Argh!

I forgot the handle on my roller bag broke the other day and ended up walking all over creation with a 30lb 22" roller carry-on set on my shoulder like I was carrying a boom box on the streets of Detroit in the mid 80's. Real smooth move. I was riding on a paper-towel-tube airplane on a one-leg flight to Cleveland the other day, so it wasn't horrible, but I had to check the bag because I wasn't about to drag it through the airport. Then I pull my bag off the conveyor and be-bop my way to the rental car with my blue square sack of potatoes. Eh... I think I'll try to get a new one this holiday weekend. I'll wait until the least convenient shopping moment on Black Friday, actually. Keepin' it real...

Apartment Homes

Why in the world am I up at 12:30 in the morning looking for apartments?

Do you ever find yourself so mesmerized by something completely basic in life... just because its on the internet? I'm looking for apartments for my fiance and I when we get married next spring. Not really sure why NOW, but hey I'm at least doing something.

I'm going to go get that glass of water my parents never gave me before bed and try to fall asleep. My ear has been ringing all day.

Actually, I'd like to keep writing, but I have nothing to be cynical about right now. Should that depress me? Maybe. Just for some random association here I suddenly remembered that my roommate likes to let his alarms go off every 5 minutes all morning long as he tries to wake up between 7am and 8:30am. It's interesting, really. There are at least two alarms involved. Usually both operate somewhere between 85 and 90 decibels and last anywhere from 5 seconds to 10 minutes. One is some sort of buzzing thing and the other is the world's smallest/loudest radio. Sometimes they keep going off when he's not here or when he's away for the weekend. Gotta love someone else's alarm going off at 7:30am on your sleep-in weekend (I know, I know... that's late for old people). When I lived in Oklahoma, the papermache walls were so thin in my dorm room that people's alarms going off next door, across the hall, and downstairs woke me up constantly. And that was usually right after I fell asleep from waking up all night as the guy at the end of the hall ran up and down it screaming every night like he was a velociraptor. You know... that reminds me of a velocipede. I think those were those giant wheeled bicycles from the black and white pictures. I just looked up another website for a definition and there was this banner ad of a cartoon family being eaten by what looked to be a staple remover. I stared at it, unmoved for a little bit, then continued on with life (I clicked another web page tab so I could keep writing). I wonder if my reaction may have been different at a time of day my body is capable of expressing emotion. I may have witnessed something that the 1920's would have considered disgusting, heinous, and cruel. But anymore, its just one more cartoon family being eaten by a staple puller.

Ah yes...
So I'm still sitting here... emotionless... squinting into my laptop monitor light... ... ...and stuff...

Ok, goodnight.

Bad Oysters

I had some bad oysters the other night while I was with a customer. We were at a really fancy restaurant overlooking a city. Next thing I know he's in a cold sweat and dribbling puke on the table as he's doing everything he can to hold it back. There's just something intangible there. It's perfectly disgusting, hilarious,random, and empathetic at the same time. I was just shaking my head in disbelief while trying to hold back laughter at the sight of us in this really fancy place (he was getting better after the incident) and then all of a sudden I'm on the verge of puking. I don't know how I didn't, but that would have just been the highlight of the evening. Front page paper material there. "Two people throw up in high dollar restaurant overlooking the city... more on this late-breaking story at 6!"

Bad oysters.

Apparently I'm a Bad Person

I think my life slogan goes something like this:

"No, you didn't say/do the wrong thing/screw up/its not that you don't care... you're just a bad person."

See? It's kind of consoling before you drop-kick them with your amazing cynicistic wit. Spell check tells me that cynicistic isn't a word. Oh well.

So I didn't post in about 300 months - and tons of people keep asking me where the posts are. I used the "got lost in the mail" excuse last time.

The dog ate my blog posts.

I do have some special news for everyone tonight. I'm engaged! .... Ok, shut up. I've heard that joke from you already about 300 times. Wow. It's so amazing! I love my fiance more than I could possibly imagine and I'm so excited about what the future is going to bring us. On another note, my spell-check tells me that fiance should be finance. Classic. Everyone knows that the dating/engagement/marriage period is defined by any term other than finance. It's like anti-finance. Or something.

On another note, I've pretty much stopped traveling during the last several months. I've taken a bit of a promotion at work and they let me work full-time in Madison. Its great! I can see Jen all the time and I'm a much happier person not waking up at 4am every freaking Monday morning. This means that most of my adventures now take place at Wal-Mart and the local Giga-Grocery Store. They're huge! They have a special entire gigantic room just for their alcohol that's bigger than most small-town grocery stores. Booze-R-Us if you will. I found myself walking through Wal-Mart the other day with an internal sit-com running through my mind. You know the little voice like in the movie "A Christmas Story" talking in the background? It was like that as I watched ridiculous human activity at an abnormally hilarious pace. I can't even remember what it was that I saw now, but the residual brain vibes are still with me. Man... it must have been hilarious.

Oh, did I mention that I'm engaged to the most incredible and beautiful woman in the world? It's completely surreal. And then the next second its not. I love it!

Just remember to bring me a nice present :)

I'll be posting more. Hold tight. You won't want to miss this.

Posting Delays and Crying Flying Babies

My last 18 posts got lost in the mail. But, hey... what can you do, you know?

You know, there must be some natural law that determines the number of crying babies on a given airplane. Certain kinds of planes NEVER have crying babies, and other planes ALWAYS have crying babies. Babies only travel during peak business hours on Mondays and Fridays between airline hub cites and major airports. There is a mandate of 5 babies per airplane, and 3 must be crying at all times. If the babies fail to cry, the pilot is forced to delay the flight due to "weather", or one of many "minor maintenance delays" generally averaging 45 minutes to 1.5 hours in length. Maybe this is some sort of distracting cover for the US Air Marshalls. Maybe the presence of crying babies is a deterrent to terrorism? At any rate, the natural law of babyism states that 2 of the 3 crying babies must be in the immediate vicinity of the most frequent business travellers. Generally one on your left in the row behind you (occasionally a crying baby will be substitued for a loudly snoring, strange-smelling man) and one in either the row in front of you or across from you. The babies are angled toward the walls such that the crying is projected the clearest and the most obnoxiously through the aircraft for the better portion of the flight.

I think when I have kids, I'm going to teach my infants to scream on command so that I can be that guy on the airplane whose children are fighting and screaming and I don't seem to notice that anything is wrong. It will be obvious to everyone that I make more money than I should and that I don't discipline my children. Then as we're about to land, I'll wave the hand signal and all will be quiet. Then we'll go have ice cream or something. If I'm really feeling mean, I'll let them scream as the airplane is taxiing to the airport. That seems to be the most annoying part of the entire trip to hear a screaming baby.

Dental Humor

For future reference, I don't recommend using the phrase "cavity search" while the dentist is digging around in your mouth on your next visit...

Breakfast Milestones

It has become apparent to me that phases in a relationship can often be defined by the type, yes type, of breakfasts in which the relationally involved partake. My girlfriend and I have been discussing this lately, and I thought I would share the results of my latest theory with you.

It is a basic class-scale, based on 5 factors, that can be applied to a simple breakfast scenario. We begin with a class A breakfast in which all of the factors are met. Remove one and we have a class B breakfast. Remove two and we have a class C breakfast, and so on.

1. Everyone is looking their best.
2. This event is out of the ordinary.
3. The individuals involved are "just friends."
4. More than two people are present.
5. This was a planned event.

So my girlfriend and I are meeting this morning for the first breakfast scenario of our dating relationship. It was a planned event, it's out of the ordinary, and we'll be looking our best. Since we are missing parts 3 and 4, this is officially a class C breakfast.

Wedded couples often indulge in class E breakfasts; couples with children are bumped back to D. Youth group outings are generally Class A's....You see how it works.

Developing...
After further discussion (*ahem*!), we have deemed it best to update the breakfast scale so that there are two versions. A guy's version (above) and a girl's version(listed below). The idea of us sharing a "Class C" breakfast wasn't all that appealing, apparently, to my girlfriend. :) The new scale does not have groupings called "Classes" or "Grades", as they appear somewhat reminisent of meat or beef grades to the fairer sex, but will instead have "Categories" and be based on somewhere between 6 and 137 factors that may include the relational status of the other involved parties, timing of the event, and a bunch of stuff guaging the intent, intimacy, phase of life, relative stage of beautification, time of year, perception of event's meaning by the other involved individual(s), perception of event's meaning by 3rd party individuals, etc. More on this to come...

Harassment

Ok, people. If you're going to harass me about not posting, at LEAST make it a little more vicious, ok? No more requests or kind reminders. I need to know you mean business - like you're going to kick in the side of my car door, or stomp on my goldfish's tail or something like that. Come to think of it you may have already kicked in my car door, but I couldn't tell. You gotta threaten me or something. Take a handful of paint from my car hood and arrange the flakes into an eerie reminder on my windshield. Slash one of my flat tires. Poke another hole in my leaking gas tank. Get original already!

:)

Please note that I will more than likely contact the police regarding any of your threatening statements and actions, but that's just part of the fun!

The Miracle of Transportation

I haven't written anything remotely cynical in a good while, and I apologize... kind of. I've been doing a lot of fun things lately. My job has taken the standard "end of the year slowdown" for travelling, which means they slated me for 5 full weeks in town to recoup and try to remember where all of my illigitimate children are again... I'M KIDDING!

I know where they all are.

Giving me 5 weeks in town is apparently like giving a honey bee a honeycomb and setting him next to a wild bear - then telling the bear not to eat it. They clear away a 5 week block for me to recover and then give me SIX "short" trips that I have to go on during that time. SIX . *sigh*

So I go with a coworker to a short job the other day down in central Texas. Man it was a nice day down there. The flight was short. The travel was smooth and problem-free. Everything was happening better than it ever had been. Liesurely lunch, the work went well, etc.

Just to give you some background... I'm on a string of bad-luck trips right now. Sometimes things go wrong on the job, but for the most part its the travel that is getting me. I once was on a trip during which my coworker managed to get the last flight on the last plane out of town after some travel delays caused us to miss our first flight out. I ended up driving 6 hours home - fortunately I wasn't in California or something like that. But it was just stupid! I'm WITH the guy the whole time and somehow he gets to go home and I don't. grrrrr. Then comes the standard weather delays and my 12-hour layover in the Pittsburg airport. They have about 300 escalators and a really mean bartender at the airport and thats really all I remember. I've had a whole bunch of other mishaps lately, inlcuding another flight delay that caused me to have to fly into Chicago and take a rental car home to madison - got home at 3am.

Anyways, I'm with that same guy on this trip. And the SAME THING HAPPENS! We were really late in getting to the airport and he made it through security, but the people at the desk wouldn't let me print my boarding pass because the guy at the gate had closed the flight already - my coworker sat on the plane for an hour as they let 5 other people onto the plane after denying me and then they were stuck at the gate with the plane door open because there was a mechanical problem with the plane that had to be fixed before they could leave - I would have MORE than made it if I had crawled on my belly through the airport to get to my gate. Moral of the story, I guess, is to print out your boarding pass if you can before you get to the airport. Mistake on my part. Anyways, I had to fly to Chicago and take a rental car home. My coworker was home by 9pm and I was all snuggled and tucked away by 415am. Fortunately I only had to get up at 615am to go to work. It was almost a short night of sleep...

Flying is stupid. Planes are stupid. People are stupid... travelling is stupid...yeah.... I'm going to go find something to eat... or whatever....

A Traveler's Life

I understand how glorious I make my job and my travel sound to you all... fortunately all you hear about are the horrible things that happen to me, and you only hear about 2% of those. I never posted about being stuck in Pittsburgh for 12 hours at the airport, or the flights I have been on that were cancelled while we were on the tarmac, or the flights I took that never got to the airports they were supposed to so I had to get a rental car and drive untold numbers of hours, or all the fast food I have eaten to survive, or how many smoke-filled wet-dog smelling rental cars I have driven, or the several times I have had to fly to a completely different airport and drive untold numbers of hours only to arrive home past 3am, or the TWO times I travelled WITH the same coworker and HE managed to make the flights home but I DIDN'T, the hilarious number of people that smack their heads on the baggage compartment when they stand up at the end of the flight, the way people really get scared of me when I laugh with excitement as our plane skews sideways while we're trying to land, the fact that McDonalds's almost always forgets the barbecue sauce for your nuggets (is the fad to eat them dry these days?), the life-threatening encounters I have had with genuine southern-style sweet tea in Georgia and Mississippi, the various times I have heard gunshots from the hotel or business I was visiting, the way TSA people are programmed to treat travelers in casual dress as if they were morons (they're right a large percent of the time, though), the sheer number of morons that travel, and why I think the federal government should make people pass a short touch-screen exam before they are allowed to go through security (complete with sturdy electric shock administration for stupid/wrong answers), the countless hours of my life I have wasted playing spider solitaire in airports, all the nasty hotel rooms I have stayed in with roaches and burn marks and things I don't even want to tell you about, the magnificent hotel rooms I have stayed in with king-sized beds and pillow-top matresses and little fluffy clouds from heaven for pillows, or the time I watched a semi back over those big parking lot tire spikes the wrong direction, or the time I watched a semi drive over a stop light/street light in slow motion, or how many times I have gotten completely lost in a city I have never seen before, or the number of times my directions to my jobsite (given to me by someone else) included a random "u-turn" in the middle of a 4-lane non-divided highway, or how many times I have bottomed out on sharp inclines with my rental cars, or the time that I hit an igloo cooler that fell of the truck in front of me at 75 mph that flew over the median, or the times that I have gotten to go crazy places and haven't told you about, or how much food has gone bad in my fridge because I didn't use it all before it rotted into slimy bags-0-brownslush in my fridge (cucumbers are special in that category... try it once. its cool), or the fact that I'm trying to date an amazing woman while running around the country like a raving psychopath... so who knows whether you'll ever hear about that kind of stuff...