Yes. Another meme. Not feeling like writing anything beyond a short description of how I'd like to punch anyone and everyone I meet in the balls. So, yeah...meme:

( Four things... )

From taraljc, ( Name 5 things from science fiction's vision of the future that you wish you had now... )

or "Why You Shouldn't Be an Asshole to People You Don't Know."

( On Saturday morning... (long) )

Taking my previous post as instruction, I compiled ( a list of 75 things I'd like to do before I die... )

I spent Monday and Tuesday down in Ft. Lauderdale for work.

( Travel Hell )


Happy Birthday to El Guapo. If you lived in Atlanta, then you could see the many stuffed piñatas for your birthday celebration.

Since I'm taking the time to upgrade my current work machine (a sub-500 MHz machine, no less) from RedHat 7.3 to Fedora 2, I figured while waiting on the machine to quit thrashing and start the damn install I could drop an update.

Los Angeles is a neat place to visit, but aside from the tourist traps, it's not really all that pretty. For the most part, driving around Los Angeles, even during non-rush-hour hours, approaches the most infuriating kind of Sisyphean Hell. Los Angeles has all of the bad traffic of the New York area without the benefits of a far-reaching rapid transit system.

As far as neat things in LA:

• The Getty Museum is way, way cool. Now I've been to the Louvre, the Musee d'Orsay, and a bunch of other museums, but my architectural tastes tend toward the modern, so this campus of buildings was just as interesting as the art it housed.
  
• Took the WB Studio Tour, and walked around the inside of the Dragonfly Inn. I even touched Sookie's kitchen phone. I thought briefly of stealing one of the pictures of Davey that were in magnet frames on the fridge, but I'm too much a niceboy.
  
  No Lauren Graham, Alexis Bledel, or Scott Patterson sightings, although our tour guide did bring us around the left (mostly-unseen, not the same wall as Doose's) side of Luke's Diner. He mentioned that they might have been filming scenes inside, and I made the crass move of pointing at the window, so if you see some idiotic Chinese guy through the wooden blind slats pointing during an episode, that's me.
  
  I'm disappointed I didn't get to dress up as Santa, but hey, that was a fucking pipe dream anyways.
  
• Saw Jason Priestly at the Farmers Market with what I assume was his exceedingly hot girlfriend/spouse/lover.
  
• Saw Ty from Trading Spaces get on my flight back to Atlanta. I would learn later that the man lives in Grant Park and is a frequenter of 97 Astoria where my buddy Blake is a bartender.
  
• Also on my flight, Linda Blair, looking shorter than I imagined. Luckily, Captain Howdy didn't make an appearance, so no spontaneous crucifix-wankery.
  

When I was younger, my parents would always take my brother and me on these long roadtrips to Disney World. In hindsight, it only takes like three hours to get to Disney from Miami, but I think time passes slower when you're younger--I remember the whole no eating/drinking for thirty minutes after getting a fluoride treatment at the dentist was interminable.

So invariably, on one of these roadtrips. we would stop at some random gas-up rest stop, and we'd find a big, garish, Orange-decorated sign advertising "Sundries." If you've ever taken a trip through the Sunshine State, Florida being it's whacked-out, hurricaned, can't-vote state of worship to the citrus fruit, you'll find these odd little candies, shaped like flat half-slices of oranges and grapefruits. I think at some point, etymology be damned, I decided that those candies were "sundries"--candies which looked like citrus fruits dried in the sun.

To this day, I can't hear or see the word sundries without picturing those candies, which oddly were never all that appetizing to this sugar-fiend.

I am suddenly overwhelmed with the desire to go back to Paris.


Or Las Vegas.

Following the fam's visit this weekend, I can finally post the following:

- And you know what they call a, uh, a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?
- They don't call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?
- Nah, man, they got the metric system, they wouldn't know what the fuck a Quarter Pounder is.
- What'd they call it?
- They call it a "Royale with Cheese."
- "Royale with Cheese."
- That's right.
- What do they call a Big Mac?
- Big Mac's a Big Mac, but they call it "Le Big Mac."
- "Le Big Mac." What do they call a Whopper?
- I dunno, I didn't go into Burger King. You know what they put on french fries in Holland instead of ketchup?
- What?
- Mayonnaise.
- God damn!
- I seen 'em do it, man, they fuckin' drown 'em in that shit.
- Yuck.

Yes, that place is called "Nooky," that is a peep show located right next to McDonald's, and that is the Aviation Club where they hold the World Poker Tour tournament.

Rules:
Leave a comment, saying you want to be interviewed.
I will respond; I'll ask you five questions.
You'll update your journal with my five questions, and your five answers.
You'll include this explanation.
You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

( And finally... the answers to the interview... )

Everyone should go read musesfool's latest Potter piece, "Happiness is a Warm Gun," which she graciously dedicated to me. For a while now, she (and her amazing prolificness) has been an inspiration to me since I started my desultory career writing fic, so it's cool to find out that it's something of a two-way street :)

Here are a handful of pics I took in Paris when I finally got fresh batteries. There would be more, but my batteries died before I even got into the Louvre. Jerry took most of the pictures anyways...

It's been about a week away, and even with a relatively relaxing extra day of vacation, it's really nice to be back home. I hope to soon have pictures up of everything, just as soon as Jerry gets his to me.

Where did I go, you ask?

I spent most of the past week strolling around the streets and underground passageways of Paris. Jerry, Mom, and I took a short jaunt to the city to take in some of the sights. We managed to hit the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay, the Musée de l'Armee, the Rodin Museum, and the Eiffel Tower.

It's definitely a city where I'd like to return to take in more. We managed to escape most of the wandering accordionists on the Metro, although we did encounter a man singing Mambo Kings songs, and a woman singing in a language I could not place. We twice encountered one guy at the Concorde Metro station, playing Avé Maria on the Horn (well, in the English-speaking world, I suppose it would be the French Horn). On one of the bus tours that we took, the recording mentioned a Museum of Erotic Art in Montmartre that I would have liked to have seen, but that's not quite the kind of thing you go to see with your mom and your brother (although we did debate going to see a show at the Moulin Rouge).

Our flight back was supposed to get in Tuesday, but a mechanical failure meant that United Air stuck us (along with the rest of the passengers on our 767) in the Holiday Inn next to the airport following a four-hour wait on a grounded plane. While we entertained the idea of going into town again, I was too exhausted from the previous days to do anything but sit around and watch TV--our favorite nightly pastime following all the walking about that we did.

I caught a few interesting things, like The Simpsons (Les Simpson), Cardcaptor Sakura, Hard Rain, and The Name of the Rose in French and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and South Park in German. Little is quite as funny as the German Mr. Mackey trying to approximate a "mmkay?"

Even with the extra time, though, flying is just exceedingly tiresome. I got home at around 9:00 last night, with a sore throat and a pervading sense of lethargy. It's good to be home.


Anyone want to go to Paris?
Current Mood: tired

I just got invited to head to Biloxi, MS this weekend with the Sweetest Girl in All The World* (a.k.a. the Best Bartender in Atlanta). I've got nothing immediately pressing, except for some tentative plans which can always be pushed off until next week/weekend. Should I go?

* We're going to see her girlfriend.

In anticipation for the upcoming New Year, I finally posted the pictures from the China trip. Yes, that trip was in the beginning of November. I am a lazy, complacent git.

In other news, there's a new service called Dude, Check this out--it's a combination Blog/Social Network. Unfortunately, it works primarily on Internet Explorer, but my own page lists something I threw together for Mozilla. Now I just gotta get something going for Opera...

I've had this idea for a while, but after recently receiving an e-mail describing how AirTran Airlines will be installing XM Satellite radios into all of their passenger seats, I decided to send this in to TiVo.

Because many hotels are now investing in in-room systems where guests can access pay-per-view items as well as services such as reviewing itemized bills on-screen, I think a good strategic move for TiVo would be partnering with a major hotel chain to provide some kind of TiVo system, which has been augmented with hotel information system capabilities.

Pay-per-view functionality is already present in TiVo's DirecTV DVRs, so all they would have to add is the ability to browse the hotel systems for data.

I think it would get TiVo's capabilities into the minds of many travelers. Of course, they might want to investigate some means of making this a centralized server system to prevent thefts, but aiming, perhaps, at the more upscale hotel chains which cater to business travelers may minimize those dangers as well as target the ideal demographic--professionals with disposable income.

I'm the King of the World!

Err... actually, I was shivering and tired, but climbing the Great Wall was exhilarating. Jerry and I made it to the top of the fifth tower out from the entrance at Ba Da Ling with a few other members of our tour group. The steepness of the climb to that final tower is literally breathtaking (in climbing terms, I'd probably give it about a 4.8-4.9). The stairs themselves are slightly indented from what I can only imagine is thousands of years of use and wear. I think all of us were a bit shocked when my mom trailed in as we took several minutes to catch our breath.


For those of you who know them, I met up with Anna and Adam in Beijing at a pretty famous shopping district (Wang Fu Jing). We were supposed to meet up at the DQ in the Mall at Oriental Plaza, but they got stuck in traffic, and I figured out that there are two DQs in the mall, so we got in a bit of a disconnect before my brother found them from my descriptions. We went on to eat outdoors, amidst a crowd of men who barked at each passerby with promises of good, fast food, and then walked around Wang Fu Jing, catching up, and taking in all the stores and vendors.


Running around the web today, I spied An intriguing analysis of the deleterious effect of stupid people on society. The illustrations alone are worth it.

Finally, for the writers among you, I found writerdose, author Michelle Richmond's Daily Dose for Writers, a daily exercise in writing. I've syndicated it on LJ, although, if the syndication continues to use specific font colors, I'll probably mirror the RSS feed on my own site and strip out the <FONT> tags. I really like the story she uses as an example on the fetish entry.

I'm back from the Middle Kingdom. I've got a boatload of e-mail and TiVo to catch up on, as well as trying to recuperate from SARS (yes, that's hyperbole).

A bit too much went on in China to really write a lot about--I saw Tienanmen Square, the Forbidden City, Summer Palace, Temple of Heaven. I climbed the Great Wall (Ba Da Ling section), and saw the Terra Cotta Warriors in Xian. I ate entirely too many eggs for my poor cholesterol level, but they sure were tasty.

Jerry has the digital camera at the moment, and I'll probably have digital pics of everything we went through some time soon. One of the members of our Beijing tour took pictures of everything, including each individual plate of food that we consumed. I'm hoping he'll post those sometime soon.

Otherwise, I'm jetlagged and ready for bed.

So, where the hell have I been for the past few weeks?

Well, aside from the usual goings-on (pool league, etc). About three weekends ago, I took a set of coupons that I got in the mail to Best Buy to see what sort of stuff I could pick up. Imagine my surprise when I saw that they were selling DirecTV DVRs (a.k.a. TiVo) for 93 dollars. Given that I was at the Perimeter store, and they had already sold out of all their units, I had them call around to the other stores in the Metro Atlanta area, and eventually drove like a madman over to the store in near Cumberland Mall to pick one up (for 84 dollars with a coupon :). I went straight home that night (completely bypassing the stop at Target I had intended to make to pick up some more socks) and tried to hook it up...

Unfortunately, since I live in a condo serviced with two or three DirecTV dishes for the whole complex, just connecting the thing wouldn't work. I did a search on tivocommunity.com, and found out that I've got a stacked and diplexed setup (ask me if you need to know more) and I would need about a hundred dollars worth of additional equipment to get it running smoothly (i.e. with two tuners so I can record two things simultaneously). I bought everything online (at about a 60% discount than your usual brick-and-mortar stores), and it all arrived last monday (the 20th). From there, I had to wrangle a bunch of RG6 cable to connect everything correctly as well as get a signal amplifier so as not to lose about half my channels.

After Thursday of last week, I got things hooked up clearly. So now I can grab Angel, Jake 2.0, and The O.C. all at the same time, and not have to worry about re-setting a VCR if the power goes out.

Of course, every silver lining has a dark cloud...

Tuesday of last week, I learned that our main client wants to cut down on our billable hours. I suspect that this has something to do with budget crunches and missed forecasts, but what it ultimately means is that where my company could bill x hours of work is now chopped to x/4 hours.

This doesn't bode well for the company's future. As well as seeking new business, we're also looking at different ways of trying to squeeze more money/productivity out of the situation we're currently in.

In the meantime, however, my mom and brother have this trip to China planned, and since we don't have enough hours to cover a single person working for a full-time week, everyone concerned, from my supervisor to my boss, thought it was a great idea for me to join them on their trip. Towards the end of last week, I had to send a bunch of money and express mail my passport to someplace in Houston, so I could get a visa approved to visit China (I'll tell you more about this after my trip). I received my passport with the visa and everything last night.

I've got mixed feeling about going to China, however--firstly, my father says it's heavily polluted over there, and it'll wreak havoc with my allergies. I've already got two boxes of Claritin ready for my daily consumption. The plane ride, as well, I figure will be anywhere between 14-18 hours long. I hate flying.

But I will get to see the Great Wall, as well as the buried Terracotta warriors, and that's pretty exciting.

In other arenas, I wrote this CrazyGoNuts Drabble for the sunday100 Masks challenge.

Friday Morning::8:00 am
Patty, Jason and I get up early so we could go and register for the $25.00 Texas Hold'em tournament at the Luxor, after which we hit the Pyramid Cafe for some breakfast. The way the tournament (which starts at 12:00 noon) works is you pay $25.00 for T$350.00. For another $3.00, you get another T$50.00 in chips. It starts with $10-$15 blinds and $15-$30 structured betting limits, and essentially doubles every fifteen minutes until you hit $100-$200 limits after which it's No-Limit.

We all did moderately well, getting down to the second-to-last tables by playing conservatively. There were a lot of fish in the tournament, and they could make or break us with the river sometimes. Jason got knocked out before the No-Limit round, which was a bit disappointing, because that's where his strength is. Patty got out soon after, playing until a pair of sixes or sevens got outdrawn when she went all-in.

I made the mistake of calling two raises with A-6 suited and lost a good portion of my stack. I had to go all-in at one point and managed a heavy hand (trips/flush/boat). I don't remember the exact hand. I got knocked out after playing dumb again, and then losing out on the blinds.

From the tournament we transitioned over to 2-4 Hold'em again. I cashed in $60 and lost a good deal of it playing conservatively, and then (you guessed it) getting impatient, and chasing dumb hands. Again, the fish were out out-drawing me on two pair and top pair hands, as well as Patty who was disciplined enough to play her way up to $80 (from a $40 stake). Jason played up and down until he hit Quad Queens and got a huge pot as well as a Four-of-a-kind $20 jackpot hand bonus.

I, however, lost all the $60 and the subsequent $40 that I cashed in. I took another $60 to play PaiGow Poker (yeah, yeah, I know I said I wouldn't). Lost about $38 there, but it was good to pass the time not thinking about getting outdrawn and seething about it.

Jason met up with me at the PaiGow table after his Quad Queens win, and we waited a bit for Patty to cash out. Once she did we headed to the Hard Rock to find Amy, Runa, Jeech and Keely.

It has to be said: The women at the Hard Rock are fucking gorgeous.

We met up with Amy at the casino, looked for the others, and then ate dinner at the Pink Taco. After dinner, we hit the casino and played a couple of games. I dropped another $15 on paiGow and then I did something really stupid: I got another $300.00 out from the ATM. Note: at this point, I'd already gone about $240 in the hole on the trip, not including the $28 I spent on the tournament, and most all of $364.25 that I had mentioned previously is gone.

I don't know. I do have a somewhat addictive personality, but it's tempered by an extreme dislike of losing, as well as a healthy sense of moderation. There's something about this town, though--the constant blinking, the clip-clack, click-clapping of shuffling casino chips, the incessant bleeps and clunks of slot machines taking and spewing out nickels and quarters and tokens.

I watched Jeech, Amy, and Runa play PaiGow for a bit, and then Keely joined them. Behind me, at the Let It Ride table, two friends bantered as they played the game, and I would occasionally turn and watch. As one guy's chips dwindled down to $15, he put all three reds onto the betting circles and borrowed a dollar token from his friend for the sucker bet. He played the hand blind. I watched as his friend drew a 5-6-8 and took his first bet back. When the dealer flipped a 7, he let it ride. The dealer then flips a 4. Hoots and shouts. His nearly-broke friend is very excited for him, and then the dealer flips the blind hand-- 4-7-7. Full House. Blind. He jumps up and hollers and most everyone around is both happy and envious.

Buoyed by their success, and the fact that Amy was a bit tired of PaiGow and wanted to try a bit of Let It Ride, I cashed in $100.00 and played. On my second hand, I picked up 2-7-8 of spades. A bit wary of the possibilities, I took my first bet back. When the dealer flipped the 4 of spades, I let it ride on a hunch. I was overjoyed when she flipped the Queen of spades. I had essentially doubled my stake. That (perhaps overly) healthy sense of moderation kicked in a few hands later (when I started to lose), and I cashed out for $205.00

We hung out at the Hard Rock for a bit more, then went back to the hotel for a quick nap. I opted to take the rest of the night off because I wanted to be rested for Zumanity, but we all ended up crashing for the rest of the night--I would learn in the morning that Jason met up with Jessyca and that he scored about $400 playing slots and blackjack.
Current Mood: down, but hopeful

Thursday afternoon::3:30 PM Eastern - 8:00 Mountain
Ok. I don't know if this is a good or a bad omen, but everyone on the road is a complete and total idiot--getting onto 285 from work, the old bluehair in front of me decides that the optimal course of action when merging onto the interstate is to make a complete stop at the fucking end of the merge lane. WTF? I come this ->||<- close to rear-ending the moron, and of course, I have to wait to merge with the rest of the traffic heading that way once he decides it's safe to move.

Coming down I-85, some guy in a pickup truck decides that his haul isn't all that important and somehow a large box full of crap has ended up in the road. Now, this might not be too bad, but someone's already hit said box and strewn its contents across all four lanes of the thoroughfare, including a large shovel in the second-to-left lane. I see the guy resignedly walking back to his pickup as if he could do anything in the proto-rush-hour traffic of 3:30 PM Atlanta. Dolt.

Once I've gotten home, things are much better, however. I switch things around in the bags, and I almost forget my contact lens case and glasses and toothbrush, but I manage to remember and save myself a world of aggravation. I do forget my good cell battery, but let's face it, who gives a shit? I'm going to Vegas to play poker, not gab all day on the cell phone.

Let me just say, that Delta's online check-in, despite what everyone says about the airline's other drawbacks, pretty much rocks.

I make it to the security gate around 5:00 PM, somehow managing to get about five or so people behind Wendy, Sasha, and Shannon. Up until this morning, I had no idea that I would share the flight with anyone else on the trip, so having them along is a lot better than sitting at the departure gate, leering at all the cute women walking by. We grab a bite and they grab some smokes after I get patted down at the security gate for forgetting to remove my big metal belt buckle; I felt cheap and used--the security guy molested me! The sad thing is it's the most action I'd seen in months.

The flight over was completely uneventful other than sitting next to Bill Hackett, a former Gator with whom I struck up an extended conversation about UF, business, music, poker and blackjack. A blackjack player by preference, Bill has a negative progressive betting system whereby he doubles his bets after every loss. It sounds okay, but a) it requires a lot of capital and b) I'm so not going to Vegas to play blackjack.

Bill and I talk a great deal--so much that another passenger, Dan Something-or-another, and his really hot wife chime in about gambling and poker and blackjack. After the plane lands, Bill tags along with the rest of us to the Westward Ho to see if he can grab a good rate on a room. All in all he was a pretty cool guy, but he did talk a lot...

Somehow, our flight beats Patty's flight despite her earlier arrival time. And we had no layover, either. w00t!


Night One::Luxor::9:00 PM to about 3:30 AM
$364.25
That's how much money I brought with me into Vegas, give or take a few sub-dime coins. I spend 4.25 of that amount on the shuttle from the Airport to the 'Ho.

I spend twenty dollars on a cab ride for Jason, Patty, Felicia, Tammy and I to get to the Luxor.

I spend about $0.25 on Camel Races and another $0.25 on a single spin of Wheel of Fortune slots.

And then I drop $100.00 dollars playing 2-4 Hold'em at the Luxor. The evening starts out okay--I was playing pretty tight, catching the occasional hand (I caught Aces full of Jacks twice, and slow played both for more money from the fish). At some point, however, I started catching some good cards, and dropped the entirety of my $80.00 buy-in to a guy who was catching great cards. I'd have top two pair, and he'd have trips. I'd have big slick for a pair of aces, and he'd have the bottom two pair. It was infuriating, and I lost another $20.00 playing on tilt.
Current Mood: excited

Got back from Vegas last night and went to Rob's birthday gathering. Lost money to fools at the poker table, saw hot boys kissing and hot girls lighting each other on fire. Leered at many a pretty young thing, and probably more than a few prostitutes disguised as pretty young things. Still had no courage to walk up and talk to any of them.

Am feeling dead tired now, almost nodding off at the desk and foregoing the use of personal pronouns.

Will post Vegas journal bits in a little bit.
Current Mood: tired

Strike that--reverse it.

Well, with the upcoming three and a half days off, I've had to get things ready, apart from my usual obligations--last night's pool league, book club tonight. Today I got a package in from my parents which required my signature and initials in over a dozen places (there's a rainbow of tape flags marked "Sign Here" and "Initial Here" sticking to the edge of my desk at the moment), and I need to find a UPS drop box to throw this thing in so they get it soon.

And then apart from getting things for this trip, I'm also have to figure out the schedule for the next few weekends. Blue Man Group is playing at the Civic Center on the 23rd. So looking forward to this show. I've been listening to Audio in the car for the past few days. When I first heard about the show, I was planning to work up to doing Rock Concert Movement #4, but first I got lazy and then I hurt my back. Oh well.

And then the weekend after that is Dragon*Con. Anyone reading this attending? I figure bratsey will probably want me to get her an autographed something or another from James Marsters, if she hasn't already asked someone else to do so.

Add to all of that the compelling desire to complete Xenosaga on the PS2. When I read the back of the package, it said something like "up to 80 hours of gameplay!" "Yeah, right" I thought. Few games made these days ever amount to anything over two days' worth of enjoyment, but I'm pleasantly surprised...and unwittingly addicted.

On top of that, I'm waiting 'til after the trip (and Xenosaga) to start Splinter Cell, and Soul Calibur II comes out on August 29.

Right now, however, it's all about Vegas, baby.

We're gonna be up five hundy by midnight.
Current Mood: excited

He knows that I'm going to Vegas next week, and so he had this advice for me:

• Don't gamble too much and
  
• Don't mess around with the wrong kind of woman

He ended that with "You know what I mean..."

This just reminds me of my favorite father phone call. He had called me at my old job, and ran through the usual concerns:

"How's your health?"
"Doing fine, dad."
"How's the car running?"
"Not too bad."
"How's your apartment?"
"Nothing new."
"Ok. Well, take care of yourself. Don't spend too much money...

And don't fuck all the time."

Go figure.
Current Mood: amused

Sigh.

I just bought tickets to Las Vegas and to Zumanity.

Now I need to make sure that I don't spend 200 dollars on books for the next three months.

So we (Keely, khubli, Flossie, and Team Boobie) booked our flights and rooms for April's Sin City Spectacular. It cost a pretty penny, but I think it'll be worth it. I sent Jerry e-mail to see if he wanted to go, as well, since it looks like I'll be partaking of a single room at the Luxor by my lonesome. Of course, I could hook up with some nymphet while trading chips at the Bellagio Poker Room, but since I'd expect the women at the poker tables (aside from those going on the trip) to be at least seven years my senior, as well as the abject terror which grips me when it comes to talking to new people, I'll probably be spending my room time alone.

( I went indoor rock climbing for the first time in almost a year )

I just found Iusedtobelieve.com from a FOAF. A particularly funny entry:

For some reason, when I was a little kid I was convinced that if you hooked two nine volt batteries to each other, they'd explode violently and destroy anything within about 100 feet.

Some part of me still thinks this. batnandu suggested that we try it sometime--connect two nine-volts and leave them someplace. You'd think that someone would have already done this experiment and written it up on some website, but a cursory search of Google turns up nothing but a description of devices which use two nine-volts.


My parents are coming up this weekend. I need to clean the condo up and put away all the, umm, non-childish things.... I've already thrown a bunch of stuff into the closet, which is a veritable jungle of boxes and papers, but since my father is a bit of a stickler for "proper" bookkeeping, I need to get all my bills and statements in order.


I'm writing something. Nothing particularly concrete as of yet, but listening to some of Philip K. Dick's stories--"Second Variety," "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," "Paycheck," and "The Minority Report"--on the way down and back up from Miami put me in a writing mood.

The story which I'm writing puts a different spin on Rekal from "Wholesale"--what if you could rent someone else's body to wear for an hour, a day, or a week? What kind of person would allow themselves to be rented out?
Current Mood: Vegas, baby

It's road trip time.

I'm packing for my drive down to Miami, and I use the term to loosely cover the wandering about/watching television/snacking that I generally do before a trip. Since I'm only going down [Shit. forgot I did laundry before I went to the bar for a couple of hours...gotta fold... I'm back] for a couple of days, I don't have to pack too much.

Since I am going down for an old friend's wedding, I'm bringing the suit and shirt and the whole getup. It's way too hot in Miami. I think my father said it was like 88 degrees earlier today.

I rather wanted to do something creative this weekend, but the whole driving thing is getting in the way. Maybe I should stop at an office supply house on the way down and pick up a dictation machine and some tapes...

Oh well. Because the 'rents only have a filtered dialup through the school system, I may be offline for a couple of days (shocking, I know). At the latest, I'll be back on Sunday night.
Current Mood: busy

At about that time, my father walked into my room in Miami, and turned on the light next to the bed. Having just rousted myself from whatever faraway reverie I had in order to funch, I luckily noticed him making his way to the night stand and managed, at the last moment, to avoid that sudden, piercing light which took me back to so many high-school mornings.

Not quite two days prior, I subjected myself to a similar sort of Chinese-Light Torture, where, at about 1:00 AM on December 24, I went to sleep with the light on my nightstand still blazing. Knowing full well that an alarm alone wouldn't wake me up on less than, say, five hours of sleep, the light was my insurance that I would not miss my 9:50 AM flight. Given the stories of the previous days (see my previous entry), I felt it somewhat necessary to get up extra early to make my flight--and were I to have an expected surplus of time, I could just catch up on a few episodes of South Park or Inu-Yasha.

Christmas with the family was pretty much business as usual, and we went to the requisite parties/luncheons. On the night of Christmas Eve (following a much needed nap), we went to Auntie Lydia's place where we met with a whole slew of old childhood friends. Well, mostly my brother's childhood friends--I was probably far too young to really be anything more than the token little-brother figure for the lot of them. Most of them are now married, and a good number of them now have children, which makes me feel as though I've somehow fallen behind in the race to acheive my life-goals. At this point, I'm not even near having a girlfriend, despite my father's assumptions, suggestions, and insinuations. Hell, I think I now know more people in my high school graduating class who have married and/or have children, than those who are single and/or are sans child. Of course, at this point in time, I hesitate to think I'd make a very good dad, despite my willingness to give them my steak^***.

But part of me can't shake this feeling of missing out on something, especially when the wives of said associates are quite attractive.

More on Christmas later...

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^***The Steak Theory: My personal theory of fatherhood. Imagine, if you will, that you're sitting at Bone's or The Highland Tap or whatever your favorite place to eat great steak is (somewhere not All-You-Can-Eat, like Fogo de Chao), and you're currently cutting into what could quite possibly be the greatest steak you've ever eaten. It's juicy, it's flavorful, it's charred in the right places; it needs no sauce of any kind.

Your hypothetical child looks up at you and says, "Dad, can I have your steak?"

You're not ready for fatherhood unless you're willing, eagerly willing even, to relinquish the greatest steak of your life and give it to your child.

That's the Steak Theory.
Current Mood: tired

DuPree's held it's "Family" Christmas Party last night, and we all stuffed ourselves with a potluck dinner, and tossed gifts all around the bar.

Like I said before, the acrylic yarn that I ordered for Marsha last Monday is still in Transit according to UPS, so I gave her a card which said:

How do you keep a sweet and lovely girl in suspense?

-Ship her present UPS :(

She still demanded that I tell her what I got her at that spot, so I reneged and told her. She was most excited. :)

Earnie got me two really cool things--Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich, the story of the M.I.T. Blackjack team, and a stuffed GIR Plushie. Earlier in the week, Earnie was telling me about the Invader Zim stuff he saw at Urban Outfitters, and said "Which one do you have?"--totally trying to figure out which one to get me. Of course, I was totally oblivious.


I'll be flying back down to Miami tomorrow morning at 9:50 in the A.M. Apparently the airports are supposed to be crazy, with one guy getting to his flight two hours early and still being two hours from the counter when his flight took off.

Luckily, I'll be checking in online... hopefully the lines won't be too long.
Current Mood: ready to leave work...

One year ago, I was unemployed, and Blake and I went to see The Fellowship of the Ring on opening morning.

Three years ago, I told Keely, "I've never thrown up from alcohol." I would go on to have numerous balloons taped to my person. A stripper named "Six" would later tell me that she'd love to see me in drag, and my aforementioned statement would eventually be false.

Thirteen years ago, I sat at home all day, hoping that Amy Karoly would call me. She never called.

Some seventeen or so years ago, I would board a plane in Miami on December 18 and would later arrive in Taipei, Taiwan on December 20. A Pizza Hut pizza with bean sprouts would be my dinner that night.
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: the quiet hum of my laptop...

What is it about people who can't bother to follow directions? The woman in front of me on my flight back to Atlanta, while the plane was taxi-ing--before it even got off the ground--decided to recline her seat. Surely she's been asked not to do such before. Why is it that every time I take a flight, there's some idiot who decides that their agenda is far more important than the rest of everyone on board and gets up while the plane is on the runway?

Oh, the plane's on final approach... I gotta shut down...
Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: "The Way You Look Tonight" Frank Sinatra

And so ends an extended weekend in Miami.

Phew.

For some reason, more than likely money-related, my mother bought me a round-trip for
Thanksgiving weekend where my return flight is taking place on the Tuesday following. I suppose it allows me some extra time to hang out with my parents and Jerry, as well as catch up with some old friends, and these are all moments that I cherish, but I crave my home.

No, not just for the TiVo.

I haven't really slept all that well this weekend; the bed was uncomfortable, etc. etc.; ironically I did get a lot of not-great sleep, however. Every night I basically went to sleep around 11:00 PM, and woke up at 9:00 AM. But for some reason it was unsatisfying. I did have this strange dream where I actually married a brunette women from Eastern Europe. More than likely, Russian, but then again, I couldn't tell you the difference between a Czech and a Slovak. You'd think I'd know, given that I was married to the woman, but, hey, it was a dream, and thus, I don't even remember her name.

She was hot, though...
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: CNN Airport Network News