It's Friday!  Friday's are good.  What is everyone up to tonight?  Going to the bar?  Staying in?  Converting to Judaism?  Reinventing the wheel?  Beating dead horses?  Sucking on a red pen until it explodes in your mouth and then going to the dentist and telling the receptionist that your mouth is a little sore and you think you might have a cavity?  Limbo contest? 

Man, I ate something foul for lunch today.  It was a chicken milanese sandwich with some really awful cheese on it (Fontina).  I don't think I will ever understand cheese.  American cheese is one thing...it's processed to perfection (kinda like diet soda/nutrasweet).  I've sorta grown fond of pepperjack cheese too, but only because I'm slowly incubating an affection semi-spicy foods (horseradish mayo is pretty damn good!).  It has to be the right kind of spicy though.  Pepper still totally sucks on everything and that crap that they put on buffalo wings that makes your lips burn is just plain annoying.  I think that people who 'like' that stuff are totally faking it.  Don't even try to disagree with me on this, because me will thinks thou doth protest too much.

One year ago today I started this job.  Doesn't feel like I've been here for a year.  This is a good day because now I can actually apply for grad school and have it covered under tuition reimbursement.  Something happened to my fingernail this weekend and I don't like it.  The side of it is a little swollen on the skin part and it's sorta sore.  Sortasaurus would be a good name for the first dinosaur we find with a hangnail.  Thunder lizards.  How awesome is that? 

Wowowowow!  What an awesome weekend!  I was down in NYC to visit some friends and check out the NYC marathon.  So many fun things going on that I don\'t even know where to start.  Actually, I don\'t even want to start.  I'm frickin' exhausted to be completely honest.  Here's a picture from my cameraphone (phone just died so I couldn't send more to my Flickr).  Check it!  This is from the top of my friend's apartment looking down on First Ave.  Marathoners going north for 50 blocks here.  I think.  A lot of blocks.  A lot of people.  Everyone yelling.  It was way cooler than you would imagine watching on TV.  Crazyness.

Testing...testing.  This is only a test.  It's been a few days since I blogged and I have an endurance blogging marathon scheduled for November (NaBloPoMo) so I figured I would crank up the old blog and get her warmed up and ready to go.  I'm feeling pretty good about this.  <does a few wind sprints>  Yeah.  I'm feeling pretty good about this.  <stretches legs>  Last week I did a quick recon of the some of the other bloggers and I have to say that I was almost impressed by some of them.  <swings arms around>  Oh yeah, feel the burn...I'm totally gonna win this thing and get myself a free year of Flickr Pro.  <chugs Gatorade>  I spent the entire weekend getting myself physically and mentally prepared by eating vegetables and thinking of thoughts.  <runs in place a little>  Oh yeah, I'm at peak blogging form...I can just feel it.  <wipes sweat off brow>   Man, I'm starting to get a little dizzy now.  <pukes a little>  Out with the bad, in with the good...out with the bad, in with the good.  <cramps up and lies down in fetal position> 

Oh yeah, if anyone is wondering what the hell this is all about, I signed up for this.  Check it out!  Cavutto's Blog!  Woot!

http://www.fussy.org/nablopomo.html

I come into work 45 minutes early every morning for no reason whatsoever and I used to use this time to do the APoD but then I got burned out on that.  Anyways, where was I...oh yeah, so I really like to come in early and I'm usually in a bloggin' mood, except that it's really early in the morning and nothing has happened worth blogging about yet....not that that's ever stopped me before.  Hell, the only thing I did so far this morning was to write the first two sentences of a blog post, so I guess I'll just have to write about how I wrote those two sentences in a blog post.  Three now (four!).  Really though, I'm just interested in the first two.  See, when I started this blog post I was all excited to be here blogging and it started out relatively coherently, possibly leading into a discussion about my early morning work habits or something.  I think that by the end of the first sentence though, I really lost my train of thought and by the time I realized that the train had passed I kinda started to panic just a little because I can sorta tell when I'm about to write a really bad blog post.  The panic quickly dissipated though because I remembered that I 'do' really bad blog posts so I embraced it and ran with it and that's pretty much how I wound up here.  Anyways, getting back to the topic at hand...the second sentence.  I think I started writing that by accident and I got as far as 'Anyways,' before it dawned on me that this was going nowhere.  I sorta had to backtrack for a second there, but it was like backtracking after like 2 steps into a trail.  You know, just sorta looking back just to see that you only took two steps.  By the end of sentence two I was completely disoriented and I think that was a precursor of what was to follow.  I had totally given up on anything substantive.  So, yeah.  In following with the backtracking/trail analogy, this post is like the kids from the Blair Witch Project putting the map on the hood of their car after parking it and then having it blow away and then immediately panicking like crazy and running around screaming and yelling and crying even though they haven't gone anywhere at all. 

I spent two hours in the car this afternoon driving back from Albany.  Here are some of the things I thought about...

1.  Does the air inside the tire spin as fast as the tire does?  Does it start spinning like, immediately or does it take a while for the friction of the rubber walls to actuallly get it going.  I'm pretty sure it has to start spinning eventually.  Then, what happens if you slam on the brakes and lock up the tires?  Does the air keep spinning around inside the tire?  I want to test this somehow.

2.  If life begins at conception, do pregnant women get to ride in the carpool lane?  Maybe if you were a lady and in a real hurry all the time, you could keep like a vial of man juice like in your purse or something, then you go drive in the carpool lane and if a cop pulls you over you can shove it up your hoo-ha real fast and try to get pregnant like on the spot.  That's a terrible idea, I know...but whatever.  I was bored.

3.  What are the odds of an 'indecent proposition' actually working if I asked a stranger really politely?  I think this it might have like a ten-to-one shot on a good deay.  Maybe a little less, but I'll take those odds.  Not good enough to gamble on, but good enough to risk getting my fragile male psyche crushed.  Is there a such thing as a mercy eh-eh?  Kinda like a mercy killing...except pretty much the total opposite. 

I had a dream last night that 'Merca was under attack and it scared the crap outta me.  I was at somebody's house way up on this really high hill/mountain and we were hanging out outside just cooking out and stuff and then all of a sudden I heard this huge explosion and looked out and saw huge bombs going off with those shockwaves spreading out for a split second.  Then they started going off like right next door and all over the place.  I was with my buddy Scrubs and she got really scared and was like paralyzed with fear or whatever and she wouldn't move so I told her she had to come with me and everything would be okay.  So I figured we should just run...somewhere.  I didn't really think anyplace was safe because bombs were falling all around and there were explosions everywhere, but running seemed like a good idea.  So, we get to the edge of the yard and I decide that we should climb the fence (it was like a 4 foot tall metal one...no problem) and go down to lower ground.  So, we climb the fence simultaneously and she loses her grip on the other side and falls like 50 feet down and her head hits the edge of the roof on this garage and she does this like awkward, rag-doll backflip and lands on the ground all strewn about in a weird way.  I was like, 'D'oh!  I guess everything won't be okay..sorry about saying that.'.  As I climbed down and ran past her, I could see that she could move her eyes but she was otherwise totally motionless and really close to dead.  I said 'Sorry Scrubs, but I gotta get the hell outta here.' and I ran down this grassy hill that was like right next to a road and everybody in the army trucks were yelling 'Put your hands up!' so I started running down the grassy hill with my hands up until I got to the bottom and found these guys having some kind of like crappy old-person cook-out party on their driveway and I asked them if I could have a beer because I was really flipping out and they gave me one.  Then I woke up and I felt really bad about telling Scrubs to follow me and not worry only to have her totally die in like 20 seconds.  The end.

Breakfast kicks all the other meals square in the gnads.  It kinda sucks that all of the foods designated as 'breakfast foods' have to sit at the back of the bus all day long and can't drink out of the same water fountains.  Eggs, the blank-canvas stape of early morning eats, provide the perfect backdrop for the tastiness of sausage and bacon.  You hear that bread?  You are really lame next to eggs.  Sure, for lunch you team up with cold cuts and crap, but among the breakfast crew you are a stupid side dish that has to be toasted and smeared with other things and I don't even like you anyways (Hey peanutbutter, if you're still out there...you should really ditch that square.)  Cereal and milk makes soup look like that other Baldwin (broth is such a dumb word too).  And what the hell do you even drink with dinner that can compare with a cup of coffee?  Soda?  Forget it.  Oh, and breakfast burritto!  Wow man.  I really like what you've done with yourself. 

So, I suppose I should finish this up.  Anyways, I was at the DMV auction this Saturday morning.  From what I gather, a lot of this crap was confiscated material or whatever.  I don't know.  That's what my brother says.  So anyways...we were there for this TV and not much else, so after walking around checking out the microscopes and other assorted junk, I decided to go outside and read because my brother was in there waiting for the TV to come up to the block and I was bored.  So I'm outside, sitting on a railing reading Kite Runner on a beautiful, sunny Saturday morning.  After less than five minutes, this little black kid comes up and stands like right next to me.  I would guess that he was like 7 or 8.  I said, 'hi' and he said 'hi' and then he asks me if I always come to these things.  I responded in the negative since this was my first (and probably last) DMV auction.  He said that his dad always takes him to these to get cheap junk.  Ok, cool.  Whatever.  Then he asks me what I do and I told him that I'm a librarian of sorts.  I always mention 'of sorts' afterwards because people always assume that I work in a library with like books and stuff and check-in, check-out procedures and really that's nothing like what I really do.  So, back to the story.  We're sitting there talking and this kid is like really interested in asking me all sorts of questions; what do you do? I'm a librarian.  What book is that?  Kite Runner.  What's it about? So far, kids growing up in Afghanistan. What's it like in Afghanistan?  Pretty bad actually...we went on like this for like 10 minutes.  Then out of nowhere a bee flies up and lands on my face.  It was one of those long, scary looking bees that probably aren't bees at all...maybe a wasp or a hornet or something.  So, now I have this bee on the side of my face and this kid's eyes get really big and I could see that he was sorta starting to panic.  I mean, who really likes bees?  So, I told the kid that it was alright and the bee would just take off eventually.  Except it didn't.  It crawled all over my face.  Up my cheek (near my eyeball!) and then down along my nose and it finally wound up on my lips.  Yeah.  ON  MY FRIGGIN' LIPS! That's when I started to think that maybe this wasn't such a good idea.  I mean, I had to breathe and stuff and I wasn't about to open my mouth to do it and I thought that maybe my nose-exhalations would like make it crazy or something.  I was also scared to inhale through my nose for fear of inhaling the scariest looking bee on the planet.   So there I am, sitting there with a bee on my lips, trying to figure out how I'm going to breathe and then the thing takes off.  Totally anti-climatic, I know.  I was really relieved, not only because I didn't get stung on my goddam lips, but that the kid thought I was like actually cool or something.  Well, after that whole thing, the kid asks if I want to go inside and look at stuff and I said sure.  So we go inside and he introduces me to his dad and stuff and the guy like looked at me all suspiciously.  That made me feel bad or something...for what, I don't know.  Then my brother came over and said that we didn't get the TV.  Then we left.

So, that's that.  It was fun and cool and stuff and pretty much a good Saturday morning. 

I had an awesome morning.  A crown-worthy-almost-not-quite-blog-worthy morning.  Almost-not-quite-worthy morning. 

Here's the story.

I was up early this morning and my brother and I decided to go to the state auction over at the DMV in Wethersfield.  Tons of cool shit there.  Literally tons of it.  Anyways, my brother wanted to go and bid on this HD tv and crap so I tagged along to look at the other stuff.  I was really drawn to the microscopes (goddammit Bones, I want to use your microscope so bad!).  So, while I was perusing the dysfunctional microscopes I happened to meet this 80 year old guy named Art.  His whole job is optics (microscopse/telescopes). 

I'll finish this later maybe...ugh.

People look so silly eating cake.  Cake itself is so over-the-top gaudy to begin with...it's like the Elton John of cuisine.  Apparently, it's also impossible to eat cake without grinning like a complete fool at the same time.  Don't get me wrong, I don't hold anything against the cake-eaters of the world.  I just get a kick out of watching I guess.  It's such a production whenever cake is introduced into the environment.  I don't think any other food gets as much fanfare as cake.  Does any other food get candles?  We even sing songs when cake arrives!  Wedding cake has to be the most ridiculous of them all.  It's really amazing that we've developed a three foot tall dessert.  I think I would make a good cake architect, what with all my experience building boats out of crap in the woods and making binder-clip archways.  Wedding cake is really the next logical progression.