There’s a fruit fly zipping around my office and it’s driving me nuts…

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And that line reminded me of this joke…

A bunch of guys are sitting at the bar talking when a pirate walks in – the hat, the eyepatch, wooden leg, parrot – everything, but what actually catches their attention is that the man has the captain’s wheel of a ship sticking out of his fly.

He sits at the end of the bar and they ignore him most of the night, but finally five minutes to close, one of the guys finally takes the initiative and approaches the pirate.

“Excuse me, Sir,” he begins, “I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but my friends and I couldn’t help but wonder … what’s with the captain’s wheel???”

“Arrrrggghhhh,” the pirate replies, shaking his head, “it’s driving me nuts!”

blisters suck

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Ok, so I’m confused…

I bought new shoes last night – 1/2 a size larger than what I normally wear so they won’t be so tight – but after putting in 45 minutes on the old elliptical this evening, I still came out of it with the same kind of blisters that I had before. One long one on the inside of each heel and boy, do they hurt! (especially after realizing that I’ve been sitting on my foot for the past hour while using the computer!) I’ve been reading around online and it sounds like trying a different kind of socks might be in order, but if that’s not it, I’m kind of stumped.

They also started tingling a bit when I got to the 30 minute mark, but maybe that’s just the blisters forming or something? My shoes aren’t tight at all anymore now, so I can’t see how that could be the problem, but at this point my feet and I are certainly open to suggestions!

…again, with the Valentine’s Day already???

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I think it’s time for me to write some new V-Day humor, but until then…

Scott and Matt’s Guide to Getting Women…
http://www.justlaugh.com/online/vol3issue2/women1.php

What Women Don’t Want…
http://www.comedic-genius.com/writing/columns/20030205_women.php

The Dating Game
http://www.comedic-genius.com/writing/columns/20030212_dating.php

True Love Means Never Having to Say, “Get Off Me – You’re Heavy…”
http://www.comedic-genius.com/writing/columns/20030219_heavy.php

All’s Fair in Love and War…Including Cyanide
http://www.comedic-genius.com/writing/columns/20030226_cyanide.php

Can We Still Be Friends?
http://www.comedic-genius.com/writing/columns/20030228_friends.php

Ten Things I Really Can’t Stand About You – a Valentine’s Day Blitzkrieg
http://www.comedic-genius.com/writing/columns/20040211_10things.php

Better luck next year!

weekend stuff

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  • Stayed up until about 4 AM Friday night / Saturday morning and made some great progress where databases are concerned. It’s very nice to see my thoughts finally coming off the paper and onto the computer screen, and I’m looking forward to possibly even getting close to setting a deadline for the revamped site to go online!
  • Discovered the other day that I think I need bigger athletic shoes. 🙁 The last couple of times I’ve exercised, my left foot was getting a little tingly about twenty or so minutes in…which scared the hell out of me because isn’t that one of the major symptoms for diabetes or something?! Well, I’ve been noticing blisters a few hours after I finish working out, so I think it’s just that my shoes are too tight. Weird because they’re the same size as my regular shoes, but whatever. There goes another forty bucks…
  • Renewed my Disney pass last Friday, so I’m good to go for another year…at least as soon as the new one shows up in the mail. Probably won’t go again until March because the rest of my February weekends are filling up quick, but no doubt I’ll need a break by then!
  • Am about ready to let my match.com membership lapse again if I don’t come across someone with a hint of manners, though. It’s pretty bad when my current standards as far as meeting women is concerned are limited only to “replies to my e-mails”! I don’t care if you’re interested or not (well, I do, but…) – just reply or hit the “No thanks” button within a few days time. Don’t ignore me altogether – that’s all I ask. :<
  • Weight Loss Update: no change whatsoever. In fact, I’ve been fluctuating between 215 and 220 for a while now, so something’s got to change. One idea is that I might start keeping better track of calories and such again (yay spreadsheets), which is a pain but should help me to figure out portions better; another is that I need to incorporate more variety into my exercise routine because my body might be “getting used to” the all-cardio deal. Any suggestions???
  • Went to Leeroy Selmon’s with Dad tonight for dinner and surprisingly had a very good salad that I’m definitely going to try to imitate the next time I go to the grocery store. Grilled shrimp, water chestnuts, egg, bacon, corn, bits of guda cheese (I think) with a mustard vinegrette – talk about a salad I could get used to! Of course, lord only knows what the calorie count for that bad boy was…
  • And lastly, I think I’ve finally got a do-able plan to kickstart my writing once again. A nice pep talk Friday evening reminded me that if I really want to write professionally for a living, I should be writing pretty much every waking moment when I get home in the evenings and…for lack of a better descriptor…that’s just not happening. There are a lot of motivational and mental roadblocks that I need to break down and really, the only way for me to do that is simply by writing every single day. It might not have to be the Great American Novel, but the only way to break out of a rut like this is to keep working at it until it gives. And it’s tough for me because I haven’t written a truly good (in my opinion) humor column in nearly a year – I’ve got several dozen opinion columns that have never been published anywhere simply because although I wrote them, even I am afraid that they’re a bit too sarcastic and bitchy to be worth reading…and you know something’s wrong when I’m concerned about being too sarcastic!Even lately it’s all I’ve been able to write and I don’t want to ruin the image that people have of my work, but maybe it’s just a stage that I need to work through.So anyways, my plan for the immediate future is to sit down each night, after exercise and dinner, and write one column…or story, or chapter, or whatever. Seven columns a week on a regular basis is more than I’ve put out in a while, but maybe it’s time for a change. I know that there are a lot of reasons that I’ve enjoyed writing in the past … it’s time to get back to those days … so here’s to a wordier, happier tomorrow! And I’ll try to put a little something simple together to offer my musings online again by the end of the week – it won’t be pretty, but then again, I can’t guarantee that the writing will be, either… 😉

    P.S. Thanks for the pep talk, Court. I’ll have those memoirs on your desk in no time!

…and just to prove the little sister wrong…

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Ok, so I also wanted to postpone exercise … sue me.

Four jobs you’ve had in your life:
1. Nature Director @ scout camp
2. warehouse slave
3. truck driver
4. technical analyst (current)

Four movies you could watch over and over:
1. Robin Hood: Men in Tights
2. The Muppets Take Manhattan
3. Uncle Buck
4. Disney’s Hercules

Four television shows you love:
1. Futurama
2. Curb Your Enthusiasm
3. ALF
4. The Drew Carey Show
5. The Simpsons (honorable mention because nothing else compares to Homer)

Four things you do daily:
1. brush my teeth
2. rant about the rise of conservative America
3. cheat on my diet
4. read the newspaper

Four places you have been on vacation:
1. Disney World
2. Washington, D.C.
3. Cleveland
4. Gaylord, MI (didn’t see that one coming, did ya?!)

Four websites you read daily:
1. LiveJournal
2. Digg
3. BoingBoing
4. match.com (sadly enough…)

Four places you would rather be right now: (actually, I’m pretty happy where I am, so how about four places that I wouldn’t mind visiting right now?)
1. Europe
2. San Francisco
3. New York City
4. somewhere in the islands

Four bloggers you are tagging:
1. I hate to impose on people, so if you read this and feel like chiming in, by all means knock your socks off…

this, that, and the other thing…

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Got up bright and early (read: 5 AM!!!) to do the finishing touches on the calendar revisions and print out some stuff, but those plans were soon trashed when my printer completely and thoroughly crapped out on me. Everything came out blue…nothing but blue, and opening up the cover, I found that mysteriously the pink and yellow tanks had somehow gotten blue ink in them as well – talk about a mess! Came home and yanked the print head out to find that there was a ton of blue ink pooled at the base of the jets – I guess it must’ve back fed up into the other tanks or something. Soaked the whole thing in rubbing alcohol and water this evening and it looks fairly clean now – will be interested to see if the damn thing still works tomorrow after I let it dry overnight! 😛

…

Got my schedule changed at work so I’m now doing 9a-6p instead of 8a-5p – hopefully that’ll cut down on the time that I have to sit in traffic a bit. Mind you, I’ll only be reporting downtown for another week, then I’m in the new building two miles away from home anyways, but lately I’ve been staying late until at least 6p to get things caught up, so I might as well get an extra hour of sleep for it.

I’m also hoping that this will help change my mood in the evenings, too. It seems like for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been kind of crabby / depressed / don’t want to do anything when I get home, which sucks because I’ve got about a million different projects that I want to be working on right now! Sometimes it’s been stemming from leaving work in a bad mood – I know that, for sure – but today I was fine until I got home around 6:30p, and then suddenly it was almost nine o’clock before I could motivate myself to get up and be productive! Maybe it’s just something with trying to change so many things in my life at once – between the diet and the exercise and resurrecting several creative projects, I might just be overwhelmed. *shrugs*

…

Made a taco salad for dinner this evening, just like Mom used to make! Mmmmm….

…

Time to go exercise. Bleh…

“And the more skin that you shed, the more that the air in your throat will linger when you call him your friend…”

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Geeky Bullets:

  • Finally found my boo boo in the section of L7’s SQL code that has had me scratching my head for literally months – dropdown menu for the comic now lists all of our strips and also stays centered on whichever strip is being displayed at the time! Added a second set of navigation links above the comic to make it easier to search through the archives.
  • Although there’s still a ways to go, I also made tremendous advances (at least for me) in the dev upgrades for Just Laugh’s Joke Database – nothing viewable online at this point, but the first steps for the new site-wide management system are now behind me and it shouldbe just a matter of getting organized at this point.
  • Also along dev lines, not sure exactly where it stemmed from, but the head-clearing walk mentioned below somehow did wonders for getting me motivated once again about the massive project that I’m gearing up for with bringing Just Laugh back. So much potential – now to see if “two years of growing up”– as the last two years of my life have been referred to – can have an impact on this venture as well…
  • Watched The Fantastic Four this evening – it only had about ten worthwhile minutes in it, as I’d suspected. Kind of like The Punisher, I suppose, but really, it’s tough to follow in Spider-Man’s footsteps anyways.Non-Geeky Bullets:
    • Because I knew that whatever I watched on pay-per-view this evening would be crap (it was between The Fantastic Four and War of the Worlds), last night I watched Mallrats on DVD and those were good times. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for Sega…”
  • I worked out both Saturday and Sunday, and I really think that it’s starting to do some good. I’ve had increasingly bad neck / shoulder cramps ever since I drove trucks up in Michigan and I’m always saying that I should start going to a chiropractor, but this weekend I actually found myself feeling betterafter doing my time on the old elliptical. The last machine I used was lower body only, whereas this one works the upper body, too, so my best guess would be that I’m just finally stretching out those muscles that got beat on so much up north! Now if I could just beat the 215 mark…
  • Took a little break in between all of the geek stuffabove to take a walk around the neighborhood because I realized that I’ve never really done it since I moved here. I used to do it all the time back at the old apartment on the other side of town when I needed to clear my head, but I guess I’ve just never taken the time here. It was pretty dark, so I didn’t really get to see much, but relaxing nonetheless. Will try to do some more exploring to wind down tomorrow evening, perhaps…
  • I also picked up the hooks for my balcony so that I can hang some plant baskets from the ceiling – my little relaxation area is really starting to come together out there! It’s tough, though, because I’ve got the new table & chairs picked out from Lowe’s that I want and they’ll go perfectly with everything else that has been done … but I’ve already spent so much in the past couple of months and I reallyneed to curb my spending for a while. It’s just that I hate to fix up everything else, then be left with an ugly ass, half rotted table as the center piece … I shouldn’t do it, but we’ll see… :PSo much to do tomorrow, but at least I feel like I got some decent stuff accomplished again this weekend. So far my to-do list is about three or four items long, so it shouldn’t take too much motivation to press on and get them done before Surface so that I can still get to bed at a decent time. Hasta luego…