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 462): Caysodaylos

Made breakfast and somehow got stuck watching Richie Rich. Movies like this are the reason that I draw a line in the sand against #1GF! about having every cable station known to man. There’s never anything worth watching on, but if you give me enough channels, I’ll invariably get sucked into watching a piece of crap like Richie Rich. I’d rather have three channels with nothing on because it’s cheaper and less addictive. Giving me access to 200 channels is like leaving pixie stix all over the house when you know the fat kid is coming over. It’s not a good idea for anyone involved.

When #1GF! was getting ready, I added three more tracks to my Finetune cowbell playlist and then checked my stats. I found a site that was attempting to imitate my beard quest because they “scoffed” at it. I have to say that I’m amused when people take non-serious things very seriously, but it made me think: If knockoffs start appearing for your version of a Ronco product, it’s time to dig out your life preserver because you’re probably scheduled to jump the shark very soon.

I played video games again, but found it extremely unsatisfying, so I didn’t play long. Instead, #1GF! and I decided to walk down to the beach and enjoy some of that ocean air. We ended up sitting on a wall watching the surfers who were congregating to catch some of the waves from a hurricane that had moved out to sea. I thought that it was sort of funny that even though both the air and the water were pretty warm, most of them had wetsuits on. I thought it was even funnier that most of them had hundreds of dollars worth of equipment, but absolutely no sense for waves.

After a while, we went to our local haunt to grab an early dinner, and heard someone behind me say that they “should’ve ordered the caysodaylos or whatever.” I had no idea that quesadillas were so uncommonly difficult to pronounce.

Monday (Day 463): Tearing Out The Bathroom Again

Got up and went to the gym at 5, went to let the contractor into the house, and then went to the bank. When I got to the bank parking lot, I realized that I wasn’t sure of how to spell the contractor’s name, so I gave him a call. He didn’t answer, so rather than get an incorrect check, I went home. A little while later, I got a call back that the contractor would be over at the house prepping a couple of things for the floor guy, so I got the correct spelling and went back to the bank to get him a check. Unfortunately, by the time I made it back to the house, the contractor had already left. I went home to spend the rest of the day writing LOR. Late in the day, the contractor gave me another call, using some of my favorite language to describe the way our old contractor did things. It was a hack job, and I was laughing because it was funny to see someone else as perplexed and irritated at the mess that our old contractor made. It was nice to see that I wasn’t the only one.

#1GF! picked me up after work so that we could go see the house, and they had torn up almost the entire bathroom because wall and floor were both individually curved. We also found out the old contractor had hidden a light fixture behind a cabinet that was supposed to be moved. It wasn’t a good feeling to see that we were moving backwards, but it was good to see that things were finally going to fixed so that we could move forward.

When we got home, we ate dinner, and I continued writing until 9PM. We had garlic bread with dinner, so as we were laying in bed, #1GF! asked…

#1GF!: Isn’t your mouth garlicky?
Me: (Already forgetting about dinner because of all the writing) No, why?
#1GF!: (trying to find the word “mouthwash’) I needed to take a big swig of… uh… you know… ugh…
Me: Ass juice?
#1GF!: What is wrong with you?
Me: har har har Ass juice har har har
#1GF!: I’m glad you think you’re so funny. You deserve to go to bed happy.

Tuesday (Day 464): From Inept to Deceitful

I got up at 5 and read, then went to the house to meet the contractor. I had nothing ready to post, and I was already feeling the pressure, so I only waited around for fifteen minutes before heading home. Immediately after I got home, I got a call that he was there, so I jumped back in the car and went back to drop off the check from the day before. If I had just relaxed on the porch and wrote in my notebook, I would’ve saved myself some time.

When I got to the house, the bathroom floorboards were torn out because the old contractor had installed them unevenly. The contractor asked me if I could grab one of the lights for over the fireplace because he wanted to be absolutely certain that the lights would be at the right height when the electrician moved them. Even though it was another trip back and forth, it was good to be asked questions before things happened rather than having to tell the contractor that things had to be fixed after they were done. On the other hand, I hadn’t stopped running, had no post, and the morning was slipping away.

I went home to write for a while and returned with the lights later on. When I got back, the contractor had found that the bricks installed in bathroom window were installed cracked and broken by the previous contractor who then covered with floor leveling cement to hide the error. Then, he almost apologetically took me up to the roof to show me how the contractor hadn’t actually pulled out the frames of the old windows completely before installing the new ones. There were large pieces of rotted wood sticking out everywhere. There was also a hell of a lot of some sort of goo everywhere instead of flashing.

To top things off, the old contractor punched a silver dollar sized hole in the center of one of the brand new windows and then filled the hole with caulk. That seems like a reasonable thing to do with brand new, three fucking hundred dollar window, considering the hole was in the middle of the window sill on the outside. No water would get into something like that, right? Say it loud and proud like my old contractor ladies: Caulk is the cure all. I was standing out on the roof staring at a big hole full of caulk, and realizing that this took my old contractor out of the simply inept category, and put one of his feet in deceit.

I went home and started writing again, but I got peppered with calls, so I had a hard time getting anything written. It’s much better than the week long stints of unreturned calls that came with the last contractor, but when combined with my lack of ideas, I wasn’t getting very far. Frankly, if the posts have to take a backseat to the house, they have to, but I put a lot of pressure on myself that I should be able to simply crank out a post a day no matter what else I’m doing.

In the afternoon, I got a call from the electrician saying that the building department wouldn’t issue him a permit because there was already an open permit on the job. He said I needed a letter from the previous electrician stating that he was no longer on the job. That’s when all the frustration of not being able to get something written simmered over the top of the pot a bit. I got a little animated with him and told him that it sounded like he was getting the runaround because I had dropped a letter to town hell a while back to cancel all open permits on my house.

I told him I would go down there and straighten it out as soon as I hung up, and I think I freaked him out a little because he told me to calm down. There was no calming me down, though. If spending 13 years in a large company taught me one thing, it’s that bureaucracy is easier to get through face to face because there is less of a chance for both parties to sidestep or escape. On the way over, I missed two calls from the contractor because I can’t drive, shift, be aggravated, and pick up the phone at the same time.

I went to the building department with my nice face on, and although they remembered that I dropped off a letter, they couldn’t find it. I had to write another letter by hand explaining what I had dropped off before. The new contractor showed up a few minutes after I did, and I think he sort of expected to see an office full of carnage. He filled out some paperwork, and we got out of there.

On the way out, the contractor mentioned that he wanted to go back to talk to the building inspector to make sure that the electrical and plumbing permits were all set. I thought it was overkill, but even though that’s why I went in, the letter that I wrote on the spot didn’t cover electrical and plumbing. They wanted additional letters to cancel those permits. After everyone looking at each other for a few seconds, I asked if I could just tack it onto the end of the letter that I wrote 5 minutes ago. They said it would be fine as long as I named the contractors and signed it again, so that’s what I did. Twenty minutes and the job was back on track.

I went home and wrote until #1GF! got home, and went to the house again to see the progress. I came home and wrote until 10 and still had no post to show for it. I did, however, have house construction that was still moving forward.

Wednesday (Day 465): Send More Humans

When I went in to work out at 5:30, there were two women already there, and neither of them even turned their heads when I walked in. The complex gym is pretty small, so it was a little weird, but whatever. Maybe they hadn’t had their Cheerios yet.

I waited around for a half hour to let the floor guys in before going home to start writing, but I didn’t really care because the floors were looking really good. I couldn’t tell where the floor had been replaced in places because it matched so well. If I didn’t know that there had been holes in certain spots, I don’t think I would’ve known that the floor was repaired.

That happiness turned into frustration once I started writing because for the second day in a row, I was having trouble getting a post out. I don’t like to miss a post during the week, but if I do, I eventually shrug it off. If I miss two days in a row, I feel like I’m slacking, and pile pressure on to get a post out. Between fielding a few calls and visiting the house a total of five times that day to check on various things, I couldn’t get a thing written and out the door and that frustrated the shit out of me. It’s a strange reaction considering I have been intentionally going without ads for months now.

I finally got a quick comic out, which took less time than they normally do. As is usual when I go for geek humor, I had to explain parts of it to #1GF! because she’s only geeky by proximity. I still didn’t have a post ready for Thursday, I didn’t return a library book that was due, and we were facing at omelets for dinner because I didn’t make time for the food shopping. It was easily solvable, inconsequential things, but they all added to the feeling that I was falling behind. Who needs a boss or a job to feel pressure over deadlines? My pressure to meet deadlines is self-induced. That’s why I made a decent corporate slave.

I was a little punchy from wrestling with posting all day, so after our omelet dinner, #1GF! put on the science channel to calm me down. An ad for a medical mysteries show came on, and the host was describing some symptoms and said, “When I touch her in the chest, she feels it…” and I burst out with “IN THE VAGINAAAAA!”, completely obscuring the end of the sentence. #1GF! gave me that eye-rolling look that she gives when I should be ignored like a zit faced kid at a middle school dance.

As soon as my outburst ended, I heard someone moving around outside and realized that the air conditioner that had kept the windows closed all summer was definitely not on. The windows were wide open. There must be something soothing about walking your dog out in the dark and hearing a man yell “IN THE VAGINAAAAA!” unexpectedly. It must be even more calming if it comes from your neighbor’s apartment. It’s times like that when I think that I’m social dead weight, and #1GF! recommends that I get more human contact during the day.

Thursday (Day 466): Triple Score Swear Combos

I opened the house for the floor guys in the morning, and went home to check my stats. My religion, atheism, agnosticism post was generating a bunch of traffic, which is funny because it pokes fun of everyone. What’s even funnier was that the only people who seemed to be refuting it were the atheists.

I spent the whole day fact checking and writing my Metallica post in hopes of posting it, but it still needed a final round of editing. Instead, I ended up giving up and put out a quick post out in its place at the last minute. I ended up going back to it at 8:30, making changes and saving often, until I thought it was as good as it was going to get. I was finally done.

At 10:30, when I was about to post it and head off to bed, my two hours of edits disappeared. I don’t know if I hit the back button or what, but I was staring at the post as it was before I started editing. Thanks to the autosave feature of Wordpress, that original version was committed to my database, and those two hours of edits were overwritten. I tried to figure out what went wrong, but I didn’t want to bother #1GF!, so I ended up doing the whispering equivalent of yelling, where you expend the same amount of energy as you would yelling swears, but without all the loud noise.

By the time I finished basic troubleshooting, I was running through double and triple score swear combos that made absolutely no sense and would’ve sounded insane had anyone been within three or four feet. When you’re throwing out phrases like “cockass fuck bag” and “dick donkey shit toast”, you’re brain needs to be excused from whatever it is doing immediately. I gave up and powered the machine down. I didn’t know if I was angrier at losing all the edits, not having the post ready for the general 5 AM post time, or having to continue working on a post that had already taken me way to long as it was. I didn’t analyze it. I just went to bed.

Friday (Day 467): Let’s Start RUNNING!

I got up and went to the gym at 5, and then immediately tried to reconstruct the edits in the Metallica article that I lost the night before. Even though there were a lot of edits, I remembered them fairly well and had the post done before I had to go to the house to let the floor guy in. I went to the bank to get a check for the floor guy who had installed a new hallway, fixed the old radiator holes, and fixed a good number of the screw ups from the last floor guy. I called to get the plumber in to install the heating, and the boiler was dropped off within an hour. Things were looking up.

I drove up to mow my parent’s lawn and asked the neighbor how his wife was because she had been in poor health. That’s when I found out that she had died the prior week. The couple had been together fifty years. I decided to drop by #1GF!’s work to see if I could get her to go out for lunch. She was more than happy to go.

While we were sitting at a sandwich shop, I saw a older woman dressed like a twenty year old walk by. I actually did a double take because her belly was sticking out of a shirt that was cut too tight and too short. When I turned back to #1GF!, I said something like “C’mon you’re fifty lady. Dress your age.” As I reached for my sandwich, I looked down at my cargo shorts, metal t-shirt, and Vans and said, “C’mon dude. You’re in your mid thirties. Give it up and dress your age.”

On the way out, we ran into a former co-worker of mine, who I hadn’t seen in a while. I met the guy years ago when we both got stuck on a six month project that no one wanted any part of that ended up dragging on for years. We talked a bit, and #1GF! kept having to push me toward the table to keep me from swinging my arms into people who were walking by. I eventually told the guy that it was good to see him, but that I had to get outside where there’s more room to swing my arms around. Like most of my former co-workers, he just sort of smiled and shook his head.

By the time I dropped #1GF! back at work, did the food shopping, and headed home, it was late afternoon. I answered my e-mail and then got a call from a friend who needed some Sketchup help to redesign a bathroom. I tried to walk him through some stuff, but he hadn’t even installed Sketchup yet, so he didn’t know what I was talking about. I suggested that he take a look at my Sketchup tips from a while back. There wasn’t a lot of time left in the day, but I managed to write a little before #1GF! made dinner. Thanks to a late call from the contractor, she also cleaned up. Yea, who’s domestic, now?

Saturday (Day 468): Wasting Gas Running Around

I woke up at 6 thinking I was the early bird only to find #1GF! had been awake long enough that she was already reading a book. She went to work out, and I went to let the plumbers in to install the baseboard heat. Plumbers on a Saturday, I say? Yea, and I only called them the day before to schedule it. It’s been such a distinct turnaround with this job that I feel like Alan Funt is going to jump out at some point and tell me to look at a camera in a tree and smile.

#1GF! and I spent the day going to places looking for lights, faucets, and a bathroom mirror. We drove all the way to the Northern part of the state to hit a home improvement store, and ended up going to the Burlington mall while we were in the area. When we walked in, we noticed that the mall smelled like an expensive hotel, and the stores were nothing that we ever heard of. We joked that we need to get off the beach more often. Everyone walking by seemed like they were on their way to a wedding or a luncheon at the yacht club, making us wonder what the hell kind of fancy rich people mall we had wandered into. It eventually turned normal, but we didn’t have any luck finding anything that we were looking for.

We were striking out everywhere, so headed back to our own neck of the woods to hit more stores in search of a bathroom mirror. We were running out of steam, and Warrior needed food badly, so we went to lunch. #1GF! wanted to go to TGIFridays, but I never agree to go there because I think it sucks. I did this time because it was right in front of us, and the memory of getting a vanilla coke there as a kid held some interest to me.

TGIFridays has changed since I was a kid, but I’m still justified in my opinion of it. There’s a whole lot less crap on the walls, and they don’t have vanilla cokes on the menu anymore, but the food was still an overpriced and underportioned version of Friendly’s. The waitress smiled once at the very beginning of the meal, and her failure to blink seemed to indicate that she was actually dead on the inside. I couldn’t really blame her too much. If I had to work there, I’d probably be dead on the inside, too.

Beaten by our long and fruitless post-lunch shopping excursion, we picked up Chinese takeout to avoid having to cook. When the lady brought our food and read off what we had ordered, she didn’t wait for the confirmation, so I ended up saying “Yup, that’s right” to the back of her head. I can’t say that I was insulted because they make such good Chinese food. Not even the crappiness of Dude, Where’s My Car (which had worked its way up to the top of our Netflix queue from sheer neglect) could ruin the headache inducing goodness that was in that brown paper bag.

What I Learned

• A lot about exactly why Metallica sucks.
• TGIFridays no longer sells vanilla cokes, and they’ve become a crappy version of Friendly’s.
• What I find funny and how I dress are entirely inappropriate for my age.
• People have started to imitate my beard quest. Please get me my leather jacket and set up the ramp for the shark jump.
• #1GF! does not find the words “ass juice” amusing.
• My old contractor was more inept than I could’ve imagined, but filling a hole in a window with caulking implies something worse.
• Regular shopping eats too much time with travel. If CERN would hurry up and get the teleporters online, things would go a lot faster.
• #1GF! can identify a picture of the cast of Star Trek, but has no idea who Yoda is.
• I create a lot of unnecessary pressure to post on this blog.
• There is a smell that I associate with a fancy hotel.
• The Burlington Mall seems like a rich person’s mall at one end.

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Posted in Leisure