//Posted Wednesday, August 13 2008 at 9:09 PM - 0 Comments
This is just an informal post about some upgrades I made to XocNet the other day; because of abuse (viagra spam bots) I’ve removed the Contact section. I also updated the Archive section to use a GridView control instead of the generated table. I also fixed the bug everyone has been emailing me about for months; that’s right, the ’Older Articles’ buttons now actually goes to the Archive section! Hooray! More later guys, BSG now.
//Posted Saturday, August 09 2008 at 10:08 PM - 2 Comments
No, no, I haven’t found religion- I’m just watching BSG and Gaius is just royally pissing off Six by questioning God’s Plan. Specifically it’s “Lay Down Your Burdens" in case you were wondering. Watching these older eps really makes me wonder what the frak the writers were smoking when they wrote the first half of Season 4; seriously, it makes the Xindi story arc on Enterprise look good. I mean there have been a few good eps and looking back on it in two years I’ll probably end up liking Season 4, but it just hasn’t felt like BSG since about 10 minutes after Starbuck came back and I’ve spoken with a lot of fans who feel the same way. Maybe the second half of the season will kick ass, and I hope it does, because I don’t want BSG going out as just another crappy-last-season space drama.
So last night I was thinking about going to some bar in Kent with Sean and a couple of his friends for some birthday hoopla thing (for him) but I guess everyone else canceled on him so it ended up not happening. I was a bit relieved to tell you the truth mostly because as most of you know my social skills are less than that of a 2 year old plus I would have been a bit out of place since I don’t drink. There’s nothing like being the sober guy drinking Pepsi while everyone else is getting a bit buzzed and letting loose… Not that this happened to me once when Erin wanted me to go to the bar with her when I still worked at NIIC because I was the only person she was comfortable around… Yeah, not that that happened… Oy. (Great, now I’m thinking of Erin. Grr) The thing is I’ve given up on the mantra that I’m “never going to drink", aside from neither of my parents being all that supportive of me not drinking I’ve come to the conclusion myself that yeah, one day I’m gonna drink. There are only two conditions. The first is I’m never going to drink alone (one of the best pieces of advice that Erin ever gave me) and the second is there is only one person I’ll have my first drink with- and if you know me, it’s not that hard to guess who I’m talking about.
Switching topics, this week at work went by pretty fast though I wanted to walk out at one point. Basically one of our clients had us build them a website which was supposed to be a two day project (at least on my [programming] end), well, they approved the design, approved the layout, approved the step-by-step process and even got as far as saying there were only a few text edits left to the site before we could ship it and take it live. Well, cut to this week and the jackass comes back and starts bitching about every little aspect in the site; this is the wrong color, the way this works sucks and isn’t what they wanted, this feature needs changed, this needs added, this thing they approved two weeks ago doesn’t work right, etc etc. This pisses me off because working on this client’s crap is backing up another project of mine which is *alot* higher priority. I’ve already lost two weeks to this damn website (that was only supposed to take two days!) and I’m really tired of looking at it plus the added fact that I’ve worked with this client in the past and this whole acting like a jackass thing isn’t new. Oy. It’s hard to vent here because I have to be very vague; while we don’t have an official blogging policy I have my own guidelines to adhere to which prevent me from giving out any meaningful details. On a happy note, I was able to do some work on eCommerce site for the first time in almost 3 weeks; this week I was able to get the authentication system built and start work on the shopping cart. W00t!
Life at home as been ok I guess. Aside from crunching the numbers today and realizing that I’ve already blown around two hundred bucks of spending money this month things have been ok. I’m loving my iPhone and I’ve finally made the decision that next time I see Katie I’m going to tell her how I feel; the way I see it there’s only three possible outcomes and of those three, only one involves me wanting to jump off that fancy new bridge on I-280. I mean she has to be blind and deaf to not know it already based on how I act and that big dumb lost in the moment look I get on my face when I’m around her; but I’ve just never said it out loud and to her face. The only thing that’s stopping me now is getting her to commit to a date when I can come up next (I work days, she works nights; I work weeks, she works weekends). As much as I like getting out of Ohio, I’d just be tickled pink if she were to come down here because let’s face it, staying at a hotel costs me about $80 bucks a night. Either that or I just need to schedule every trip for when her dad is out of town, haha. And no, not like that you sick bastards!
Oy. I miss my Starbuck. I’d marry that girl if she’d have me...
//Posted Sunday, August 03 2008 at 12:41 AM - 0 Comments
I tried going to sleep an hour ago, you know, being utterly bored with nothing to do and all, and that really didn’t work for me. Instead of peacefully drifting off into a pleasant sleep, *poof*, my mind had to turn itself on and kick into over-drive. I can’t stand that. I mean I’m trying to sleep, not think. If I wanted to think then I wouldn’t be lying in bed trying to sleep; why can’t my brain just shutup for awhile? But as much as I hated it, it got me thinking. About a few things that you might know about and others you might not. This is one of those posts that I’ve been thinking of doing for awhile but just haven’t, well, I guess it’s time.
The truth is I hate it here. I hate living in this little apartment in the middle of nothing nowhere. I hate the fact that the only reason I live here is because of my job. I hate that I’m basically stuck here living in a place where I don’t want to live if I want to keep this job. I hate the fact that all the places I want to live, well, I can’t live if I want to keep my job. I hate the fact that I like my job so much that I’m willing to put up with living here just to keep it. I mean you’d think I’d be happy; at a time when a lot of families in the country are dealing with their homes being foreclosed or who are barely getting by, here I am with a stable job, a good solid place to live and a car that runs great and I just hate it. I mean I should be relieved that I have it so good but I just don’t.
The truth is work hasn’t been going so great for awhile. Let’s not get off on the wrong foot, I love my job, but things aren’t as good as they were this time last year. Around December of last year incoming projects began to slow and early this year they ground to a halt. Literally for about an entire month I was getting paid to just sit there on my ass, in the most uncomfortable chair in the world, and act busy. I made my boss aware of this on several occasions but there wasn’t much he could do since there wasn’t enough incoming work to go around. Things have picked up since then, but the problem now is that it’s the same old boring monotonous work day after day and it’s just not challenging. You see, with my mindset I need to be challenged. I can’t stand the same old ‘insert Flap A into Slot B’ work that most of the population does. While most people are perfectly content with doing the same old thing day in and day out as long as they get paid for it, I’m not. If I’m not being challenged than I’m not happy. Compounding this is the fact that I’ve missed out of two raises because the economy is in the crapper (which means business is down and my boss just can’t plum afford to shell out any more money a month). It just helps contribute to the mindset that I’m working my ass off and have nothing to show for it. Not to disparage my co-workers, but none of them have to deal with their dinner being interrupted because a client’s database got attacked and needs fixed nor do they have to worry about being woken up at 3am because a server went down.
The truth is I like Katie. No, not just like ‘like’, I mean like-like as in I’d spend the rest of my life with her if she gave me the chance. The truth also is that this is one of the worst kept secrets in the history of secrets; I don’t know how many times I’ve been approached by friends or random folks I know online who basically say ‘Look, it’s obviously you like her so just say something already’. The truth is the reason I haven’t done so, first and foremost, is because I’m afraid to admit it to her. Granted she has to blind to not see it, but the last time I opened up and bared my heart and soul to a girl I got hurt, bad. How bad? Only Josh will ever know how bad things got. The thing is I don’t know if I’m ready for that to possibly happen again and I don’t know if I’m ready to possibly put myself in the position of losing my best friend. The second reason is, well, I don’t know if I’m the guy she wants.
The truth is I hate my social-ineptness. Let’s be clear here, I’ve lived in this part of the state for over ¾ of my life and only have one real friend in the area. That should give you an idea of my social skills. For a further idea, read
this post, specifically the part where I just froze up and sat there like a bump on a log all night instead of having fun. I mean it’s a Saturday night. I’m 22 years old, I should be out having the time of my life meeting new people and just having fun and instead here I am, sitting here alone once again.
The truth is I know how to remedy all these problems but for one reason or another I’m just unable or unwilling to do so. The truth also is I have a list the length of my arm of things I wanted to touch upon tonight, but I’m becoming very incoherent at this point so if I keep on going things are going to start to get a lot more random and make a lot less sense. Even some of the things I wrote about above have had entire sections deleted out of them (i.e. the Katie paragraph) because while they made sense to me, what I was saying was starting to get so fragmented that it was almost incomprehensible. So on that note I’m going to do something I rarely ever do; I’m going to quit while I’m ahead (and without any proofing). Goodnight folks.
//Posted Wednesday, July 30 2008 at 10:15 PM - 0 Comments
I may have fraked up last night. I don’t know yet if it’s bad and if so how bad it is. I mean you would have figured that after the whole fiasco with E I would have learned that (Jason + 2AM + Email) isn’t a good idea because my barriers just seem to drop and I tend to, well, speak the truth and not sugar coat it for the other person. Last night I spoke the truth (granted, looking back on it now I did so cryptically [and according to Josh, pretty incoherently too]) and now here I sit wondering if doing so is going to frak things up like always happens. It’s just that whenever this happens, things either change for the better or things change for the worse, there’s never been any middle ground. And to be honest, most of the time they’ve changed for the worse.
I’m just worried. This is not how I wanted this to happen. Ugh.
//Posted Sunday, July 27 2008 at 10:53 PM - 0 Comments
(Sorry, I’m just watching South Park while writing this)
So I finally got my iPhone on Friday. It’s the Black 16GB model and so far I just love it. From an IT standpoint, the interface itself seems to perform a bit faster than the iPod Touch (though Contacts still freezes up for several seconds quite often) and it seems less prone to crashes, however some (native) apps do just randomly crash for no reason. I’m hoping the subsequent 2.0.1 and then 2.1 firmware updates will resolve this issue because while this was tolerable on my iPod Touch, it’ll just become annoying on the iPhone.
I haven’t had a chance to play around with it a lot on AT&T’s network yet mainly because I’ve been home all weekend, but I did toy with GPS while driving home on Friday (seriously, don’t say it). I don’t know why the Internet has been so bitchy about the iPhone’s GPS, it was only off by about 10-20 feet on my ride home on I-77 and I’m pretty sure this has more to do with Apple not intending it to be used as a real-time GPS navigation device than a hardware issue like the Internets was claiming. One thing I did notice is that AT&T’s coverage in this area kinda sucks. I picked up Rt. 82 on the drive home and lost signal 3 times (Sprint only had one kinda-dead spot if the planets aligned right) and sitting here in my apartment I get anywhere from no signal at all to 5 bars (Sprint had 5 no matter where I was), all of this occurring within clear sight of my windows and within a 10ft radius of where I sit right now with 5 full bars. And let’s not bring up the fact that I’m going to be paying $105 bucks a months for a cellular plan with only 900 minutes where nights start at 9pm. Paul Thurrott hit the nail on the head when he said that AT&T was the Achilles Heel of the iPhone 3G. Sprint spoiled me with excellent coverage and an awesome price but alas, they don’t have the iPhone so oh well.
I’m probably going to end up selling my 8GB iPod Touch to Katie’s brother (Nick) so in the end the iPhone should end up only costing me $100 bucks. Pretty cool, huh? I formatted and repackaged it today so it’s just a matter of him having the money and finding a weekend that Katie wants to see me again (hopefully soon!). And speaking of Katie; hon, that thing you’re confused about- don’t do it. This is one time you need to just trust me and my expirence; just say no and walk away while you can. And assuming you even read this, I’m planning on coming up in the next couple weeks and again hopefully the first week in September. Let me know what you think about that, again, assuming you even read this (which I don’t think you do).
Did I mention that I bought fish at the grocery store last night? Yeah, when Katie and I were at Red Lobster, for the first time in my life, the mere smell of fish didn’t make my stomach churn so I figured what-the-hey and picked up a box last night. Had it for dinner tonight, it actually wasn’t bad at all. I had a salad with it too; scared yet? ;-)
Well, that’s about all for tonight. Hit me up on my cell anytime you want to talk; if I can’t talk I’ll probably just send you to voicemail so don’t be offended if you get VM after only one or two rings. Also like I said my nights start at 9pm so if I’m running low in minutes and I ask you to call me back later, you know why. I’m pretty sure I gave everyone who needs my number the new number, but if you don’t have it and think you should, just drop me an email (or check my Facebook if I have you added). There’s a couple people who purposely didn’t get my new number so if someone asks you for it, don’t just hand it out. Kat, Josh, feel free to call me anytime, I seriously don’t mind 3am calls for either of you.
//Posted Thursday, July 24 2008 at 1:20 PM - 2 Comments
So I was reading Kotaku today and they were talking about the new ‘Age of Conan’ MMO game (which apparently is based off of some book series I’ve never heard of); lately I’ve been hearing some good things about this game so I figured what the hey, I’ll give it a try. The thing though is that this was contingent of getting a digitally downloaded copy of the game; while GameStop is just two minutes up the street from my office, let’s face it, I’m lazy and gas is still fraking expensive. So here I am reading over the game’s website, checking some reviews and browsing the screenshots when I go ‘what the hell, let’s just do it’ and head over to the digital download page on the game’s site. While I’m not thrilled when I see the game is going to cost $15 bucks a month it doesn’t deter me because it won’t be the first time I pay $15 bucks a month for an MMO.
But anyway, I’m filling in all my information when I see an upcoming field: ‘SMS Verification’. What the hell? You guys want to verify my cell number to buy a game online? Talk about stupid. I mean digital downloads are supposed to be easy impulse purchases that I can make in seconds; adding this roadblock completely defeats this! Now yes, granted a huge majority of people do have cell phones (and I will again whenever AT&T ships my damn iPhone), but a lot of people don’t have SMS enabled phones because carriers make you either pay per message or charge you ‘x’ dollars a month for ‘y’ messages. I just find this just so completely and utterly stupid. But hey, I guess on the bright side I just saved myself $65 bucks.
//Posted Tuesday, July 22 2008 at 11:08 PM - 0 Comments
So tonight has been a different night for me; as of today I’ve implemented a new set of guidelines that I’m planning to try and live by over the next several months to bring into effect massive changes in my life. Some of those changes include a (hopefully) reduction in my weight, increased energy levels, better mood and the list goes on. This has been a long time coming and sometimes it just takes one spark to set off the explosion that finally gets the ball rolling. I’m planning on trying to eat less and better (pizza once a week is out [#%@$]), exercise for at least ½ an hour a day (eventually working that up to 60-90 minutes in which running is involved [Ack!]), getting a bit more sleep and so on. Hell, if I can even drop 50 lbs it’d be massive but not as much as my 100 lbs goal; what can I say, I shoot for the sky but aim for the stars. As for the reasons behind this, some of them are personal and yet others are just me not wanting to have a heart attack at 30.
I’ve been trying to come up with an acronym for this ‘program’ because, well, I like acronyms; they go with my personality (something else that’s honestly on the change-list) plus they can have fun names that mean something to me that I don’t have to explain to you (like SEKPro; that’s the first time I’ve mentioned that on the ‘net and hopefully the last).
But tonight was different; it was hopefully the start of a new thing for me. I came home, hoped on the treadmill, ate a light dinner and then had tea (!) instead of a snack a little bit ago. Now sis, before you ask me why I have tea in the house when I don’t like it, long story, but its stuff my mom had stashed here. Speaking of you, I’m willing to work with you if you want, I know the folks have been hounding you forever and I’m sure it’d make Dad happy if both his kids were working together on this.
Currently listening to:
Should’ve Said NoEdit: Have I seemed upset in the last few days? Personally I haven’t seen it, you know, too busy being slap-happy around Katie, but Josh seems to have seen it and he’s the only one who knows me better than her... Thoughts?
//Posted Tuesday, July 22 2008 at 1:49 PM - 0 Comments
So yesterday I was driving home when I remembered something that someone had said that I just knew I had to post here. It was among a few things last night that got left on the cutting room floor to stop that last article from ballooning up to 10 pages and taking me until 2:00 AM to write. But anyway, the back story is that I was at Katie’s mom’s house and like I said in the last post, I was just sitting there watching her brother play Rock Band while she and her family chatted outside when I realized that I needed to use the little boy’s room so off I went. A moment later everyone started to come inside and all of a sudden I hear her mom saying “Where’d the IT Guy go?". Yeah. Not ‘Jason’, not ‘that guy you brought over’, not ‘what’s his face’. But ‘IT Guy’ I almost lost it.
I just love that wherever I go I’m instantly known as the ‘IT Guy’; granted the fact that I always end up fixing someone’s computer while wearing my Windows Vista t-shirt (which according to Nick I had worn the last time I came over; I’m cheap, I only have like 3 good t-shirts) doesn’t help me get known as anything but the ‘IT Guy’, but I just find it amusing that it’s the almost universal nickname that people who don’t know my name give me. Well, lunch is over. Back to my desk I go… Hmm, it’s almost 2:00 PM, I know someone who’s probably just waking up now… ;-)
//Posted Monday, July 21 2008 at 11:09 PM - 4 Comments
So for those of you who have been following me here or talking to me on XBL, you probably noticed that for the past few weeks I’d been pretty worried/upset/concerned over a certain friend of mine regarding an issue that I’m still not going to talk about (honestly, because it’s private and really none of your business). This person, if you haven’t put the blatantly obvious together yet, is Katie and the few of you that I have vaguely discussed this with know why this was hitting me so hard. Well, anyway, without diving into a lot of detail (again, mainly because you guys don’t need to know), a few things happened and we started talking about me coming up to see her on Saturday. Again, skipping details, things got moved around and I went up yesterday (Sunday) and stayed through tonight.
I got up there around lunch-thirty and learned two valuable lessons. First, that Katie hates people using the doorbell (guess what I’m going to use from now on… heh, sorry hon!) and second that Nick (her brother) can sleep through anything. We sat around her place for awhile while she fraked around on the web and I iTouched myself (look into how I used the word, it’s nothing dirty, just my typical play on the word) before heading out to see Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Coincidently, I had just re-watched Hellboy on some cable channel the other day completely oblivious that a new movie was coming out. The movie was great, if you liked the first one, I recommend you go see this one. But anyway, when the movie finished I had to take her back to her place because she had to get ready for work.
Eventually she and her brother left to go do things they needed to do and there I was sitting in their driveway, iPod in one hand, laptop in the other jockeying the two to try to get on AIM to see if Fras was available and above all us, find a map to his house (I get lost easy… I need iPhone 3G!). After 45 minutes of cussing, moving from car to her front porch (I probably could have found the spare key, let myself in and just plugged in; but then again I don’t want felony breaking and entering on my record), and creating a Skype account, I finally managed to get Fras on the phone to confirm he was available to do stuff so o ff I went to pick him up, easy, right? Wrong.
The thing is I knew the street Fras lived on but I could never figure out which house is his mainly because he’s always been waiting by the curb when I come to get him or his dead truck has been sitting in the street. Well, this time I forgot to tell him to meet me outside PLUS his truck was in the shop PLUS Google Maps was down so I couldn’t call up a map on my iPod Touch. Bah. So here I am, doing laps around his block trying to figure out which house is his. Seriously, I’m lost. My little pushpin is of no help if I can’t see the map and then the house it’s pointing to. It’s on my second lap though that I have an epiphany. Apparently there are numbers in front a street name in someone’s address. And those numbers? Well, some idiot also put them on the houses too. Yes, you’re probably putting it together. Jason then realized that instead of finding Fras based on a super-cool electronic map, Jason would have to do it the old fashioned way: Mark I Eyeball, i.e. if I looked out my window and read those numbers painted/nailed to the front of every house (almost like they were put there for a reason…) eventually I would find the house matching the one I had listed in Fras’ contact entry and I’d, you know, find Fras. And find Fras I did. I never did tell Katie about this; too embarrassed.
So we went out and grabbed some Wendy’s for dinner, drove around for a bit, played a bit of wee-wee-run (i.e. Fras gets out of the car and goes to take a leak in the woods and the car drives off, heh). Eventually we made our way to Katie’s work where Fras (after noticing that something he had done to my car last time I was up there hadn’t been seen by me yet, grr) found out that Katie doesn’t lock her car. Yes my friends, Fras kinda-sorta broke into Katie’s car (and yes, I told Katie, she laughed). But yeah, so time rolls on waiting for her to get out of work and next thing you know we’re listening to Anakin vs. Obi-Wan from Episode III and quoting scenes left and right. By now Fras has whipped out his keychain which had a Lightsaber on it and I had whipped out my Touch which had a Lightsaber on it. There was then obviously discussion of who was who in Star Wars. I think we settled on Fras being Obi-Wan and Katie being Padme (note: Katie was still not present, but we still volunteer her for stuff) and then I had the brilliant idea that I was Anakin; Fras however didn’t see me as Anakin, something about being too fat… jackass, lol.
Anyway, after we concluded our Star Wars argument and I set apart screwing around with my cars electrical systems (long story) we see Katie come out of her work (it’s a restaurant) and on her way to her car she’s stopped by some shirtless old looking white guy. Of course I see this right away and figure ‘oh, he’s just asking for directions or something’. After a few minute she’s still standing there talking to this guy and he’s starting to get animated and I start thinking that maybe he’s just an upset customer who recognized her as an employee. Fras though is oblivious to this all as he’s playing with my iPod so I turn to take my iPod back and to tell him that something might be up and to be ready to move and when I look back Katie is gone; she’s just gone. The guy is there but she’s gone.
All of a sudden I see her stand up (at this point we were still sitting in my car so there were like 2 cars blocking our vantage points so we could only see waist up) and my brain hits the panic button. Did he hit her? Did he knock her down? Is he trying to force himself on her? Anyway, in full panic mode I think I nailed Fras in the arm to get his short ass to pay attention. By now my door was open and I was ready to run at this guy when I heard him start dropping the f-bomb loud and often. My feet hit the ground, I’m half way out of the car (keys still in the ignition mind you) when I hear the strangest thing; Katie starts laughing. I turn to look at Fras and I think we were both lost at this point. The cussing stops, the animated mood stops and they’re just talking and Katie is laughing. The guy then pulls out a cigarette and starts smoking while they chat. I’m completely dumbfounded. Eventually she says goodbye and starts walking back toward her car again. So she gets over to her car and we both basically go ‘what the f***?!’ and she laughs and tells us that the person she was talking to was not some insane-angry-girl-beating-and-raping-customer, but one of her fellow employees. And what I thought was a cigarette he was smoking? Well, he was smoking but it wasn’t a cigarette.
My jaw dropped. Wait, you mean this guy, right over there, that guy, in real life, is doing drugs, in public, in the daylight, in the middle of a crowded strip mall? Needless to say I’m a little shocked because, well, I’ve never seen anyone do drugs before let alone in the middle of the freaking day in a public area (I mean I know a few people who said they did it when they were in HS, but I’ve never seen it actually done except on Cops). While I was recovering though I also had to restrain Fras from bounding across the parking lot to ask for a hit. Damnit Fras! This bad for you! [/jackieChan]
After the Trenton Missile Crisis (edit: almost typed ‘Crysis’) ended, Katie had invited me over to her mom’s place again, which I honestly think was a miscommunication between us; I had asked her what time she’d be back here, where ‘here’ was her dad’s place and I think she took that as ‘what time can I meet you at your mom’s place’. So Katie, if you’re reading this, if it seems like I self-invited myself to your mom’s, I didn’t.
But anyway, I dropped Fras off and headed over there where I pretty much just sat and watched Nick play Rock Band (this is however after a 5 minute ordeal involving Nick waving me into the right house and then having me re-park my car… long story). Katie and family were mingling outside, but aside from me being a pussy and trying to avoid social interactions with people I don’t know, I figured I’d just stay inside and let her spend time with her family since the original plan was for me to not even be there anyway. Her family is great, but it’s just kinda awkward if you’re a stranger in someone’s house on family night when they’re all talking about family things; no matter how much they try to include you in the discussion you really can’t get into it (not to mention last time when Katie’s mom asked how we met and she said ‘Oh, on the Internet’ I about bashed my head into a wall. Needless to say she had to do some damage control later, lol). We got kicked out around 10pm so her folks could goto bed and headed over to MJR to see the new Batman flick; sis, I know you’re reading this because I mentioned I was writing it to you, but yeah, apparently all siblings are like us and argue over stupid things, except that I actually hit you back, heh.
So yeah, Batman equals freaking awesome (I’m not going to spoil it so don’t worry). I’m not going to sit here and praise Heath Ledger though; his acting was good but the writing made the character. I’m no actor but seriously, it’s not that hard to act insane, I do it on a near daily basis with excellent results. I really liked how realistic and gritty all of the characters were; they all felt complete and alive and the modern/realistic feel of Gotham was just excellent. I’m going to just end there because if you want to read a movie review you shouldn’t be on XocNet (unless it’s a Star Trek or Star Wars movie). Hopefully though the folks in your theater are a bit more in control than ours, they’d all randomly start clapping or burst out laughing at the weirdest moments when the character hadn’t done anything good or funny, when things were just happening. But probably high and drunk 11:15 PM movie audience aside, it was an excellent movie. All of the actors, including Ledger did great, though I think internet fandom had already written a glowing review of the recently deceased actor’s performance long before the movie was even screened.
After the movie, Katie and I headed back to her place where we watched some TV until we went to bed ~5 AM. Now upon saying that, let me just add a few things to stop the flood of emails/IM’s/comments that I’ll probably get (form Josh, Fras and Smith). Yes, I slept in her house. No, I didn’t sleep with her. Nothing happened. To be clear we were not only in separate rooms, but on different floors as well. If you know me then you know that I have certain rules and regs that govern my life such as not taking advantage of girls who happen to be my best friend who I like-like more than words can say whom are also emotionally vulnerable. So, on that note I should get no emails about this (though I still expect something from Josh).
As mentioned in my previous post, I woke up pretty early after not getting nearly enough sleep and proceeded to email with my boss for awhile (I mentioned I had the day off, right?) before saying ‘frak it’ and getting out of bed, cleaned up and dressed (Kat, if you were wondering why you never saw me brush my teeth, change, etc, it’s because I did it all when you were still out cold :-) ) before firing up my laptop and heading online for a few minutes before realizing that I actually was still tired whereupon I crawled back into bed and fell asleep for an hour only to be woken by Nick’s cell phone alarm (remember how I said that he could sleep through anything? This thing was on full volume, right next to his head; he slept through it three times until Katie woke him up… I only mention this because while I can sleep through natural things, like storms, even the slightest noise that’s out of place, like a mouse scurrying across my carpet [true story], can instantly rouse me from my sleep).
Anyway, at this point I’m up and wide awake so I head out into the kitchen, grab some water (I don’t do coffee in the morning) and plop the laptop down on the kitchen table and begin pounding out work emails until I hear the basement door open and the walking dead appears (i.e. Katie is not a morning person; even if ‘morning’ is half past noon… yeah, you can shoot me on my next trip hon). I continued to work while she did her morning thing and after awhile we headed out to the beer store. Yes, you read that right, Jason Cox, straight arrow kid, went into a beer store. Ok, to be honest Katie needed to buy some booze for her mom’s after-wedding party which is next weekend (to halt the current wave of emails, no, I’m not going/invited. I’m not her boyfriend. @Josh: Shutup or I’m telling Sam; I don’t know what but I’m still telling) but it was just worth mentioning because I’ve never been in a place like this (unless you count the times my dad had me help him load a keg into the back of the Saturn); I’ve never seen so much alcohol in one place, it was kinda neat. Weird, only I’d find beverage store that sells a huge amount of alcohol as ‘neat’, lol.
After this we headed over to Red Lobster to grab lunch (she’s worth every dime) where I actually ordered something with crab in it. Now I know that most of you at this point are going ‘huh? Why are you telling us this? We don’t care what you had for lunch’ and at the same time I can hear my sister going ‘What?! You ate seafood?? OMG!’. But yeah, I’m not a real fan of seafood, the smell of it makes my stomach churn, but I don’t know, maybe it’s because this was expensive seafood instead of just salmon fillets done on the grill, but the smell wasn’t bad at all, the crab was delicious (@Moses: Shutup. I don’t want to hear ‘I told you so’) and I almost grabbed some of the lobster off Katie’s plate to try. It was really nice though, just me and her talking through a meal. Fras, don’t get me wrong, you’re great, but it was nice to just have a meal with Katie for once.
When we finished eating we headed back to her place (where I again had to deal with more work emails; needless to say I was pissed as I was going to be leaving in an hour but was stuck having to answer faking emails instead of spending time with her) where we sat around for a bit before it was time for me to go. I grabbed my stuff, walked with her to door and… nothing. I chickened out. I wanted to give her a hug, maybe a quick peck on the cheek and I just got scared and didn’t. It’s the second time in a row that I’ve Ieft and this has happened. I don’t know why I’m even mentioning this on here because I know it’s going to come back and bite me in the ass, but it’s just been eating at me the entire trip home because at the same time I was trying to make this call, she was hanging half way out the door almost like she was expecting me to do something; then again I could just be over thinking this like I always do and she was just holding the door open so we could talk for another brief moment. I don’t know. This is one time I’d like other people’s input, Josh, yours especially. And Fuzzball, if you’re reading this, and I’m wrong, don’t be pissed…
Two interesting things about the drive home though; I was on the turnpike approaching Cleveland when I had a muffled bang or pop. This obviously wasn’t a normal noise so it jerked me out of autopilot and onto alert. I’m trying to figure out what it was when I look about 500ft in front of me and notice a cloud of smoke coming from underneath a truck. Luckily I saw this smoke and knew what it was right away because if I didn’t I probably would have been hit my blown-truck-tire that flew off the tractor five seconds later. I avoided it and so did everyone else so all was good. The second thing was when I was getting off at the Strongsville toll plaza a Coyote just ran across like 10 lanes of traffic and almost got hit by myself and another car. The little guy made it the wooded area with no injuries and my mind couldn’t help but wonder back to my favorite wolf…
Wow; five pages? That’s got to be a new record (my English teach would be so proud!). Seriously, when I started writing this I was planning for one, maybe two paragraphs max just highlighting the fun details of my trip, but the thing is that this post isn’t just written for you guys to read, it’s written so I can remember. The thing with my memory is that if I hadn’t written this all down, by Friday, all I would have remembered is that I went to see Katie, we saw 2 movies, I slept over and had lunch. I’m bad remembering details about my own life. I can quote you a technical email I wrote you a year ago, but don’t ask me what I had for dinner two nights ago because I won’t have a clue. With this it’ll help jog my memory so I not only remember what written here, but a few other details that I didn’t write.
On that note, I’m going to sign off. I need to get my lunched packed, watch a bit of TV and then bed before a fun filled day at work. Thanks for reading guys; I’ll see you online.
//Posted Monday, July 21 2008 at 12:29 PM - 0 Comments
So I’ve been awake on and off since around 8:30 this morning after falling asleep around 5am. Don’t ask me why that is, it’s just always been that way. I think it has something do with the ambient light in the room, i.e. when it gets so bright, I wake up. But whatever. So far I’ve managed to clear out my inbox at home and work, fix an FTP issue at the office and somehow drain my iPod Touch battery down to 10%. Even when I’m on vacation I’m still working; while it’s great that I have that capability, it sucks because I never get any real time off.
I’ll post a more in depth-thingamadoodle when I get home; but needless to say you need to go see Hellboy II and the new Batman movie. Well, that’s all for now. Katie just got up so I’m going to bug her after I get some more H2O; speaking off, I still need to find from D2O, maybe I should stop at one of the two nuclear plants I pass on the drive home today?