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 483): Homemade Food And Creepy Machines

We started the day by watching Romance and Cigarettes, which ended up being good but weird. I imagine that it would appeal to Coen Brothers fans. We sat down to play Carcassonne for the first time, and the game didn’t turn out to be nearly as complicated as I expected. We went to #1GF!’s family’s house for dinner, and we were charged with bringing desert. We brought ice cream from a local farm, who sold quarts at the same price as half gallons. Why the two sizes were the same price was beyond me, but it was painted on the wooden sign, so it wasn’t a special or anything. Hold on. Maybe having the half gallons priced the same as the quarts makes people think that they’re getting a bargain and distracts them from the relatively high price they’re paying for the half gallon. Ooh those sneaky farmers.

We had a nice dinner, and to the kids’ delight, #1GF! got startled by a mechanical spider that had been set up to crawl down a string when you made a loud noise. I got a jar of homemade pickle chips to use on my lunches, so I couldn’t have been happier. They’re so much better than the store bought ones. After we got home, we spent the rest of the night playing Carcassonne.

Monday (Day 484): Unemployment Benefits

I typically get up at 5:30 these days (which seems a little crazy for someone who doesn’t have anywhere to go in the morning), but today I woke up at 4 AM and then 5 AM. Not having a job doesn’t detract from the feeling that my brain is robbing me of free sleep time when I wake up before the alarm. I laid in bed staring at the blurry red haze that is the alarm clock trying to figure out if I was looking at a 6 or an 8 and trying not to let the day start in my head before it did in the physical world.

When the alarm finally went off, I went to the gym and was dressed and answering e-mail by 6:30. When I grabbed my coffee, I stood out on my porch and listened to the rain. It was just dawn, and half the sky was cloudy and the other half was dark blue. There wasn’t anyone around, and so I leaned on the railing and listened as the rain hit the dying leaves with a dull patter. I couldn’t help but wonder if anyone else was doing the same thing, or if they were too busy getting ready for work or still resetting their brains from the day before. It was one of those rare quiet moments where I answered all those questions about whether I should be working with a quiet “Nah.” There are moments like these available all the time that end up buried under piles of to-do lists when you’re too busy to notice.

Within fifteen minutes, I decided to get back to writing and stop craning my neck up at the clouds like some sort of nut. I headed up to my desk, and even though I had most of LOR written, I spent almost the whole day adding to it. The whole point of writing most of it ahead of time was to stop me from spending the whole day on it, but I seem to be getting in the habit of writing more and more every Monday. Most Life Of Riley posts are over 3,000 words. Last week’s LOR was nearly 5,000. To put that in perspective, an average book is about 30-80 thousand words. At the rate that I’m going, I could technically crank out a really rough draft of a book in a couple of weeks. Maybe this blogging isn’t so bad for practice and discipline after all.

When #1GF! got home, we checked on the progress at the house before I made her Fettuccine Alfredo. We played Carcassonne again, and I seem to be winning more than usual, which is odd, considering she usually beats me in most games. Maybe I’m winning more often because there are knights and thieves in the game and nerds always win against non-nerds in games of that sort. Or maybe it’s because I’m constantly swishing my cape around and laughing maniacally whenever “Lord Jontoth, the Mighty” deploys a knight or thief. Either way, I’m winning, so the question is unimportant… Muah ha ha ha ha ha

Tuesday (Day 485): Annoyances And Bugs

I got up and went to the gym at 5 for the second day in a row. I debated about going because, even though I’m no longer a teenager, my metabolism tends to kick up too high if I work out every day. Unfortunately, the cold, black heart in my chest needs to be worked to keep it beating for as long as possible, so I decided that it was in my interest to go to the gym.

When I got home, I wrote all morning, and went food shopping in the afternoon. The market was full of people who liked to either A.) leave their carts in the middle of the aisle and stare at the ceiling, or B.) push their carts to the side and plug up the aisles with their big butts while intensely examining items on the bottom shelf. The biggest problem with these people in the supermarket is that if you run into them once, you’ll run into them gumming up the works for the next five aisles. No matter how many times I sped up on this trip, I would end up running into a new crowd of butt-sticking, aisle-hogging shoppers. There is a reason that I wear headphones when food shopping, and it’s mostly to keep distracted enough that I don’t strip down naked, roll myself in Cap’n Crunch, and run down the aisles knocking over big butt dipshits.

I dropped off the groceries and went to the house to talk to the painter and electrician who were moving along and needed checks. By the time I got home, it was late afternoon and I realized that I had forgotten to eat lunch. I grabbed a quick sandwich and checked my site stats. A friend who had shown up in last week’s LOR called to make sure that he didn’t offend me. I assured him that I’ve known him for way too long to get offended by him, and that he merely got me thinking about things. It was the first, “I was reading your blog and…” call that I’ve gotten in a long time.

Once things settled down, I got an e-mail from a reader who pointed out a bug with Best Foot Forward that was causing draft revisions to show up in their sidebar as normal posts in Wordpress 2.6.X. I nailed down a solution in about fifteen minutes and upgraded to the latest version of WordPress so that I could properly test it. Thirty minutes later, Best Foot Forward version 1.2 was uploaded to WordPress’s server for distribution.

Once #1GF! got home, one of the fire alarms started beeping every so often to let us know that it was running out of battery. It would beep, then I would listen for it to beep again to figure out where the noise was coming from. I’d inevitably get distracted by something else, and it would beep again when I wasn’t paying attention. This went on for longer than you’d think, but I finally found the culprit and replaced the batteries in it.

Wednesday (Day 486): Refusing A Dime And Chasing The Beep

Once I got back from the gym, I wondered why or how Danzig’s “Her Black Wings” got stuck in my head. I spent the morning writing, and then shut off post revisions in Wordpress after saving 30 drafts of a 1500 word post to the database. Maybe post revisions are good for some blogs, but they are annoying and a waste of space for the way that I blog.

I drove over to the house to drop off a check to the tile guy and talk to both the painter and electrician. The painter wanted to know what color white we wanted on the walls, and I sort of stood there wondering how many versions of white I was going to have to sift through. As it turns out, there are probably 25 versions of white to choose from not including tinted whites. I told him I had no idea and would get back to them once we looked through the whites and decided on one.

I decided where we were going to put the the floodlight that the last contractor inexplicably ripped out, and did it relatively quickly because I’m getting tired of having to make choices. I headed home and had a sandwich with homemade pickles on it. As I was happily chomping on picked cucumbers and onions, I realized that I forgot to go to the store to pick up samples of the 30 versions of white. I then couldn’t get the chip bag closed and couldn’t find a chip clip to close it with. I got overly annoyed with that chip bag, which wasn’t a good sign because we all know it’s never the chip bag that’s the issue.

I decided to check my stats and read my mail to throw myself into a place where I had more control and less choice. Because it was the first of the month, I changed up my monthly and all time best of lists (in the sidebar). I even added Google ads back in just to see if they are worth it at 100k visitors a month. They certainly weren’t worth it at 10k visitors, but I told #1GF! that I’d try them again to see if they made anything. She thinks I’m crazy for going without ads, but I look at like this:

When I was in college I worked for a retail clothing store to make some extra money. The boss told me that I was doing a great job, and announced that she was going to give me a dime an hour raise. I thanked her, but told her to keep it because a dime an hour raise was insulting. I thought it would be better to forgo (literally) a couple of dollars a week to make a point, than to accept a dime as being an acceptable form of validation.

I feel almost the same about online advertising. Is it better that I pour a ridiculous amount of work into this site and make no money, or pour a ridiculous amount of work and make a dollar a day? In one scenario, this is something that is helping me to practice writing, and will lead to something that will earn me a full time salary. In another, I’m busting my ass for a dollar a day, when there are much easier, and better paying alternatives. That dollar is like the dime, and for a while I’ve been politely telling advertisers to keep them. I’d rather feel like I’m a writer building my skills than someone who’s dancing for spare change.

I spent the afternoon trying to come up with a Mabegromo T-shirt even though I’m not sure that there’s a market for it. I figured if I came up with something clever, then maybe I could print them up and give them away. Thankfully, a friend called with a web question, stopping me from wasting too much time on it. About halfway through the conversation, another smoke detector in the house started beeping. It would beep, I would listen for it, he would talk, and I would return to the conversation and forget about the beep. It was the same process from the day before.

In the middle of the conversation, the alarm beeped again, and I couldn’t take it anymore. “Fuuuck!” I jumped out of my chair and ran down the stairs, startling my friend on the phone. He asked what the matter was and got a garbled reply about “f’n beeping” and smoke detectors. It’s not something I do with normal people, so if you hear something like that on the phone with me, you’re in the circle of trust and I ask that you don’t put together a blog post that makes me look like I’m out of my mind or someth…

Anyway. If you want free tech support, sometimes listening to the tech running around the house saying “I’m gonna find you, you sunufabitch” comes with the territory. This particular episode happened to deal with smoke detectors instead of a virus or some obscure setting that is blowing up your site. It ended with “Quiet now. Ok qui..[breep] AH HA! Gotcha, you bastard!” and the sounds of a smoke detector batteries hitting the floor like shell casings, leaving me to get back to making suggestions for my friend’s issue.

Thursday (Day 487): The Coyote In My Kitchen

I wasted some time looking for free fonts for a t-shirt design even though I still didn’t have a post for Friday. I looked at my ad earnings and realized that even at 100k visitors a month, Adsense may still not be worth the space. I resisted the urge to take it down, but I’m going to be struggling not to baleet them for the next 25 days.

I got a call from the contractor saying that the doors were being delivered, so I went over to the house to drop off the handles and lock sets for them. When I got there, I went in the back door, and heard the painters saying, “Get out of here now. Shoo.” When I went into the kitchen, there was a husky looking dog standing in my front hallway. I got within a couple of feet of it before one of the painters got it moving towards the open doorway. It walked out and stood on my front steps looking in. I took another look at its size and its bushy tail, and it seemed too small to be a husky.

“Wait, was that a dog?”

“Nope.”

“Is that a coyote? A coyote was just standing in my kitchen?”

“Yep. He probably smelled our lunch.”

I shut the front door enough that the coyote would have to push it open to get in. I started talking to the painters, and after a minute, I looked out the window and it was still standing on the front steps. I opened the door and made a movement to scare it off, but it didn’t even flinch. Wishing I had a beard and a flannel shirt, I closed the door fully and looked out the window. It jumped off the steps and ran off. The painters mentioned that the coyote had gone onto everyone’s porch up and down the street before arriving at my house. That didn’t sound good. Coyotes should be afraid of big people so that they don’t attack the hordes of little people who ride their bikes up and down the street.

I went home and wrote a bit, but got distracted by new versions of Gimp (released on 10/1) and Inkscape (I was months late on this one), Filezilla (9/29). I downloaded and installed them all because they’re some of the core programs that I use every day and I love free, good quality programs.

After #1GF! got home, we had to track down one of the smoke alarms to change its batteries or risk being woken up every few minutes to an annoying beep. I told her the story of the coyote in the kitchen, and after she stopped saying “NO WAY!”, I decided that “Coyote In The Kitchen” would make a nice title for a book.

Friday (Day 488): Running 1, Writing 0

I went to the gym in the morning and somehow porked my knee up pretty good. I don’t know if it was the 6000 lb deadlifts or the 4 billion pound squats or if I just banged it on a corner of something, but it was bad enough to require ice.

I got a quick post cranked out (which was a little too cute for comfort for some readers) before unlocking the house for the painters. I gave in and put on jeans for the first time this year because it was too cold not to. Resistance was futile. I started researching a post, but had to run back to the house before I could get really into it because the lock for the back door was defective. The guys started giving me shit, so I ended up giving them the finger. It was very unprofessional of me to do to people who are working on my house, but I was smiling and no one ran back to the truck sobbing, so I it all worked out. The door guy didn’t send the stain with the doors because he didn’t know what color we wanted, so I made a note on my list to call him once I figured it out.

I had to run the broken lock set back and get another one while the contractor’s guys finished installing the doors. While I was at the store, I priced out some knobs to save #1GF! and I some time later on. I dropped the lockset back to the house and went home to get the door colors over to #1GF! so we could get the stain ordered.

I went back to the article research, but it kept getting more involved. I had to run back to the house again because I realized that I didn’t have any keys to the new doors. I picked up one set, but was missing another. I couldn’t find the second set, so I gave up and headed over to the building department to try to square away some permit issues. The building department was closed, so I headed back home to continue my research and try to get something written.

On the way, I got a call from a former coworker who never calls me and we talked for a while before he had to go do family stuff. It was a pretty random call, but not as random as the next one that came in. I got a call from a Vietnamese (sounding) guy telling me that the old contractor wouldn’t pay him for the floors he did in my house and was ducking his calls. I told him to join the club. I also told him that I had to have his floors ripped up and redone because he did them so badly. When I asked how he got my number because I had never met him or talked to him before, he said the old contractor left my number on his answering machine saying that he should call me for money. I never had a contract with the guy, so I thought that was interesting. So, the old contractor takes my money, abandons the job, doesn’t pay his subs, and then leaves my number for the subs to collect money from me.

Good times. Good fucking times.

Saturday (Day 489): All Day House Stuff

I woke up at 6 to the alarm and was really not happy about it. I asked the clock if it was fucking kidding me, and it responded by lodging some 70’s tune in my head. It was not kidding me at all. It was dead serious.

We went to the house, then to the bank, then to a home store to get a bathroom mirror, lights and a doorbell. We dropped off a check to the kitchen people and tried to figure out what knobs we needed to get. We ordered all the drawer pulls and decided to get the knobs at a home store because they were cheaper. We talked about the kitchen place’s website, and they suggested I bill them for helping them with it. I told them that there wasn’t a chance that I would bill them for something like that because they have been so nice to us.

We drove all the way to Harvey Door and saw the saddest door showroom I’ve ever seen. They’re a door manufacturer, and they had only two storm doors on display. Home Depot has a whole row, and the manufacturer has two? It was a long drive for a ten minute visit that produced 0 results.

It was getting late, and we were going to get some lunch, but I thought we should get over to the paint store and get all of our errands done before we took a break. #1GF! reluctantly agreed, so off we went to the paint store. Because the bathroom color we picked looked like it had driven out of the 50’s and parked on our walls, we went to pick out something else. It was a small, local place, and we were out of there with a new color in less than twenty minutes. I don’t know if it’s because the people were helpful or because we have grown tired of choice.

We dropped the paint off at the house and then went to our local restaurant for a late afternoon lunch. I started in again with the whole “I need to write a book or go back to work” deal. Blogging will never pay the bills, and even if it could, there are much easier ways to make a buck.

#1GF! suggested I sit down and just start writing, but I look at a book like a 300 page term paper: If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re going to end up somewhere you don’t recognize and then have to rewrite the whole thing to make it fit the ending. That’s like writing the book twice. My goal is to have an idea, write the beginning and the end, and then spend some time writing the middle. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to come up with an idea that I’d personally want to sit down and read.

After lupper, we went to a craft store to look for ping pong balls for a goofy idea that I had. #1GF! played along because we really had nothing to do. We didn’t find any at the craft store, so we went to the mall to look. I found ping pong balls, but was too cheap to pay $2 for a 6 pack of them. I later regretted that decision. On the ride back, #1GF! and I were talking…

#1GF!: Did you have trouble quitting smoking?
Me: Uh, I probably relapsed a couple of times, so I suppose so.
#1GF!: I’m surprised at that.
Me: Well, it’s hard to quit smoking.
#1GF!: You don’t seem to have a hard time quitting anything. Drinking, smoking,
Me: …My job…
#1GF!: [laughing] Noooo, I mean you’re good at quitting things cold turkey and not looking back.
Me: [laughing] Oh my god, it’s true. I’m really good at… quitting. And there’s no job for it.
#1GF!: We all like to think every relationship is different, but we’re the same people. Sometimes, I wonder if you’ll ever quit me.
Me: I only quit things that are bad for me. Just don’t be bad for me.
#1GF!: What about when you’re a famous author? There’s a lot of pretty girls who show up to book readings.
Me: There is? Since when? I don’t think I could do a book realing anyway because I stumble over my words.
#1GF!: Oh, you do not.
Me: What did I just say a minute ago, book reelings? Reefings? Whatever it was, it wasn’t readings. It’d be a disaster. Plus, could you imagine me at a book reading? You know my agent would lean in and whisper something like “You could’ve worn a jacket.” Then, I’d look even dumber for wearing jeans and a metal t-shirt to a book reading.
#1GF!: No, you wouldn’t.
Me: And you know that they can pile pretty girls to the ceiling and I wouldn’t know if they were flirting with me until they whipped open their tops. Even then I’d think, ‘Holy crap, that’s weird. She must have fire ants on her or something. I better not get too close. Damned fire ants’.
#1GF!: Come on.
Me: Although it’s hard to believe, there are going to be more and more people as we get older who are a lot better looking than we are. Some guys are on a quest to find the prettiest girl in the world, and once she fades a little, it’s off to find the next. All I ever wanted was for a girl to be nice to me. I don’t know why it’s been all that hard to find, but it’s a little hard to live without once you find it. Hey, speaking of getting old, can we go to the graveyard to see if we can find any spooky graves?

#1GF! pulled into a local graveyard and stayed in the car, but I took pictures of a couple of interesting graves. Both were full sized figures of women, which is a little creepy if you imagine them moving or something, but not so creepy if you don’t believe in ghosts and goblins. While we were there, I got a call from the contractor who wanted to let me know that he has enjoyed working on this job. I waited for the punchline, but there wasn’t any.

What I Learned

• If the standard gauge is 250 words per page in publishing, every Monday, I write and edit a 13 to 20 page paper.
• Carcassonne is simpler than it seems.
• Graves are a lot less spooky if you don’t believe in ghosts.
• Harvey industries has a sad showroom for a door manufacturer
• I learned a bit about the different free virus scanners available.
• Craft stores don’t sell ping pong balls.
• The old contractor is sending his subs to ask me for money.
• Coyotes don’t scare easily and will walk right into your kitchen.
• There is something different about being awake before everyone else that seems better than being awake after everyone else.
• Wordpress 2.6 has a revision tracking feature that can’t be shut off through the options. It must be shut off with a plugin or by adding define('WP_POST_REVISIONS',false); to your wp-config file.

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