This is week 96 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 665): Moo Shu Pork Omelet

I made a leftover Chinese food omelet sandwich for breakfast, and I have to say that it was one of the more delicious breakfast sandwiches I’ve made in recent history. We hung around reading for a good portion of the day, with my biggest achievement being the installation of a bathroom towel rack. Oddly enough, that small check mark on the list of things to do made it feel like all the crap that needs to be done around the house wasn’t such a big deal. I don’t know why, but I felt at peace with it all.

At 3PM, for a lack of something better to do, #1GF! and I went out looking for a dining room table. We hit three stores and may have actually decided on one.

I ate leftovers for dinner, and despite my protests, #1GF! had cereal. No matter what I offered to cook for her, or how much I claimed that cereal was invalid as a dinner food, she would not yield. She ate cereal. After “dinner”, we watched Kung Fu Panda, which reminded me that I need to keep a better eye on the Netflix queue.

Monday (Day 666): Dude, Where’s My Evil?

I woke up early and lay in bed thinking about all the things that I was supposed to do. I got up and got dressed because I was supposed to drive #1GF!’s mom to an appointment. #1GF! said she’d take care of it. I protested, but it didn’t do me any good. I changed into my around the house clothes, got #1GF! out to work, and spent the entire morning writing LOR Week 95.

The mediator’s office called with an update about the issue where the plumber installed a cheaper boiler than we paid for. The mediator said that the plumber’s attorney was putting up some sort of fight and asked whether I had hired an attorney. I said that I hadn’t because I hadn’t thought it was necessary. I haven’t done anything wrong, and the issue is pretty clear cut. She said that she’d get back to me by the end of the week.

At 1PM, I got some bad news about #1GF!’s mom, so I finished writing, jumped in the car and headed over to her house to provide some comic relief. While I was there, #1GF! told me that she felt the baby kick for the first time at her mother’s appointment. I guess it lightened the mood a little.

While we sat around talking, #1GF! discovered that LOR 95 was only half published. Thinking that I might’ve lost hours of writing, I went home to see if I could find a backup copy and republish.

“I’m sorry about this. I’ll be back,” I said to #1GF!.

“No, that’s crazy. You don’t have to come all the way back,” she said.

“Of course I do. I’ll be back in a bit. I’m sorry I’m so obsessed.”

“You’ll never relax if you don’t.”

“Hopefully, it’ll be quick. It’s probably nothing.”

I don’t think that #1GF!’s family has seen me that concerned about anything without cracking a joke, so I think that they were a little surprised. I drove home 45 minutes and ran in the house. It looked like the lost information was the result of a database hangup during publishing. I was lucky, because it only took me five minutes to find the full copy of the post and republish. I made the ride back to #1GF!’s mom’s house feeling a whole lot better, if not a little foolish.

When I got back, the mood bordered on somber.

MISSING DATA 96-666A

People were in and out offering support and food. I had some pasta fagioli, which I don’t think I’ve had in a thousand years, if I’ve ever had it at all. #1GF! and I went home in separate cars by 8PM.

When we got home, we relaxed and watched The Big Bang Theory (CBS Mondays). It’s just so well tailored to a geek audience that I don’t understand how it’s not popular. I don’t know why I thought this clip was so funny, but the show is full of little geeky inside jokes for folks like me.

That was it for day 666 of unemployment. I certainly expected something a little more evil, like maybe chawing on some devil dogs or at least eating some deviled ham for lunch, but it just didn’t work out that way.

Tuesday (Day 667): Hulkamaniac Root Wrastlin’

I answered e-mail and comments, and while doing general checks on site stats, I noticed that there was a sudden, an 800+ increase in visitors coming to the site without a referrer. I’m sure the traffic was real, but a sudden increase in traffic without someone sending it was a little too unusual. I suspected some sort of redirect from somewhere like Twitter that wasn’t being accounted for properly.

At 10AM, I went out and did the food shopping. Even though I thought about using a basket, I picked up a cart just to be safe. I may be learning to judge my food shopping volume because the cart ended up halfway full. I was $13 dollars short on cash, and had to pay with a credit card. Other than having a cart wheel that would inexplicably stop rolling at times, that was the most unusual thing that happened on the entire trip. And you thought your job lacked excitement.

By the time I got the groceries put away, it was already noon. I had a sandwich, and put some St. Louis ribs in a zip lock bag to marinate in a whole mess of BBQ sauce. I zipped up the bag and started mushing them around to spread the sauce, when I noticed that my hands were getting sticky. Sunufa. The bag was leaking.

I washed my hands and grabbed a second bag out of the drawer. Slowly, I poured the contents into the second bag, wringing out every drop of sweet BBQ sauce that I could. When I went to zip it, I noticed that the zipper on the new bag was ripped. I actually said, “Oh, you little…” to the bag. I’ve now hit the point where I talk to zipper lock bags.

I washed my hands again and was about to pour the ribs into a third bag, when I asked myself why I wasn’t using a plastic container. Duh. I dumped all of the BBQ goodness into a big plastic container, and wrung out whatever BBQ sauce I could out of the second bag. I threw it in the fridge to marinate, fully convinced that BBQ ribs that fall off the bone might brighten up #1GF!’s day a little.

My plan was to change into some old clothes, and tear up bush in my yard for an hour or two before putting the ribs into the oven at 3PM. I don’t know in what Hulkamaniac world that this made sense, but that was my plan.

If you’ve ever pulled up a bush, you know that the bush part is easy, but the real work is getting that tenacious ball of roots out of the ground. The first bush had me knee deep in a hole, and had a root ball that was probably older, and definitely tougher than me. It took me hours to get that knotted ball out of the ground, but once I did, I wanted to hold it above my head and body slam it like Andre the Giant.

Unfortunately, the stump was too big, and I was too tired. I quietly taunted the stump with, “I got you, you bastard” and dragged it across the yard by one protruding, wrist-like root. It didn’t resist, and was thrown out of the squared circle that is my yard. I don’t know if it was the roar of the crowds or the adrenaline rush, but I ended up pulling up two more bushes, and ended up in the yard all day.

I took one water break (and resisted taking twenty minutes for a pose down), so I was able to finish breaking and bagging all the sticks by 7PM. #1GF! hadn’t arrived home, so I headed to my parents to drop some stuff off. I didn’t tell my parents that I was going to show up, and ended up calling them from their driveway. I dropped off the stuff, and we talked for a few minutes before I headed back home. I wasn’t exhausted, but my hands didn’t have their usual kung fu grip, and my forearms were pretty sore. I considered it an effort to make left turns in ROCKET CAR! without yelling out “OH YEA!” like Randy Savage.

When I got home, #1GF! still hadn’t arrived, so I jumped into the shower. I hadn’t checked any messages all day because I left my cell phone in the house. I would’ve taken it out into the yard, but it looked weird jammed into my wrestling tights, and the ref probably would’ve confiscated it as a foreign object if I had tried to hide it in one of my boots.

When #1GF! finally got home, she had eaten at her mother’s house, but brought home leftovers for me. It was a really good thing because after a hot shower, I suddenly realized that I didn’t want to cook. I gratefully ate the cold leftovers standing at the sink, as I have been prone to do since I was a teenager.

“I wanted to make some ribs for you tonight, but I took too long on the bushes,” I said to #1GF!.

“You’re a nut,” she said.

“And I wanted to make some cookies for your mom.”

“Aw, a sweet nut.”

“I just ran out of time.” I lifted the fork up, exposing my scratched up forearms.

“Aw honey,” said #1GF!.

“Whaff?”, I said through a mouthful of chicken.

“Your arms.”

“My twenty four inf pyffons?” I said while inspecting the scratches and chewing a piece of chicken as big as a turnbuckle. “Thaff nuffing. Juff a flesh wound.”

“Awww.”

I swallowed quickly. “My hands hurt like hell though. I hate to admit it, but I’m having trouble holding this fork.” I took another really big bite to get as much in as I could before my grip let go. My mouth was so full that I felt like George The Animal Steele.

“Aw, honey.”

“Don’t ‘Aw, honey’ me. You know why they hurt?”

“Because you worked hard out there.”

“No, because I’m a pussy.”

“NO!”

[pointing fork at self] “You are a pussy.”

“Oh stop.”

We went and sat on the couch. It was 9PM. “Oh, shit,” I said. “Is it Pete’s birthday?”

“Uh, yes, I think it is.”

“I have to call…” I said as half a question considering the time.

“You do.”

I called and pretty much yelled/sang the last line of “Happy Birthday” in the most drawn out way I could and hung up without another word.

#1GF! stared at me. “That was loud. You are so weird sometimes.”

“Some people call it weird. I call it entertainment.”

Wednesday (Day 668): Wil Wheaton And Beardo Roboto

I wrote an April Fools post that said that Wil Wheaton doesn’t write this blog, and spent a while trying to create, edit, and convert a video clip off of my camera phone just to add a punchline to the post. There were seven takes of that stupid film, and my camera phone only holds a minute, so I had to cram as much crazy in as I could before the camera cut me off. In the end, the post was so long that it felt like I was making everyone go a long way for a very small small joke.

Once everything was done and posted, I thought that it would be a good idea to send an e-mail to Wheaton just to make sure that he wasn’t bothered by the whole thing. I couldn’t imagine that he would be, but I thought that it would be a good idea to check. I’m not out to offend anyone. He didn’t respond, but I didn’t expect him to. Famous people really should have better things to do than talk about what they’re not writing.

I felt a little crazy about the whole post until I picked up an insane message from a former coworker. The message was almost unintelligible and done in the voice of a baby. I almost saved it just to prove to people that I wasn’t the crazy one, but then thought that playing saved unintelligible baby messages wouldn’t necessarily work in my favor to make me look sane.

At 4PM, I threw some ribs into the oven to cook for a few hours. They were supposed to go in at three, but I completely forgot to put them in. I hate to admit it, but the only reason that I remembered to put them in was that #1GF! called around four and I remembered that I had to feed her.

The ribs came out great as usual. 300 degrees in a covered pan for two or three hours and the meat falls off the bone. I guess you have to be home early to get something like that started, so it’s not a working man’s meal. Although it’s easy enough.

After dinner, I didn’t want to watch TV, but I wanted to be hang around with #1GF!. It was after 8PM, and it seemed too late to start anything, so #1GF! and I talked for an hour, and I held up a People magazine so that she could see the 3D pictures in it. Then, she did the same for me. There were ten or so pages, and it seemed like a long way to go to advertise a 3D movie. It was about ten minutes of each of us saying, “Oh yea, I guess that’s 3-D.”

Thursday (Day 669): #1GF!’s Lucky House Boy

I somehow got involved with re-titling and correcting posts from November, 2002. I never updated the posts after they were transferred from Blogger because, well, it seemed like a waste of time. Most of the links were long since dead, but I did manage to find one or two interesting bits. It seems that I might’ve been a little less weird back then.

After finishing November, there was no way that I was going through another month, so I checked my stats, answered comments, read e-mail, and then stared at the screen, wondering what to do next. It was 11AM. I felt like a bit of a bum. Sometimes, I feel like I’m dropping in usefulness every day.

Nothing compliments feelings of uselessness like looking for a job, so I started going through my job feeds. I stopped after less then ten jobs. The beard film that I was working on might require me to have a beard for at least another week, and I couldn’t go to an interview looking like a Sasquatch. Then, I thought about driving #1GF!’s mom to her appointments, and I didn’t really know if it would be good to get a job. I might have been over thinking things, but I shut down the feed reader to focus on something that I was more comfortable with.

I fixed a WordPress issue for a reader who wanted to work Better Blogroll into one of his client’s sites, but couldn’t get it to work because he wasn’t using WordPress sidebar widgets. I rewrote his sidebar to use widgets and gave him instructions on what code to put in various widgets to make it all work. The guy mentioned that it was for a client, so I assume that he was making money from it. I was doing it for free, but I still hope the guy made a couple of bucks off of the changes.

In an effort to get some projects off my plate, I started building the layout for the kitchen site. I worked on it for a while, and it took longer than usual to give up. I was still having trouble getting a sidebar to line up properly when I gave up, but it didn’t phase me as much as usual. I wasn’t quite in the mood to work on the site, but I thought that I could claim the project as work, it would somehow validate my day. That is pretty sad. It didn’t validate anything.

Sometimes I feel like a trained chef working at a summer camp. Will it be sloppy joes or hot dogs today? It doesn’t matter because I’ll feel exactly the same no matter what I serve. Or it could be that I’m simply a camp cook who has been given free reign of an executive kitchen, and I’m spending my time refilling salt and pepper shakers. At some point, I lost track of what the analogy meant, so I went to the kitchen to have a sandwich.

I promised to make macadamia nut cookies for #1GF!’s mom, so I started on them in the afternoon. For the first time in recent memory, I burned a batch of cookies so badly that they had to be pulled out of the oven and thrown away. The middles were uncooked and the bottoms were burnt, making them unsalvageable. I think it was because I had it in my head that I wanted to make really big cookies instead of the standard size. My dreams ended up half baked and capable of making someone sick, so I stuffed them into the disposal.

I readjusted the oven temp down, and cooked a few more batches, which came out perfectly. The stink of burnt cookies lingered in the kitchen all night.

#1GF! brought home pizza, and I helped her eat it. After all of the test cookies that I had eaten while baking, I only managed to eat two measly pieces of pizza. It seemed impossible that #1GF! would continue to think of me as a young, attractive house boy if I ate that little, but there was nothing I could do.

The cookies were not giving up any space, so I went for an alternate way to prove that I was still young. While #1GF! watched one of her shows, I retired to the office to play a little after dinner QuakeLive. I only played for an hour because teenagers need limits. I shut down the PC and #1GF! and I talked until it was time for bed.

During the conversation, I figured out that I may need better rewards than I’m getting. If you work at a job all day that you don’t like, you get a reward of a paycheck at the end of the week. If I work at something I like all day, like fixing someone else’s problems, or upgrading a WordPress plugin, there is no TA DAH moment when the projects are complete. It’s more like an “Ok, what now?” moment. It’s like having a whole bunch of projects that don’t need to be prioritized because they really will end up giving the same benefit.

As if to prove that I wasn’t on solid ground, I contradicted my own arguments while #1GF! looked on.

“On the other hand, people would kill to be in my position. Working on whatever you want with no boss breathing down your neck is pretty awesome. And I guess that’s a pretty big reward.”

“It is.”

“But is it enough? A lot of people my age are at the midpoint in their careers and at this point in their lives. Where am I?”

“You make people laugh…” #1GF! offered. “A lot of them.”

“I guess. But, I rarely get to hear the laughter. It’s back to the problem of being a literary DJ. I’m up in the booth, and I never know who’s listening.” I paused. “I guess I am pretty lucky though.”

“You are.”

“I am.”

Friday (Day 670): Sitting in the Waiting Room Ah ahhh

I left the house early to drive #1GF’s mom to her appointment, and I made sure to pack a container of macadamia nut cookies for her. I didn’t time things right, and we ended up at the office twenty minutes early. As luck would have it, the office was running forty minutes late. As if this were a regular occurrence, they had more snacks than I’ve ever seen in an office. There was a full kitchenette stocked with chips, coffee, candy, soda, all free for the taking.

We waited for an hour before #1GF!’s mom was seen. #1GF! was working across the street, so she met us on her lunch hour. We all went over to the next appointment, a town away. I sat in the waiting room plowing through their stockpile of magazines until it was over. I made it all the way to where I had to make a decision between Details and Country Living, but #1GF! and her mom came out before any decision had to be made.

#1GF! went home to get back to work, and I drove her mother home. #1GF!’s mom and I both agreed that rainy days were not made for going out. I put on some Patsy Cline, specifically to relax her mom in case she was wound up tight after the her appointments. I’m not sure if it worked, but I think that she was thankful that I wasn’t singing along.

I got home at 1:30PM, and I had no desire to do anything. #1GF! got on conference calls and worked, and I got online and played QuakeLive. I know. Video games are a stupid waste of time. If #1GF! wasn’t there, I wouldn’t have played, but because she was, I felt like I wasn’t hiding anything. I was openly being a bum. I played the game and racked up frags until I was thoroughly bored with it.

And then, within an hour of each other, I got two unsolicited requests for meetings for two very different jobs. Both had significant advantages and disadvantages, but I was amazed that they came in unsolicited. They weren’t job offers, but they were requests to interview. I told both parties to give me the weekend to think about whether I was interested.

As I was contemplating what to do next, #1GF!’s mom called to tell me that the cookies were delicious. She seemed to really mean it, which was nice. She suggested that they were better than hers and that I should try to make her apple pie. I declined on that one because there’s no way that I could make an apple pie the way she does.

At night, #1GF! and I were going out to dinner with a couple of friends, and were instructed to bring a game along. I wasn’t sure whether to bring a party game like Last Word, or a strategy game like Pandemic, or even a card game like Grass. In the end, I decided to bring Ticket to Ride because it matched the more quiet, strategic play of Mexican Train dominoes, which we play at this couple’s house once and a while.

The game went well, and the results were fairly typical. People always worry about my playing in the beginning to the point that they openly talk about what the hell I’m doing. I must look like I know what I’m doing, or my strategy seems so counter intuitive that people figure that there must be something to it. #1GF! made the prediction early on, “Don’t worry about him,” she said, “he’ll hoard cards, play big points, and then eventually lose.”

And that’s what happened. I came in dead last. I still had a good time playing, and I think everyone liked the game, so losing wasn’t really a problem for me. We got home at 11, and went directly to bed.

Saturday (Day 671): Pixie Fett or Komandra Kirk

I felt sort of unaccomplished, so I read one of the baby name books while I ate my cereal. I figured that coming up with a name would be at least minimally productive. After pages and pages of suggestions, I didn’t find the perfect name, but I did find out that there are a lot of dumb ass name suggestions out there. Why don’t we just name the kid “Pixie Fett” or “Komandra Kirk”? I was going to mention these names to #1GF!, but thought that if she liked them, she might later kill me when she found out that I had stuffed sci-fi references into our baby’s name.

You never know who might show up when the weather gets nicer, so I spent the rest of the morning cleaning the bathroom. It took until 11AM. I either have to clean that thing more often or get a better bathroom cleaner, because three hours of scrubbing is plain stupid in this day and age.

#1GF! hopped into the nice, clean shower, and I ventured into the sterile vacuum of QuakeLive. I know. It’s a bit obsessive, but I’m not going to become a world champion video gamer by doing anything productive.

Once we were dressed, #1GF! and I went out and bought a dining room set. It’s not solid wood and it wasn’t made in America, but we bought it anyway because it’s better than the small, wobbly table that we have right now. We expected that picking out options would be a major undertaking, so we didn’t plan anything for the rest of the day. Within twenty minutes, a salesman had punched what we wanted into a terminal, and we were out the door with a delivery date. We didn’t even sit down or answer any questions during the process, so we walked out of the store a bit bewildered.

With nothing planned, we felt like we should go shopping for stuff.

“Want to go register for baby stuff?” #1GF! asked.

“On a Saturday afternoon?” I asked with as much panic as my eyebrows would allow.

“Yea, you’re right. Let’s head home.”

We went home for a while, and then went back out to get some KFC. I am not a KFC fan like #1GF! is, but I was willing to eat it if it meant that I didn’t have to cook. We brought some crispy chicken back home and watched Role Models as our evening entertainment.

The movie was unrated and starred Paul Rudd, Sean William Scott (you know, Stiffler?) and Christopher Mintz-Plasse (aka McLovin). I expected a slapstick comedy, but it ended up being a regular drama. It wasn’t bad, but excluding Jane Lynch’s insane interpretation of her character, it wasn’t exactly funny, either. And I couldn’t figure out what made it unrated. Unrated usually means more swears or gratuitous nudity. I don’t think this had either.

What I Learned

• Moo shu plus eggs equals delicious.
• You can’t make big cookies by simply using more cookie dough. There’s some sort of trick to it.
• Jane Lynch is pretty funny.
• I need a more effective bathroom cleaner
• KFC isn’t good, but it’s not as bad as I remembered it.

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Posted in Life of Riley