crappy day

well, today pretty much sucked... work really dragged on, and i didn't get this job as done as i wanted to for a printing today... i didn't go over to dr. mike's for tequila shots, because i thought i had too much to do. i was going to go do some more shopping, but didn't go. i had to fill out about 50 forms because my work changed our insurance... i would rather have my fingernails pulled out one at a time than fill out forms... especially the same crap on multiple forms like tonight... and then there's all the boxes and questions that i don't know the answers to. it was about 2 hours of my life that i'll never get back, and it's not done yet.. i'll have to sit with the accounting lady that runs our insurance, and go thru it all and fill in the missing crap... with today's technology, couldn't our accounting lady give our basic info in a database to the insurance company... which could run a script to fill in all of these stupid forms, and save it all as a pdf, and not waste an entire folder of paperwork that i will never read... in fact, i'll probably put it in a drawer with the last huge packet of worthless info from the insurance company we just switched from... i'm just really tired lately of people doing things the old way, let's re-evaluate and find better, more efficient ways to do the things we do every day...

no gas day / walmart

well, i filled up the p.o.s. with gas on my way home from dave's tonight, mostly because it was empty, but partially because the asshole in me wanted to thwart the efforts of the mindless idiots who passed around the mass e-mailing of the "don't get gas on this day" e-mail again. what small thinking... the little band of nitwits think they will crush the giant oil and gasoline companies... then those same people, who thought they were actually affecting the world, will all need to fill their gigantic sport utility or minivan up tomorrow or the next day, and average the week back out perfectly for the giant oil and gasoline companies. idiots! gosh!

after i got gas (heh! still chuckling to self) i stopped in at wal-mart to return some jeans i bought late last night. i was on a supply run, i go late in order to avoid the mad sea of wal-mart shoppers. so i grab all the stuff i went there for, and went by the clothes section and looked at the discount racks, and they had some jeans on sale, in my size, so i grabbed a dark pair and a light pair. turns out, they use a different size inch on their tape measures in malaysia. they were too tight, and not long enough, either that, or i'm just built like a circus freak. so, it's almost 10:00 and the lady at the door puts stickers on the jeans and tells me to hurry, the return desk is getting ready to close... i haul ass, well, my normal walking speed, thru the store, back to the return counter, and there's some lady there... returning a Stack of clothes... that she had obviously shoplifted... we're not talking about a few shirts that "made her look fat" she did that naturally... she had men's clothes, kid's clothes, bathing suits, women's pants and shirts, in all different sizes and colors and styles... we're talking about 35 to 40 items, and guess what... no receipt for any of it... so the poor worker bee finishes zapping all the tags, and tells the lady she needs a manager's approval because it's such a large return amount, without a receipt. a few minutes go by... she tells me, sorry, i have to wait till this goes thru to deal with you, even though there's another perfectly good register on the counter... a few more minutes go by, manager #1 shows up. she's all of about 18 1/2 years old, with her little manager badge, probably needed to get out of there because she's got homeroom at 8am... she punches some buttons, makes "shady" explain the whole scenario again... then calls manager #2. another few minutes of my life click away... #2 gets the rundown from #1 and the worker bee, takes #2 around the corner for a huddle... they come back and tell her that "they'll allow the return but next time she's gonna need a receipt" read as "you can still shoplift here, but you'll have to go to a different wal-mart to commit the actual return money crime". i walked up to the counter (faking like i was getting impatient) just to try to see what they printed for her or how much they gave her back, but i couldn't tell. so, she heads off to buy her crack and my return of 2 pairs of jeans takes all of about 45 seconds, and i'm outta there...

softball

well, we lost the softball game tonight, not terribly badly though. the first couple of innings they had me playing center field, and i only got to chase 2 big hits down and throw them in. then i switched to 3rd base, and in my first inning there, i made all 3 outs. i caught 2 line drives, then someone grabbed a base hit and threw it to me to force the runner out at 3rd.. it was pretty cool. i made one more out in the next inning, then i messed up. i got the ball and had someone trapped between 2nd and 3rd, so i quickly did as braxton's old coach told them, held the ball up and charged the runner, then as they turned to run and were almost back to second, i threw it to the lady playing 2nd base. the runner turned before she could tag him, so she threw it back to me, i was in perfect position and should have just caught it and tagged him.... but i had to stretch way out to catch her throw, and fell and dropped it... as the guy runs past me and makes it to 3rd... i suck... but my good plays outnumbered my screw ups by far, i only didn't make it on base one time, and that time was because i just barely got beat by the throw. had some excitement about half way thru the game, one of our older players started spitting up and fell on his face and was convulsing on the ground right next to me. he was totally unconscious for a minute or so, just acting like he was choking, except i could tell he was breathing. i kind of propped him up and all of a sudden he came to, and started telling the 2 people who were already on cell calls to 911 to cancel the ambuli (plural?). he had just taken a swig of a beer, and he's got some kind of throat condition, he gets a bubble if not paying attention while drinking (anything, not just beer) and his oxygen level bottoms out, and he passes out... it was weird. he sat in my chair for a few minutes and was completely fine... he pitched the rest of the game... until we lost... not entirely due to my error on the run down... oh well.

what's this?

What's this? you say... it Can't be?!?! a Mikey post 2 weeks in a row?? Yes, it's true.

had a good time at the Cinco de Mayo party, many coronas and tequila poppers were consumed... which leads to me spending the night at the party... so i barely slept 30 minutes on the couch (combined total for the night), left at 6:30, took an hour nap at home. then got up, took a shower and headed over to belleville to install a dishwasher for my buddy Rut. it took a long time, had to fit it into a cabinet that wasn't meant to hold a dishwasher, but it turned out looking and working great. so i leave at 11pm, get to the end of the street and can hear a tire growl... hang my body out the door and can see a flat back tire... shit... so i drive back to rut's, he's still cleaning up the kitchen, fire up his compressor in his garage and make a big ruckus in his neighborhood, and fill my tire... and see the huge nail sticking out of it, spray it with some water and see it bubbling a slow leak. screw it, i've gotta get home, so i leave at 11:30. half an hour into the ride home, i'm right by shit-ville st. louis, around the goodfellow/lucas & hunt exits, and i hear this ricochet ping, ping, bang, zing, out the back something goes... i think, holy shit, there went my nail, and this tire's gonna deflate and blow out on the highway... at midnight.. in the middle of crapville. i've got a butt load of tools (probably worth more than the car) that i didn't want to leave stranded... but nothing happened, it was just a rock or something that i kicked up, no flat... so, after a quick nap, it's time for work.. tire's flat, so i pump it up with my compressor and drive to work. get out of work (of course too late to make it to the tire shop) and have to pump the flat up with this toy roadside cigarette lighter powered little compressor... noisy little sonofabitch, especially in an echo chamber like the underground garage. took about 10 minutes running to fill it to 30psi, and drove home. went in late today after being the tire shop's first appointment at 7:30, got the rest rotated and balanced while they were at it...
tomorrow night is my first softball game for the office team. we lost our first game, i couldn't go to it, not that i could have probably affected the outcome... so i'm bringing my ugly purple shirt with the stupid ardvark, or groundhog, or whatever our mascot is on the front... of course i got number 37 on the back... we'll see how it goes, i won't be the worst one on the team, i can hit, catch and throw, and i remember most all of the things that the ex-almost-step-son's baseball coach used to yell at them all the time, so i should do fine... as long as i don't break a toe.

update

So, it's time for my... now, bi-monthly update... i haven't had time to look at anyone's blogs, much less write in my own...
Last night, it's almost 3:30am, i wake up because i hear a loud noise. i sit up and look at a silhouette of the cat, he's sitting in the open window (on where the window sill will go if i ever finish trimming the windows out). he then starts shrieking and hissing, there's a crash against the screen, and he jumps down and goes screaming down the hallway, still making a horrible howling and hissing noise. i jump out of bed, and can see a whirl-wind of action in the back yard, Thing 1 is chasing Thing 2 around in circles in the back yard, and there's more shrieking and hissing out there. i don't know if it's Oliver (the cat) or not, so i felt the screen, and it's still intact (i thought he jumped through it and was getting his ass kicked by something) so i know he's still inside, and whatever is outside is still outside. so the battle heads across the back yard and goes away into the night. i go to find Oliver without turning any lights on, cuz i didn't want to rattle him any more... he's standing in the middle of the hallway, in a full karate stance! back arched way up, tail is about 3 inches in diameter, and straight up, and i can hear him panting... so i got down and reached out toward him real slow like, cuz i didn't want him to kick My ass again... he eventually calmed down, but didn't come back into the bedroom the rest of the night. this morning, i went out back to see what i could find, and there were little piles of rabbit tail fur all over the back yard, mostly right under my window. i'm assuming it was my new neighbor's cat, she lets it run loose at night. Oliver heard it attack and was scared to death, it was a riot. i don't know if he was trying to jump out, or if the one out there tried to jump in, but one of them ran into the screen really hard.
what else is new??? the lawn is looking pretty good. my neighbor Damien (i not only call him damien because that's his name, he is also the evil one, and has better grass than i do) threw down the gauntlet by fertilizing his yard one weekend before i could get to mine... so my fertilizer and weed killer are taking effect, and it's looking descent. after mowing saturday morning, i walked back and forth thru my mowing lines with weed-b-gone in one hand and dandelion/clover killer in the other. i looked like the Wyatt Errp of Lawnsville!!! man, were my trigger fingers tired.
i turned in all the paperwork for my passport monday. i went and got my picture taken for it at walgreens sunday, well, first their camera didn't work, then the scanner machine wouldn't work, then their photo printer wasn't working either. so i drove down the street to the next walgreens and got it done there. he even made me put on one of their blue "photo guy" lab shirts, because i had a white t-shirt on, and against the white background, it looked like my head was floating in space. i take all my stuff to the post office downtown because i'm close the the expedited shipping deadline to have it in time for the trip, and find out they don't do passports there, so i had to walk to the post office at olive and tucker (remember this is the first 90 degree day of the year). my postal worker said that expedited ones are only taking 3-4 weeks, which is shorter than i had heard, so i should have it in plenty of time...
i need to get back to work on the house, hopefully i'll get a bunch done this weekend. i need to frame out and drywall the shadow boxes, i've now got my LED lights, so i need to test and see how many i need for each shelf, and get that all wired up...
well, that's all for now

renovation

today i started on my painting project. i'm going to paint the dining room, kitchen and living room in this phase. so i started by scraping off all the high spots, patches and broken corner beads everywhere. ladder day is tomorrow, i only went up as high as i could reach. it's got kind of a middle eastern look to it... like a bomb went off in my living room. there's huge black scraper marks everywhere, plaster is all chipped off of the corners.. it's lovely. after i'm done scraping down the high walls and ceiling, it'll be patching and a skim coat of mud over the whole thing, a full sanding, primer coat over the whole thing, then the paint.
well, i'm off for the races tonight, my company is having a work function over at fairmount parks... it's a little early in the evening to promise that i'll be "goin crazy" every 18 minutes, but i'll see what i can do...
i went to see my old friend Linda from the Ultraviolets last night at the new J Buck's out by winghaven, it has been a long time, we talked alot between sets. as usual, every time i hear someone play a guitar i get all ramped up about getting good enough to be able to sit in for a few songs... that'll just take time that i don't have.
well, gotta run... maybe i'll stop by and get some carrots to throw around the track.

ugh

well, at least tomorrow's friday, my thursday kinda sucked. going back to work at the office sucked, i got to work from home all day wednesday. i got so much more done than i would have at the office. our supreme revit being came over and we worked on revit mep engineering stuff all day. the house was buzzing with a high level of geekiness. today i was in the office, back to the usual unavoidable hearing of personal phone calls on all sides of me, the dick-weed that sits next to me, who smacks while eating, and chews with his mouth open, snacking all day... i want to throw up on him from over the cubicle wall. sounds like he's giving head over there, it's disgusting. so i put on my headphones and crank them way up, it still doesn't drown out cell phones ringing and the paging system. i listened to Beastie Boys - Paul's Boutique on repeat today, one of my favorite albums of all time. that made the day a little better.
i thought i was going to cash in on the american idol dead pool. there is a pool where we picked our top 6 winners, and we get points for every round our people are still in it. there is also a side bet (the dead pool) for 5 bucks a week, where if you guess All of the people to be voted off, you get the pot... i was feeling very confident, because the 4 i had picked to go tonight all gave stellarly horrible efforts this week... well, the pool's still growing as of tonight because of the big upset. i have Sabrina to win the whole show, and she was voted off tonight. what a crock of bullshit!! she's been among the top 4 performances each week... gone. and sanjai (mowgli from jungle book) is still alive?? i wish they would post actual stats, such as exact number of votes each, age and sex of the actual voters. this is the first season i've actually watched american idol, i've always stood by my theory that they are all collectively not worth a shit as far as real music (what i like) goes. sure, the winner will cut one fake teeny/pop/dance shit shingle, that they didn't write, or play an instrument on. and all the teenage girls will make their parents buy it, so it will sell alot. but in the big scheme of things in the rest of the musical world, they will still just be an overrated kareoke singer. so i actually gave it a chance, and am being greatly disappointed, this will also be the last season i watch this non-musical popularity contest.
so, after watching the show, and an episode of south park, and general conversation, i head home at around 10pm. i was telling everyone how excited i am, because i'm getting my car window fixed friday afternoon. i haven't been able to roll down my window for almost a month. i remember on the way home that still have a 2x4 in my door holding the window glass up in place. so, not wanting to be the idiotic picture of the month on the car dealership's website, i took apart my door panel again, took out the lumber, and put the door back together. it didn't take too long, it's the third time, i'm getting pretty good at the whole door panel process.
i've also had a sinus headache all day, and developed a sneeze and runny/stuffy nose today. so like i said, at least tomorrow's friday.
if anyone's interested in looking at someone who has more musical talent than all the contestants from every year combined, check out my friend Jimmie Bruhn.