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 357): 11,000 Visitors

When I got up to check my stats, I had just been brought up after being taken down for 24 hours due to going over my monthly bandwidth limit. I estimate that I missed about 18,000 visitors in that time period, but I don’t blame my host. I agreed to a bandwidth limit when I signed up, and I had gone over it. It was as simple as that. I had never come close to my 100 Gb limit before, so I never thought to check my usage regularly. If I was lucky enough to have this happen again, I told myself that I’d have to keep a better eye on things.

We filled the day with looking for lights and other house stuff, but it seemed like we should’ve been doing something fun because the weather was so nice. I’m starting to think that filling time with errands is the Yankee way.

Monday (Day 358): 16,000 Visitors Today

We got up early because #1GF! wanted to go out for a walk. I’m not much of a walker, but I had nothing planned, so I figured I should go. It was early and cold, so I threw on sweat pants, not thinking that we would be out too long. After a couple of hours of wandering our town, we decided to stop in to a local restaurant to refuel. We sat at the counter, which I like to do at breakfast time, and got a quick meal.

From there, we walked to the house because #1GF! can’t come within a half mile of the place without thinking of some reason to visit it. I don’t like to visit because I always seem to pick out something wrong, but I went anyway. Once she got her fill, we walked on and on, checking out new houses that were being built and trying to imagine what it must be like to live in different locations. After about four hours of this, I was sweating my nuts off, and itching to get home and into some shorts.

As soon as we walked in the door, we picked up a message from some friends who were coming down to the beach and wanted us to go along. We headed down to meet them for a few hours on the sand. The beach was packed thanks to the nice weather, and we had a group of girls next to us who really wanted us to be able to hear the new Madonna CD. As a male, I have the innate ability to ignore almost anything that isn’t shaped like boobs, so tuning out the music wasn’t really a problem for me. But seriously? Madonna? Even I know that Madonna can’t be hip, and you can tell I’m lame by the way I wear my shorts. Dear girls, U R lame.

Anyway. Our friends’ teenage daughter showed up to say hello, and she’s always fun. She’s a nice kid, and I’m not making fun, but the teenage mind is such a foreign experience to me that I almost always end up shaking my head and laughing. My favorite quote from that conversation was that “Girls don’t like boys who write,” which everyone found amusing, considering that’s all I do all day. She may be right. Maybe girls don’t like boys who write. As long as no one tells #1GF! that I write all day, instead of riding around on a motorcycle, things should work out fine.

After a few hours in the sun, we headed home and I cobbled together a recipe for pesto sauce from a bunch of different sources. The recipe called for pine nuts, which, I found out, really shouldn’t be eaten by the handful. They must be the nut family’s equivalent of baker’s chocolate because I make the exact same face when eating either one. The sauce came out ok, but I might need to tweak the recipe a little next time.

We were pretty worn out by the end of the day and just wanted to sit in front of a movie until it was time for bed. Unfortunately, the only thing that we had from Netflix was a movie that had somehow gotten into our queue without either of us remembering adding it. We spent 15 minutes waiting for something to happen before giving up and shutting it off. Because we had no plan for fun, we did the Yankee thing and started picking paint colors for the house. I even tricked #1GF! into going over to the house so that we could start measuring off rooms to see what would fit. It was there in the semi-darkness that we realized that the new house isn’t nearly big enough to support some of the furniture that we’ve been looking at.

Tuesday (Day 359): 24,000 Visitors Today

I drove by the house early to see if anyone was there, and found a guy sawing through a brick wall. I didn’t know a guy was supposed to be sawing through a brick wall, so it’s interesting that my first thought was “Awesome!” instead of “What the hell is that guy doing?”

When I got home, I found out that my site was getting so much traffic that my host had suspended it because I was taking down the server that I was on. I had to load a Wordpress plugin called Super Cache to ease the server load. Most of the traffic was because my beard quest page was still getting linked by big name sites like NPR, Neatarama, Metafilter, and Fazed, all of which I have been reading for years.

I can’t begin to tell you exactly how cool I thought it was to be featured on sites that I regularly read, but it has been one of the highlights of my blogging career so far. The best part of the whole thing is that even though #1GF! had never heard of reddit, metafilter, or neatarama, she looked at me like I’m actually cool. Not the “I love you so you’re cool with me even though we both know you’re a nerd” kind of cool, but the “Wow, you’re pretty cool” kind of look. I won’t be winning any cool contests any time soon, but at least she thinks I could compete.

I spent the whole day answering e-mails and comments, and thanking folks who were linking to me. Once #1GF got home, we finished up our paint decisions and then went out to dinner because neither of us was in the mood to whip up dinner. When we got home, I went back to the PC to check more stats and thank more linkers until long after I should’ve gone to bed.

Wednesday (Day 360): Over 33,000 Visitors Today

I checked my stats for the day before, and even though they were insanely high by my standards, I think I expected a lot more because of all the fuss about slowing down the server. It’s really odd to look at 20,000 visitors and be disappointed for a second before you realize that 20,000 people in a day is insanely awesome.

I spent most of the day writing what should’ve been a quick post about Mustachr, and by the afternoon I was starting to saying things like “Come on man, pick up the pace!” to myself because there were errands that needed to be run before #1GF! got home. I stopped adding mustaches to a picture of me as a kid, grabbed whatever I could out of the fridge, and ran out the door with a half piece of pizza hanging out of my mouth.

I dropped off the paint and tile SKU’s to the contractor, and there were more people working at the house than I had seen since the project started. I was psyched. I went to a plumbing place to do some recon on faucets and save #1GF! some time by eliminating some choices. All I ended up doing was getting a couple of brochures and the advice that I should look at faucets on the internet and come back once I knew what I wanted.

Once I got home, I wrote more, answered a bunch of e-mails and comments, and ran out of steam before I could check my stats. I actually made #1GF! eggs for dinner because I was too lazy to cook. Right before bed, I ran across a guy who had taken part in MaBeGroMo, and shaved in March, earning him the title of “MaBeGroMo Champion”. I had to leave him a comment on his three month old post because I felt so bad that this guy took part in the event and I never knew about it.

Thursday (Day 361): 16,000 Visitors Today

I started the day off watching a portion of Back to the Beach with Frankie and Annette. That movie sucks, but I found it difficult not to keep switching back to it. I hit the bandwidth ceiling on my site again, and got shut down because I chewed through another 25 Gb in less than a week. When I talked to my host, they were good about getting me back online on the premise that this is a temporary situation. I said that it was, and I fully expect to fade out of fashion like pair of bell bottoms in the near future.

I headed out to drop a check off to the contractor and got home pretty quickly. I thought the rest of the day was going to be spent writing and checking my referrer stats, but I ended up being interviewed by phone and then e-mail about my love of beards. Even though I think that getting interviewed is pretty cool, I don’t understand what has gotten people interested in me all of a sudden. Don’t think I’m knocking it, at all. I just don’t understand it.

Friday (Day 362): 23,000 Visitors Today

#1GF! took the day off, and we drove out to Gardner, Mass to look at furniture. The first thing that happened was that we got stuck in traffic because the damned Fore River Bridge was open. Luckily, we got stuck next to a kid in a white ford Taurus who wanted to spread his love of Southern rap with everyone within a 100 yard radius. Before you get annoyed at those kids, remember that you went through the same phase with Led Zeppelin or NWA (or something) back in the day. It’s a phase we all went through, right?

The only song that I can remember playing was “I know you see it” by Young Joc. I didn’t know that the song was by Yung Joc or even what it was called, but I was laughing and singing it for the rest of the damned day. If you’ve never heard it, the chorus goes, “Bim Bam, you know you want some, she chewin’ on the dick like a piece of Bubble Yum.” And just when you think that the song is a little sexist, a woman chimes in about chewing pussy like Bubble Yum, just to make everything fair.

I don’t understand why it’s being immortalized in such a distinctly positive light, but all this chewing on naughty bits does not sound like a good time. It is a really catchy song though, so I hope Yung Joc gets a product deal with Bubble Yum. I would really love to see Yung Joc smiling and holding up a pack of Bubble Yum above the slogan, “Yung Joc says, ‘Chew it like a dick’”.

Once the bridge opened, we made our way north and spent a few hours going from store to store in the furniture capital of the state. After we hit our last furniture warehouse, we thought about taking a break for lunch, but because the local bars looked like the burgers came with a side of rape, we didn’t stop in. Instead, we decided to grab dinner before we hit the furniture stores that are closer to home. We finished up by 9:30PM, and when we got home, we found out that my site had been down for four hours because I had chewed through 25Gb of traffic in two days as a result of being linked to by sites like College Humor, The Atlantic and W00t. I don’t understand why people are so into my beard quest, but I think it’s funny and weird every time I go to a site and see my mug staring back at me.

Saturday (Day 363): 10,000 Visitors

We went to a couple of yard sales in the morning, and I drove. #1GF! usually drives, and I typically navigate, but since I had a full tank of gas, we decided to reverse roles. After pulling over three times in twenty minutes to help #1GF! navigate, the experiment ended. We pulled over one final time and #1GF! got behind the wheel of rocket car and I took up navigating. Even though #1GF!’s has a good sense of direction, without a steering wheel, she is an absolutely atrocious navigator.

We eventually made it to a couple of the yard sales, and #1GF! found a $10 filing cabinet and didn’t buy it even though I told her that I could probably get the people to not only sell it to me for $5, but throw in their mother as a cleaning lady to sweeten the deal. She only kicked herself for two miles before forgetting about it, so she couldn’t have wanted it that badly. They had no Mr. T stuff, and some dink was pulling classic rock records out of a box like they were collectible, so I left empty handed as well.

After the prior day’s furniture shopping spree, you’d think that we’d be done, but after we dropped a check off to the kitchen folks, we were off to another furniture store and then to an unfinished furniture store in historic Plymouth. To make the day better, we had lunch at Friendly’s. Ok, I know that Friendly’s is ass, but it reminds me of being a kid, so in recent months, I’ve started going there again like there’s something on the menu worth eating.

The waitress screwed up both of our orders, and I eventually got what I wanted, but #1GF! wouldn’t let me complain about her meal being wrong. The place was packed with kids, yet the most interesting thing that happened was seeing a woman who was possibly shorter than #1GF! and then trying to figure out if she really was.

From Plymouth, we drove halfway across the state to go to Expo to look for knobs, faucets, and all the other crap that we know is going to have to be decided on suddenly. On the way out, #1GF! wanted to stop into Linens N’ Things, which pretty much sucks if you’re a guy, but I wasn’t awake enough to try to stop her. I got bored pretty quickly in there, so when people weren’t looking, I would start dancing in the aisles to make #1GF! laugh. It wasn’t little “look, I’m snapping my fingers, ha ha” dancing. This was the type of dancing that is so big that it feels like you might be wowing the judges, when in reality you’re a mess of flailing arms and legs. No matter how careful you are, that kind of dancing is as hard to hide as a boner in a Speedo, so I did get busted a couple times. Luckily, no one joined in or anything, probably because they were too busy picking quilts and listening to their hearts race over all the “As Seen On TV” merchandise.

I then dragged #1GF! to Ikea to see if there was any furniture we might like there. I don’t know what I was thinking, because there is nothing but dorm room furniture in that place. I don’t know why I expected any different this time around. We were pretty ground down by then, but we still went to one last furniture store before stopping into a Dunkin Donuts to get some iced coffee. When I pulled up to the drive through, despite how I felt, I made my voice as upbeat as I could, to the point where you’d expect me to use phrases like “Sure do!” and “You bet!”. I suppose I just wanted to see if it made any difference.

When we got up to the window, the girl told us a random story about a woman who ran over a turkey and asked for some hot water to clean all the blood off of her car. Then, another girl got involved in the conversation, so that there were two wide-eyed smiling girls practically leaning out this little, drive through window to tell us about the goose that wanders around there looking for the dead turkey because it was somehow in love with it. There was no one behind us, so this went on for a few minutes, leaving us laughing and shaking our heads as we drove off.

All that joy got sucked out the window when we stopped by the house to check on the progress. Both the brick and mortar that was being used to close up a doorway didn’t match the existing brick at all. I was pissed, so even though it was 6PM on a Saturday night, I put in a call to the contractor to nicely explain that the brick was no good. He agreed and said he’d talk to the mason. After working as a LAN admin for a number of years, I don’t like to call people off hours. I think that everyone needs their downtime where they’re not expected to be on call.

By the time we got home we were exhausted thanks to a day where we accomplished nothing but preference consolidation. I fully expected to fall asleep while we watched a movie, but the late coffee and the inability to let go of the issue with the mismatched brick kept me up a lot later than I would’ve expected.

What I Learned

• Apparently, with a lot of planning and a little luck, this post proves that you can survive a full year without a job in one of the most expensive locations in the U.S. without being rich or collecting unemployment.
• A handful of pine nuts is the nut equivalent of baker’s chocolate.
• I learned to make pesto sauce.
• People react nicely to my upbeat voice.
• 20,000 visitors a day can look like a lot or a little, depending on your perspective.
• If you’re in Linens N’ Things, you can dance if you want to. You can leave your friends behind. Your friends don’t dance, and if they don’t dance, well they’re probably just looking for the latest “As seen on TV gadgets.”
• My host is understanding when I get rammed with traffic, but my site will go down a number of times.
• Kids today enjoy Madonna and having their private parts chewed. Although they are similar, I have decided that I no longer understand kids nowadays.
• When faced with a free day, I seem to go the Yankee way and run errands.
• Big traffic is a trip and a half, but regular readership is still built one person at a time.
• Getting interviewed is surreal if you can’t understand what the fuss is all about.
• Thanking people who link to you can take hours at 20,000 users a day. I can’t imagine how the big sites do it.
• Getting linked by big sites that you read really feels like an accomplishment even though it seems to be mostly luck.
• There are a million types of furniture, faucets, and lights available, and I like maybe two of them, but I’m really not sure.
• Geese can apparently fall in love with turkeys.
• Girls don’t like boys who write.

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Posted in Leisure