This is week 79 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing 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. This edition was a lost episode that was written later and back-posted to keep the dates straight.

Sunday (Day 546): Network Goes Up, Water Goes Down

The first thing I did after I got up was punch down all the phone and network jacks. I didn’t consider it work because I like premise wiring. I don’t know why, but there’s something satisfying about the kachunk of a punchdown tool when it secures a wire in a jack.

Once all the jacks were done, I put the DVR on the wire to test for connectivity. Yes, a jack testing tool would be good for this sort of thing, but they get used so infrequently that I’ve never been able to justify purchasing one. I’ve always just used my worst PC as a jack tester.

Everything ran smoothly. There were no hiccups, no incorrectly punched down jacks, and no issues. Of course, because we have been living in the no TV, no phone, wake up at dawn, go to bed at dusk, grow a dangerous beard world over the last couple of weeks, the DVR suddenly being online sparked something in #1GF!. It was like I slid a tray of goulash under a starving prisoner’s door, and I wasn’t sure I liked the look I was getting. I left the room to admire my jacks.

“The updater isn’t working,” #1GF! called from the other room.

I walked back in. She was looking at me like she knew that the tray of goulash was made up of mostly sawdust. I was a little afraid, and slightly annoyed at being taken away from the loveliness of my new jacks. “Did you try it again?”

“Yes, the file isn’t updating.”

#1GF! is a techie by career, not by choice, so in most situations, I deal with the home tech support because I enjoy it more. When it comes to the DVR, she knows exactly what’s going on because it’s her lifeline to commercial free hours of prime time soaps like Desperate Housewives. If she says the DVR is not working, I can skip any tier one solutions.

So, the first use of the internet in our new house was… to figure out why our program scheduler was preventing #1GF! from recording her quota of over-sexed doctors and melodramatic actresses who take every breath as a personal affront to their characters. These shows make up the bulk of our DVR storage, so fixing the DVR wasn’t exactly a big priority for me. It was a priority for #1GF! though, and I thought better of testing that crazy look in her eye.

After a little research, I found out that the application that we used to schedule programs (Yapi2xml) had been discontinued in the last two weeks (what luck) and could no longer be used to update our DVR’s cable guide. We needed a new, free way to download our TV schedules so that GBPVR would know which dreamy doctors to record and when.

After fumbling around on the web for a bit, I found a free scheduler called mc2xml, which was easy to configure and worked like a charm. #1GF! happily dove into planning out all the shows she would record over the following week, and I went to check on how the rain was affecting our leaky basement window.

When I got downstairs, the water was leaking in to the basement like two tiny waterfalls from the sides of one of my basement windows. The resulting river was slowly forming a nice lake that would’ve made an awesome place for some R&R if I were four inches tall and wandering around the basement trying to eradicate Cobra troops.

That was the moment that I admitted to myself that I was probably getting a migraine. I went out in the rain to bucket out the window well and then vacuumed up the water in the cellar. Despite the sudden lack of noise from me, I didn’t hear a peep from #1GF! asking if everything was ok.

I took off my work boots and walked upstairs to check on her. She was sitting on the floor staring at the monitor exactly where I left her.

“What are you doing?” I asked with a smirk.

“I’m checking my mail,” she said without even turning towards the door.

“I have the start of a migraine. I’m going to cover my head for a few minutes.”

“Oh, are you Ok? I’m sorry. Ok,” she said as if torn between technology and humanity. I smiled and shook my head.

She went back to mainlining the web and I went to lay down. Not five minutes after my eyes were pressed into the dark reaches of a pillow, we got a call that one of #1GF!’s family’s PCs was acting up. #1GF! asked me to take the call. I lifted my head out of the pillow just high enough to ask her to run through as much as she could, and if she needed me, I’d be happy to help. I was using her as tier one support.

I eventually had to step in a little bit, but she handled the follow up call like a pro, leaving me to get over my migraine. I generally don’t like to treat migraines like they can slow me down, but sometimes, when light causes inexplicable pain, I have to put myself into maintenance mode for a bit.

A few hours later, my migraine was down to manageable levels, so I sat in the hallway and made a few patch cables out of the leftover cat-5 from the day before. I may find something satisfying about punching down jacks, but I can tell you for certain that I don’t like making patch cables. It’s not that they’re terribly difficult to make, but the process is about as fun as threading 8 needles at the same time. It’s far from difficult, but I wouldn’t describe it as fun.

When I finished off the cables, it was late enough that it was time for bed. I ran down to the basement and clicked the new cables into the patch panel, zip tied them in an orderly fashion that my engineer friend would certainly not approve of, and headed off to bed.

Monday (Day 547): The Chronically Masturbating Monkey

I woke up at dawn, and because #1GF! was on vacation, so was I. I laid in bed and finished a book before getting for a cup of coffee and some cereal. I called to order trash pickup because I am now living in a town that doesn’t offer garbage collection. I tried to call to cancel the utilities at the old apartment, but the calls were longer than a ten minute wait, so, because it was a “vacation day”, I gave up.

#1GF! and I went to a craft store and bought eleven wreaths. I rarely grab a cart in a store, so I had to carry them by threading them onto my arms. It was difficult for me to resist raising my arms and stomping around the store like some deranged “green” version of the Michelin Man, but I managed to contain myself (when people were looking). The most I did was look at #1GF! with a gleam in my eye, lift my arms a little, and quietly say “Grawwrrr”. She gave the look the same look that parents give to kids who are doing things that they don’t want to encourage and said something like “Awrighty. Let’s go.”

From there, we headed over to a local home improvement store to pick up a tub of water stop cement. I intended to put an end to the leaking window well once and for all.

After we got home, I had a quick sandwich and went outside to mix the cement for the window well. It was about 1 PM. “This should take about ten minutes”, I said. I could see #1GF! translating Jon time to regular Eastern Standard Time. “I know I always say that, but wouldn’t it be funny, if at 2 PM, we were sitting here wondering what to do next?” She rolled her eyes. About fifteen minutes later, I was done. No snags. No hitches. Everything went like it should’ve and the crack in our window well was sealed. #1GF! looked at me in amazement. “What’s next?” I asked.

From there, I pulled out the window screens that had been boxed up in the basement and we worked together to get them all installed. I popped them in from the outside, and #1GF! set the clips on the inside. Because most of my job consisted of popping in a screen and waiting for them to be clipped in, I had a lot of time to stare at the careful craftsmanship that went into installing my windows. I really think I could train a blind, chronically masturbating monkey to install the windows better, and probably in less time. Maybe even more cleanly. Please don’t hold me to this, but I really think it’s true.

In the process of installing the screens, I unlocked a new window in the attic and found that the first contractor had balanced the window lock to make it look normal, but had removed the screws that would make it functional. Nice. Even though the fix wasn’t complex, the fact that he’d hide a small error like that made me wonder about every little thing in the house. If someone showed up with that masturbating monkey, a stack of Playchimp magazines, and $100, I might’ve been ready to make a wager. I made a mental note to fix the issue went back to installing the screens.

Once all of the screens were in, I looked at my phone for the time. “Ha. It’s 2. What do you want to do now?” Even though I was obviously some sort of prophet, #1GF! skipped the adoration and said that she wanted to put the wreaths up on the windows. I agreed, but wanted to hold one of them up to plan out how we were going to actually hang it.

That’s when we realized that even though the wreaths looked pretty big in the store, they were way too small for our windows. They might as well have been plastic, spiky, green doughnuts. We put all the wreaths in a pile on the table for return, and I took my tools down to the basement. We weren’t going to accomplish anything else that day.

Neither one of us felt like cooking, so we went to a local restaurant for dinner. The first thing we were faced with when we walked in the door was an immense man eating lobster. I guess on certain nights of the week, the restaurant offers two lobsters for $14. I’m not normally one to eat lobster at a restaurant, but the fat guy looked like he was having such a good time that I couldn’t resist on joining the party.

The waiter came over and before we could say anything, he said “Two twin lobster specials?”, as if asking was merely a formality. I ordered one, but #1GF! didn’t. Despite my efforts to protect her, I ended up squirting her in the face with lobster juice a couple of times. She seemed to be more unhappy with the fact that I refused to wear a big lobster bib than with being squirted a couple of times. It’s times like these that make me wonder how I could possibly have lived without her for so long.

After dinner, we picked up a roll of insulation so that I could finish insulating the basement the next day. Then, we went home so that I could get to work fixing another one of #1GF!’s family’s busted PCs.

Now, we were moved in, but nothing was set up in the house. Speakers, TVs, furniture, and boxes littered rooms like unwanted guests the morning after a college party. The only PC that was online was the DVR, and that thing was set up on the floor as a jack tester and co-opted by #1GF! to tape her favorite shows. It was still setup in the middle of the TV room floor because that was the only place that there was room for it.

And in this atmosphere, we set out to revive a five (+?) year old PC that would refused to boot. If you’re only as old as you feel, a good test of your age is to sit and lay on a hard wood floor for a few hours fixing a PC. I think I can safely estimate that I’m a young looking 74.

It took a few hours, but we finally figured out that the PC failed during a service pack install, which is one of the last places that you want a PC to fail. I jumped through a few hoops and got the machine to boot an hour later only to find out that it failed during the service pack because the drive was failing. I salvaged whatever data I could from the drive and installed one of those spare drives that computer people have stashed away for situations like this. By the time I got the old drive cleaned out and ready for patching, it was 11PM.

I did a quick post to announce the start of MaBeGroMo, and noticed that there were weeks of comments were piling up. I sighed and knew that there wouldn’t be any time for them for a while. I closed out of the web, kicked off a service pack install on the broken PC, and went to bed.

Tuesday (Day 548): Fixin’ PCs And Makin’ Poopies

I got up, made the coffee, and finished off the updates on #1GF!’s family’s PC. I went up to the attic to pull the plastic off the windows and to finish installing the last few screens. Installing screens with two people is so much easier than hanging out of an attic window to get the screens to lock in place. I ended up using scraps of wood and some name calling to get the final few screens in place. And I didn’t drop one. Once the screens were in, I set to getting that window lock fixed that I found the day before.

Because I had no idea what type of screw would secure a lock without ruining a window, I had to go downstairs, take apart another lock, and try to find a match for that screw in one of the coffee cans of screws that homeowners tend to have. It only took me a half hour to find the right replacement screws and get them installed, but knowing that the first contractor actually hid something so minor and stupid made me again wonder about every little thing in the house.

#1GF!’s family came by to pick up the (finally) fixed PC, and they hung out for a half hour with the kids. They had never seen the house, so I gave them a little tour. At one point, one of the kids went into the corner. I said, “Hey, what are you, hiding? Come on out of there.” He just smiled and stayed put. His sister walked over and looked him over. “Are you going poopies?”, she asked.

With a huge grin, he let out a “Yeeeaaaaaa.”

“You should call and tell [#1GF!] that he pooped in your house!” the little girl exclaimed. So, I stopped laughing long enough to call and tell #1GF! that the house had been christened with baby poop. She found it as amusing as I did.

Once #1GF!’s family was back on the road, I compared all the prices on trash pickup service and ordered from one of them. Being from the city, I never had to pay for trash before, and let me tell you: Trash pickup is not cheap. And if you want to recycle, the cost is about double. How’s that for providing incentive to get people to recycle? It’s cheaper to throw things away and let the next generation worry about it.

Once the trash situation was sorted out, I finished installing the insulation in the basement. Then, I moved the track for the laundry closet doors because they were set in such a way that they’d never be able to close because of the depth of the dryers and the dryer vent issue.

The doors only had to be moved out an inch, but now they at least close. Once I had opened and closed them a few times, I started unpacking the kitchen. The kitchen had been #1GF!’s pet project, but she was at work, and the boxes weren’t unpacking themselves. In the process, I kept going to the cup cabinet to put dishes away and vice versa. Rather than retrain my brain to the way things were, I relocated things to where my brain thought that they should be. I wish I could say that this hasn’t become more common as I get older.

I did as much as I could in the kitchen, and moved on. I was fully prepared to tackle unpacking the office, but after standing in the doorway for ten or forty minutes (It could’ve been more), I realized that the volume of boxes and furniture had me outnumbered and unprepared. I backed out slowly and went to unpack some rogue boxes that seemed less intimidating than the army that had laid siege to the office.

By the time #1GF! got home, I actually was tired enough that I just wanted to flop in front of the TV. That is not something that I normally go for, but I was tired. It’s not like I was doing a ton of hard labor, but I think decision making and trying to figure out where things go can take its toll. It didn’t matter what I wanted though, because the TV wasn’t actually set up.

We made pasta on our new stove and got to use the giant “power boil” burner. Man, that thing boiled the water so fast that I wasn’t done prepping the rest of the meal before the water was boiling. I would have to readjust my cooking speed, because this was not your grandma’s stove. (I’m getting excited about a stove burner? Seriously, is this the dream that people think you live when you quit your job? Really? I swear that paragraphs like these are enough to keep people firmly entrenched in their cubicles, no matter how grey or mundane their jobs may be. It’s better than finding yourself getting psyched about faster boiling times.)

Wednesday (Day 549): The Partners Desk

I emptied and then loaded the dishwasher full of stuff that had been in storage for years, had a quick cup of coffee, and headed out to get a haircut. I had a wedding to go to the following weekend, and my beard was leaning me toward the crazy side of the scale. If you get a normal, clean haircut, people will file your crazy beard as eccentric instead of treating you like you’re homeless and possibly dangerous.

On the way to the barbers, I stopped into a home improvement store to pick up D-con and stare at all the blinds. I didn’t really have enough time for the stop, so I was almost late to the haircut. The haircut went exactly as it does 99 out of 100 times, and I ended up with a half hour of good conversation and the same haircut that I’ve had for the last twenty years.

I decided to stop in to see my parents’ for a couple of hours and drop off a book that I had borrowed called The Road. My mom is a huge reader and wanted to discuss the symbolism of the book, but I don’t really read to analyze and deconstruct. I read what is written and move on.

The book was science fiction, so I can understand the recommendation, but I ended up hating it. It started nowhere, ended nowhere, and I found the writing style to be insanely annoying. When I read a book, I want a rollercoaster. I want a bunch of twists, a couple of loops, and some unexpected drops. When the ride ends, I want to be dropped off where I started thinking, “Now, THAT was fun.” This book was like a ride on a golf cart through a very long tunnel under Disneyland while the driver continually sang “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”.

I got another book to try from my Mom and had a discussion about how anyone can be a published author regardless of whether they have style, substance, or can write coherently for more than twenty pages. I wonder why I have yet to attempt a book. It’s probably because my need to write a good book supersedes my need to be published. Or it could be laziness. Or it could be any combination of lofty goals and lack of ambition.

I headed home and replaced the D-con trays. Mice (or some critters) had eaten two trays of D-con per day for the last two days, so I loaded up two more trays and headed downstairs to tackle unpacking the office.

I spent three hours putting my chair in different positions around the room to see what had the best feel. I also tried to set the room up so that #1GF! was in a decent position at her PC, even though she told me that she didn’t care where she sat because she rarely uses her side of the desk.

In the process, I realized what a junker my desk is. It was beat up when I got it at a flea market years ago, but it’s even worse now. It has a side for me and a side for #1GF! (although she rarely uses her side), so it looks like two back to back desks with one top. It was made more for two crotchety old school teachers than a couple of computer folks, but I drilled a hole in it for the wires, and stuffed the drawers full of disks and cables to drag it into the modern world.

Despite the chipping wood, coffee rings, and evaporating varnish, my desk has become one of my writer’s quirks. Some people prefer to write in Moleskine notebooks, or only write with blue medium Bic pens. I only write while sitting at one side of a partner’s desk. This is where I’ve written nearly every one of these blog entries for the last seven years.

I dusted off the top, and thought about putting on new veneer so that people wouldn’t think it was a piece of crap, and then thought that it would be a big job and a waste of time. This desk is an extension of me. It’s solid, functional, a little worn, and not in a role that anyone expected when it was made. You can stick me in a suit, or you can revarnish the desk, but the core is always going to be something that only a select few people see the awesomeness in.

Even though it was the most abnormal place for it, I decided to set the desk up in the dead center of the room. It’s sort of in the way, but being able to look away from your work and look out at the ocean can be as refreshing as a good stretch. And sometimes, it’s more important to feel good, than to look good. Or so they say.

I had to flip the five foot by four foot solid wood top a few times to make sure all the screw holes lined up properly (which isn’t easy, even if you have a six foot wing span), but once it was set up, it seemed to be in the spot where it belonged. The rest of the room was still in shambles, but getting over the placement of the desk was a major hurdle. I figured that I better leave it alone to let it get used to its new surroundings.

I went to the kitchen and unpacked pans and other kitchen stuff that I didn’t know we had. #1GF! came home and helped unpack, and although she wasn’t happy about the desk placement, she let it go because, like she said, she doesn’t use the office much.

I ended up going to bed at 9:30, but woke up three times during the night for no apparent reason. It was probably just the desk looking for some attention.

Thursday (Day 550): Don’t Cut The Blue Wire

I started my morning by making some notes of what I needed to get done. It ended up being a pretty long list of minor items. I cleaned more storage dishes and then set out to install a programmable thermostat because even with the new heating system, only two rooms in our house actually get heat. I figured that replacing the thermostat might solve the problem, so I set in to get it done.

According to the directions, a thermostat is supposed to have five wires: two red, a white, a yellow and a green. You unhook the old wires and screw them into the new thermostat. Total install time: twenty minutes.

I checked the directions and they said to hook the red and the white wire up if you only have two wires, and to never use a wire that is not currently used. I had a yellow, a blue, and a red wire. The red was clipped and unused, leaving me with a blue and yellow wire to choose from. There was a yellow terminal listed in installs that had a higher number of wires, but there was no mention of a blue wire in the booklet or website. I looked at the thermostat again half expecting to see a red LED clock hidden in the wall ticking down seconds until the bomb went off. If there was, I could’ve given up on the project and called #1GF! to tell her that we were moving. There wasn’t one, so I just looked at the wires sticking out of the wall and growled.

I couldn’t use red because it was clipped and the booklet said not to used clipped wires, and I was supposed to have a white wire that I didn’t have. Yellow is kind of white, but there is no logical way to pretend that blue is red. Not on planet Earth, anyway. I cursed the long dead contractor who was fucking with me from beyond the grave.

So, what do you do when you’re wires don’t match? You trace them down to the furnace, where you find that there is a white wire, but in the furnace, it’s hooked up to the green terminal. Ok. So, white is green, red, which is supposed to exist, does not, yellow may be yellow or red or white, and blue, well, fuck, blue is just some bonus color that doesn’t exist but really does. I wanted to cut the blue wire and wait for the timer to tick out on the house. I’d explain what happened to #1GF! from our new rooftop Canadian apartment and hope that she agreed to her new alias of $7GF?.

It seemed like a good plan to me, but I was almost positive that she wouldn’t go for it. I traced some wires to a junction in the basement, and found that yellow was wired to white (which is hooked to the green terminal), and blue was wired to red. So Blue is red and yellow is white. Got it. I went back upstairs with my translations and and installed the thermostat.

I cranked up the heat, flipped on the boiler, and got… nothing. Shit. I unscrewed the face plate and realized that after all the troubleshooting, I had forgotten to actually connect the wires to the screw terminals on the thermostat. Once I did, it ran like clockwork. I programmed it up to get me some energy savings, and a few hours later, noticed that half the house was still cold. Not good. I would have to ask the plumber about it later.

I made a quick sandwich and then checked on #1GF!’s record player, which had been in storage for years. I was going to hook it up to my receiver, but it was one of those unisystem record players that only functions with the system that it comes with. Cold house, no records, the day was looking like it was going to pick up at any time.

#1GF!’s work had started another layoff plan, and she was having a really hard time with it, so I thought that having at least the cable hooked up would give her a little stress relief. I went up to the TV room and got just enough components wired that she could watch a show when she got home. You’d think it would’ve been easy, but it actually required me to look at photographs of the back of my receiver (that were taken before we moved) to figure out which cabling belonged where.

It took a couple of hours, but just as #1GF! got in the door, I was finishing up the last connections to have cable TV ready for her. The “TAH DAH” of the moment didn’t help at all. #1GF! was completely upset over some of the people who had been let go, and when I heard some of the names, I was as surprised as she was.

I know some of the people who were laid off and they worked their asses off. I also know that there are huge pieces of driftwood at that company that have made long careers out of avoiding any added value. To the outsider, it seemed like the company saw a storm coming and were jettisoning engines and life jackets instead of the hold full of salted donkey meat that had turned long ago.

But, then, I don’t have all the information, so I have to assume that that something positive would come out of it for the people who were let go. Maybe it would be the best move that the former employees never had to make. Who knows?

I wanted to make dinner and clean the dishes and let #1GF! settle down a bit, but #1GF! insisted on cleaning the dishes herself. No amount of playful shoving would get her out of the way, and it just seemed to make her angry. That’s when she accidentally broke the coffee pot in the sink.

I told her it was no big deal, but it just made her even more upset. I couldn’t understand why she was so upset, and I couldn’t help her, so I sort of snapped. I told her to snap out of it because she wasn’t the one who got canned. This was not the correct thing to say. #1GF! and I don’t fight, but she left the room, which was as close to fighting as we really get.

#1GF! was understandably upset by the unfair nature of the layoffs, but the corporate game isn’t going to change because it’s not fair. Large companies don’t rely on fairness. Large corporations rely on mediocrity. If you stay long enough, you end up mediocre or frustrated as hell. Connections matter more than actions, and rewards are given less for production than for correct behavior (or to hide incorrect behavior).

Someone called to talk her down, and it was probably a girl, because boys have a very limited capacity to help in situations like that. Men aren’t really built for feelings. We’re problem solving machines with a small, outdated feelings module. Most of the time, we solve problems to eliminate the feelings. When there are feelings, but no solvable problem, we are pretty useless when compared with girls. Or, at least, I am.

Of course, I later apologized for being blunt, but nothing seemed to help.

Friday (Day 551): Why The Long Face?

I had a cup of tea in the morning because the coffee pot was broken, and spent the morning standing in the doorways of the office and TV room and thinking about how to set them up.

I ended up polishing the desk, which added a little life back to it, but not enough to make a real difference. I ate some cold pizza for lunch and decided to head in and see if I could get my speakers set up. It was not going to be an easy task in the TV room given its small size and my bass averse nature.

I couldn’t find the feet to my speakers, and I really needed them. My speakers are filled with sand, so without the feet, the speaker sit balancing on a small rubber stopper that holds in the sand. The rubber stopper makes the speakers a giant messy accident waiting to happen, and because I seem to be prone to giant messy accidents, I figured that it would be in my best interest to get some feet on there as soon as possible.

I checked online, and couldn’t find any exact replacements for the feet, so I checked a few audiophile forums. This was a mistake. Do you have any idea how much people pay for speaker feet? Hundreds of dollars. For conical pieces of metal that bring attributes to sound that may or may not be a product of the price paid for them multiplied by the owner’s imagination. Most of the logic that people touted and repeated about the audio qualities of high priced speaker feet seemed counter intuitive and, at times, completely illogical.

As I awoke from 45 minutes of looking for fucking feet for my speakers, I had that uncomfortable feeling that I was back to wasting my life again. I went to the one place where I can put that feeling to good use: dyers.org. I approved a couple of weeks of comments, and found that I still wasn’t ready to go back online. Blogging still seemed like a dead end obsession.

When #1GF! got home, we went to the mall and bought a coffee maker for $20 because we couldn’t find a replacement pot. We kept the pot, and got rid of the new coffee maker. Thanks, America! I mentioned that I was happy to have nothing to look forward to that weekend, and #1GF! reminded me that we had a wedding to go to.

We popped into the Outback for dinner, and as I approached a young woman with a skinny head sitting at one of the tables, I thought, “Why the long face?” I then thought, “That’s not very nice.” And then thought, “I’ll think what I want. Why the long face? Har har.” I turned my attention to #1GF! who had no idea that I was mentally poking fun at, and chastising myself for poking fun at, people who surrounded us. We stared at each other for a minute. She gave no indication that she knew what was going on in my head. I felt like I had gotten away with something.

I told #1GF! that I didn’t want to go back to blogging because it eats so much time and didn’t seem to have a point or future. She was very surprised. Then, she pointed at a picture of a koala hidden behind those colorfully useless drink ads that sat on our table. It would be cool to think that she was mentally leading me to a conclusion like a wordless, pointing guru, but I think it was more like “Hey, look! Hidden koala!”

I thought of all the people that I correspond with all over the world that I’d never have come in contact with in a hundred years of wandering my home state. It’s really cool to be able to talk to people from all over and get different perspectives on things. It’s also sort of neat to think, “If I ever travel to [insert place], I definitely want to look [insert blogger] up to say hello.” That’s a neat thing. That and a couple of bucks will buy me a cup of coffee, but it’s still a really neat thing. I suddenly found myself thinking that I wasn’t really paying attention to the hidden benefits of blogging steadily for so long.

#1GF! and I talked until the place closed, and then had to walk all the way around the mall to the car because the mall was locked and we were parked on the other side of it. Even if I did my best to jump and joke to take #1GF!’s mind off of the biting New England winter winds, it would not be considered a pleasant and memorable stroll.

When we got home, I did a quick check of my stats. Even though I hadn’t posted in two weeks, my traffic was essentially the same. On the one hand, that’s pretty good. On the other hand, it says that new content or posting schedules don’t make a lot of difference to who is going to show up here.

Saturday (Day 552): You May Now Kiss The Bride

I woke up at 7:30 when the heat kicked on, and ended up laying in bed staring out at the water for a little while. We went to a friend’s wedding, and an odd thing happened at the church. The priest said,

“Go, the mass is ended.”

I turned to #1GF! and whispered, “What, they don’t say ‘to love and serve the Lord’ anymore?”

“Uh,” #1GF! whispered, “what about, ‘You may now kiss the bride’?!”

“Oh yeaaaaa. They missed that one too.”

The priest suddenly remembered that part, and the bride and groom kissed as the mass ended. We went to the hall, and everything was very nice. I must be getting old because I didn’t recognize a single song that the DJ played. And I felt oddly out of place. And I was seated across from a guy I may or may not have hazed into drinking way too much about fifteen years ago who has sworn vengeance ever since.

The weirdest thing I found out was that a couple of friends of mine met on an online dating service. And I think a couple of married couples I know met online, too. It’s not a weird thing to happen these days, I just never knew that people I was close to had relationships that originated with a click and scroll instead of a wink and a peck.

I said something like, “What the hell. Doesn’t anyone hump their co-workers anymore?” The better looking half of the internet couple asked how #1GF! and I met, and I mentioned that we met at work. The wife was shocked like meeting at work was odd these days.

“How does that happen? I mean, what do you say to your co-worker? ‘Do you want to work on this report? No, let’s try to kiss!’”

I laughed, but yes, that’s the way it sort of goes.

The wedding went normally, and at the dancing portion, a friend of mine started taking pictures. He always has cameras and lenses with him at these type of events and they always look like they cost more than an enterprise level NAS. I have to admit that despite being an engineer (and slightly humanly challenged as a result), the guy takes pretty good pictures. They’re waaay better than my awesome camera phone shots, anyway.

Midway through some thumping song that I couldn’t make out, a guy quickly walked over to my friend, they start nodding, and quickly walk over to a table near the DJ. I narrated the scene to #1GF! and the guy’s wife as, “Heeeey. Are you a nerd?”

“I’m a nerd. You a nerd?”

“I’m a nerd.”

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEE”

In reality, the guy who came over was the wedding photographer, and he loaned my friend a couple of lenses to play with while he was at the wedding on the basis of his kick ass camera. As a result, my friend shoved a fish eye lens up my nose a few times to see how awesome my nose hairs would look. They really did look awesome, but I didn’t know how I could really use the shots to further my illustrious blogging career.

The whole situation was incredibly funny because the photographer and my friend didn’t know each other at all. They were openly sharing based on a common love of photography. Or at least high tech photography equipment. It made me wonder what the hell was going on. Do nerds leave scent trails like ants? Is there some sort of technoshare program that I was not made aware of? Or did these two just arrange this meet on myawesomecamera.com? I didn’t know the answer, and I wasn’t sure if that made me uncool or cooler.

What I Learned

• There are very few free TV scheduling apps for home brew DVR’s out there.
• I’ve been unemployed for almost two years, but I still think like creating a “vacation day” is a luxury. There’s something wrong with that.
• If you’re as young as you feel, A good test of one’s age is to lay on a hardwood floor to fix a PC for a few hours.
• The old contractor even screwed up the minor details.
• If the goal is to get people to recycle, making it cheaper to throw things away than to recycle is not the way to do it.
• Small children seem to like to poop in the corner. I have no idea why.
• Telling a woman to get over something is never a good plan.
• Focusing on blogging for money is like going to a car show to meet girls. It’s possible, but you’ll probably waste a massive amount of effort and miss out on a lot.
• More and more couples start more with a www than a Mm mm mm these days.
• You HAVE to say that the wedded couple can kiss in front of everyone or no one will believe they’re married. Without the kiss, everyone thinks that they could be faking just to raise tiny dogs and share healthcare.

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Posted in Leisure