This is week 90 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 623): Commuting To Cow Hampshire

We were at #1GF!’s Mom’s house at 8:30AM so that the whole family could ride up to Cow Hampshire in a single three row SUV. It was sort of cool not to have to drive two cars, but it was impossible to have any fun because the kids were busy watching movies and the adults were alternating between staring out the window or sleeping.

While up north, I played the Wii for the first time, and wasn’t as impressed as I thought I should be. I guess motion-sensitive controllers are a novelty, but to me, Nintendo is still a kiddie game system that always seems too young for me. Then again, I’ve had that prejudice against every Nintendo system released after the NES. I think the only reason that I like the NES is that it was released when I was an actual kiddie.

The Wii and the air hockey table were on at the same time, so while I was getting beaten by a seven year old at tennis, #1GF! was beating a range of ages in air hockey. Challenger after challenger fell, and I gave up my spot at the Wii to lose the worst out of anyone. We left New Hampshire around three, and the whole trip seemed a little odd. It was almost as if everyone was a little disconnected.

I made a stir fry for dinner and #1GF! and I sat down to watch The Express, a movie about racial tensions in football. The musical score was so overblown that it added an overly dramatic tone to every word, as if to bolster and validate what amounted to poor acting. We shut the movie off after twenty minutes rather than torture ourselves further. We haven’t done that in a while.

We replaced the movie with The Lucky Ones, a movie about war veterans returning home from the Middle East. It wasn’t bad, but didn’t really go anywhere I was interested in going. It was sort of like being in the car for two hours, only to find out that you’re going to buy school clothes.

Monday (Day 624): Holiday Visitors On A Minor Holiday

I kept waking up over and over because I kept thinking that I’d miss the alarm and wouldn’t get the recycling to the curb in time. In one of those sleepy fits and starts, I had a dream that I lived next to a lady who had a giant garbage pile for a yard. When I put my recycling out, she asked me to keep it on the other side of my house because it made her property look trashy.

I managed to wake up before the alarm and got the recycling out on time. I decided to make a batch of cookies because a few people were supposed to come over to visit, and cookies are a really easy snack that very few people will turn down.

I was going to make macadamia nut cookies, but once the batter was ready, I realized that the nuts I bought were dry roasted. I wasn’t sure if the dry roasting would create salty barf flavored delights, so I decided to make chocolate chip instead. I felt like I was cheating people out of good cookies for something easy.

One of #1GF!’s friends came by to see the house with her three little girls, just as I was finishing up the last batch of cookies. As the kids sat at the table, they were still trying to figure me out. While they ate their cookies, the two year old was tearing through her mother’s wallet and showing all the pictures.

I teased the children that I couldn’t remember their names and called them Mimo, Mimi, and Mocha. That set off an unexpected cacophony of nonsense words, because I forgot how much fun kids think nonsense words are. Their mother had to calm them down to get them speaking English again.

The kids were a little well behaved, so I told them that I didn’t like children, and that they shouldn’t come near me. It’s the one trick that kids can’t resist. That got them climbing all over me like a jungle jon and burying me in couch pillows that I’d plead to be released from before busting out of like the Hulk.

Their mom politely and gently told them to leave me alone, but I’m not one of those polite people who endures kids because he doesn’t want to hurt their little feelings. I like kids and all their nonsense. They’re fun, and they give my goofiness a venue to seem normal.

The kids were doing all the climbing, and I wasn’t exerting any effort, so I let them continue doing whatever they had to until they wore out. One of the girls leaped at me over and over gripping on my back with her legs and arms at the same time. If she doesn’t end up a gymnast or some sort of rodeo horse breaker, I’ll be shocked.

Another one gave me a sock square in the nose, which I thought was just an errant elbow because I was busy paying attention to the other two children piling pillows on me. The mom caught the child’s intent out of the corner of her eye and nailed her for it. I didn’t care about getting socked in the nose, but I understand that kids need rules so that they don’t grow up to maniacs or IT support people.

I’m always amazed at a mother’s ability to know what their children are up to even when they don’t seem to be paying attention. I noticed what good control the mom had of the kids, letting them have a good time, without letting the good time spin them completely out of control. I thought it would be a feat with one child, but with three small children, it was impressive.

Their mom gave us a set of clothes for our expected bundle of awesome. I thought that it was really nice of her, and #1GF! got all misted up.

It was getting to midday, so our friend packed her kids into the car faster than I would’ve thought possible, and headed out to get on with the rest of her day. My engineer friend and his wife were supposed to come over for the second week in a row, but I wasn’t sure if they would be showing up. Rather than wait for them, I invited my parents over because they’re always good to play games with.

We were trying to get our friends over so that we could tell them about the baby in person, so that I wouldn’t have to inorganically inject the information into a conversation. To make the information pass as a bit of a trick, I kept leaving #1GF!’s pregnancy book on the counter to act as the conversation starter if they ever showed up.

When my parents arrived, they brought along Fill or Bust . It was sort of like Yahtzee, but adding an all or nothing / push your luck element. We played a couple of rounds and then I introduced them to Fluxx, a flexible rules card game. The two games couldn’t have been more disparate.

In the middle of one of the rounds, a former co-worker and his girlfriend showed up. #1GF! and I showed them the house, and my parents decided to take off. I thought it was generous of them to leave us to focus on the new company, but I thought it would’ve been fun to have them around, too.

Our new company stayed for a few hours and asked if the cookies were from scratch. I thought, “Well, I do use a bag of store bought chocolate chips,” as if making chocolate chip cookies from scratch require a person to go harvest their own cocoa beans. It wasn’t a difficult question, but I didn’t seem to know how to answer it.

“They are. Jon makes them,” #1GF! said.

“Wow,” the guy said, and I heard the encoded man message, “you are a girl with a vagina” on a male sideband that girls can’t hear.

“I like cookies and I don’t like buying them,” I said with a shrug. And then after a pause, “But, how do you make cookies not from scratch?”

“Tube,” the guy said, and I sort of had a little WTF? moment.

Chocolate chip cookies are so damned simple to make that buying a tube of pre-made dough seemed like a waste of time. If you’re going to eat preservatives, just buy a box of cookies and be done with it. If you’re going to go through the trouble of turning the oven on, why not spend the extra ten minutes and make the dough. It’s flour, sugar, vanilla, eggs and a bag of chocolate chips for crying out loud.

I kept that all to myself and just shook my head in disbelief that there is a market for such a thing as refrigerated cookie dough.

While we all sat on the couch, #1GF! told them about the baby, and the girlfriend said that she had noticed the cards on the mantle and the gift box from a children’s store, but that she didn’t want to say anything because we just met her a few minutes ago. The guy didn’t notice any of that, and really, neither had I. Men generally aren’t very observant unless there are electronics or boobies involved.

Once they headed out, #1GF! and I were left alone for the first time all day.

“That was fun,” I said.

“It was fun,” #1GF! agreed.

“Almost all of the cookies are gone,” I said. “I think there were around three dozen.”

“That’s nothing. Just wait until beach weather.”

“Oh, we’re going to have to go to Costco and buy some big ass boxes of snacks.”

We had leftovers (meaning I didn’t have to cook), and sat on the couch watching sitcoms until bed.

Tuesday (Day 625): All In All, You’re Just Another Cell In The Sheet

#1GF! and I drove to the mechanic’s to pick up her car on the way to work. I love the mechanic’s place, although I don’t think I’d ever randomly drop my car there if I didn’t already know about it. The building is practically falling down,and it’s covered by a roof that is made up of several tacked down blue tarps. When you go in, there are phone numbers for various automotive companies written directly on the wall. If the inspection guy is out, a hand-lettered sign appears in the window telling you when you should come back for an inspection. Business is in cash or check, and things only get replaced if they can’t be repaired. If franchises are the Microsoft of automotive repair, this place is like Linux. It’s a hacker’s version of a garage.

And because it’s like a hacker’s garage, no one is going to offer you a sweet mocha latte or blow smoke up your ass. Transactions are pleasant, but brief, and #1GF! was in her vehicle and headed out to work in ten minutes. I was back home and writing by 9AM. I wrote non-stop until 7PM just to get the 6900 words that make up my weekly LOR post out the door.

The LOR posts are getting absolutely ridiculous these days, and probably should be broken up into separate posts if I have any interest in using them to increase traffic. But, then, The Life Of Riley isn’t made to be indexed or seeded with keywords. It’s made for when I’m chained to a grey cubicle that’s as unique as a cell in an empty worksheet to help me remember the time that I took a couple of years away from bosses to try my writing hat on.

I answered e-mail and checked stats to give myself some time away from the words to make them less familiar and more editable. When #1GF! got home, she made dinner while I finished my final edits. After dinner, she read my post before it went out to cut down on the number of grammatical errors. While she read, I solved the cube in 1:41. It was a best time.

Wednesday (Day 626): I Got Your Pee Right Here

I checked my e-mail and then headed out to pick up my new glasses. There were no parking spots at the opticians, so rather than drive around the block a bunch of times, I drove to the hospital to get some bloodwork done in preparation for my doctor’s appointment the following week. I figured I’d stop by and pick up the glasses on my way back.

I didn’t know how long I’d be waiting to get my blood drawn, so once I got to the hospital, I dropped into the bathroom to get rid of any fluids that might make an extended wait less comfortable. It was odd, but it looked like the bathroom hadn’t been updated since the 1960′s. The chrome of the handles had warn through to brass in most spots, and the brown flecked tiles hadn’t been replaced since they were just coming into style forty years ago. It was like being transported to a bathroom in grade school without the fear that someone was going to try to stuff you into a toilet. If you don’t want to touch anything in a hospital, entering a run down bathroom in the hospital makes you want to touch things even less.

I gave up on not trying to touch anything, and went down the hall to the doctor’s office. I picked up my paperwork from the receptionist and followed her instructions on how to get to the lab. Within a minute, I was standing in front of two more receptionists who were busily looking at baby pictures or something similar that would make two older women swell and coo.

One of the receptionists broke free and checked me in to the hospital. She then directed me to the next lab for the actual testing, and I walked into a copy room and stood there looking around for the door to the hall that I had walked right by. Once the lady directed me into the hall, I got to the next lab without further issue.

The receptionist at that lab was dealing with another patient, who had a disheveled, book-smart look coupled with an attitude that seemed a little too happy to be very normal. I sat in a chair to wait and wondered if the woman was mentally ill, or if she had a particularly fulfilling life in World Of Warcraft. In either case, I was sure that her Elvish identity was her sole identity on weekends.

After a few minutes of being ignored, a man came out of the back and took my paperwork. I sat for another minute before another guy came out of the lab and called my name. I can’t describe exactly how he said it, but he somehow added an incorrectly accented syllable, and a few elongated vowels. I’ve come to expect that fifty percent of people will throw an unnecessary W into my last name, but this was the first time someone took a hammer to my first name. I wondered if I would later look back on this as a sign after I fell down the rabbit hole and was offered the red pill.

I sat down in the chair and the tech prepped various needles and tubes while I looked on. He tied my arm off and the veins barely popped up. “I need to get back to the gym,” I thought. “I used to have really good veins. I’d be a terrible junkie.”

I used to watch the needle go in to desensitize myself to it, but now I just watch it go in out of habit. I could see right into the hole of the needle, and never realized how large the needles actually are. Within seconds, the blood was flowing out of my veins and down the spiral tube, like a really small, vampiric version of a crazy straw.

In a couple of minutes, the vials were filled, and the guy gave me a cup to pee in. “Of course you need a urine sample,” I thought. I look at all tests as if they are school tests, so when they take my blood, I think of small veins as failing. If they give me a cup, I expect to be able to fill it. I looked at this like an unexpected pop quiz.

I didn’t think I’d have anything left after the trip to the 60′s bathroom a few minutes before, but I gave it a shot anyway. I cranked out just enough to fill that cup, and felt like I passed a pop quiz. I refrained from saying “BOOYAH!” or anything like that because the bathroom was right in the middle of the lab, and I knew everyone would hear it.

I screwed on the top to the small plastic jar, and thought that there is something severely uncool about holding a warm cup of urine, even if it is your own. As I washed my hands, I wondered a couple of things: First, what is the point of washing your hands if you’re going to be handling a small, warm vat of urine two seconds later? And second, how many people had that same thought and grabbed that doorknob without washing their hands?

As I dried off my hands, I stared at the sealed pee cup on the counter. “When I walk out,” I thought, “should try to conceal that I have a jar of urine, or should I hold it out in front of me like a baby with a dirty diaper?” I wasn’t sure if there was an etiquette to urine delivery, because I generally don’t save mine for other people.

I imagined that the tech would be somewhere else, and I would be wandering around the hospital with that cup until the liquid inside was closer to room temperature. Fortunately, the tech was right outside the door and took delivery immediately, leaving me no time to think about proper urine delivery protocol.

I went out to the lobby to put my coat on, and there was a technical guy replacing some type of machine. I had a shirt on that said “geeks rule” because when I was getting dressed, I forgot that I’d have to take my fleece off to get blood taken. I typically don’t like to run things up the flagpole, but I threw up the flag anyway and made sure that the shirt could be seen by the tech. There were no salutes. I threw on my coat figuring that the tech guy was more of a business tech than real tech. His pants were way too nice to be a real tech anyway.

On the way out, I looked at the halls and realized just how run down this particular hospital is, and how devoid of activity its halls are. I’ve been going there forever because it used to be a fairly local hospital for me, but it’s an inner city hospital and doesn’t seem like it’s getting the funding it needs to look like something other than an inner city hospital. And the doctors that I’ve seen there are really good, so it’s sort of too bad.

On the way home, I picked up my new glasses, and then dropped by my parents’ house to do a small amount of work on their computer. I had a hard time balancing my need for security with their love of flash games. I wasn’t in a bad mood, but I realized that I was sort of in a quiet mood that might easily have been misinterpreted as bad. I tried keep that from happening, but wasn’t doing a very good job.

I dropped by the market to pick up one thing, so I didn’t get a basket. When I got to the register, I had seven things, which would’ve filled a basket nicely, but which ended up being clumsily pinched and gripped in my hands. When I have a basket, I get so much stuff that I could use a cart and end up carrying a ton of extra stuff. When I don’t get a basket, I get enough to fill one. It’s like I’m constantly underappropriating grocery storage space.

When I got home, I made myself a sandwich, and started work on idea for Better Blogroll, one of my WordPress Plugins. With version 2.8, the only option was to display a single list of links, but I wanted to make it so that the user could separate their links by category if they wanted.

It seems like it should’ve been an easy task, but I worked on it until I made dinner, and then after dinner until 11PM. I was still no closer to a solution. I was looking for elegance, efficiency, and functionality, and that rarely happens on a first pass. Sometimes you just have to thrash out a working mess and then tame the code later.

Thursday (Day 627): An Even Betterer Blogroll

I was sitting on the couch doing some post breakfast reading, and I heard, “and the baby would be born with its organs outside its body…” from the other room. I thought, “OK, that’s it.” I walked into the other room. “You are not watching this.”

#1GF! looked up at me with a mixture of nervousness and guilt.

“OK, OK,” she said as she changed the channel.

“I mean, you can watch what you want, but this is not going to do anything but make you worry about rare pregnancy complications as if they are common.”

“You’re right.”

“I’m sorry to boss you around.”

“It’s OK. You mean well.”

“I’d wrap you in bubble wrap if I could.”

“I know you would.”

Once #1GF! was off to work, I checked my mail then went back to the optician’s because my new lenses seemed like they were thicker than my old glasses even though my prescription was the same. To someone looking at me, the glasses would distort my head and make it look like an hourglass. The glasses weren’t cheap, so I went back to see if there was anything that could be done to fix it. I was apologetic to my optician for something that I wasn’t sure was minor, but she said she’d take care of it for me.

Once I got home, I went back to work on Better Blogroll’s new category separation feature and ended up working on it all day. I felt like I was wasting my time adding features to a free plugin, but I’ve been thinking about the feature for a while and wanted to add it. Even though I worked out some of the logic out on scrap paper, I was tearing my beard out until I decided to solve each logistical problem at a time with ugly, but working code.

An interesting thing I did to streamline testing was to set up a post template in WordPress to allow me to write the code in a draft page and test it. I could then test portions of the code in a post that no one would see, rather than continually fixing a widget that would throw errors site wide.

Once I had working code in the post, I worked on streamlining it into functions to make myself feel like less of a hack. Once that worked, I changed the naming conventions of the variables to match the current Better Blogroll plugin, and tested the widget once again in what I thought would be nothing more than a testing formality.

And the widget bombed.

Thinking that I was done and knowing that I screwed something up in a simple search and replace made me jump out of my chair and stomp away from the computer saying things like “Oh, you fuckin’ gat gingin’ snopple fwah” and other half-intelligible obscenities as I ran my hands through my hair and beard.

I spent an hour testing and narrowing the location of the error, until I found a single, misplaced underscore. If PHP had the equivalent of Perl’s use strict;, that error would’ve been pointed out to me immediately as an errant, undeclared variable. And if wishes were fishes, I’d have my own aquarium.

I finally finished up at 6PM, just as #1GF! was coming in the door with pizza. I updated the SVN repository with the new code, and shut down my PC. I spent the rest of the night watching TV and doing the cube, as happy as if I had really accomplished something.

Friday (Day 628): Three Fourths != Three Eighths

#1GF! took her mom to the doctors, and I cleaned the bathroom from 7:30 until 9. I was surprised at how long it took despite how good it looked before I started. I listened to a local pop station as I cleaned, and they were already repeating songs before I was finished.

Once the bathroom was as clean as it was going to get, I got dressed and started a batch of cookies. I was counting on them coming out great, but I accidentally doubled one of the ingredients. I got a little pissed at myself and almost threw the whole batch away. Yes, I was pissed about cookies. No, I wasn’t that pissed because they’re only cookies.

#1GF! came home a little while later because there was some screw up at the doctor’s office where they didn’t have the right staff available for the test that they were going to do. #1GF! and her mom wanted me to go to lunch with them, but I was in the middle of a cookie baking cycle. I didn’t want them to wait for me, and I didn’t want to waste any money on the restaurant that they were going to. It’s not a bad place, but it’s a little fancy for a guy like me.

The two of them left, and I continued baking. When #1GF! came back, I asked her to try a cookie without telling her what was wrong with it. She said it was good, but not as good as the cookies usually were. That’s a passing grade, but I still wasn’t happy with them. I ran out of butter, so that batch was the best that I was going to do that day.

I packed the cookies in a tin and we went to drop them off at the granite fabricator’s because they had been so good to us. We stayed for a few minutes, and then drove #1GF!’s mom home.

When we got home, I looked up the granite fabricator’s website and noticed a ton of errors right off the bat that would hurt their search engine rankings. I realized that even though I’m no genius about the web, I’ve picked up a fair amount of knowledge that most web novices don’t know or care about. I think that there’s opportunity in that, but I’m not sure if I’d want to exploit it and derail the idea of getting a real, weekly paycheck type job.

#1GF! and I spent our time before bed playing a couple of rounds of Carcassonne. I won both games, but that’s only because it usually takes #1GF! a couple of tries to get the hang of a new game.

Before bed, I checked the stats on Better Blogroll, and the new version had been downloaded 275 times during day. Not bad at all.

Saturday (Day 629): Wanted – Movie Tagline Writer

I was up at the crack of dawn, and I wanted to get up and get going, but I really didn’t have anywhere to get up and get going to. #1GF! didn’t have the same feeling, so I decided to make myself some coffee and sit around timing myself on the cube.

A lot earlier than you’d expect, there was a knock at the door asking if I could come over to a neighbor’s house to help move a TV. In our house, you can hear people talking across the street even when the windows are closed, so I later realized that saying, “My hair is a wreck, and my breath probably stinks bad, but I’ll get it” right before opening the door might have gone unmentioned, but probably didn’t go unnoticed.

When I got back from moving the TV, I sipped my coffee and stared out at the lawn trying to mentally landscape it. When the roadblocks started piling up on that idea, I would think of other problems to solve. Each idea was shared with #1GF! as they arrived. And they were arriving like a fat guys to a comic book convention.

“I can’t imagine what it’s like in your head,” said #1GF!.

“What do you mean?” I asked, pushing down my mental pause button with a spring-loaded, old school chaclick.

“You have so many ideas going all at once.”

“What I’ve had is two strong cups of coffee after not drinking coffee in a while.”

“Ah, good point.”

I probably should’ve let the super genius illusion go on a little longer, BUT I HAD TO GET ALL THE IDEAS OUT BEFORE THE CAFFEINE WORE OFF. GABIDIBRUDALAGA.

A little while later, #1GF! and I went to our friends’ house to set up their wireless router that I failed to set up a few weeks before. The husband had to run out for a minute, and the wife wasn’t home yet, so #1GF! had to sit and wait in their game room. Luckily, they have a very fun house, so rather than run around with their underwear on our heads, we fired up their air hockey table, and #1GF! proceeded to give me a 1970′s style thrashing.

Midway through our game, the husband returned. With a rag and some furniture polish he stopped the game to Zamboni the rink for us. It didn’t help my game, and I got destroyed. #1GF! played a championship round with the husband, and he won by a narrow margin.

Fun time was over, so I went in to set up their wireless network. They had an N router, a G extender, and B cards. I knew that it was theoretically possible to get all of the different specifications to work together, but after the previous attempt at getting the different protocols to play nicely, I decided that we should go get some N cards to match the N router. We’d dump the B cards and deal with the G spec extender only if we ended up needing it.

The wife came home, and the husband and I ran out to a local office supply store to get new cards. When we got back, #1GF! and the wife were going out shopping. We waved as we passed in the driveway.

It took a little longer than I thought, but I got the router setup and secured, and got one card working. A second machine wouldn’t install the drivers for the new card, and I eventually needed to re-register the Windows installer service to get it to work. Once the machine would take a new installation, everything went like clockwork.

The husband mentioned that after I secured his router the last time, his neighbor suddenly announced that he was signing up for internet service. It sounds like there might’ve been a little internet piggybacking going on in the neighborhood before I shut it down.

The husband was so grateful to have his internet back that he thought he owed me, but he helped us move and gave me a nice strong cup of coffee, so I would say that we were even. Actually, I might owe him a cup of coffee. Once we were out of there, I felt like I had accomplished something. I love solving problems for people.

To try to get something checked off our own list, #1GF! and I went to a couple of furniture stores and then to a furniture consignment store. We were looking for a dining room table that would fit more than the two of us and remove the fear that a chair would suddenly fall apart and skewer one of our guests.

I hadn’t been in a furniture consignment store in a long time, and it was sort of fun. It was like a flea market where no one is toothless or telling you that everything is double the price because it was once owned by Elvis. I’m not sure that I’d buy a used couch at this stage of the game, but when you’re looking for something like a table, used doesn’t seem like a bad idea.

By the time we finished furniture shopping, it was dinner time, so we decided to drop into The Cheesecake Factory. I don’t know what the big deal is about that place, but #1GF! likes it, so I figured we should stop in while we were in the area.

The mall parking lot was packed like it was Christmas time, which made no sense to me. We had to drive around for a full ten minutes just to get a spot near the back of the lot. We walked across the parking lot in the freezing cold, to end up in a place that was completely mobbed.

I walked up to the counter and asked the guy with the black tie and matching shirt how long the wait for two people was. Without actually turning his tiny glasses away from the screen, he said that the wait would be 60 to 80 minutes and then upgraded it to 65 to 85. Even though it made the time spent parking seem wasted, I thanked the guy and we walked out.

As we walked up the row to our car, people followed us up the rows in an attempt to grab our parking spot. “Come on, let’s ditch them,” #1GF! said as she cut through a row of cars.

Getting the message, I paused and pretended to look for my keys next to a Mercedes SUV before following her into the next row. Once the driver sped off to find another pedestrian to stalk, we turned back into our row and continued on to our car. “Oh you’re a mean one, ” I said.

#1GF! just smiled.

We left the mall to hit one more furniture store because it was easier to drive there from where we were than from home. As we were driving, “It Takes Two” by Rob Base came on the radio. I dialed a friend of mine and held up the phone while the song played. I then said, “Long live the pig,” into the phone and hung up.

“What was that all about?” asked #1GF!.

I explained to her that when I was a teenager, a friend of mine had an 80′s Dodge Colt hatchback that we referred to as “the pig”. It was shaped like a pig, it was colored a weird light tan color that was as close to skin tone that you could get in a production automotive paint, and it hauled our sorry teenage asses all over the place, needing a push every once in a while to get it in motion.

In our infinite wisdom, every time a boom box died, I would hand over the speakers, and they would be wired into the Pig’s premium tape deck sound system. When the pig took corners, you could hear the hollow tonkata tonk of loose boom box speakers banging into each other in the tiny hatchback area.

This was a homegrown and thoroughly teenage operation, so there were no real speakers or amplifiers added. When we popped in Mr. Magic’s Rap Attack Volume 4, it would get cranked to the max. When the tape made it to “It Takes Two”, the old boombox speakers would distort so badly that most of the song sounded like “BSHGGRRKK Woo! BSHGGRRKK Yea!”

In the rare occasion when I’m driving and “It Takes Two” comes on the radio, I feel the need to call and leave a message to remind the guy of a time when our expectations were a lot lower.

When we got to the final furniture store, I started looking under the tables and found that most of them were made of plywood. Oddly, I didn’t know whether I cared or not. I’d rather have a solid wood table, but times are tough, and a dining room table is rarely an heirloom. You use it, and thirty years down the road, you chuck it, or feel bad that no one but the Salvation Army will take your heirloom quality table.

We left the furniture store with nothing but ideas, and went to a restaurant near home. Out of habit, I ordered a cup of coffee with dinner. “It’s hard to believe that this is the same place that’s mobbed in the summer,” #1GF! said while looking over the six other couples scattered around the place.

“Yea. You wouldn’t know it’s the same town,” I replied.

“Soon enough, they’ll all be coming back.”

“They always do,” I said.

I wrote in my notebook trying to scratch out the details of the day without ignoring the lady across the table.

“Hey, tell me what you think of this line,” I asked #1GF! as I shared a quick idea with her. ‘His life was like a summer rental in a beach town. And she was like the summer that never arrived.’”

“Oh, that sounds sad,” #1GF! said. “But, I’d rent it.”

“It’s an interesting line isn’t it? Wait, you’d rent it?”

“Yea, if it was on the box of a movie, I’d rent it.”

“Hmm. Maybe I should get a job as a tagline writer. I wonder if they have jobs for things like that.”

What I Learned

• I don’t think the Wii is all that impressive.
• I might suck at air hockey, but #1GF! is truly an air hockey force to be reckoned with.
• Three-quarters does not equal three-eighths.
• Kids like nonsense words and will act mental if you encourage nonsense too much.
• I make cookies from scratch.
• It is possible to mispronounce my first name.
• I can do a Rubik’s cube in 1:41.
• The hospital that my primary care doctor is in is turning into a dump.
• I constantly underappropriate storage space at the supermarket.
• PHP has no equivalent of use strict;, and it really should.
• You can create a template in WordPress and use it to test PHP without disrupting your entire site.
• Sometimes you need to thrash through a mess of ugly code before working in the efficiency.
• I’m probably better at fixing websites than I give myself credit for.
• If my writing career doesn’t pan out, there will always be movie taglines that need to be written.

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Posted in Life of Riley