place lately that I’ve been needing a break for a while – it’s just too bad to see all of my vacation time slip away so quickly. When I do return, the new product that I’ve been working on for the last four months will finally be launching and things will likely get pretty crazy for a while – probably just enough to suck up every ounce of time until Sara and I go away in May. The good news is, I have been writing a little more lately … emphasis on little, but still more than nothing at all. I wrote about a column and a half worth of “humor” on a legal pad while I was waiting at the auto shop for Sara’s car, so I’m hoping even if I can only write a single thing each night over the next week, maybe I can kickstart this whole writing career again and actually entertain the possibility of eventually shifting over from one payroll to the other. I know that it’s still a long ways off, but I really need to crack down and start somewhere if I’m ever going to give it a worthy try…
Of course, Sara recently reminded me that there are a whole lot of things that I’ve failed at starting routines for over the past six months – diet & exercise, watering plants, writing – so clearly I need to change my approach somewhere, but we’ll talk about that in another post. This week is my week to relax, enjoy some time with Mom while she’s here, and if a bit of work gets done along the way, then that’s great. When she heads home on Friday, that’s when I’ll start trying to get the chaotic aspects of my life back on track.
🙂
I can see how Sara got a little upset that they were keeping her awake while she was trying to sleep yesterday, because I’m already awake and all of the noise is still pissing me off!
(Downstairs neighbor claims to have a leak somewhere, so they’re pounding on our roof at eight o’clock in the morning…)
Yes, it’s 3:36 in the morning.
I just finished putting my 2006 tax return through Turbo Tax and they claim that I’ve got $765 coming back to me.
I should be elated, and yet I’m more confused than ever because I haven’t gotten a refund in years. Remember, I just finished paying a penalty for 2005’s return and gave the government $400?!
Really weird, but the more I go over my numbers, I can see that I made more at my day job, they took out significantly more taxes – probably due to my bonus, and it looks like I made so little for writing last year that my deductions completely ate up any income that I had, to the point where I don’t even have to pay self-employment taxes. Crazy…
I’ll have to double-check these darned things tomorrow after I’ve gotten a bit of sleep, but if it’s actually true, then that’s pretty sweet! It’ll all get sent to Chase Manhattan to help pay down credit cards, but still, pretty sweet indeed.
Good night.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X8BkuFQBOo
This video got a lot of negative comments on digg because Tom was allegedly “impersonating a police officer,” but I think it was pretty swell the way it all turned out nonetheless…
The good news is, I didn’t go to work today.
The bad news is, it was because I had to go to the doctor.
I spent most of yesterday in utter hell, feeling like somebody was cracking me in the back with a baseball bat. It didn’t feel very good, and by the end of the day and with a handful of tylenol behind me, I almost went home early it hurt so much. I came home and spent the remainder of my night lying flat on my back with a heating pad underneath me (which I was told by my doc today is only supposed to be for short doses), and by midnight I knew that I wasn’t going in to work the next day. Luckily, my doctor is awesome and got me in at 11:30 this morning, so Sara went into work a little late and took me in to find out what was going on with my back.
Fortunately, it turned out that I just have a couple of inflamed muscles in my back, which apparently is more common than you would think for people who just sit at desks all day, so he just gave me a few drugs and sent us on our way. One was a muscle relaxant, which I was told might be “fun” because it usually put the doctor out for twelve hours when he took it for pain relief, but I took the first one about six hours ago and aside from a quick nap, have been up all day. Maybe it’s just that I slept from 7pm last night through 9am the next morning, but regardless I was happy to see that I’ll be able to take it at work without it kicking my ass too badly.
So with the drugs doing their thing, I’ve actually been able to get some things done today – I’ve slowly been catching up on things around the house in between episodes of The Simpsons and Family Guy, and with any luck everything will be semi-back to normal by the time Sara gets home tonight. My big task is going to be figuring out dinner because I was supposed to go shopping last night and I couldn’t because I came straight home as fast as possible, and obviously I don’t want to go anywhere tonight at this point, so we’ll see what happens for that. I think I’ve still got stuff to make homemade pizza, so that might just have to do. Anyways, I’ll be back to work tomorrow, so clearly after work I’ll be going straight to the grocery store!
Don’t worry, I’m “taking it easy,” too. At this point I’m just happy it wasn’t something far more serious… :O
Final Expenses
Talk about an expensive couple of days!
car repairs – $941 (replaced radiator, radiator fan)
past-due taxes for 2005 – $409 (only $93 in penalties & fees – better than I predicted!)
Disney pass renewal – $209 (luckily, Sara helped me out with this one…)
The car really set off my money schedule because, well, who plans on spending nearly a grand on a whim like that?! It was spur of the moment, it was expensive, and a lot of people think that I got ripped off, but at least it’s done now and there’s a lot to be said for that. No AC in Florida is no fun, but a car that won’t even drive because it overheats when it’s idling is even worse!
Ring Shopping, Part Deux
For our afternoon together Saturday, Sara and I continued our ring shopping endeavors, which had pluses and minuses – the minus being that we only made it to a single store, and the plus being that she managed to find her hands-down new favorite. Good news because it was less than half the price of the ring she liked from Jared’s, bad news because the store is a really small business compared to everything else that we looked at and their “service plan” doesn’t even come close to what the others offered. Whereas with most other places, the diamond itself was covered if it fell out, and Jared’s even covered the whole ring if it happens to fall down the drain or get left behind somewhere, but this place covered just the tiny accent diamonds on the sides of the ring and that’s it. They recommended insuring it along with a homeowner’s or renter’s insurance policy, but I’d have felt more comfortable if they were able to cover it in house.
So that’s where we stand right now – Sara’s going to take the design to some other places to see if they can replicate it at a similiar cost / better service plan, although I’m still considering the option of going with the other place and looking elsewhere for service and replacement insurance. We’ll see… 🙂
My Disney Dad
And Sunday rounded out the weekend with a chilly trip over to Epcot with my Dad – to think that we’d let a whopping four weeks go by since our last visit! Blasphemy, I tell ya…
It was a good trip, despite the chilly weather, and we got around to as much stuff as we could before Dad’s legs just said, “Enough, already!” We didn’t make it on Soarin’ like we wanted to because the Fast Passes we got at noon weren’t good until 8:30pm and Dad just wasn’t going to make a 145 minute wait in the standby line without someplace to sit and rest, but we all still had a lot of fun and it was neat to take Dad back to someplace that he hasn’t been in over a decade. At one point he commented that it was nice to see that he was able to pass along the Disney bug to me, and I smiled inside, thinking of how I look forward to passing it along myself someday.
But not for a looong time, Babe! 😉
All in all a quick weekend, but good times nonetheless…
Please keep my transportation in your thoughts this morning as my car goes into the shop to try to figure out why it’s making all sorts of weird, grinding noises whenever I try to use the AC anymore. Here’s to hoping that it’s merely a $.03 o-ring or something that they decide to have mercy on me for and install for free … but I doubt it. I fear that this one could be the most expensive repair yet, but likewise, it sucks not having air conditioning in Florida, even in February…
Meh.
So good, old V-Day snuck by us this year without too much commotion, and that was kind of nice for a change!
Sara ended up having to work until 2am on one of her crazy, double-shifts at the hospital, so we really didn’t get to spend much of the actual day together. She ended up calling me up after work and persuaded me to bring takeout up to the hospital from our new favorite Chinese place so we could at least have dinner together, so that was good. Of course, she came home later to find the usual roses and chocolates and other objects of my affection to greet her at the door, long after I went to bed myself. Nothing fancy, but sometimes it’s the little, simple things that can mean just as much…
While she was at work yesterday, and pretty much every day, I tend to do a lot of reflection to try to figure out just how I got to this great place in life that I find myself right now. I’ve certainly entertained my share of life’s challenges, and probably got my swing at some of the more difficult romantic ones of the bunch over the past couple of years, and yet here I am today – head over heels in love with a woman who’s only faults to this point are that she hates doing housework and she refuses to kiss me after I’ve eaten anything containing peanut butter. On the other hand, she believes in me, but also has the guts to stand up to me when I’m full of crap; she’s open-minded and has no problems agreeing to disagree; and we share a sense of humor that can even be a little bit scary at times! We can tell each other just about anything, and actually have – an important sub-note!, and somehow we just seem to really work well together. Many people already have looked at us and said that we make a good team, and I think that’s a good quality to have.
In a few days we’ll have officially passed the 10 month mark, closing in on 1 year, and part of me still looks back and tries to figure out where all of the time went. Well, they may not have all been the absolute happiest of days, but we seemed to work through the worst of them and managed to come out the other side unscathed. I still look to our future together with a smile on my face – a big smile – knowing that I get to spend it with her, and somehow it makes fighting my way through all of the previous nonsense in my life seem worthwhile. If things had gone different, I might not have met Sara, and that’d be a shame because right now I couldn’t imagine it any other way than it is right now – just two honest and decent people, who happen to love each other very much, working our way through life together. At the end of the day, who could really ask for more?
Thanks for a fantastic 10 months so far, and a lifetime of happiness to come, Sara. I love you…