The Life of Riley is a weekly post that details my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 294): Easter

We toted two quiches, an apple cake, and two pans of French toast over to my parents’ house for Easter. I set up my mom’s new phone because she refuses to read directions. I didn’t read the directions either. My Dad and I started taking turns at shooting a ping pong ball out of the air with an Airzooka in some sort of impromptu skeet shooting match. We talked about my learning experience on the web and how it doesn’t seem to amount to much of a living. My parents asked when I was shaving my beard off, so it must look a little nuts.

We got home around 4PM and I noticed that my beard cast a distinct shadow, which made me feel pretty good. Later, #1GF! prepared a plate of Anginetti cream puffs that her mother had given us the ingredients for. I don’t know how many people she thought were coming over, but she made a plate up as if there were a legion of them. I ended up scarfing down about a dozen of them while we watched a crappy Vigo Mortensen movie.

Monday (Day 295): Better Blogroll

Updated Better Blogroll to include some features that users have been requesting for a month, and I finished reading a book on GIMP. Again, I’m talking about the graphics software, not the bracelet making string.

Tuesday (Day 296): The Old Man Dream

I was really bored, so I went through my daily reads. Once that was done, I was still bored, so I tried my hand at photo retouching. I now know that I suck at photo retouching, because my results were more creepy than real. I closed out the results without saving and decided to work on my FineTune Friday April playlist a week ahead of schedule. I should’ve shut off the computer and walked away, but the web is a hard habit to break.

I went to bed early and dreamed that I was someone else. I was an old man who had drank a good portion of his life away and was stuck living at his grown daughter’s house. I had the feeling that neither of us was excited about the situation, but I had nowhere else to go, so I one of the things I did to help out was get up before her and make the coffee. I got up while it was still dark and went to the kitchen.

After I was done scooping the coffee into the coffee maker, I turned to find my five year old daughter staring at me. She had died years prior, and I had the feeling that I had something to do with her death. I started getting angry that I was hallucinating, so I threw a short whiskey glass at her. She caught it, and placed it on the floor with a smile. That’s about the time I woke up yelling and had to explain myself to #1GF!.

Wednesday (Day 297): Down With Mandarin Oranges

I started the morning by deciding that I would put fruit in my cereal to cover up the taste of the milk that was on the edge of going bad. Why not just have a bagel, toast, waffle, or one of the many other choices available? That would’ve made sense, but sometimes my logic circuits don’t fire before breakfast. Instead of grabbing strawberries or something that goes with cereal, I grabbed a can of Mandarin oranges. Do you know what Mandarin oranges taste like on cereal? If your thinking tropical Cheerios, you’d be wrong. There’s a reason why we put milk in our cereal instead of orange juice. Orange juice and milk tastes pretty close to vomit. I ate as much of it as I could and threw the rest down the sink. It was not a good start to the day.

After #1GF! got off to work, I started googling information on magnetism and simple machines to see if a simple low power generator could be created. I have no idea why. It wasn’t like I was going to build a monorail or anything. That led me to green energy like geothermal heat pumps, solar power, and windmills. By the time I was done, I was drowning in expensive ideas that would justify year round beard growing if I could make them a business.

Spent some time working on my Beard posts trying to figure out how many beard types I’ve actually had. The answer was 19. Nana nana nineteen nineteen.

Thursday (Day 298): Avoiding Taxes

Got up with the intention of doing the taxes, and got as far as sorting out the paperwork before losing interest and surfing the web. I soon ran out of tolerance for that and continued work on compiling my list of beard types. I soon lost interest in that and tried to figure out if there was a formula to picking up Mixx awards and karma points. I realized the futility of that project and went back to compiling my beard list.

The only successful thing that I completed was to take out the garbage, so at 5PM, I started the taxes because I couldn’t avoid it anymore. I got #1GF!’s finished before bed but ran out of time to start my own.

Friday (Day 299): Embracing Taxes And Rejecting Youth

I started my own taxes in the morning, and then had to run out to find more tax forms and drop off a library book. I was feeling like the king of the library when I pulled into a nearly empty parking lot, until I started pulling on the locked door like the town dunce. Once I read the sign that stated that they’re always closed on Fridays, I decided to reverse directions and get some grocery shopping done.

While I was picking out coffee I got a call from a former co-worker insinuating that I was lying about #1GF! forbidding me from getting a job. I had to explain that I wanted a job, so the only way that I could be lying would be if I had a split personality and was forbidding myself from working even though I wanted to. After I hung up, I found it odd that I actually had to explain this to someone because it seemed so obvious to me.

Once the shopping was done and put away, I went to the post office to get some more tax forms. The post office told me that they don’t get the forms in anymore, but that I could do my taxes on the internet. Because I hate the internet and all that it stands for, I was glad that they suggested that I try the library if I wanted real paper tax forms. I did, so off I went.

On the way, I called a former co-worker, who was very surprised to hear from me. I thought that I had called them a few weeks ago, but I was told that the last time I called was Christmas. I have a terrible sense of time, so they had to listen to a few minutes of me arguing that that couldn’t be right. It was. I seriously have a horrible sense of time.

Once I got the forms, I headed home and spent the rest of the day working on my taxes. I put the TV on the background to keep me from going insane when transferring the value from line 2 to line 18a if line 18a is a prime, or or to 19b if it’s divisible by 7, 5, or ends in digits that are a multiple of 43. I then laughed like I do every time I read the line that says that I can pay a 5.3% tax rate or opt to pay an optional 5.8% tax rate.

While I was calculating, I heard a young TV host say that his producer wanted him to say “Book ‘em, Dan-o, whatever that means.” All calculations stopped, and I stared at the TV like I had been slapped with a frivolous lawsuit. Am I so old that I have knowledge of pop culture that is no longer pop culture? Seriously? Before you answer, know that I asked the TV “What? You don’t know who Steve McGarrett is? It’s Hawaii 5-0, biotch! Hawaii. Five. Oh. WTF?” If anyone was there to witness it, it might’ve seemed a little crazy, so it’s a good thing that I was alone.

Toward the end of the evening I finished off my taxes, and #1GF! checked them over. By then, I was watching an infomercial selling a DVD set of the Dean Martin Variety Show. I’ve never even seen the show, but I was was having fun picking out who would appear next. At one point, I said, “Hey, It’s Flip Wilson!” like it was something special. Who the fuck cares about Flip Wilson anymore? Anyone? It’s over for me. Save yourselves. Just make me a little tea and get me my shawl before you go.

Saturday (Day 300): Granite, Games, And Gams

We went out again to look at granite and were able to narrow down the field to only two or three choices. When we were done, I found a fiberglass door by IWP Aurora that had knots in it to make it look like wood. I stared at it for quite some time as it looked so much like wood. I’m serious. It was amazing.

We headed over to #1GF!’s Mom’s house to fix the computer because she games online. Without her games, the woman is incomplete, and I can understand that. Afterward, we went to lunch at a diner where someone hired a lot of relatively pretty waitresses with penchants for tight pants. My coffee cup was never empty, so I couldn’t complain.

On the way home, we went to Home Depot to look at more stuff for the house, and disagreed about just how big a sink should be. I think it should be big enough to bathe Jonathan Winters in, and #1GF! thinks that it should fit a plate, cup, and maybe a fork. I ran out of house shopping steam, so we went home and I made a batch of Tollhouse cookies. #1GF! had to tell me how big to make them, but I think they turned out pretty good.

What I Learned

• Cookies from scratch are easy.
• Some Fiberglass doors are amazingly wood-like.
• The new generation has no idea who Steve McGarrett is.
• I have a head full of pop culture that probably isn’t pop culture anymore.
• Learned more about the Gimp.
• Learned more about writing WordPress plugins.
• I suck at photo retouching.
• Mandarin oranges do not go in cereal.
• I’ve had 19 types of beards.
• The web is sort of a waste of time.
• You can’t avoid taxes.

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Posted in Leisure