This is week 88 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.

Sunday (Day 609): Mira! Global Thermonuclear Mullets

I was snapped instantly out of a dream in the middle of the night because I thought the house was flooding. My eyes flicked back and forth in the dark while I listened for the source of the sound. Within seconds, I realized that it was merely #1GF! running water in the bathroom.

I can sleep through wind, thunder, Mack trucks, and all sorts of expected sounds no matter how loud they are because my brain has some sort of filter that eliminates anything familiar. When a sound is atypical of my environment, I wake up instantly and alert, no matter how quiet or distant. I asked my brain to add bathroom water to its sound filtering blacklist, but given the way the house has gone, I don’t think it’s a particularly safe thing to do.

When I eventually woke up to start the day, I thought it was Monday. After the flood scare, I was not very psyched about getting out of bed. When I realized that it was still only Sunday, I thought it was funny that even without a job, I had that giddy feeling like I gained a weekend day.

I got out of bed on my bonus weekend day and made breakfast for #1GF!. I sat at the counter for a few moments writing notes of what happened over the last couple of days in my notebook. The counter was ice cold.

“This counter better keep this place cool in the summer because it sucks right now.”

“I know.”

“I’ve been leaning on the thing for maybe five minutes, and I can feel the cold in my legs. That just doesn’t seem right.”

I shook my head leaned back on the counter to continue my writing. You’d think I would learn. I was pulled out of my notes by a crack, and my arms instantly lifted off the counter. I looked at #1GF!. “Did you just stomp your foot?”

#1GF! looked up from her magazine as if she were waiting for the celebrity haze to dissipate. “What?”

“I heard a crack,” I said, still holding my arms up like a choking child.

#1GF! smiled and dropped her slipper off of her foot and onto the floor again.

“Shit. I thought it was the counter.”

#1GF! just smiled.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that. You know as well as I do that you never know what’s going to go wrong around this place.”

We got dressed and headed out to the mall to find super balls, toiletries, and silicone spray. We struck out on everything but the toiletries, so I decided to have a little fun by sitting down at one of those free machines in front of the pharmacy counter to test my blood pressure. A little fun, you say? Yea, that’s what my life has come to. I had discovered the elderly version of the quarter driven mechanical horses in front of the store.

I felt like I was 900 years old, but there were no old people waiting, so I gave it a shot. A little pressure here, a little beeping there, and everything turned out normal. Maybe it was because I kept throwing my free arm up and quietly saying “Weeeeee!”, but I made it look so fun that #1GF! had to try it too. Once the ride had come to a complete stop, #1GF! was deemed normal as well. We then bought some Depends to contain our excitement for future rides. OK, maybe we didn’t buy Depends, but I was surprised that #1GF!’s blood pressure was lower than mine considering that she has to live with me.

As we walked through the mall, I noticed that a lot of stores were empty. I hadn’t seen that many open storefronts in a mall since the days when small strip malls were losing ground to larger malls back in the late 80′s. It hit home that maybe the economy isn’t doing so hot for people who haven’t been offered billion dollar bailouts.

They didn’t have a clothes store that #1GF! was looking for at this mall anymore, so we went to a larger one to see if we could do better.

We went into a department store and I got a call from a friend of mine. I changed his ringtone to a message he left me once, thinking it was funny. Now, it seems that every time I’m within ten feet of a stranger, my pants start screaming “WAAAZAAAAAAAA”, leaving me to shrug or pretend that they were hearing things. I bring it on myself, but that ringtone bites me in the ass every time.

#1GF! had no luck at the department stores, so we headed for a maternity store. Trying to be a supportive father type, I started to follow her in. Within two feet of the actual entrance, I was overwhelmed with the female only nature of the place, and mumbled something like, “Uh, maybe I better stay out here.” I didn’t think I’d be comfortable following her around, and I doubted whether those newly pregnant ladies in there would be psyched about a male presence invading their domain at a time that they were trying to squeeze into bigger pants.

While she continued her shopping, I decided to stay outside and lean on the rail that overlooks the mall floor below. I people watched for a while and noticed that big 70′s hair crammed under a baseball cap is a big look on boys these days. I remember this trend from when I was a kid, and I’m going to make a prediction that it won’t be long before the mullet makes a comeback. You watch. Adults everywhere will cringe as “business in the front, party in the back” becomes a slogan for a new generation.

I chuckled to myself about making up “Generation M” and “Mullet: The choice of a new generation” T-shirts when I spotted a five year old girl retreating from the escalator. “Mira, mama! Mira!” the little girl kept saying, as if she had never seen an escalator before. Her mother sort of dragged her on, and the child looked as if she would’ve hung suspended from her mother’s arm rather than have her shoes near the metallic teeth of the escalator stairs. The mother was laughing, and I couldn’t help but grin.

As they went down the stairs, the little girl turned to a young man who was a couple of steps back and paying a lot of attention to looking like he wasn’t paying any attention to anything. She waved a little finger an warned him in Spanish not to come close or she would call the police on him. I’m not sure if he understood or cared, but I stood there laughing and doing rudimentary translation the whole time she rode down.

The little girl retreated from the escalator exit the same as she had the entrance, until her mother lifted her up and over where the stairs cycled under the floor. The little girl skipped and hopped away with her family, I shook my head and laughed quietly.

I leaned on the rail for a while longer, trying to stay out of the way and not look like some weird, people watching, creep. I kept a smile on my face the whole time, which tends to balance out the unruly beard and naturally angry looking face.

I was only trying to look harmless, but I noticed that a number of people smiled back. I hoped that maybe I passed a smile to them that got passed on to someone else. A smile can change an outlook and snap you out of your own head and into the world for a minute.

I got tired of people watching after a little while and went into the store to see how #1GF! was doing. I arrived just as she was finishing up decent sized purchase. I was happy for her to have found something to wear. “How’d it go?” I asked.

“Oh, they were so helpful. They were really, really nice,” #1GF! said, as the clerk looked up and smiled.

We left the mall and the temperature had reached 45 degrees. This is Boston in Winter, so people were walking around in shorts and flip flops. Hey, it’s been under twenty degrees more often than not this year, so even if I won’t join them, I can’t blame them. Well, I can blame them for flip flops, but that’s a different story altogether.

I dropped off a phone filter to my parents on the way by, and then #1GF! and I headed home. #1GF! asked if I wanted to go out to dinner at a place with such a high ratio of old people that the place is usually packed by 5:00PM. We popped in a little while later, and were lucky to get a table.

I pulled out my notebook while waiting for our order, and wrote a few details about the day (like the little Hispanic girl, for instance) so that I wouldn’t forget them later. As I was jotting my notes, I wondered whether people think I’m some sort of food critic. I haven’t detected any difference in service or food quality when I do that, but I always wonder how paranoid people are. If they only knew that it was all for a blog.

After a delicious dinner, we went home and watched Eagle Eye, which was a repackaged version of Wargames. It started off interesting, but got really dumb about halfway through and ended up preachy by the end. Sort of like Wargames. Lets play taktak Global takitytak Thermo taktak nuclear takitytak War. Maybe the kids today will like it. I dunno. Anyway.

The worst thing about the movie was that the DVD had an antismoking commercial on it. I haven’t smoked in, geez, fifteen years, and #1GF! never smoked, so I didn’t see why we should sit through it. I tried to skip it, but, skipping the commercial was disabled.

Hey, Hollywood dickheads: I get your DVDs to watch movies. If I want preaching, I’ll go to church. Don’t make me sit through a friggin’ anti-smoking ad because I have no use for it. I would imagine that people who smoke have no use for it, either. It’s not like they don’t know that smoking is bad for them. They just don’t care. Or actually like smoking.

The dangers of smoking have been known for 50 years, and there are warnings all over the packs themselves. If you’re going to waste your time creating an anti-smoking message, don’t waste my time making me watch it. You’re not parents or babysitters, you’re entertainers. So, stop with the no skip bullshit and let me use your DVDs for what I want: entertainment. OK? Got it?

After the movie, I tried to glue a couple of stickers back onto my Rubik’s cube and ended up gluing the whole thing together. With the amount of stickers I’ve glued back on, it was bound to happen some time. Two sides were solidly locked up, and no amount of prying would loosen them. I stood there chuckling before jamming a butter knife between the stuck pieces to get it back in working order. I took one last shot at the cube before bed, and did it in 2:25, which was a personal best.

Monday (Day 610): A Thumb And A Smile

I wrote and edited LOR in the morning, and took a few breaks to let the words settle into place. I never managed to break 2:31 in my cube breaks, but I did give a salesman friend a few suggestions on how to speed up his slow PC. He took to them surprisingly well, despite claiming to have a mild case of computer illiteracy. I took that as a win.

When I checked Facebook, I had a friend request from some busty young lady that I was quite sure that I didn’t know. I didn’t know why she was trying to friend me, and there was no message from her letting me know why she was trying to add me to her friends list.

Dear internet, I’m a dude, but I’m not stupid. I am not easily tricked by low cut shirts. When you were drunk and threw your boobs on the bar and batted your eyes at me to borrow a cigarette, I was the guy who would point you to the cigarette machine with a thumb and a smile.

Boobs are great and all, but you don’t get added to my friends list just by having a pair. My Facebook friends list is far from an exclusive club, but if I have never talked to (corresponded with, emailed, IM’d, smoke signaled) you, why would I expose my and possibly my friends’ information with you?

It’s difficult enough for me to figure out who some of those people from grade school are, so why would I add someone who doesn’t bother to send a message along with the request? You don’t walk up to someone on the street and throw your arms around them, so don’t blindly befriend people without at least trying to explain yourself. Facebook isn’t myspace. It’s not a faceless friend collection game. I ignored the woman and didn’t bother to ask what her deal was.

I made dinner, but was a little aggravated about it because it was taking time away from a post that I hadn’t finished writing for the day. Sometimes, my priorities get a little screwed up when it comes to writing. I have no idea why.

Tuesday (Day 611): I Love Silicon And Silicone

It was snowing sideways once again, and I tried to get some writing done in the morning. I talked to a friend about his job via Facebook before heading out to the dentist’s in the early afternoon.

I misjudged how long the ride would be in the snow, so I had some extra time to drop into a small local hardware store for some silicone for my Rubik’s cube. When I asked where I could find the silicone, the guy sort of finger gunned me with his eyebrows up and cheerfully said, “For the ol’ snowblower?” in a way that could only be described as half guess, half statement.

While I was following him through the store, I was a little embarrassed to say, “Well, it’s for a Rubik’s cube, actually.”

He stopped with a quickly perplexed look and then his eyebrows and the corners of his mouth went in opposite directions. He bobbed his head to the side a little to shake the information into place.

“Well, that’s a new one,” he said cheerfully.

He showed me a bunch of kinds and suggested one that might work better on a cube because it was dry. I thanked him for the advice and he went on his way. I picked up an industrial can of silicone that I had seen mentioned on cubing sites. It was not the one that he recommended, but it was cheaper and didn’t contain acetone or other elements that eat plastic.

I threw the can into the passenger’s seat and headed up the block to the dentist’s office. I was a half hour early, but the office wasn’t busy. I hoped that I wouldn’t be waiting for a half hour, but dove into a recent computer magazine just in case.

I checked out all the new boards and chips, and read articles on what kind of power your money would buy in the near future. I had forgotten how much I love new computer stuff. I happily waited and tried not to drool.

I got into my appointment early, and it was fairly routine. The receptionist thought that the pop song on the radio was singing “I want a cigarette” as one of the lines, and I refused to correct her and tell her that it was actually “All the single ladies.” I might listen to pop, but I’m not going to advertise it to an office full of ladies, lest they take me out one night and introduce me to their single friend, Renaldo.

While in the chair, I felt really weird about my mustache. I’m trying to grow some crazy wild west mustache this year, and it’s getting so long I that figured that it must look gross near my mouth. Even though ladies generally don’t like facial hair, I didn’t hear one, “holy fuck that’s fucking gross” from the hygienist, which I thought was professional of her. Not that I’ve ever heard her swear anyway.

Once the choppers were clean, I drove over to my barber’s to see if I could get a haircut while I was in the area. I know. Everything is pretty much near where I grew up, which is not near where I live now, so if I’m in the area for one thing, I try to do them all at once, even if we’re in the middle of a snowstorm.

I’ve been going to the same barber shop for the last twenty years, so even if my barber was too busy, I was all set to sit in the chair for a little while to hang out. It’s just sitting in a barber shop, but it’s one of those places that I don’t worry if I belong there or not. For me, that’s sort of neat because I always feel like I’m just slightly out of focus in most places I go.

I had to wait for a few people to be done, but it wasn’t long before I was in the chair. At one point the barber got a call and part of the conversation went like, “Yea, one of my friends is here, Jon Dyer, you know ‘im? Yea, he says the snow was sideways when he left his house…” My friend, Jon Dyer. Can you be proud of little moments like that? Should you be? I am.

I got home at 3PM, and shoveled a foot of snow out of the driveway. It was still snowing and had been since 9AM. When I got inside, I tried to write, but all I wanted to do was socialize. A friend in Seattle mentioned that he was enjoying 60 degree weather as I watched the snow whipping past the window horizontally.

When I couldn’t stand being at the PC any longer, I took apart my Rubik’s cube to clean it. I cleaned out all the dust and gave it a good shot of silicone spray. It didn’t seem to be as easy to move as I had expected, and I was having a lot of trouble doing any finger tricks. I read somewhere that the cube should be worked for a half hour after siliconing, so that’s what I did.

By the end of the half hour, the cube was amazingly slick, allowing me to do little finger tricks to spin the sides with very little effort. I expected lightning fast, sub one minute solve times.

Unfortunately, I got slower. Sunufa. I didn’t realize that I was solving the cube with completely different motions than when it was tight. Now, instead of using my wrist to twist sides, I was learning to flip rows into place with single fingers.

#1GF! had gone out in the mess to take her mother to the doctor’s, and didn’t get home until 8PM, leaving me plenty of time to try to make the new motions automatic.

Wednesday (Day 612): Overly Friendly Dudes In Banana Hammocks

The first thing I did was go out to shovel so that #1GF! would be able to get out of the driveway to keep makin’ the paper and keep on climbin’. It didn’t take long thanks to the high winds that had been helping me clear the snow from the driveway all night long. All I had to do was dig through a few drifts.

When I got back in, I did the cube in 2:25. I think it was a bit of a fluke, but I thought I should be way faster with a greased up cube.

A little later, I beta tested a new FineTune app that I’m not allowed to talk about. It seemed like a really neat idea, but I’m not supposed to talk about it. Nope. Not. Talking. Beta.

I created a personal bloggers group on Facebook in the hopes of finding some personal blogs to read and sharing some of the tips that I’ve learned about what drives traffic over the last couple of years. By the end of the day, the group still didn’t have very many members, but I guess it’s better than a party of one. If you’re a personal blogger, get in on it. It’s an open group and if I can help you, I will.

I did another strange thing today. I joined Typepad solely to have the option of commenting on Wil Wheaton’s blog. I thought it was a little weird to join Typepad just for the option of leaving comments on a single blog, which is why I never did it before. I’m not going down as some sort of stalker, but there have been times that I have wanted to leave a comment and couldn’t without a Typepad account. Unfortunately, I never had an account. Well, now I do.

If you don’t know Wheaton, he played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek and Gordie Lachance in Stand By Me. Yea, the guy with the cock leaches. I’ve been reading the guy’s blog for a little while on a reader’s suggestion (thanks, Rocky!) that his style and mine were sort of similar.

After a few months of reading, I have to say that Rocky was right: if you like my blog, there’s a pretty good chance that you like Wheaton’s. It’s a celebrity blog, but not an “I’m doing blow off of celebrity nipples” sort of blog. It’s more of what you’d expect a blog to be like if Wheaton never became a celebrity. It’s really down to Earth and has enough good writing to keep me reading. Even though I avoid celebrity blogs like overly friendly dudes in banana hammocks, Wheaton’s blog is worth a read. And a comment. …Even if celebrities have an unfair advantage in gaining readership (fist shake).

I published LOR Week 87, which officially caught me up to the present. I thought about creating a Facebook page for dyers.org so that people could become fans, but then I didn’t. I don’t know why, but it seemed a little pretentious. I’m all for promotion, but I don’t want to cross that line into pretension. I don’t quite know where that line is yet. Maybe you can’t have that line to promote. Maybe one day I’ll know.

I found some interesting jobs on LinkedIn and at MIT, and then found some easy part time gigs on Craigslist. Then, I avoided applying to any of them. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because even though I’m pulling back on the writing, it’s what I really enjoy. Eventually, I’ll have to get off my ass and apply to some places, because not even a semi successful writer makes as much as a mid level tech worker.

I ate a couple of PB&J sandwiches for dinner because #1GF! went out to dinner with her friend and I didn’t feel like cooking. I’ll cook for other people, but sitting down to cook for yourself can seem like a big pain in the ass sometimes.

Thursday (Day 613): Where Are All The Good Personal Blogs?

I sat eating my cereal and watching music videos, and wondered when hip hop’s infatuation with autotuned vocals would wane a li’l. Did you see what I did there? Wayne a Li’l? Yea, really fucking clever. Send me a book deal before this literary train is buried under an avalanche of money.

I was still doing the cube in around 2:29, which still wasn’t an improvement over my pre-lubed cube times. I think I’ll eventually have to learn a new method of solving to speed things up.

I went on a hunt to see if I could dig up some personal blogs that I’m interested in reading, but had real trouble finding any new ones that weren’t written about kids or only updated once a year. There are a lot of interesting blogs out there, but not a lot of interesting personal ones (I’m not talking about you. I probably read your blog regularly and like it just fine). I really wanted to have a good smattering of personal blogs to put together a top ten, but I think I need to refine my search methods to get a bigger sampling of some of the good ones out there.

I made a quick graphic for the Facebook personal bloggers group, and noticed that GIMP was a couple of minor versions behind, so I upgraded it to v. 2.6.4. I looked into upgrading Inkscape, too, but I was already at the latest and greatest. For the rest of the day, I worked on roughing out LOR week 88.

Friday (Day 614): Beardicus Wildus

I did the cube in 2:16, which was an improvement, but I’m still using the beginner’s method. What I thought was really awesome (you will probably not feel the same about this) was finding an online Rubik’s cube timer that starts and stops a big stopwatch by the spacebar. It not only makes it easy to start and stop the timer on your own, but it gives you random cube scrambling sequences and keeps track of your average times. It’s so good. It’s at cubetimer.com

I wish that I could say that I wrote all day, but I didn’t. I surfed a lot and added some items to my social media profiles to keep them updated. I only wrote LOR for a small amount of time in comparison.

I cleaned the bathroom sink and then thought about trimming my beard because it’s getting pretty bushy. I ran a black plastic comb through it a couple of times, shrugged at myself in the mirror, and didn’t bother. It seemed to stay in place, and I didn’t want to get hair clippings all over a newly cleaned sink, now did I? No. Obviously not.

When #1GF! got home, we went out to dinner with a couple of friends. They’re close friends, so a good portion of the conversation was dominated by the baby. I don’t want to be one of those people who keep talking about the baby, but it’s still a new and unbelievable situation to find ourselves in, and well, they started it.

Behind us sat a lady having her 90th birthday party. There were probably twelve people with her, a couple of whom were quite good during the singing of “Happy Birthday”. I have to say that I was impressed.

Now, when I’m out at a restaurant, I try to ignore people who are having a good time. Let them laugh and be loud, because there’d be plenty of room for everyone on this planet if we could all come to grips with the idea that annoying things are the problem of the person who feels annoyed.

Towards the end of their dinner and at the midpoint of our own, I was suddenly straining to hear the conversation at our table over the random, harmonized Aaaameeens coming from behind me. It was well done, but it was a little much, and I accidentally shot them a look.

If I have to look, I try to keep my looks neutral as if to say, “Pardon me, but your behavior is boisterous and a bit louder than I expect. As I’m trying to have a conversation with my companion here, I’m finding it difficult to hear them. I don’t wish to impose on your rollicking good time, but would you mind terribly if I asked you to take a bite of roll every so often, so that I might finish my sentences? I know it’s my problem for being a deaf old stick in the mud, but if you wouldn’t mind, I would appreciate it.”

Unfortunately, my looks sometimes come off as “WARNING: WILD BEARDO (BEARDICUS WILDUS). DO NOT POKE OR MAKE SUDDEN NOISES WITHIN CAGE AREA.”

I cringed at possibly giving the latter look, but the random singing stopped. I’m all for people partying their faces off with Nana, but sometimes I just want to eat dinner without feeling like Father pinchytouchy is sneaking up behind me.

Our friends came back to the house for a bit, and we sat around our old apartment table. No one ended up on their asses, which was a relief because of the age and quality of the chairs.

The wife of the other couple reads this blog regularly, so from time to time during the conversation, she would bring up subjects up as if we had talked about them before. I would be left trying to figure out, “When the hell did we ever talk about that?” until I figured out that she was talking to me via the blog.

That sort of thing used to happen to me a lot when I had readers at work, but it hasn’t happened to me for a while due to my current lack of jobitudinal vocation. It was sort of neat and confusing at the same time.

Once our friends headed home, I lay in bed and thought of ways to improve Better Blogroll. I came up with a couple of good ideas. That’s what I do when I’m laying there waiting for sleep. I try to spin up my brain to come up with ideas for things until sleep shuts the system down.

Saturday (Day 615): Bad Plots And Shampoo Mohawks

The minute I woke up, I was back to trying to work through the Better Blogroll code that I had thought up the night before. Once I hit the point where additional thinking would require paper, I moved on to thinking about how I could cut out certain moves while solving the cube. That got boring awfully quickly.

As I lay there, still waiting for #1GF! to wake up, I thought about ideas for short stories. I figured that I wouldn’t come up with anything that I’d want to write, because my story ideas usually start at depressing and end at mean.

I decided to try to think of some unlikely pairs of characters that might develop into a scene. The geek and a stripper? Been done to death. The career criminal and a child. Done a few times. A talking bear and… I stopped right there because if I was injecting a talking bear into the story, it probably wasn’t going to end well.

Instead, I just imagined someone standing in my bedroom doorway and a scene came to life. Then, I thought of an entirely different scene involving a small Tinkerbell like character flying down the beach (which was weird because I tend to eschew the fantasy side of sci fi/fantasy), and another story idea sprang to life. I was amazed because neither story was depressing or depraved.

#1GF! jumped into the shower, and I abandoned the plots to brush up on wireless security. We were supposed to go over to our friends’ house to help fix their wireless network, and I wanted to make sure that I was remembering which encryption schemes were more secure. It didn’t take very long.

When I was heading into the shower, I excitedly told #1GF! that I might finally have a book idea. I started to tell her what little information I had.

“Oh that makes no sense. Why would someone do that?”

“I already told you, the character is weird.”

“Still though. Why would he [plot point] and why would he be [plot plot]? No one would do that. It makes no sense.”

“Ok fine. What about [plot additions].”

“I don’t know. It all seems pretty far fetched.”

“Ugh. You are not getting this at all.”

I jumped in the shower and randomly yelled out points to advance the story as I thought of them. Most of them were met with an “I don’t know…” that is reserved for things that you don’t want to let on that you thoroughly don’t believe in.

“Don’t you understand,” I said in a laughing and exasperated tone, “I’ve thought of a plot that isn’t depressing and has nothing to do with murder! I have something that could be a framework for actual comedic situations.” I stuck my head out of the shower and looked at her. “I have a plot. Whether it’s good or bad doesn’t matter. I never came up with a plot that wasn’t depressing before. It’s a breakthrough.”

She just gave me the same “Oh that’s good, honey” look that is given to a four year old when he’s explaining the details of Transformers and simultaneously slicking his hair up into a shampoo mohawk. I stopped trying and rinsed out the shampoo.

#1GF! and I went out to Building 19, which is a large warehouse discount store that I used to like when I was broke and young enough to think that smoking was cool. It sort of rides the line between discount store and flea market, and is a fixture in the Northeast. We wanted to look through some of their furniture to see if we could pick up a dining room table cheap.

I don’t know if the store changed or if I did, but it was like walking into Caucasian Tijuana. Sure, there was some semi-interesting stuff, but most of it was absolute crap. There’s a dirty coating at flea market that I’m absolutely fine with, but this wasn’t a flea market. This was supposed to be a store that sells overstock at overstock prices without the grime and the haggling.

While walking through the furniture section, I walked by some sort of baby rocking machine that either had mustard or puke on it. And it was well worn. If it was at a flea market, I wouldn’t have looked at it twice, but there was no way that it was overstock. Next to it were metal file cabinets at overstock prices that were pitted with dents and rust. It made me wonder whether the company had become an overpriced flea market.

We headed for the front of the store to wait in a fifteen minute line for a fifty cent item. The lines were clogged with people buying food. It wasn’t “I’m broke and I need this” food, but “oh look, cheap expired cookies” type food.

I’m always amazed at people willing to buy food in these places. Half the stuff I don’t want to touch, and if I happen to touch something, I’m not putting my hand anywhere near my face. These people were doing full on grocery shopping and actually ingesting things from the store, so I think if I could’ve set up a hot dog stand, I could’ve made some money. To each their own, I guess. Call me risk averse.

On the way out, we passed by a machine full of super balls, which had been remarkably hard for us to find over the last few weeks. Not many places have machines full of super balls at their doors anymore. Look for them. You’ll see. Like quad damage runes, they’re never around when you need them.

The super balls were only a dime each, making me wonder what kind of toxic lead or tiny alien egg was in the rubber. As I slipped each dime in and turned the crank to release the super balls down the chute, I became less and less paranoid. “No one puts toxic lead in super balls anymore, right?” #1GF! didn’t have an answer.

We went to a higher end furniture store to continue looking for tables. The store was showing some absolutely mental colors, but everything seemed to work well together. I don’t have an eye for that sort of thing at all, so I thought I had better just keep quiet about it. We didn’t see anything we liked, and didn’t like the store as much as before it moved to its new location. We plopped ourselves on a lime green leather sofa in front of some insanely cut squiggle of a coffee table to figure out our next move. With perfect timing, we got a call from our friends to come over.

We went over so that I could troubleshoot their wireless network issues. Their router had been moved and was now out of range of the PC’s at the opposite end of the house. Our friend bought a repeater to sit between the two to extend the network, but the router was a B router, and the extender was a B/G extender. It should’ve worked, but didn’t.

I decided to move the router back to its original position and get the network secured. Once the PCs were all talking to the router, I went to work on the extender. No amount of configuration would get it to work. It simply refused to connect.

After about three hours of trying to get it all going, we gave up. I hate to lose, but I suggested that the B router be upgraded to a G router, and then called a friend of mine to confirm that I wasn’t talking nonsense. He confirmed: sometimes traversing B and G doesn’t go as planned. Our friend was willing to throw a little money into the upgrade, and I said that I’d come back and reconfigure everything to get it working once he did.

We headed out, and I went back to analyzing my moves on the Rubik’s cube. I wanted to convert the rote moves into actual understanding. I don’t know if they worked, but I did the cube in 2:11, then 2:05, and then in what can only be described as a complete, unrepeatable fluke, I broke the two minute barrier after we arrived home.

I drilled through the superballs to recreate a weird yo-yo toy that I had laying around, but had no idea where to buy (I later found out that these were called astrojax). I made my first set a decade ago out of three metal nuts and a piece of twine. I made this set out of three superballs and thin nylon string.

Once I put away the Dremel and cleaned up the surprising amount of super ball dust, #1GF! and I went out to dinner. The cook put way too much flour in my meal, making it pasty and not very good. I could randomly taste pockets of flour. I wasn’t about to send it back for a heaping helping of loogie, so I just ate it anyway, and washed the flour down with a cup of black coffee.

When we got home, #1GF! was exhausted and fell asleep on the couch well before 7PM. I sat on the couch like an idiot, because although I didn’t want to watch TV, I didn’t want to turn on my PC, or go read a book. I was boring myself silly flipping from channel to channel, and it was aggravating me to no end.

I wasn’t sure how long #1GF! was going to sleep, so I didn’t want to wake her by going to do my own thing, but I think the real issue was that I wasn’t willing to use my brain to come up with something better to do. So, I sat there waiting for it to be time to go to bed, with no one to blame for my rising aggravation but me. I really do think that only boring people get bored. If you’re bored, you’re not thinking creatively enough. And I was not.

What I Learned

• Running water has been added to my internal list of things that will wake me from a sound sleep.
• A lot of stores in the mall have gone out of business.
• The 70′s mop top is making a comeback.
• Hollywood thinks that I should be forced to watch anti-smoking commercials.
• You have to be careful when mixing super glue and a Rubik’s cube.
• Silicone spray completely changes the way you solve a Rubik’s cube.
• Computers have made a lot of advances in the last year, and I still get excited about them.
• There is a huge, but annoying, trend of autotuning hip hop vocals these days.
• I learned how to make a Facebook group.
• I think I figured out a little trick for generating story ideas.
• Either Building 19 has changed or I have.
• Sometimes B and G standards don’t play together like they’re supposed to.
• That weird yo-yo toy sitting in my closet is called a set of Astrojax and it costs about $1 to make.
• Slayer makes tiny onesies and T-shirts for tiny metal fans.
• They have maternity clothes stores?
• They have special maternity pants?

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Posted in Life of Riley