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 385): Flying Monkeys, Indeed

Watched Weeds: Season 3 in the morning, and then took a walk to the house at #1GF!’s suggestion. Can someone please tell me what’s up with girls and going for walks? Maybe it’s a gal thing, because I don’t know of any guy who just goes out for a walk unless they’re too fat too run or trying to stop themselves from throwing things inside their houses. Maybe I liked walking at one time, but once I turned three and discovered jumping, walking hasn’t really been a source of fun for me.

Because I had nothing to do, I ended up going on the walk with #1GF!, but as a man, I don’t believe that I’m allowed to gain any health benefits from any activity where there isn’t enough pain to justify a “BOOYAH!”. I made sure to undo any health benefits that may have accrued by making sure that we walked all the way to the grocery store so that I could buy cookies. #1GF! didn’t seem to mind because, well, like I said: girls like walks.

As we were walking on what I will now refer to as our “cookie quest”, a pre-teen walked by and yelled out “flying monkeys!”, thinking that she would freak us out with her random behavior. All she ended up doing was making me think, “Shit. I’ve finally reached the age where kids think that random, non-threatening words will freak me out. Aaaand I’m taking a walk. Maybe I should stop into the hardware store and get some tennis balls for my walker.” It was not a proud, youthful moment to say the least.

We walked home and I sat on the couch eating cookies and waiting for either Murder, She Wrote, Matlock, or a Power Chair commercial to come on so that I could feel like people my age can still lead active and fulfilling lives.

Monday (Day 386): Slayer Came Over To Jam

I have no idea what the hell happened this day, so I’m going to say that Slayer came by to jam. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t, but I can’t remember, and you weren’t there, so who’s going to dispute it except Slayer themselves?

Tuesday (Day 387): House Frau

I cleaned the bathroom, planned the dinners for the week, did the food shopping, checked on the house, cooked dinner, and had to shut off the PC mid-day thanks to a thunderstorm. Had I turned on a soap operas and grown a set of sweet, sweet cans, I could’ve been mistaken for someone’s lonely housewife. When you’re pulling equal weight in bills, the feeling of being stuck running household errands can be a crappy feeling. I actually thought about getting a job just to not feel like the house frau anymore, but I opted to upgrade Firefox and research the history of heavy metal until the feeling went away.

Wednesday (Day 387): Domestication

I made an update to Better Blogroll and then went over to the house. I ended up talking to the painters and pointing out glaring issues with the paint, but they kept telling me that everything was good. If that wasn’t how this whole project had been going, I might’ve been surprised, but it’s not, so I wasn’t.

I went home, did some backups, and spent the rest of the day researching Doo Wop in an effort to impress my parents with my knowledge of their music. I made dinner for #1GF!, and even called to see what time she’d be home so that I could time it properly. Real domestication has replaced the corporate domestication, and I’m not too psyched about it right now.

Thursday (Day 389): Doo Wop

Spent most of the day finishing off my Doo Wop playlist and post. I eventually realized that I’ve lost the ability to link directly to playlists with the Finetune player. For some reason, the player only recognizes a user’s collection of playlists and refuses to link directly to an individual playlist. Finetune never responded to let me know if there was a fix for the problem, and got bored trying to hack out a workaround with the URL, so I never found out how to fix it.

I spent a little time creating a fake Doo Wop 45 for the post from an old Atlantic 45, but I don’t think anyone really noticed it. #1GF! didn’t say anything because she said she thought it was real. It wasn’t. It was just me goofing around and wasting time on things that people don’t really notice.

At the end of the day, #1GF! and I went to the house to stare at the progress. She likes going there, but I just end up finding more problems every time I go. I’m a little more than tired of this project at this point. I’m tired of picking things out that are obviously wrong over and over again, I’m tired of calling the contractor for updates that don’t exist, and I’m tired of spending a shitload of money on a house that I can’t even live in. At this point, I think I’m a little tired of everything except pizza, #1GF!, and you folks, of course. When you consider getting a job just to avoid dealing with the mundane bullshit that makes up your life, something is wrong.

Friday (Day 390): Cancellation

I checked my stats, went to the grocery store, and then dropped by the house to see if anything was going on. In the afternoon, #1GF! called to tell me that a thunderstorm was coming my way, which I thought was a strange reason for a phone call. Thirty minutes later a thunderstorm rolled in like I’ve never seen, and soaked everything like a fake Hollywood monsoon. It was cool to stand and watch the rain, but I had to shut down all the PCs because of the thunder and lightening, so I couldn’t work on anything.

Once all the storm passed, I got back on the PC and started writing. I didn’t feel like writing this post, but weekends are always busy with obligations and house choices, so I figured that I had better sit down and rough out a portion of it to save myself some work on Monday. When writing here becomes an obligation, things aren’t going well because I can typically work on this site for twelve hours a day without it feeling like work. Once I got started, the maintenance guy showed up and we stood and talked for a while before we both had to get back to work.

When I couldn’t write anymore, I started retouching some photos that people sent in a while ago for me to practice retouching on. Unfortunately, GIMP crashed before I saved. I never get mad when that happens, because if I don’t save early and often, the loss is my own damned fault. I simply uttered “No” and a swear word or two before starting over while the changes were still fresh in my mind.

Later in the day, #1GF! and I went to check on the house and found fresh cement on all of our new windows. Once we saw all the issues inside, I had to leave a message for the contractor and we went out to dinner to try to calm me down. I only partially relaxed because the summer people are clogging up the local joints like hair in a drain, and we had to wait a half hour for a table at a place that we normally walk right into. We drove by a carnival in town and the lights against the ocean backdrop were relaxing, but it only replaced the frustration while it was in sight, and at 30 MPH, it wasn’t in sight for long.

When we got home, I worked on the photo retouching again because I find that concentrating on tiny things keeps me from popping about larger issues. It seemed to distract me for a while, and I ended up figuring out an interesting way to remove scratches from a photo by overlaying a negative of the photo over the original. The negative over the original cancels the scratches right out.

Saturday (Day 391): Two Weeks

We went to #1GF!’s nephew’s birthday party from 9:30 AM until 6:30 PM. Instead of enjoying the cookout, I couldn’t stop thinking about the house because every so often someone would ask me how it was coming along. It’s normal for them to ask, but every time they did, I had to repress the frustration and explain that things weren’t on track without teaching the kids any new swear words. It got to the point that we were all making the joke from The Money Pit where the house is always going to be done “in two weeks” no matter when you asked.

When we got home, we had egg salad sandwiches for dinner and ironically, The Money Pit was on TV. After it ended, I finally freaked about the house for a while. When #1GF! got tired of listening to me sputtering on like an old diesel truck with no muffler, I redirected my energy into fixing my RSS feed, which Feedburner has been refusing to deliver for the last couple of weeks.

No matter how short I set my RSS feed, Feedburner would give users an error that the feed was unavailable because it was over the 512k size limit. After an hour of troubleshooting, I finally figured out that deactivating and reactivating one of my spam fighting plugins (Bad Behavior) fixed the issue and got my feed working. By then, #1GF! was asleep, so I resumed stewing about the house until long after it was time to go to bed. I actually had to watch infomercials until I fell asleep to keep my mind off of the house, which is something that I never do.

What I Learned

• “Two weeks” is not a joke.
• Sometimes having a job can help distract you from other issues.
• I figured out a neat way to get rid of photo scratches.

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Posted in Leisure