Smoking Stinks … YUCK!!!

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So studies have shown that quitting smoking is … a good thing!

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(via Daily Infographic)

I used to smoke for a period of about 6 months in high school because I thought it was cool and I would get bored when I drove truck runs on Friday night. I barely even smoked enough for any real smoker to consider it smoking … it took me weeks to go through an entire pack of cigarettes and I was always very paranoid about getting caught. Eventually I quit because I started getting into diving and I realized that my lungs were actually pretty important to the process.

Good to see that some 15 years later, my risk should be pretty much non-existent at this point!

Related:
(I wanted to link to a YouTube video of those old anti-smoking videos … remember “Smoking Stinks – YUCK!!!” and then the person would stick out their tongue and it would be covered in cigarette butts??? Well, I couldn’t find one, surprisingly, but you probably get the idea nonetheless…)

THE BIG ANNOUNCEMENT!!!

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So good news, everyone … this is officially happening…

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And also for a more sugary take on it all…

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What to say, what to say?! :mrgreen:

It’s all still very surreal to me, even though we’re technically now out of the first trimester and are 1/3 of the way to having a baby.

HAVING A BABY

It’s definitely going to take a while to get used to seeing those words in the present tense instead of merely wishful thinking!!!

There’s a lot of back story behind all of this that I promise we’ll talk about eventually … it’s been quite the ordeal over the last couple of years, to say the least … but for now I’d rather focus on the crazy, insane, unbelievable positive that in roughly 187 days I’m going to be a Daddy! 😯 😯 😯

Needless to say, I’ve already started on the first of many new humor columns that are to be written about the mere idea of me being a parent. It’s wild, and the one thing that I’m starting to realize from talking to other people who are already classified as such, it’s that as much as I feel like I’m not ready, I’m starting to get the impression that most people never are, and it’s just one of those things where you roll with the punches and just kind of see what happens…

And so that’s what we’re going to do! There’s so much to do, and a lot of it honestly makes me feel equal parts excited and terrified, but I’m just trying to take it one day at a time as Sara and I slowly prepare for one of the biggest things that will ever happen in our entire lives … no pressure.

Current Baby To-Do List:

  • Put “bun” into “oven”
  • Announce said 9-month baking process
  • Panic
  • Calm self down from panic by buying toys
  • Read through 100,000 baby names and, in collaboration with wife, pick 1
  • Buy stock in Babies ‘R Us in preparation for their huge stock increase after we buy pretty much buy every single item they have in stock
  • Sell lots and lots … and lots of books so that I don’t later have to rob a bank to pay for above-mentioned purchases
  • Teach Cleo not to eat babies (work in progress)

187 days and counting… 😯 😀 😕 😐 :mrgreen:

Why NutriSystem (and other diet programs) don’t work…

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I just cleaned that gigantic mess out of our kitchen pantry, where it had accumulated for several months.

My wife decided to try NutriSystem around November of last year, and for the first couple of months it worked great! She probably lost 20-30 pounds – we’ve got the Beanie Babies with the #s stitched into them around here somewhere to prove it, but the problem was, just like Weight Watchers or any of the others where they sell you food to eat, is that inevitably you eventually realize just how terrible the food actually is, and gradually you start eating less and less of it as you slip in just a bit of regular food here and there, and before you know it you’ve got shelves of this crap with new shipments coming in every 4 weeks that you don’t even have room for anymore!

Seriously, I think our last shipment before she finally put the thing on hold earlier this year probably stayed in the box for a good month and a half while we convinced ourselves that it was still possible to “catch up” and get back on track. I even started eating some of it myself – at least the ones that I could stomach – but that only lasted so long because you can only eat so much of the same packaged, microwavable crap day after day. There are only so many choices that they can give you, and if you end up not liking a sizable number of them, you’re pretty much committing yourself to eating the same thing every. damn. day…

Of course, I don’t have a huge bushel of room to talk because I was trying to lose weight right alongside her doing my own thing and I wasn’t really very successful, either, but it just goes to show you that it’s really willpower that you need to lose weight – not some fad diet or books or a new workout routine. I never really cared for these types of schemes because the question always in the forefront of my own mind was “How am I supposed to switch back to normal foods after eating all of these meticulously-planned meals for month after month???” Sure, they tell you that they’ve got a graduated plan to ease you back into the real world once you’ve hit your target weight, but the truth of the matter is that most people probably never even get to that stage because they slip far before they ever reach their target weight and once they’re reminded what a hamburger not made out of cardboard tastes like, the food starts backing up like a clogged toilet. 🙁

I need to see if there’s a food bank nearby where I can donate all of this crap instead of feeling guilty about throwing two months worth of “food” in the garbage…

Humor Book #1 – Free On Kindle – GO GET IT NOW!!!

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I kind of feel a little silly that this book literally came out three years ago and I’m just now getting around to publishing it in e-book form. I’ve actually tried it a couple of times in the past, but the formatting can sometimes be kind of a pain in the ass and I always ended up throwing my hands up in frustration before it was ever done.

But it’s done now, and as sort of a mini-celebration I’m currently offering it as a free download on Kindle for the next week (promo ends on 10/31 at midnight). After that you’ll be able to pick it up for $2.99, which is considerably cheaper than the $9.95 paperback price, as I think it should be. Few things drive me nuts more than seeing people pricing their e-books at or even above what they would charge for physical copies – especially the big box publishers. I couldn’t imagine someone paying more than ten bucks for a digital copy of a book when the print copy is the same price, considering that there’s no thing to physically print and ship anymore…

But that’s an entirely separate rant that we’ll save for another day! 😛

Anyways … humor! I know that I’ve kind of been slacking in this area for a while – visitors to comedic-genius.com will note that I haven’t really put up any new humor columns since February, and even then they’ve been few and far between for the last year and a half. For a long time, I’ve kind of been taking a bit of a break from humor to work on some other things, but let the release of this book come as somewhat of a sign that hopefully we’ll be seeing some new things in that area here in the upcoming months. I don’t want to share a date at this point, but I’ve been working on a brand new website that better highlights my archives (over 400 humor columns now?!), I’ve started writing columns again, despite not posting them anywhere yet, and I’m even starting to get some things in the works for next year.

Ok, so here’s a bit of a spoiler – 2014 will mark the 15th anniversary of The Humor Column … spanning 1999 – 2014, and so without giving too much away, I’m pretty proud of that accomplishment and I’m hoping to do a bit of trumpeting throughout the year in celebration. At some point during the year, we’ll see humor column #500 go up, and I would also expect humor book #3, which was actually supposed to happen this year but got postponed for … reasons.

There will likely be some other cool stuff, too, but we’ll save that until the new site goes up and we’ve got some other stuff out of the way. I would also expect to eventually see an e-book for Random Things That Amuse Me… hitting Amazon’s virtual shelves here sooner than later … now that I’ve worked out most of the kinks with book #1, my hopes are that book #2 will be a little less time consuming to knock out! Maybe Thanksgiving-ish, maybe December-ish for that one – I really don’t know yet…

But go download book #1 FOR FREE right now, if for no other reason than IT’S FREE and I WROTE IT and I DON’T PLAN ON IT BEING FREE FOREVER BECAUSE IT’S HARD TO BUY FOOD WHEN I’M CHARGING $0.00 PER COPY INDEFINITELY, but in the meantime, please grab yourself a free copy while you can and enjoy!!! :mrgreen:

Dog Psychology

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I sometimes feel bad when I have to yell at Cleo for going crazy about seeing another dog.

Just now, she was looking out the front window – something that she does a lot during the day – and a couple of people were walking their dogs by on the sidewalk. The problem is, she gets super-duper-crazy excited when she sees pretty much any creature with more than 2 legs, and when she does this, she turns into this hyper psycho dog that starts clamoring and scratching at the window like she was being starved for oxygen or something!  😯

My main concern, mind you, is that one of these days she’s going to break the window, which would be a problem two-fold because a) I have no idea how one goes about replacing a window, and b) no doubt broken glass and such would be somewhat bad for Cleo, too, considering that once she breaks the window she’s likely to go flying through it en route to whatever caused her to assail said window in the first place!

But physical damages aside, sometimes it also makes me wonder about her psychologically because when I inevitably have to go up and usher her away from the window, amidst all of her shaking and yelping, I can tell that she’s certainly distraught, which from my imagination falls into one of two categories:

  1. She’s just super-duper excited because she wants to run and play with whatever she sees outside, regardless of whether or not it would actually be interested in playing with her.
  2. Or what if she’s freaking the fuck out because she hardly gets to see other dogs and so when she does, it’s this incredible mindfuck of having been kept in captivity for years and just now learning that there are other creatures out there that look just like her!

I mean, think about it if the roles were reversed – if you stayed locked up in the house all day with only a window to the outdoors, and maybe occasionally you got to go out and play with other humans, but your memory was really short so you don’t always remember those times, when you saw another being that looks just like you walking past on the other side of the glass, wouldn’t you start to wonder what in the hell is going on and begin to question everything about your so-called happy life that you’ve ever known?!

Granted, maybe I need not worry about that being the case because it’s not like Cleo has ever attacked me as her captor after piecing together dogs’ place as man’s pets or even so much as licked me to death to know the truth about what lies beyond the front window in our family room. It’s just that ever since we got her a couple of years ago, I’ve always been curious about what she thinks and what she remembers and how she learns. She’s not like the fish that I’ve had for most of my life where they pretty much just bob around and be fish – she’s learned a surprising number of words, most of them relating to food and her getting to go on walks, and she reacts differently to different people that she knows.

It makes me wonder what else goes on inside that furry, little head of hers … aside from the food-related thoughts … I’m pretty much on top of those already… 😛

Inspiration is Everything

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One of the things that’s usually pretty good for getting me revved up and inspired in the creative world is gawking at other successful creative people, so the other day when I found myself with a scad of business work, I was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon this video from PAX Prime with likes of Mike & Jerry from Penny Arcade to help me pass the time!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtJfjzFPEnM

It’s kind of cool because unlike some of the other Q&As that they’ve done, this one was led by Robert Khoo, who’s best known as the business unicorn that lifted their comic to its destiny … and officially speaking, I guess you could say that he runs the company now, and it’s certainly no secret that under his leadership, they’ve done very, very well for themselves! And so in a way it’s inspiring for me to listen to these guys talk so candidly about how their business operates and some admittedly controversial happenings that they’ve seen over the years, and how they’ve grown with them as a result.

Admittedly one piece that also piqued my curiosity was the couple of questions that touched on money, both in how it has affected Mike & Jerry’s lives in addition to the bit on various companies bidding to buy out Penny Arcade there at the end. I’ve always assumed that by this point they’re both doing very well, but it seems a little weird to put an actual number on something that started out as a couple of guys drawing comic strips in their apartment in between playing video games. I think that’s what’s inspiring the most to me – simply to be able to see the entire arc of their success from the ground level back in the late ’90s to now being this huge, but still incredibly small business of little more than a dozen people who create the largest webcomic on the Internet and raise millions of dollars for charity and run the biggest gaming conventions in the world, among all of the other new projects that they have popping up all of the time.

It’s very cool to me to see something like that because it gives hope to the types of creative stuff that I’d like to do myself.

A few other videos of theirs that I enjoyed in this same marathon session…

Jesus. H. THAT’S A MOTHERFUCKING COCKROACH ON MY CEILING Christ.

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A) This is like the third one we’ve found in the last couple of months – the other two have been in the bathroom, and I’m not sure which is worse.

2) How in the world am I supposed to kill a cockroach that’s on the ceiling, anyways?! Anyone who’s ever tried to kill a cockroach on the floor knows that they’re basically invincible! There’s only one way that this goes down – I smack it with something, it falls and lands on me, and then I die – case closed.

😕 😕 😕

Ok, so actually I already took care of it. You don’t think that I’d be sitting here writing this post with a cockroach dangling over my head, now would I?!

To be honest, it did go down sort of like #2 … I ended up squashing it with the Swiffer, which I think is the only time I’ve ever used that thing. I held the thing in place for a good minute, trying to smash it as well as I could from ten feet below on the floor and more importantly, without giving it the opportunity to make a mad dash.

When I finally pulled away the Swiffer, it fell as expected (though thankfully not into my face) and stumbled around a bit, so I slammed the Swiffer back into the carpet to hold it in place while I found a more formidable weapon to finish him off. I ended up grabbing a nearby candle jar (Apple Pumpkin Aromabeads, if you must ask – there will be a review up on the site about it tomorrow…) and with one fell swoop, I took that little motherfucker’s head clean off the second I lifted the Swiffer off of its back.

So far I feel no remorse, though I do keep checking the ceiling now for his buddies. Talk about a creepy way for bugs to attack – it’s not bad enough to sneak in under the door, so now they’ve got to drop in from above like out of some kind of Scott’s Personal Horror Movie?!

*shudder*

I’m tired and also petrified now. If anybody needs me, I’m going to go sleep outside … where it’s safe.