Hey Look, A Shiny Thing!

So I didn't really have any sort of event or experience to write about. Well, at least not any to drone on the way you've all grown accustomed to and, I can only assume, love. I do however have a lot of random thoughts that bounce in and out of my head and while I do find them interesting, really aren't enough to qualify in my mind blogworthy on their own. Really like days of free association. Have a thought, that's great, think about it. Oh, what's that over there, there's another thought. That's cool. What was I just talking about? It's a little like that. Who am I kidding, it's exactly like that. So I'm going to umbrella all of these under the banner of my short attention span. And this could be the first of may like this. This particular post will just be the verbal equivalent of leftovers with a few different subjects.


So I have what you might call an epilogue to the Snowpocalypse post. I had cleared off my driveway of snow the afternoon of the Super Bowl (I think I owe the NFL .73¢ just for typing that) and among other things I found out that my 24 year old hand me down snowblower works great when the bottom surface is ice. My driveway still has a good one to two inches of ice on it still. So the paddles didn't get stuck at all on that and got the whole thing cleared off pretty quickly. And in essence I just got rid of all the stuff that would give me traction on the ice. Oh well. And I got the end of the driveway shoveled out flat and even cleared a spot for the mailman to pull up to drop my mail in. I'm not sure who was clearing out our edition roads but the ruts in the road were getting pretty deep. So when I cleared out the end of the driveway I figured that'd be a little helpful. And it looked pretty good and the car backed out pretty easily. And that was the last time I was out on Sunday. I go to leave for work and son of a bitch if the damn blade hadn't come by and fucked up the end of my driveway with all the slush and stuff. That's wrong...frozen slush and stuff. It had gotten cold enough that there was no getting rid of it. It's there till it gets warmer. And I like that the pile the plow got in front of my driveway is tall enough to scrape the bottom of my car. NICE! That has to be great on all the parts underneath. I just hear it scraping every time I back in or out...thanks snow truck dick.
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I'm on record...'Glee' sucks. There, I said it out loud. Everyone, you can quit fucking talking about how great 'Glee' is.  Ahhh..fucking 'Glee'..they're on Oprah, they're the greatest, they're gonna do this song...I give a crap. Go watch your local high school swing choir, it's more interesting. I'm tired of  "Glee" being forced down everyone's collective throat because you're supposed to think it's great. It's like "Ally McBeal" all over again, "Hey, it's interesting because it's different." It's not fucking different, it's a sitcom (and that's generous) and they sing. People that love it make every excuse in the world for it to be good, "it's campy", "it's fun", "it's something different". No, it just stinks. Biggest problem I have with it, it's not funny. They call it a comedy because they have Jane Lynch. Great job, you have Jane Lynch playing Jane Lynch. And don't get me wrong, I think she's great, 40 Year Old Virgin, Talladega Nights, Best in Show. She is really good. But they cast her because they saw "Role Models" and said "hey, do that again every week". And the songs even stink. They had 'Don't Stop Believin' on the pilot and they can't even get a good song after that. You know, when the best part of your show is the guest stars you're able to con onto being on your program, you have a problem. You're really not too far removed from being "The Love Boat", and that's not being fair to the memory of "The Love Boat". Sorry to besmirch your good name Pacific Princess by even putting "Glee" anywhere near your memory.
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I just saw someone recently at a liquor store and she had a shopping cart. And I'm not talking about some downtrodden lady outside the store with her own cartful of sadness. She was using a cart in the liquor store. I guess that also begs the question, when did liquor store start furnishing carts? Now don't get me wrong, I love my liquor. It's one of the main four food groups. Jack Daniels...personal friend of mine. I have a number of bottles of wine at any given moment. Hell, I have my own kegerator for God's sake, so I think it's safe to say I'm a fan. Now I said all that to say this, I have never needed a cart at a liquor store. Let me repeat that, I have never needed a cart at a liquor store. Ok, once I needed a cart for liquor, but it was an extreme situation. A large work group went to an event called "Carb Day" and we rolled into the track with seventeen cases of beer. And apparently my backward state and it's liquor laws only allows for four cases of beer to be bought at one time. So I had to do multiple trips to get it. And it's a little difficult, not to mention heavy, to lug around four cases at once. But that's an event with a lot of people. And seeing how there was no event of any sort this time of year that would really warrant a cart (unless you have some really big Valentine's Day plans), I was left guessing. Now I'm thinking a few things at this point, she's done with AA and this is her big 'fuck off' to that, she's having a party and she's inviting everyone. Not everyone she knows, just everyone. Or she's very lazy and doesn't want to carry anything around the store while deciding between the Zinfandel or the Pinot. Unfortunately I saw this as I had just gotten back into my car and she was going into the store. Because you know if I had seen that while I was in the store I would have had to linger just to see how full someone decides to fill their liquor store cart on a random Thursday.
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I have forgotten so many seeds of ideas to write about it's really starting to get annoying. I at times have a horrible memory. Sometimes it's like that of a crack addicted tree frog, and that's not being fair to actual crack addicted tree frogs. I'll have this good idea, or at least what I'm calling a good idea, and I think it's so good I can write about it later. And later comes and I cannot pull what the thought was. And of course I don't write it down, that's for old people with shit memories. Well call me grandpa because I've forgotten a lot of good subjects. I only wish I could remember some of them. I know I thought they were good because I can remember being excited about thinking what I could write. How's that, I can remember being excited about the topic but I can't remember the topic. Way to go dipshit, what's a brick of Post-It™ notes cost? A dollar? Nice. In one ear and out the other. Gone in sixty seconds, and just as annoying as the Nicholas Cage move. See, now why do I feel compelled to always take a swing at Nick Cage. Ghost Rider, Season of the Witch, National Treasure (any of them), Brining Out the Dead, Zandalee, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, The Weather Man. Oh yeah, that's why.

Snowpocalypse 2011

So I was snowed in for a couple days this week with one of the worst winter storms I can remember. Let me rephrase that, I was iced in this week with one of the worst winter storms I can remember. Now all of this was supposed to start happening on a Monday night and I hadn't heard anything about it till Sunday night. Thank you Facebook for the heads up. And thank you cable tv for keeping me away from my local news as to miss this kind of important news. At least to go out and make sure I had some things on hand in the pantry in case we did get the worst case scenario that all the weather men and weather women were predicting. But I don't usually put a lot of faith in the weather guessers. I can only image how excited they were to have something like this coming up to be wrong about. And man are they wrong. How many jobs could you keep where if you do your job right 35%-40% of the time you'd still be employed? Not many. I guess in baseball you'd be in the hall of fame with a batting average like that, but for weathermen it's....it's not good. We don't need weathermen. Usually it's just an excuse to put hot chicks on t.v. The only reason they have jobs is because we're too too lazy to walk away from the t.v. and stick our heads out the door. 'Channel Whatever WeatherCenter'? More like 'Bullshit Factory'. You mean it's going to get colder when the sun goes down?!? Visibility is 2 miles? I'm not a bird of prey in search of food, I don't care about the visibility. Weather is really only exciting when it kills people or relocates trailers. There's a chance of rain. Yeah, and there's a chance the next Nicholas Cage move will be good too. Let me describe every weatherman in the world: loud jacket, spray tan, big hair, on the verge of suicide and named something fake. Like Dallas Raines. Yes, that's an actual weatherman's fake name, check it out on your Google machine. The only other industry with names that idiotic is porn, but at least that's useful. And can we please stop calling weathermen 'Meteorologists'. Let's save the fancy 'sciencey name' for the guys who actually do science. No one is giving Al Roker a Nobel Prize for saying, "Now here's what's happening in your neck of the woods." So you can imagine my surprise when 'the big one' that they said was going to hit actually hit. I've noticed that when they get this worked up about a storm nothing happens. And when they don't really see it coming, that's when we get punched in the face with eighteen inches of snow. However, having heard this I took a USB drive into work to copy some things off in case I had to work from home. That drive had been working fine. Then I plug it in there (which I'd done a number of times before) and it started acting weird. Like saying it was going to take forty-five minutes to copy something that I knew should only take a few minutes. So I was wrestling with that for, oh, the better part of an hour trying to figure out what the hell was wrong. Now in this time everyone had left. We got cut early and I was trying my damnedest to get out of there before anything kicked in. And this shitty drive wasn't playing nice. I finally had what I needed (or so I thought) and was on my way just in time to be driving home in an ice storm. Well what the fuck, they got it right. So now to try and navigate what is sure to be an interstate full of jackholes who should never drive unless it's sunny and 74. And boy was I not wrong. There was one especially annoying Prius out on the road that I just could not shake and get around. They were like my traffic nemesis that day. I know I've used the term nemesis a few times before. Like shopping nemesis but it fits. I don't know if it was on purpose but every step I took to try and get around them, they got in the way just in a nick of time. That kind of drive just drives me out of my mind. If there was some sort of recording device set up in my car during drives like that your collective jaw would hit the floor at the stream of foulness that comes out. And I admit it. My mom had the misfortune of calling me while I was en route home. And got to hear a lot of it. Actually she even said, "Boy...you really need to do something about that road rage." Not the first time that's happened. She's been in the car with me before so she has an idea. A few Thanksgiving's ago we went out to the large neighboring city that Saturday after Thanksgiving to do some shopping. It was an outdoor mall and I was driving. Now let me set the table on this, I have incrementally started swearing in front of my mom from college till now. I know she doesn't care for the work fuck. Almost everything else is on the table. And I'm a grown ass man and if I drop a few bombs no biggie. So over the course of the years I'd gotten a little more comfortable swearing in front of her. And sometimes it's been hard not to drop the F-Bomb, I say it so much it's more like a comma than a word. So back to the shopping, we were driving in the parking lot trying to find a spot. We came up to a four way stop and apparently of the two of us that pulled up to it, I was the only one that noticed. The ass clown going the other direction just blew on through when it was my turn, to which I exclaimed, "Well don't fucking mind me!!". It was a reflex. And immediately after I said I it occurred to me that I had said it. And it wasn't like a bad reception thing and maybe it got garbled. She was sitting two feet away. And it's not like her ears were gonna burst in to flames like everyone's eye's burst into flames after Janet Jackson's nipple came out during the superbowl, curious where all the blind people are from that. And then I waited. And waited. And nothing, not even a sigh as to say, "Really...was that necessary?" So I didn't say anything and everything went along as normal. But that was the last time I did that and I've caught myself several times since then but managed to change it at the last minute from HBO swearing to TBS swearing.

Anyway, back to the jackwagon Prius that was impeding my getting home. Did I also mention they were hitting the brakes at random for no reason. Well done you dick. I can see it if a stop is coming up or if you're making a turn. But you're on the interstate with no exits near....quit riding the brake in the ice you moron. When you look in your rearview mirror and wonder what caused the pileup behind you, you can know it was because of your random brake hitting. Dick. Which I'm sure you were doing with a smug sense of superiority and holier than thou attitude. You know, because you're saving the world because you drive a Prius. You're not saving the world. You're just a pretentious douchebag who wants everyone to think what a great person you are for driving that car. And this was a pretentious douchebag who had no business being out in any sort of weather that you couldn't describe as Phoenix. This is the point where I'd like to say I got around them, flipped them off and was on my way having put them safely behind me. But I can't. They managed to block my every move to get by all the way to my exit. There's a part of me that wouldn't have minded seeing them on the news later as one of the many slide offs the police were dealing with. The impotent rage subsided and I was finally home. God, I love that phrase. Impotent rage. If you're being honest with yourself you've had it too. Especially in traffic. Where you get so mad and worked up about something and you will never get to have the outlet you want for all that anger. You just have to choke it back knowing you can't (or depending on the circumstance, shouldn't) let that rage out. And any of it you do let out just floats away up into the atmosphere no where close to it's intended target. Impotent rage. Works for a lot more instances than just in the car. Feel free to use it whenever, you don't even need to credit me. So back to getting home, I did have to make one stop. They had been calling for a lot of ice in my neck of the woods. Like an inch plus of ice. Like downed tree limbs and power lines ice. So I figured I would pick up some extra fire wood for the fireplace just in case. And I guess 73% of the city had the same thought. Normally you can go to just about any gas station this time of year (check local listings) and find the pre-bundled firewood. And the last time I'd been out I'd seen a bunch of it at a couple of the local gas stations. So on my way home I figured no problem, I'll just stop there. It's on the way, and I'll be set just in case. No firewood. Went to the next station. No firewood. What the hell people? It's not milk, it's fire wood. I guess other people had the same idea and they'd also heard about it earlier than I had to go buy their wood in a panic. I finally found a station that had some so I got a few bundles and went home. That last mile or so was when I noticed my windshield wipers weren't really working. They were moving. They were just encased in ice and not really wiping anything. That was fun. Got home and a couple hours after I'd gotten home I saw an email that was calling off work for the next day. Well, not calling it off but saying don't go into the office. Now who was looking smart for bringing some stuff home? Must have been someone else because that shitty drive of mine died. What that hell man! It wasn't that old and it was babied. I really baby most of my electronics and that was no different. I tried for the better part of an hour to make that fucking thing work. And nothing infuriates me quicker than electronics that should be working just fine but for some inexplicable reason just decide to tell me to go to hell and stop working. Oh, the urge to take a hammer to that thing was growing. Idid have the thought that I could maybe save some of what was on it so it hasn't tasted the hammer. Yet. I managed to get what I needed to get done done through strategic use of my sent folder. It wasn't as quick as I would have liked but I managed. Only out of work for two days. The weather didn't get as bad as all the talking weather heads had forecasted. Really? They were wrong? GASP!! I guess I should take away from this that I depend on technology too much for as easily as it will fail me and that I should keep more firewood on hand in the winter time just in case things ever do break bad and I need to use it for more than just the nice ambience of having a fire. Oh, and weathermen suck. That too.