Rave: Swinger Clubs are fun (if they're hosting parties for young people). Imagine a party with decent music and an open bar where everyone gets laid. Peacocking douchebags? Don't exist. Attention whoring douchebaguettes (female douchebags?)? Nope. Fun and relaxed atmosphere? Check. Woot! Rave: Viagra is the shit. Also, the Duracell Bunny is a fucking pussy.
Rant: I came down with a nasty cold last night. I had a little sniffle when I went out but didn't think anything of it. Holy god. I did not sleep in intervals greater than 5 minutes last night between coughing and my nose doing its best impression of a faucet. I feel like a bag of assholes, I'm super congested, and I can't even fall asleep to shitty TV. I haven't been sick in years (excluding allergies). This blows.
Rant: I'm having freelance writer struggles up the wazoo (on top of the whole finding a job struggles). I don't have any ideas for the site I'm blogging for, and they're finally going live after going at my own random pace since last May. And I have a week until my food column is due and no interviews or subjects set in stone. My original idea was great, but I've been having trouble with people responding to my interview requests, which I don't understand. I'm just trying to give you free publicity. Why would you ignore that? Well, there was one guy that responded, but he is a COMPLETE TOOL, like that special brand of asshole New Yorker who thinks he's waaayy more important than he really is. His voicemail message is "Hi this is [name], don't leave a message." I think I'm going to blow him off, because I can't stand the attitude he's been giving me, and he lives far away. I just hope other people work out...
Spoilered unless you enjoy long whiny rants about marriage and money. Spoiler RANT: Can anyone tell me how in any way saving money is a bad thing? Every fucking time we get our hands on some extra cash and can catch up and pay off our debt substantially, my wife gives me an argument and wants to spend it. Inevitably the spending gets away and it all disappears in a month or two. That shit is not happening this time. It's the most bizarre thing. The minute I start mentioning paying off bills and how much extra we are going to have, she starts listing all the things she wants to do with the money and we end up pissing it all away. It's always the same argument too, "I always have to wait for things and you get everything you want", which is childish and untrue. I tell her all the time to buy whatever she wants, and she has her own money with the child support money she gets every week. I don't even see or touch that and she does whatever she wants with it. It's like she does it just to make things hard. It seems like she does a lot of that. It doesn't make any sense. If she would just follow the plan by this time next year we will have all our bills payed off and several thousand dollars in savings. We don't need a bunch of stupid crap.
Rave: Just got my first child support payment, just in time to pay my little guy's tuition for a full day of kindergarten ($300 a month!). Wow, this helps so much! Rave: Meeting with upper management today, get to learn about bonuses I can earn. Everything is coming together nicely.
Rant: Spent 25 minutes trying to fix a monitoring issue only to find on the first line that was 'trimmed' from the new standard operating procedure that this configuration is explicitly not supported and wont be until Q2 2012.
Rant: The amount of stuff I have to do around the house this week is staggering. I have two rooms to paint, a tile floor to grout, bathroom vanity and toilet to install, buy everything I need to install the shower, I have to go buy insulation for the two new bedrooms, pick and put in fixtures, re-run the cable to the two new bedrooms (I have no idea what the guy who was living here before was thinking when he ran it), get the main portion of the house painted, finish cleaning out the baby's room, paint the baby's room, pick out, buy, and install the drop ceiling in the two new bedrooms, buy trim and trim out the new bathroom and bedrooms, and yell at my wife constantly to get her to pick out curtains and shades for the new bedrooms. Oh, and she wants those bedrooms and the new bathroom done by early February. In order to 'motivate' me to move faster, she bought the bedroom furniture yesterday. Rant: She chose to put a queen size bed in the guest bedroom. She thinks it is just awesome for our guests. I think that them being able to actually walk around in the room might be a good alternative, as the room is going to be 50% bed, with a small night stand and an entertainment chest/dresser making up the rest of the room. Rave: Both rooms have huge closets. Rave: Being only partially employed is currently working in my favor, as there is no chance this would all get done in time for her baby shower (let alone before the baby gets here in late March/early April) if I was working full time. Rave/Rant: Hoping to hear back about a job soon, which would be part time (good for now) and NOT subbing (awesome). I really, really don't want to substitute teach, unless I absolutely have to.
Rant: After peeling an orange I found out there's a zillion little cuts in my fingertips, courtesy of working in my shop all weekend. Normally this wouldn't be too much of an issue, but I am typing much more than usual at work today because of some marketing assignments. Rave: Hell yeah it's worth it. Spoiler The little carving was a spur-of-the-moment idea and was done less than 10 minutes after I got the notion to cut it. Usually my half-baked ideas turn out terribly, but not so much this time. That section photographed was still a rectangular block as of Friday and I did everything with hand tools, so I made a metric shit ton of progress in a relatively short amount of time. Rave for doin it and doin it and doin it well.
Rave: Had a fantastic time in DC over the weekend. Ate a ton of good food, hung out with friends, and the Nerdist podcast taping was great. Their special guest was the woman who does GLaDOS' voice from Portal. Very cool. Rave: At the Drive-In is supposedly reuniting!
Rave: Back to class next week! The only down side is the list of Grand Rounds we're required to go to. Also, I learned that I'm giving a presentation. On child abuse. On my birthday. Fun! But, seriously, looking forward to seeing friends and getting back into the groove.
Rant: Moved today. Single today. Lost a kid today. Hopefully this completely changing a bad situation thing you guys are always talking about works out for me. Rant: No phone for a couple of weeks. Rant: I feel like a dick for just packing up and going. But given the entire situation, it was the best way I could think of to go about it. Rave: First day of class in over a decade. I'm excited about that.
Rant: I think I made a shitty decision about my life this weekend. Well, actually it was sort of a non-decision. I could have started an EMT course (for free at that), but decided not to for a few different reasons. Now I'm feeling like those reasons were all based on various self-delusions, laziness, and fear. It would have been hard as hell to do with my current schedule, but still possible. This also made me realize that the last 8 years of my life has basically been nothing but making terrible non-decisions like the one today and suffering the consequences. Too late now I guess. I just need to learn this fucking lesson already.
Rave: Okay, look, I'm not saying that I knew the Broncos were going to win yesterday. All I'm saying is that I did find $160 in cash on my way out of Blockbuster 30 minutes prior to kickoff. I took that as some kind of sign. Yep, you read that right. One. Six. Zero. Eight 20-dollar bills folded together, on the floor right by the exit. Being too honest for my own good, I asked the manager working the counter if it fell out of her cash register or something. Looking as surprised as I was, she said no, and offered to put it in an envelope in case someone came back to claim it, and took my name and number. She said if it wasn't claimed within 24 hours, she'd give me a call and the money would be mine. Sure enough, she called back and said nobody came looking for it. So I got a nice payday, as well as knocking out my one good deed for 2012.
RAVE: Blockbusters still exist. I spent so much time in those in HS, it made me sad to think they were more or less swept off the face of the Earth by Netflix and others. RAVE: Over New Years weekend, met a friend of a friend and hit it off. Id known of her for awhile and thought she was incredibly attractive, but wrote it off in my head for whatever reason, largely due to how I knew her friends were. Well, we had pretty awesome chemistry and clicked in a way I haven't with a girl in awhile. Unfortunately, she lives in fucking Cleveland (a city which seems to insert itself into my life constantly). However, she is coming back to visit for the long weekend, so I pretty stoked about that. RANT: Its gonna be a long week. RANT: My dentist is one of my fairly good friends, and up until Jan 1, he was a preferred provider in my insurance plan. But his clinic switched up, now he is out of network, and it basically costs $100 more per visit. What bullshit. So I either save $100 every 6 months or stay with my friend, probably leaning towards the latter... EDIT: RAVE: My current banner ad is Muslima.com Thats bizarre and completely unrelated to anything I've looked at. Probably should stop looking at all that Middle Eastern porn...
rave: 4 recruiters have cold approached me about the same role. I spy an opportunity to negotiate on price! rant: Personal life is still shit.
Rave: my wooden helicopter that my aunt and uncle got me for Christmas has come in the mail. Rant: the tail broke off in transit and gorilla glue isn't working. Rant: its pretty sick looking, but its a ch-53d and not a ch-53e. Difficult to tell the difference to the general population, but the e has 3 engines, not 2, 7 rotor blades, not 5, and a 20° canted tail, not a straight up and down. I may take up woodworking to try to fashion the changes myself, we'll see.