Say Anything.

I quit about 5 months ago, maybe 6 now?

Congratulations on quitting smoking =)

If you ever need to permanently lose something, simply do the following:

Show it to several people
State aloud "this is very important"
Continue by saying "I am putting this Very Important Item(TM) into this Obviously Logical Container."

This will 100% ensure that you will lose said Very Important Item(TM), and totally forget what the Obviously Logical Container was.


I got an awesome new computer desk from work, however I had to disassemble it...
So I put all of the assembly hardware in a plastic baggie...
Which I then took home, showed my brother and mom, "I must not lose these."
And then I put them "somewhere." Somewhere that I had said to myself at the time, "I will be opening this box very soon upon arrival in my new home."

Naturally, when I started to put the desk together yesterday, I couldn't find the hardware.
Still can't, after having gone through ALL of my boxes 4-5 times.

It's... unbelievably frustrating.

Could have been worse. The movers could have disassembled it, break it, and note on the paperwork tha You took it apart.

5mW Triple Color with Star Cap - Green Blue Red Laser Pointers with Star Cap Combo - 3pcs

Best purchase I've made in a while, lol. SOOOOO MUCH FUN! One of my cats goes absolutely bananas chasing these things. The other cat looked at it for a second, then turned and looked at me like he knew I was doing it somehow, then walked away. But the real fun comes from playing with it at night. I thought the blue would be my favorite - it does look really really cool, and the trippy light show cap-thing they come with looks nice in blue - but the green one is just SO FREAKIN BRIGHT that I've been playing with that the most. I took it outside at night to see how far the beam shines, and, I don't have any real idea how far it actually is, but I was shining this thing on trees that were hundreds of yards away, and it could probably go a lot farther. You can use it to point out stars; that's how obvious the green beam is. From my perspective, holding the thing, it seems like it goes all the way to the star... but when I point at a cloud, I can't really tell if it's shining real far, or just ending a few dozen feet away. Anyhow... FUN!

Sitting on my front porch lasering the garage door of the old man across the street:



It's hard to grasp the scale... my driveway is 2 cars deep (or however you measure a driveway), so there could be another one of my cars parked behind it, and it would just reach the sidewalk. Then there's I guess 4 or 5 feet of swale (swale? berm? I don't know what people call it), then a decently-wide two-lane street, then the same thing repeated for the neighbor's driveway etc. I'm not a very good judge of distance, and the relative tightness of the beam throws shit all out of perspective.

Yes, I am easily amused!

That durr is some technology we got from the Roswell crash Pharren!

I need this in my life!

Grrrr....I've been home sick for two days! Now that the work world is so much more demanding, I feel this little twinge that I'm putting my employment in jeopardy. Of course, I may be thinking this because of sick-grumpiness.

Celebrated our four year/one year anniversary yesterday.

Had a quiet dinner and watched a few episodes of Once Upon A Time to catch up.

Do you mean 4 years together, 1 year engaged?

I thought this was cool; I've lived in FL for almost my whole life, and in that time I've seen about 5.2 gazillion hibiscus, but never one this color that I can recall. Sorry the picture is so large but it's a PITA to resize on my phone and I'm lazy.

That is very pretty; I wonder if the gardener did some kind of cross breeding botany to get that color. I know hydrangeas get to be different colors based on soil characteristics, that might be another possibility.

The board resizes it. It's totally gorge!

No, four years together.

But "one year" since the last Leap Year. :)

SOmetimes when I have a migraine, the simplest things tickle me.

I've been SO GOOD about bringing my lunch to work, in that I've only bought lunch twice in a month.
Monday, I took my coworker to lunch because he held that desk for me for a couple weeks in his garage, and wouldn't take cash, so I told him I'd owe him lunch.
We went for barbecue.

So today, I have a migraine, and brought my bbq leftovers, and really wasn't relishing washing the containers.
So I cheated.

The kitchenette in the office has a hot water spigot.
I dripped a couple drops of dish soap in to the containers, filled it with a shallow layer of the hot water, closed the container, and shook it hard.
Got the clumps out, it doesn't stink so bad, and it's OK for it to sit for 4 hours before I get home to actually scrub it.

Yay for laziness.

This whole "having my own house with my fiancee" is fantastic from several points of view.

+I love being able to breathe
+I love being able to sit and do X and not be bothered, where X could be sleep, read, watch TV, play video games, or surf
+I love, love love being able to cook for us, and have it come out fantastic, or very close to same.

Friday I went simple, with some thin-sliced pork chops, pan seared, topped with a little salt, pepper, garlic powder for half of them, and the rest with a new barbecue rub I wanted to try. Paired with a broccoli-corn salad and parsley potatoes (no sour cream) it came out quite filling.

Saturday I went most-hog (as opposed to whole hog) and made corned beef (with carrots, onions, potatoes and celery) in the crock pot, the cheddar-guinness bread recipe from here, and also attempted oven-roasted green cabbage (but even after an hour it wasn't cooked so much as edge-burnt.) Still, m'Lady loved most of it, and I learned how NOT to cook cabbage :)

It's only been a short time, but I bet you already can't imagine how you managed to live at home without going positively apeshit. Grats again :).

I also made corned beef and cabbage on Saturday, but I just put the brisket and veggies in the dutch oven and simmered.

Having an electric stove, this is a fairly dangerous option for us.

I did however buy a pair for grilling, charcoal cooking, and perhaps oven baking. ;)

Thinking about how anachronistic it is that we still get all dressed up for each and every job interview, regardless of what we are actually going to be wearing at the job, because it somehow reflects how serious we are about getting the job. First of all, no. It doesn't reflect that at all. While someone showing up in flip-flops may be dismissed as not being "serious", there's got to be a line drawn somewhere, and somewhere far away from "wearing a suit and tie to my interview as a Wendy's cashier". It's become meaningless ritual; a test to see who can conform.

And so I think an interesting experiment would be, as an interviewer, to tell people specifically NOT to dress up, to wear "business casual" or something, or even tell them exactly what to wear (e.g., "You may wear jeans or khaki pants and a polo shirt to the interview"), and then see how many people still show up in a suit and a tie. I bet it would be a lot! Man, I think that would be waaaay more informative than just seeing who can show up in the suit de regueur. I might even consider rejecting applicants based solely on that criteria.

It reminds me of the time someone placed a classified ad for a job, but typoed my cell number somehow, resulting in a bunch of calls asking about the job. I changed my voice mail message to say wrong number blah blah do not leave a message. I was working these 13- or 14-hour shifts doing tech support, and we were not allowed to bring cell phones into the building. When I got into my car one day and checked my messages, some dumbass actually left me a message saying they didn't care if they weren't supposed to leave a message, they were leaving one anyways. So not only could they not comprehend the whole "wrong number" part, but they decided they would make a good impression by not following directions right off the bat. WTG! Nowadays I regret not calling them back and setting up an interview out in the middle of nowhere, then blocking their number.

I tell people that we're interviewing that we're very casual and to please not dress up, but I don't think most people really get what that means. I know when I interviewed for my current job, I felt that 'casual' meant no suit, just a jacket and slacks. So when my future boss stumbled out of his office in shorts and a tee shirt and went looking for his shoes, I felt a little out of place and sneakily hung up the jacket on the rack :X.

Anyway, men that I interviewed almost always wore a tie, but skipped the jacket. The women that I interviewed wore nice outfits, more fashionable than super professional. Most of the men, oddly, seemed to interpret 'casual' as 'compensate for lack of suit with extra cologne'. There were a couple of guys who I barely made it through the interview with I was sneezing so bad. Neither was hired, but that wasn't totally why. Well, it was a little because I was looking for someone to share my office with and was basically going to be in the same room with this person 8 hours a day 5 days a week. But really, I did hire the person most qualified for the job and with the best attitude of the lot. He wore a tie :). For other positions that involve working in a cubicle type environment or sometimes at home, we pretty much hire anyone who can do the job without murdering anyone; it takes a special kind of person to count cars or trace cars or put a little point on the same spot on 2000 photos. We only hire part time workers in those jobs for sanity reasons. And we've hired some interesting characters.