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 343): Eat The Rich, Not the Chocolate

I woke up tired, so I stayed in bed and listened to a musical tribute to Mother’s Day on the oldies station. Because I’m used to putting together 45 song Finetune playlists, I felt a little ripped off when the tribute was only seven or eight songs long. I felt superior for a minute, until I realized that the DJ on the radio had a job that paid him to play seven songs, and I was getting paid zippo for laying there listening. I dragged my ass out of bed, and #1GF! and I met my parents for breakfast at at a local restaurant that #1GF! and I used to be regulars at. We hadn’t been there in a couple of yeas, but it was nice to talk to the host again.

After we left, we went to a park to take a walk. When we were leaving, a guy in a Mercedes started tailgating us. It was a small, neighborhood road, so #1GF! pulled over and waved him by. The guy crossed the yellow line, and as he passed, I could see his spiky hair, sunglasses, and one of those golf shirts where the collar is a different color than the shirt. He’s had the gut of a guy who hadn’t seen the inside of a gym since high school, but that douchetastic look of a guy who thinks that whatever power he has in his workplace transfers to the outside world. As he passed by, he yelled something unintelligible into #1GF!’s window followed by “FUCKIN’ BITCH!”

Since she had actually pulled over to let the guy by, I gave #1GF! a look like “what the fuck is going on?” and gave the guy a smiling, but very long one finger salute out of the windshield. Because I wasn’t sure if it was aggravating him, I stuck my arm was out of my window way past the elbow. He jammed on his brakes as if he was getting out of the car.

People who know me know that I’m the furthest thing from a violent guy. I’m a firm believer in “live and let live” and actually go out of my way not to offend anyone, but fuck you if I think I’m backing down from anything when I feel threatened. Within seconds of both cars being stopped, my seatbelt was off and I was going for the door, and #1GF! was going for the locks and saying “Nonononono.”

Then, nothing happened. I was in ready mode, but I wasn’t going to get out until the guy did because the thought crossed my mind that this asshole might actually try to run me over. So, I just waited for opportunity to knock. Probably sensing that his big mouth was writing a check that his gut couldn’t cash, the guy jammed on the gas and cut down a side street that no one would go down unless they lived there. Because no one acts like that big of an asshole in their own neighborhood, I figured that the guy’s flight response must’ve kicked in and that some poor secretary was going to catch hell and not know why on Monday morning.

From there, we just shook our heads and went to the mall so that #1GF! could look at shoes, and I went with her because I’m not a badass. While #1GF! looked around, I followed behind her because I buy shoes like Rain Man, and and it def-definitely wasn’t time to replace them. Yea. Def-definitely not time. Black shoes. No holes. Def-definately not time.

As we walked through the rows of ladies shoes, I realized that I don’t understand why some of the high heels have a hole for one toe to poke out of on the front. The ones where your toes are covered would be good if it’s raining or something, and the ones that are open are good for when it’s sunny, but what’s the deal with the ones with the one toe poking out the front? Not good for sunny, and not good for rainy. Is there are purpose to those things? They look like the toes are all fighting to escape and the big toe is in the lead. I meant to ask #1GF! about this, but someone dropped 257 matchsticks on the floor and I got distracted.

After that, we got some iced coffee and sat at the beach so that #1GF! could to feed the seagulls with some old bagels. She doesn’t even like birds, so I thought it was sort of funny that she was suddenly willing to be flocked by a pack of hungry flying rats. Ironically, the seagulls weren’t interested. They wouldn’t get within thirty feet of her, so we had to ball up the bagels and throw them.

When we got home, there was a new fruit basket at the door to replace the basket that had spiders in it from the day before. It was a fancy basket with fancy stuff in it, and being a fancy guy, I decided to try out some gourmet chocolates. Some had cumin in them, and others had pepper in them, and I thought that they must be really good because they wouldn’t include shit cakes on toast in a gourmet basket unless shit cakes were rare and delicious, right?

Wrong. Cumin is the worst spice in the world. It smells and tastes like smelly feet, even when coated with chocolate. Even though the chocolates were gross as hell, I kept eating them, hoping that they’d somehow change or that I’d get used to them. I’d eat a piece, cringe, and say something like “Oh geez”, shake it off, and eat another piece, thinking that I must be missing something or that I’d suddenly get rich people taste buds and love the stuff. #1GF! watched me the whole time, shaking her head and asking “Why do you keep eating them, then?” Sometimes, I think that if she had a good legal pad, she might be able to make some money if she would secretly keep track of my behavior.

At the end of the night, we watched No Country For Old Men, which was a really good movie until it suddenly ended as if they got tired of writing it. If I want loose ends, I’ll live my life. What I watch movies for is to see a good story that ties up neatly. When movie makers give less than that, I feel like they are keeping the audience from part of the experience. It’s like going out for Chinese food and not getting your fortune cookie. It doesn’t make the meal taste any worse, but it’s the only thing that you’ll remember about it.

Monday (Day 344): High Traffic, Low Rating, And A Missed Interview

I visited the house in the morning and the contractor was fixing the bad plastering job. I went home to check my site stats, and ended up answering e-mails and comments for at least an hour. My traffic has been way up thanks to my beard pages catching fire on StumbleUpon, and I thought it was really cool to be able to e-mail so many different people. One of those e-mails was from WCMF who wanted to interview me about my Joseph Palmer post. Unfortunately, I got the message a week too late for the interview, but I thought it was really cool to be asked.

At noon, I had finally begun working on last week’s Life of Riley post, which ate another couple of hours. By the time that I got around to checking my stats, I found that even though my traffic is six times higher than normal, my site got bumped from a PR5 down to a PR3. I’ve been a PR4 for years, so the only explanation I have for this is that I removed Google’s ads from my site. Same content + higher traffic – Google ads = Google Page Rank slam. I’ve heard of people getting slammed for having paid ads, but I’ve never heard of people getting slammed for removing them.

I was hoping to get some photo retouching practice in, but I never got around to it because I decided to upgrade WordPress to 2.5.1. It’s been out for a while now, and I really thought that it was bad of me as a plugin developer to not have tested all my plugins with the latest version. I ended up upgrading twice because even though I downloaded version 2.5.1 to my drive, I uploaded version 2.5 to my server. Only after I was done with the upgrade did I realize that I was .1 version behind and would have to do it all over again.

Tuesday (Day 345): BFF PHP OMG

I was going to start the day with some photo retouching of some public domain images that I found, but ended up spending the morning combing through WordPress core files to figure out how to change the number of drafts shown in the WordPress admin panel like I had done in 2.3. I eventually found the section to modify, but then gave up on the actual modification because I had already wasted too much time on it by then. Because I was already in a PHP state of mind (it’s like a one track, code coma), I decided to fix a bug in Best Foot Forward that was causing problems for some who were using it with WordPress 2.5.

By mid afternoon, I was finally doing what I wanted: retouching photos of people with bad acne. The leftover frustration from combing through the WordPress code carried over into the rest of the day and I didn’t feel like I had accomplished anything.

Wednesday (Day 346): Photo Retouching

I got dressed and ready to do the food shopping, but started to retouch a photo of #1GF! and I to pass the time until rush hour was over. I got rid of a zit here, whitened some teeth there, got rid of some dark circles, etc. and then spent an hour trying to print the fucking thing out so that #1GF! would have a nice picture of us when she got home. I don’t know what was going on, but the printer was not interested in printing what I told it to. There was no one here to see it, but I actually was threatening and coaxing the printer while I troubleshot the problem. Eventually, I think the printer got tired of being called a bastard, and I got something into a frame. That’s about when I realized that #1GF! would be home any minute, and I had completely forgotten to do the food shopping.

When #1GF! did arrive, she didn’t even notice the picture and I had to do those coaching hints that only girls are good at. Eventually, I just pointed out the picture, and #1GF! liked it. One of the things that I’ve been trying to learn is how to retouch photos so that they don’t look like they’ve been retouched, and because #1GF! couldn’t tell what had been changed until she saw the original, I felt like I had done my job. I never want her to feel like she needs retouching, but I do want her to think I’m smart and creative.

Thursday (Day 347): Shopping in Espanol

I finally got around to doing a little food shopping, and decided not wear a walkman or listen to death metal. The shopping seemed to go faster, but it certainly was a lot less rockin’. There was no holding up cheese with a mighty scowl and mouthing “Chhheeeeeeeezzzaaaaahhhh!” before dropping it into the cart with a mighty, wide-eyed nod. Not like things like that happen or anything, but cheese seemed a lot less epic without the music.

When I got to the self-checkout, I accidentally pressed the “Espanol” button, and couldn’t find a “Aye Aye Aye, No es bueno” button that would send me back to English, so I shrugged and went through it in Spanish. I have a basic understanding of Spanish, but there are enough pictures that anyone can get through it without knowing any Spanish at all. I highly suggest trying it if there’s no one behind you in line because it incites a tiny panic like you’ve been transported to a foreign country and you’re all alone.

When I got home, I cranked out three posts: a Netflix Post, a classic country music post, and a post on photo retouching. I ate dinner at 9:30 because if you jump off the writing train when it’s on a roll, you run the risk of never getting picked up again.

Friday (Day 348): Avatars and Death Stars

I looked at cars for a while and then hacked around with WordPress to see if I could show incoming links from multiple sources in the dashboard. I eventually realized that this might be cool, but it’s unnecessary if you check your referrer stats on a daily basis. I do, so I gave up and decided to try to get avatar support working in my theme.

WordPress 2.5 now supports avatars natively, but because my theme is a modified version of the original Kubrick theme, sometimes new features have to be hacked in manually. It only took a half hour or so, and now anyone who has an avatar through Gravatar.com will have their picture show up when they leave a comment. People that don’t have an avatar are stuck looking like Skully McGee.

Once I was done with all the hacks, I imported the Death Star and a weber grill into Google Sketchup to see if I could actually create a model that would allow someone to easily mask off and paint a grill to look like the Death Star. The idea came from Action Figure Insider’s sketches of the Death Star grill but I’ve never seen anyone build a real one. I figured if I could figure out how to mask it off, it would be really easy to make with some high heat paint. I eventually gave up because it was eating a lot of time for something that I didn’t think I’d ever build.

Saturday (Day 349): Mall Cop

I woke up with a headache and went out to look at granite yet again. We tagged another stone, and then decided to go out to lunch at the South Shore Plaza. They’re filming a Kevin James movie there called Mall Cop, so there were trailers, signs for extras parking, and the mall was decked out like it’s Christmas. I didn’t see any signs of any Hollywood types to walk by and be discovered, but what can you do. When I got home, I looked into how someone would go about getting a job as an extra, and eventually realized that the low pay and long hours might be a way for someone to break into acting, but it’s a lot of work for someone who doesn’t care about that career.

I couldn’t shake my headache, so the rest of the day was low key. We watched I Am Legend, which seemed ok until we caught Stranger Than Fiction which made I Am Legend seem like I Am a Pile of Crap. If you haven’t seen Stranger Than Fiction, I highly recommend it.

What I Learned

• Cumin in chocolate is gross no matter how gourmet it’s supposed to be.
• I say I’m not a class warrior, but I have a thing against people in Mercedes. I don’t know why.
• Google seems to penalize page rank for dropping Google ads.
• WordPress 2.5 is pretty cool, but so was WordPress 2.3
• I learned how to add avatar support to a WordPress 2.5 theme.
• I learned more photo retouching.
• Shopping with death metal is more fun, but without it is much faster
• Using the Spanish language setting at the grocery checkout makes it seem like I’m in a foreign country.
• Good movies make bad movies seem worse.
• A good movie without a good ending is like Chinese food without a fortune cookie.
• I’m tired of creatures that get burned by direct sunlight in movies, but have no problem with ambient light. If direct sunlight fries, then ambient light should at least bake. Hollywood: Please do away with this theme or apply a little logic to it.
• It’s really funny in a cool way to see your face plastered all over StumbleUpon.

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Posted in Life of Riley