Life of Riley Week 92

This is week 92 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 637): Don’t Blame Me For My Beard

One of #1GF!’s headlights had gone out, so I went out to the driveway to get it replaced before the snow started. The light was behind the battery, so it was difficult to get at with my set of regular sized man hands. I figured that I would take the battery out to make the job easier, but of course, the tie down bolts were rusted. Any pressure applied to the nut, twisted the tie down and put it in danger of snapping. It was Sunday before a scheduled snow storm, so I didn’t want to be driving all the way to the auto parts store for something I broke.

I shoved my hand behind the battery and tried to get the light out, but it was cold and I couldn’t seem to get a grip on the rubber boot that protected the light. Just as I was starting to get frustrated, it started snowing. I closed the hood and went inside to scrub a batch of manly, but achievementless grease off my hands.

To try to get at least something checked off my list, I decided to install a dimmer switch on the light over the sink. #1GF! couldn’t stand how bright the light was, and had started getting in the habit of leaving it off when washing pans. Without light, pans don’t get very clean. Considering that a switch replacement isn’t very involved, I thought it would be a quick little check mark to prove that I was still good for something around here.

I turned on the light and went down to the basement to the electrical panel. I clicked off the breakers one at a time until #1GF! called down that the light had gone off. Sure that I was safe, I went back up to start the install.

While pulling out the old switch, the bare copper ground wire touched the outlet next to it and sparks popped all over the counter. I’ve replaced a ton of switches, outlets, and fixtures without a problem. I always shut off the power, and I even go so far as to use one hand at a time, so that if I somehow did complete a circuit, the current would go from arm to toe instead through the heart. Something like this has never happened before.

I plugged a radio into the outlet and unlike me, it was dead. I wanted to kill all the power in the house before moving on, but #1GF! was in the middle of a load of laundry, so the power had to stay on.

I stood there at the kitchen counter staring at the wires sticking out of the wall, and I waited. And waited. Within ten minutes, I got tired of waiting and installed the switch anyway. My mistake was that I shut off the circuit that the switch was on, but failed to check the outlet next to it. They were on different circuits, and I didn’t shut off the power to the outlet, causing it to short when I bumped it with the wire. Both circuits were off now, so I thought that shutting the whole house down would be overkill.

I put in the new switch, screwed the plate back into place, and went down to the panel to turn the power back on.

The instant that I clicked the breaker, I heard #1GF! say that the light was working, which was odd, because I had left the switch in the off position. I went upstairs and turned the switch on, and the light went off. I had installed the damned thing upside down. Even though I had avoided electrocution, I could see that this was not going to be my day.

To make matters worse, the switch cast an orange glow inside the switch when turned off. It took me a few seconds to process that I had accidentally bought a night light because it looked like something was burning behind the plate. I didn’t need a nightlight in the kitchen, and #1GF! didn’t want one either. I was being denied my checkmark once again.

Even thought it was already snowing at a decent rate, I threw on a hat, jumped in the car, and drove to the closest home megastore to get another switch.

Because it was a snowy Sunday morning, there were very few people in the store. I had a hard time locating the dimmer switches, because they were a couple of rows from where I expected them to be.

When I finally located a switch and took it to the counter, the self check machine had a meltdown and immediately started flashing for cashier assistance. I wondered if it was related to my robot. A cashier had to check me out, defeating the basic premise of the self-checkout.

I tried to pay with a gift card, but the register wouldn’t take it. I tried another gift card and the same thing happened. I had ran out my house with $7, two worthless gift cards, and my shoes untied, so I eventually had to resort to paying with a credit card.

The woman asked to see my ID, which I produced, complete with a clean cut, smiling young fellow on it. She looked at the ID, and then at the bearded nightmare in front of her, and then back at the ID. It was as if she was trying to reinforce that what she was seeing at least matched from the eyes up. She looked at me and didn’t say anything, but wasn’t offering my license back.

“Big difference between the winter me and the summer me,” I offered.

“Well, I don’t blame you,” she said while handing me my ID, credit card, receipt, and bag. I honestly have no idea what that meant, but felt lucky that I wouldn’t have to carry some sort of bearded blame from a clerk I didn’t know around with me for the rest of the winter.

I was back home within a half hour, and went back to installing the switch.

“Wait, wait wait!” said #1GF! “Where are my car keys?”

“On the counter,” I said. “Why?”

“Just in case I have to get you to the emergency room.”

I just shook my head. I installed the dimmer right side up within five minutes and turned the power back on. It worked fine. #1GF! would have a more romantic light to clean dishes by, and I would have cleaner pans.

“Ok,” I said to #1GF! “Why don’t we pretend that we overslept and the morning never happened.”

I made #1GF! breakfast and read the rules to Pandemic, in the hopes of playing the game that I heard was so good. Pandemic is a cooperative board game where the players work to eradicate four viruses that are attacking cities all over the globe. Being a cooperative game, either all the players win or all the players lose.

I was getting so bored reading the rules that I would read the same lines over and over again without processing them. I suggested giving up and playing something else rather than reread another line, but #1GF! suggested that we should at least give it a try. It was a good suggestion, because it ended up being one of the most unique games that I’ve played in a long time. The cooperative angle in a strategy game turned out to be really interesting.

#1GF! and I lost the first game to a black death that swept Europe and the Middle East, and were in the middle of our second game when Macoosh dropped by. She isn’t a fan of strategy games, so we put the game away to play something else.

We tried to play Loaded Questions, but despite being great for groups, this party game absolutely did not work with three. It ended up being way too easy, and we gave up after a couple of hands. We busted out an oldie but a goodie, and played nine rounds of Scattergories, which devolved into not caring about points. Well, some of us didn’t care. Ok, I didn’t care about them.

#1GF! and I started cooking up a pot of homemade chicken soup, and managed to play one round of Grass before the soup was ready. I think Macoosh was starting to get the hang of the game, but soup and cards don’t mix. Soup wins. After dinner, we all talked for a bit, and Macoosh headed home. #1GF! and I turned in soon after.

Monday (Day 638): The Abominable Shai Hulud

I started my day by shoveling out and starting #1GF!’s car. The snow was flying sideways in the 40 MPH winds, so by the time I had a path shoveled to the car, it had been filled in with more snow. I shoveled enough to get #1GF! out to work, and I went inside to dry off. I hung up all my clothes, showered, and then sat down to write the weekly Life of Riley.

By noon, I had a rough draft done, and I went out to shovel to get myself away from the words. Even though we only got seven or eight inches of snow, I shoveled for a couple of hours because the wind and twenty degree temperatures had created dune worthy drifts. I fully expected the Abominable Shai Hulud to raise up out of the snow and swallow rocket car whole. Fortunately, it was so cold that the great sand worm was probably at home sipping cocoa and watching infomercials from the comfort of a giant worm Snuggie.

I went back in at 2PM and finished editing LOR by 7:30. #1GF! was home by then and we had chicken soup for the second night in a row. After dinner, #1GF! read the LOR post as final approval and I published it.

I was sitting on the couch at 9PM, and I was suddenly exhausted. I felt more than a little shame that shoveling and writing could wear me out like that, so I blamed the warm goodness of the homemade chicken soup.

Tuesday (Day 639): Did You Have The Chicken Or The Gecko?

I shoveled a path to #1GF!’s car once again because the ocean winds had ruined my last two paths. #1GF! headed out to work and I apologized that she had to go. I sat down at my desk and answered the weekend’s e-mails before looking through some of the job offerings on LinkedIn. Within a couple of hours, I was frustrated with the job market, and started writing the following week’s LOR.

I talked to both my sister and the engineer on the phone, and then started work on the site for the kitchen folks. All they wanted me to do was add some pictures. That’s it. But, I can’t help but look at what else might need fixing because that’s what I do.

The front end looked OK, but every time I turned a corner on the back end, there was another element that was written as if the site were created in 1999. Do you remember spacer.gif? Yea, me too. Ever use it anymore? Yea, me neither. To make matters worse, the site completely breaks when JavaScript is turned off. And to top it all off, there’s no way to do any real SEO because all the text on the entire site is contained in images. No matter how many times we looked at the site, neither Google nor I had any idea what to do with it.

The more I looked at the site the more I wanted to scrap the whole thing and do it over. I figured that I could probably rebuild a new site from the ground up in the same the amount of time that I would spend duct taping the old site together. It was going to be an interesting challenge. In the end, all I did to the production site was to give them a favicon while I mulled everything over.

I wrote a post on Finetune going out of business based on some public information that I found on Facebook. I thought the post would give some Finetune fans an opportunity to archive copies of their Finetune playlists if the site happened to go dark.

For the last couple of days I had been getting a sore throat and my sinuses were getting clogged somewhere way up in my head. It was an annoying tickle that turned into a shifting clog that I couldn’t seem to get rid of.

After dinner, I blew my nose, and such a big booger came out that I couldn’t imagine how it could’ve come out of my nose. I’m not saying that I have a dainty little shnoz or anything, but this booger had the diameter of a dime and had a tail that was easily an inch long. The thing unexpectedly shot out of the far reaches of my sinuses, and I stood there looking at it like an alien had just blown out of my stomach and was waving at me. I couldn’t help but ask #1GF! if she wanted to see it. No, I really did.

“Oh my god. You are not going to believe this booger that came out of my nose just now.”

“Really,” said an uninterested #1GF! from the other room.

“You have no idea.” I breathed in and out a couple of times. “I’m actually clear. This thing is huge. You want to see it?”

“Yea, OK.”

I really didn’t expect that answer at all. I brought the booger in. It looked like I had evicted a pet gecko that had been living in my nose.

“Oh my god. Is that chicken?”

“What?” I asked before going in for a closer look. “No, it’s not chicken, Goose. It’s definitely all booger. It’s ridiculous.”

“That’s redonk…”

“I thought that I might’ve been getting sick and now I feel great. It’s like that little thing was the entire problem. You know, I was smelling wood smoke in the bathroom yesterday, and didn’t know if I should call you in to save you? Then, I thought it was more logical that I was getting some sort of sinus infection.”

I walked out of the room and into the bathroom. I will admit to looking at the monstrous booger for a few seconds and wondering if tiny gecko shaped aliens were invading human sinuses to suck on their sweet, sweet brains. I closed the tissue and threw in the trash before we ended up with a whole government-sponsored, E.T. plastic tent around the house thing going on.

I had Ramen noodles for dinner again because I’m an adult, and I can do such things once and a while to remind me of my younger and poorer days. I was sitting in front of the TV and nothing was on, so #1GF! put on one of those baby shows where the mother has to have surgery on her uterus because a three headed baby kept falling out of it. I was sitting there trying to eat ice cream, and uterine surgery and baby emergencies were not something that I was interested in watching. I changed the channel to something less gross. Anything less gross. I popped another spoonful in my mouth before #1GF! changed it back.

I got irritated, got off the couch, and put the ice cream back in the freezer because there was no way that I was going to enjoy pockets of caramel with a bloody womb filling my field of vision. I could’ve eaten it (it wasn’t a queasy thing), but why bother eating ice cream if I’m not going to get the maximum enjoyment out of it?

Look, if I sit down to eat ice cream or homemade cookies, I’m treating myself to something that isn’t good for me. Considering the small number of things that aren’t good for me that I actually still enjoy these days (drinking: gone, smoking: gone, illegal substances: gone, heavy metal CD’s: pretty gone for now, bear wrestling: gone, street fighting: gone, chicken monkey donkey porn: gone, eating sushi off naked hookers: gone), I like to make the most out of something stupid like eating partially melted ice cream out of the container. It’s sad, but it’s true.

But, that wasn’t the real issue. #1GF! could’ve put on a romance movie and I would’ve sat there longer just trying to ignore it. The real issue for me was that there are enough things to worry about when you’re having a kid. You worry about if the baby is progressing normally, if she’s kicking enough, if she’s going to grow up to be well adjusted, if she’s going to inherit your overblown sense of independence, or end up with some strange genetic disorder.

There are a million things to worry about, and no one can tell you for certain that your baby will be fine. It’s all statistics and guesswork. So, when given the option of spending my free time watching a show about one of those 1 in 20,000 births that goes horribly wrong, I don’t want to see it. I retain what I see and these shows are just another worry to add to the pile for something that statistically, I probably don’t need to think about.

#1GF! eventually changed it over when she saw how annoyed I was with it. I hugged her to thank her, but I don’t think the healing effect of the hug set in immediately.

Wednesday (Day 640): Professional Nude Jumping Jacks

I went to my parents’ in the morning to shovel them out, and noticed that their heat was at 42 degrees. They had gone out, so I checked their thermostat which showed that the boiler was firing, even though it wasn’t.

I used to have a steam boiler long ago, so it took me a minute to realize that the boiler water looked low. I added some water to it and it fired right up. I stayed for a bit just to make sure that the boiler was firing up, and while wandering around and leaning in doorways, I noticed that one of the radiators was leaking. I shut the radiator down, waited a little while longer, and headed out once everything seemed like it was creeping toward the status quo.

I dropped into the market for milk and lunch meat, and walked out with milk and lunch meat. There were no crazy arms full of groceries or juggling of food items. I’d like to thank the food warehouses for cutting down my shopping and making my writing even more boring.

When I got home, I had a sandwich, and checked my email. I had a email from a guy at Finetune asking me to take down my post that Finetune was shutting down because he was getting reamed for making some knowledge public on Facebook that he shouldn’t have.

I thought about it for a few minutes, but decided that my post wasn’t journalism. I didn’t write a cover story to break news about someone who was doing something wrong. I posted some info to help some of my readers make copies of playlists that they spent a fair amount of time on. Even though I got my info from a public source, an insider was catching hell for making it public in the first place. I took the post down temporarily at the guy’s request because I’m not out to give anyone a headache. That might be poor journalistic integrity, but I’m a blogger, not a journalist. Journalists dig dirt. Bloggers dig people.

I left the PC to put up a couple of new blinds in the bedroom so that the paparazzi won’t be able to make any money if I ever decide to enter the world of professional nude jumping jacks. Then, I went into my office and cut all the strings on the blinds so that they would no longer lay across the floor when the blinds were open. I spent more time than you’d think tying and retying knots to make the cords even. By that point it was 4:30, so I put what was left of the day into transcribing another day into this week’s LOR.

Thursday (Day 641): A Face That Desperately Needs Licking

In the morning, I set up an XAMPP server and a local installation of WordPress so that I would have a real WordPress development area on my PC. Even though I eventually found instructions, I spent a good portion of the morning figuring it out and getting it running.

In the afternoon, I got a call from a friend who was having trouble getting a wireless laptop to connect to his router. I tried to walk him through it over the phone, but then told him that I’d come down and fix it for him after a quick sandwich.

Other than being a longer drive than I expected, I got to the house fine. I went to the office and sat on the floor and leaned against the wall with the laptop on my actual lap. As I upgraded the router and secured the connections, I would occasionally have to free up a hand and point at the dog and say “No.” The dog seemed to translate this into “Go lower and move slower, because I have a face that desperately needs licking.”

Eventually, my friend sent the dog to lay down and I used my freed pointing hand to double my rate of fixing. Unlike the last wireless install I did, I had the router firmware upgraded, the laptops connecting, and the connections secured and hidden within twenty minutes.

We headed out to the driveway, and one of the neighbors came by to introduce herself and chat at us for a while. There are one or two people in every neighborhood who have to know everything that’s going on, and I find it ends up being more beneficial to just quietly give in than to resist them.

After the neighbor left, and while we were still standing in the driveway, I finally told my friend about the baby. He’s pretty much one of my oldest friends (almost thirty years), and the whole trip was more of an excuse to tell him about the baby face to face rather than over the phone. We talked about having kids for a while and then I headed back home.

When I got home, I went back to looking at the kitchen people’s web site and found myself getting up from my desk and saying “What the fuck?” at random intervals. The site would’ve been great in 1999, but it was built within the last year at a normal web development pay grade. The more that I looked at how to fix it, the more it looked like it needed to be scrapped.

I figured that it would take me just as much time to rebuild a bad site than to build a new one from scratch, so I spent the rest of the day mocking up a new site design in GIMP. By the end of the day, I had what I wanted.

I made pork chops for dinner, and they came out dry as hell. For some reason, I can’t seem to cook a juicy pork chop because I’m so worried about cooking them long enough so no one gets trichinosis. After dinner, I showed #1GF! the kitchen site redesign and she really seemed to like it. I took that as a good second opinion and opted to send it off to the kitchen people for approval.

When I went into my email, I found a notification from a reader that another site had copied my entire Quest For Every Beard Type post without so much as a link back. I hated doing it, but I sent a takedown notice, asking them to remove my material from their site. By the time I figured out how to do that and got the request out, it was time for bed.

Friday (Day 642): Seeking Mail Room Clerk. Must Be Former CIO

I started the day looking for jobs on all the online job boards. There are so many places to find jobs that I didn’t know which were spam sites, which were semi-spam, and which might land me an actual decent paying job that I liked. After going through fifty or so sites, I narrowed it down to a few that seemed relatively valid, and made sure to bookmark them so that I’d know where to look in the future.

As I looked at the jobs available, I came across basically three types of jobs: entry level, CIO level, and entry level who wanted CIO qualifications. The third category was the most fun to read. They would always start with something like

“Seeking HTML coder to fix small issues with our website. Requirements: PHP, CSS, LAMP, HTML, 5 years Flash development, Perl, C++, CISSP certification, MCSE certification, eye beams or ability to fly a plus.”

When I see postings like that I don’t know what to make of them. If they say “coder” after HTML, I already get the feeling that the employer might not know what they’re asking for, which makes me wonder why a technical person isn’t writing the hiring specs. If the technical person is writing the hiring specs and they use phrases like “HTML coder”, I can’t help but visualize some cocky wiener with more confidence than knowledge asking me questions to find out if I know how to “code” HTML.

Then, I wonder why they’re asking for C++ knowledge and certifications for a web developer position. Do they really have minor issues with their website, are they looking for overqualified people for the job, or do they simply not know what they’re asking for? It’s hard to tell.

Once and a while, I would run into postings that were in a completely different category. Or not. Or they may have been. Honestly, I’m not sure how to classify them, but they would go something like this…

“[company] seeks an I.T. specialist to act as the change agent to actualize and synergize our market deliverables within our client focus. Core competencies should reflect customer focus and should fast track key infomediaries while smart scaling our mission critical operations in accordance with our vision statement.”

When I see postings with so many buzzwords and so little content, I wonder what caliber of business based desk jockey will Mr. Goodtie his way into the job. Then I wonder how long it will take before management drills down and finds out that the new IT employee has become one of the main reasons for the current delayering initiative.

I subscribed to a bunch of custom RSS feeds from about ten sites and went through the jobs as they came in. I was either way over or way under qualified for all of them. I didn’t know if I should be throwing my resume out on some of these sites as well, because even though it seemed like a good way for an employer to find themselves a solid, mid-level jack of all trades, it seemed like a good way for me to get my face spammed off (Yes off. My face wham biff bam on the floor surrounded by a bunch of emails from girls who don’t exist trying to sell me stock tips or pee pee pills. Do you do you want my face? I need it.).

At 3PM, I gave up on the jobs and dove into a couple of hours of QuakeLive. I know. It’s my own rule that video games do nothing but waste time and give a false sense of achievement when you’re unemployed, but for the first time in a long time, I spent the day at my computer doing what felt like work.

What I do for eight to ten hours every day: writing, editing, web development, plugin development, graphic design, or trying to keep my finger on the pulse of a web that keeps shifting, rarely seems like work to me. Pay or not, whatever I put my energy into is only work if there’s no element of play in it. Being unemployed, I have a lot greater leeway in what I choose to put my energy towards, so even though scripting or writing are work-like activities, an element of fun keeps them from feeling like actual work.

Other than figuring out a way to get all the data faster and in one place, job hunting had no real element of play for me. It really seemed like work.

#1GF! got home an hour later than usual, but she brought pizza home so that I didn’t have to cook. We sat on the couch and watched a couple of shows, happily chomping on pizza.

When I went to bed, I was suddenly and randomly blowing alien slugs out of my nose like I had in the beginning of the week. I didn’t feel that bad, but thought that I might be getting some sort of nasal infection. I haven’t been sick in years, and I wasn’t about to start again now.

Saturday (Day 643): Hey, How Why Ya, Dood? Wicked Pissa?

We were up at 6AM because our internal clocks hadn’t reset to daylight savings time, yet. Getting up in the dark is one of those things that is best left to winter, and we had been getting up in the light for so long that suddenly getting up in the dark again seemed like a major step backward.

#1GF! and I grabbed a quick breakfast and sat down to watch a half hour documentary on Chris’s death that I’ve been avoiding for a while. It was a long half hour. Afterward, I felt like I should only be spending time on things that advance my life or make things better for the people around me. There’s not enough time to waste it on stupid things.

I noticed that the plumber tried to call me, and I think it’s good that I missed it because I didn’t want to spend the day fighting or being lied to. I imagine that the plumber must’ve been notified by the Attorney General’s office that he had a complaint against him. He didn’t leave a message, and I didn’t feel bad about not calling him back. He had months to call and correct the issue, but he chose to avoid it. Now he can deal with the A/G’s office and answer a complaint.

I sat at the counter and had a big glass of orange juice to try to wipe out this alien gekko nasal infiltration that seemed to be coming on. I did the cube a couple of times, and my times hovered around the two minute mark. I blamed the aliens for slowing me down.

It was relatively warm for a pre-Spring Massachusetts day, so #1GF! and I got dressed and headed out to get a few things done. I grabbed a cup of hot coffee because even though the weather felt warm, New England is a cruel mistress. Thirty degree swings between days are not uncommon, and once you get an iced coffee, she’ll freeze it and knock you over the head with it when you’re not looking.

We dropped by my parents’ house for a short visit, and then went to the mall so that #1GF! could get some clothes. I leaned on the rail outside the store and looked down at the people bustling around. It’s my only response in fashion situations that I’m ill equipped for: I just stay out of the way until the lady is finished. I figure that I’m about a Members Only jacket and a pair of slacks away from becoming one of those old guys who sleep in the chairs in the middle of the mall.

Once #1GF! came out of the store, we went to the food warehouse to get some supplies. I called an ex-coworker to find out how he was making out with rebuilding his house after his fire, and found out that insurance companies haven’t really changed in the ten years since my house fire. Even though you pay them religiously when times are good, they still drag their feet and try to short change you when everything you had is in a giant pile of ash. If you had a house fire that leveled your house, you could rebuild in six months to a year. Because of the way the insurance companies operate, that time somehow doubles. It can be really stressful and I empathize. I offered once again to help with salvage and demo.

Once I got off the phone, we went into the food warehouse and spent $90, on what I have no idea. The only thing that I can be sure of is that there was an enormous box of cereal among the items carried to the car. Yep. It barely fits in the cabinet.

When we got home, I made a pot of coffee for a Depression cake that I found in Cooks Illustrated. Depression or war cakes are made out of ingredients that were not readily available during World War II, such as butter, milk and eggs. I only needed a cup of coffee, but I figured that I might drink more if I made a pot. As if to defy the thrifty nature of the cake, I didn’t.

#1GF! made lasagna, and the engineer and his wife came over for dinner. At some point in the evening, my voice dropped and I sounded like Barry White if he ever took up the blues or starred in Sling Blade. It was raspy and low enough for me to sound convincing starting sentences with the “In a world…” speeches that start movie trailers.

During the evening conversation, it came up whether kids should have a Boston accent or be trained out of it. I grew up in Metro Boston, but I’m older now, so I have a thick accent that only gets full use when I’m with people I know or when I get really angry.

We all have different ways of speaking to our friends, versus our bosses, versus our parents, and if you want to tightly corral your speech patterns for certain audiences, then do what you have to. If people want to control or lose their accents to achieve some sort of upward mobility, then that’s their prerogative.

On the other, I think if you grew up with an accent, eliminating it completely is sort of denying a small piece of who you are. To me, an accent isn’t just a method of speech, but something that ties you to your past. To weed out a kid’s accent before they have a chance to pare it down themselves, feels like throwing out a piece of their past that they might want one day. Right or wrong, that’s my opinion. Then again, I’ve been known to talk to my shop vac.

What I Learned

  • Check all surrounding outlets when you replace a switch.
  • Some checkout ladies won’t blame me for having a beard.
  • There are web developers out there who charge people big money to develop like it’s 1999.
  • Pandemic is an awesome game.
  • Jokes about the Shai Hulud don’t seem to go very far.
  • Job hunting is a pain in the ass.
  • The web can be a dangerous place if you make private information public with the expectation that it will stay private.
  • Companies getting very fast with reputation management these days.
  • Alien geckos may be invading sinus cavities everywhere.
  • XAMPP will build you a nice little server for a local WordPress development environment.
  • I made a Depression cake.
  • Some people really don’t like Boston accents.
  • Takedown notices tend to work pretty well once you can find a contact for site that’s appropriating your content.
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9 Responses to “Life of Riley Week 92”

  1. Kirsten Says:

    I try not to have a Boston accent when I’m back there, but it comes out when I’m there or even when I talk to my Dad’s family (Mom is from NJ). When I brought Mister back to see the place and meet the family, we pulled up to Kelly’s so he could have a REAL roast beef sandwich, and as soon as I started ordering he declared that I was speaking an entirely different language.

    He’s addicted to roast beef sandwiches, btw. I made him a couple for dinner tonite.

  2. Pablo Says:

    Shai Hulud? Your public name shall be Paul Atreides but you must choose the name of manhood. You shall be known as Paul Muad’Dib. That will be your secret name. Double secret probation name.

  3. macoosh Says:

    a few things:
    1. we need to play grass again — i was really getting into it and was bummed we didn’t play a real round. next time. perhaps you guys can come over for dinner soon?

    2. tuesday’s post made me gag like, 12 times. And then laugh at this TINY typo that changed the meaning completely: “eating sushi of naked hookers: gone”…. sushi OF naked hookers…. that’s just gross. and most likely diseased.
    Just make sure you don’t get any dong juice on it. Hah.

    3. For some reason (prolly cuz it’s too early to exist yet), I read “wham biff bam” as “wham biff BARN” And I was like, oooh i want to go to the biff barn… is that in Kingston? Why Kingston you ask? No idea.

    4. Are you really going to get a job? REALLY? sigh…

    5. i totally thought with the title of saturday’s post that you were going to go to town on our accents in the documentary. my mum’s is the best: “well, i saw the papAH, and i looked at the papAAH and i read the papAAAAAH.” we laughed our asses off the first time we saw it… i never thought her accent was THAT STONG…. i mean, we’re all bad, but dad and i were always the worst. but mum won in that film. At any rate, I’ve had my accent beat out of me by dialect coaches for theatre, and I embrace mine fully. I love it. I will always have it. I’ts a huge security blanket. I will say though, when I use it around certain people, I can see them subtracting points from my assumed intelligence total. So then I throw out a big word and move on with them confusedly in my wake.

  4. Doles Says:

    I can’t believe you mentioned “eating sushi off naked hookers”…it reminds me of all the xmas parties when Uncle Billy would make his yearly joke that the sushi was under cooked…the hookers thought he was so funny.

    By the way, I still tell people the story of your imitation of an insurance appraiser evaluating your loss(holding a pad and paper)… (I’m papraphrasing..it’s been a while)…”let’s see…you had a light bulb (instead of a chandelier), the rugs were made out of paper…”

  5. Jon Says:

    @Kristen: I know it’s a North Shore icon, but I’m South Side, so I don’t get the big deal about Kelly’s. Don’t throw anything at me.

    @Pablo: exactamundo. I couldn’t have said it better.

    @macoosh: 1. Sure. 2. I laughed at that typo, but changed it per your mad. editing skills. 3. Minor brain misfires are the best. 4. They have more money at jobs than I have in my desk, so yea. 5. I will admit to using a stronger accent on occasion just to lull some people into a false sense of superiority.

    @Doles: I wish I could remember the acting on that one. I get a little more animated and abrasive when talking about insurance company tactics.

  6. Kirsten Says:

    I do agree that Kelly’s is a baseline when judging roast beef. I know there are better places out there, but I’ve been away so long that I couldn’t remember where they were, and Kelly’s was convenient to where we were staying.

  7. Pablo Says:

    You can’t go back to an office. Start an organic farm or a beard church or something. I will bring you a daily tithe.

  8. Doles Says:

    I agree with Pablo…we’ll just add a MaBeGroMo earmark to the stimulus package…no one will suspect anything.

  9. Erin Says:

    My husband had to stop me from reading about the horrible things that can go wrong w/ pregnancy and I’m not even pregnant yet. He was right, you are right. There’s no need to worry about those things, but let #1GF! know that she’s not the only lady that watches or reads those things. No matter how horrible they are…

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