*sigh*

It was a no show.......

I think what disappoints me most (and what I'm angry about) is the lack of respect these people have. For the third time in the past couple of weeks I've mustered the courage to approach someone, braced myself for rejection (which I'm pretty good at dealing with btw), received a positive response, only to have the young lady completely disappear afterwards. If she didn't want to go, she should have said no in the first place or had the common human decency to step up and at least inform me of her intent to dodge.

This type of stuff happens at work a lot too. Granted I saw more of it as a college professor than I do now, but it still amazes me how customers/potential dates/students/people in general are getting in the mindset of now wanting to "hurt your feelings" to your face, but rather give a positive response to whatever first advances you make (be it asking on a date, signing a service agreement, or what have you) then completely ignoring any further communications (or attempts at communication). This type of behavior is quickly becoming my number two reason for why America is heading towards trouble (the number one reason being the "I deserve it just because I'm me and I shouldn't have to work for anything" attitude).

Big'J's birthday appears to have gone well. He laughed at the decorations we put in his office so that started the day on a positive note. I spent a good deal of last night (3+ hours) running all over the Hoover area looking for a decent birthday card. It took so long because for his birthday last year, I gave Big'J a card with a monkey theme. For my last birthday, he gave me a card with a monkey theme. So I figured, why not keep the theme going? Make it sort of a challenge to surprise each other every year. What I have determined from this experiment, is that there are not enough birthday card makers using the full potential of the monkey theme. After visiting Target, Walmart, Publix, Brunos, and Amy's Hallmark, I only found a grand total of about 6 monkey cards (two of which we've already used). Somewhat surprisingly, Walmart had the largest collection of monkey cards at 3.

The card I decided on said something to the effect of "Hope your birthday is as fun as a barrel full of monkeys>" On the inside it had a monkey talking about life inside the barrel with other monkeys. Given that I messed up and ordered Big'J's present late, I figured it would be cool to step up the monkey them one more notch and actually buy him a barrel of monkeys (the little plastic barrel with plastic monkeys, remember?). So with the help of Mr. Porter, I set out on a quest to find this elusive beast.

After pretty much draining my cell battery on the phone with Porter (who was MOST gracious enough to provide me intel on possible store locations via his "enter-net" connection) I found what I was looking for at Target for $4.14. What I didn't know until last night is that you can get different colors of barrels. They had blue, green, classic red, and I've seen yellow on the Internet. In case you feel the need to share in the monkey madness, make sure you look in the board games section of your toy store for the Barrel of Monkeys.

It's a little after 3 a.m. I was tired after work and decided to take a nap starting around 7, and just woke up about an hour ago. Don't think I can go back to sleep, so instead I'm going to do something that I've wanted to do since I moved into my apartment. I'm going to go get a waffle and some bacon from the local Waffle House. Be jealous BJD!!!!

My new best friend....

Yesterday evening, I'm sitting on the couch planning my activities for the evening (i.e. getting Big'J a card, which then led to a barrel of monkeys.....the MADNESS...) and my phone rings. I grab it and take a look at the caller ID and it's Big'J's cell number. Heh, wonder what's up? I answer it, "Sup J?", and hear some generic clicking. It was the kind of clicking you hear when only one side of the cell conversation is fully connected. No biggie, cell technology isn't 100%, so I hang up and wait for him to call back. After two or three minutes and no call, I dial up his number.

Two rings and Big'J answers. "You called me, beeyatch?", I say. Big'J replies, "Actually, I think it was Jacob [a.k.a. Lil'J] that called you. He was playing with my phone....I didn't think he had hit the send key, but I guess he did." That's right folks, Lil'J, who is a little bit over 1 year old, already knows my number and is calling his boy. Guess the next step is to actually get him to talk! At any rate, I'm damn proud of the midget and honored for the phone call.

Flanking the Anti-hermit....

So just about the worst (or best if you're an optomist) thing has happened. I have a phone call to make in a few hours in order to tell a young lady what she and I are doing tomorrow night. I have a plan, with a few alternatives in case things change (like it rains for example). I feel that I'm about as prepared as I'll ever be and still maintain some semblance of calm. Hopefully said calm will remain for the next 36 hours (don't hold your breathe).

Tomorrow is Big'J's birthday, he turns Old - 2. We decorated his office with some crap that a lady from work bought. I have to remember to go out tonight and get him a monkey card. For his present, which won't be here until Thursday unfortunately, I picked him up 2 less than 18db blue LED case fans to replace the gaudy multi-colored ones that came default on his new PC case.

Anti-hermit action....

So I call her earlier tonight, around 5:30 or 6. No answer but I get voicemail. It's the generic voicemail that the cell phone companies provide where you say your name, but everything else is in the "pleseant" female voice.............

[ side note ]
Wednesday, at the beginning of lunch, I make up some excuse as to why I haven't called her since the first time she gave me her number (actually I did call and got voice mail, left a message saying I was still out of town and wouldn't have the chance to hang out with her, then never called her since). She tells me it's ok, because she has a new phone number and that would explain why I couldn't get a hold of her. She then asks for my number at the table, dials it directly into her phone so that mine rings, and says, "there now you have my number" while I hit all the correct buttons to save said number.
[ end side note ]

.....except that during the part where I should hear her name, I instead hear a guy say "Randy" .......

Heh, must have dialed wrong.......dial again......

"Randy"..........wtf!?!?!

So I didn't leave a message, who the hell is this Randy person (I'm guessing the guy she was trading spit with)? Why does God love me so much to have this much fun with me? Do I continue to call "Randy" looking for the girl until I get a human not voice mail? I know I'm dialing the right number, I literally watched her call me and I used the exact number that came up. I even went back to the incoming phone calls list and triple checked it (hell Mayhall even called it and got the same "Randy" voice mail).


The Hermit lifestyle is looking SOOOOOO much less complicated......feel free to laugh amongst yourselves and point at the weirdo nerd freak who couldn't get a date with 2 girls that asked him to call them.......

Open the monkey cage...

The last two weeks or so have been both hi and low. The low part was that my mother's birthday was a bit ago and while the actual anniversary of her death didn't really bug me, her birthday was a little rough. I didn't expect it so for the two days of "funk" leading up to her birthday, I was just an irratable jerk, then I on the actual day I spoke with my sister and she was feeling the same. It hit both of us that we were just mourning her. My sister spoke with a bereavement shrink and he said that it's common to feel these types of emotions on a birthday instead of a deathday. Strange stuff. I'm slowly making it back my normal self.

The high point (which has been helping me get back to normal) is that Monkey Boy will be making a triumphant return to B'ham. He accepted a position in our Cullman office as a java programmer. The pay is pretty stinking good in comparrison to his education and the pay most other intro-level people that I know are getting (like > $10k than what I've heard). He should be getting the paperwork from my company tomorrow and he'll do the "Monkey Boy Dance" and tell his current crappy company. It was suggested to him by a mutual friend of ours to find his father's resignation letter (his father used to work for the same company he is working for now), cross out the date and his father's name, write the correct date and his own name in crayon, and use that as his official resignation letter. In my opinion, that would be just about the best ersignation I've ever heard of.

At at Wing's today and ran into the young lady that I think I busted trading spit with some other guy. She put the pressure on pretty hardcore today for me to ask her out, but I'm not sure if I can get the image of her (or someone that looks kind of like her) trading oral fluids with some 19/20 year-old chode out of my head. Mayhall at work told me to forget about the "incident" and call her. All of this is really messing with my hermit-till-death outlook.

Starch this job and shove it....

Had my first official meeting in the new department today. It was scheduled for one hour, took three and a half and I discovered that our oldest department member is just about the bitchiest and negative person I've ever had the pleasure to work with. No worries, 90% of the meeting didn't have much to do with development (we were organized and said our peace in 10 minutes). I continue to learn about the existing programs we have running (did I mention that Big'J and I have about 160 or 170 programs we have to maintain as well as write new ones?). Our product manager is going to be out pretty much until the end of the month and while he is gone, Big'J is the man in charge. I'm pretty stoked about that, very very proud of him.

Consumed the rest of the chili today, as a leftover it was still decent. It had lost some of it's spice kick but I boiled up some white potatos as a base and put the chili over them. As such the meal as a whole was mighty tasty for the amount of effort I had to expend to make it (i.e. boil water).

Hoping to get started on the PoW and the KGV tomorrow. At least get the basic priming finished. No photoetch, I'm not psychotic (yet).

If it's not quite cold, it might be chili.....

Made chili tonight for the first time. Didn't try anything crazy. It wasn't to bad: 1 lb ground turkey (browned), 1 can diced tomatoes with peppers, 1/2 cup water (forgot to buy chicken stock/broth), 1 package McCormick chili seasoning. I have a long way to go in order to compete with McAlister's chili.

Had another walk, kept my time from yesterday (actually 2 seconds slower).

Modified/wrote my first MFC program today.....EVER......... I MUCH prefer C# (never though I would say that) or old school Win32 to MFC.

Caaashew......oops, didn't mean to sneeze....

Works going well. I feel more confident about what I'm doing everyday. I started a new project today and made a lot more progress than I thought I would. Should be able to finish it up by Friday. Big'j has been working on this intermediary program that is supposed to provide a consistent UI for our customers and allow us to develop plugins to convert certain types of data. He's been tweaking it for a few months now, and I'm hoping to get to use it soon (if for no other reason than to give him some uninvested feadback for it). As of now though, for each project I have to start from psuedo-scratch so things take a little longer than I would like.

I say psuedo-scratch because I'm being mildly smart with my development. I'm trying to keep my projects as modular as I can while short development time is still priority. So far it seems to be working in my favor as I now have a UI template that is pretty much set to go from the start and a few output templates that I can just kinda drop in my new projects. These two particular pieces allowed me to bring together a product that is about 60% complete, in about 4 hours. Compared to my first project which took about 12 hours to get to the same spot.

The holiday weekend was great. Had the chance to hangout with a few peeps, have a few beers (responsibly of course), had two excellent meals (the Blu Bistro and Robin cooked delicious steaks), had the chance to play through Blazing Angels on Daryl's XBox 360 (I enjoyed it, but I don't think I'd be able to play through it again), picked up my inherited firearms, and had a safe return drive to B'ham. Tuesday I was supposed to go hang with Big'J's family but I was restricted to a limited deployment area centralized to the biological waste evacuation facility so I missed it. He said he had a great time (though it was extremely hot) and he looked tired as all get out today at work.

Took my walk Tuesday at around 4ish, which was a mistake. It's amazing how the ambient heat can drain a person (especially a person with a high mass). I was so tired after my walk that I pretty much just passed out straight on the floor (which was not comfortable). Today I went at a more reasonable time and cut an entire minute off my last week 1/2 mile average. Made it down to 10:47 (estimate a 2.78 mph speed) per 1/2 mile, which I'm pretty happy about. Hope to keep that same time (or close to it) the rest of the week.

I experimented with some spaghetti sauce last night.

• 1 jar Mushroom and Pepper sauce
• 1 lb ground turkey (browned with some mild seasoning)
• 1 tablespoon thyme (double if fresh)
• 1 tablespoon parsley (double if fresh)
• 1 cup Cashews
• Souther Flavor spice to taste
• 1/2 box noodels

Don't know what exactly possessed me to throw cashews in the sauce...maybe because I was snacking on some while cooking. It turned out pretty good, the nutty flavor sat well with the turkey and sauce, imo.

I also picked up some materials to make chili. Don't think I'm going to throw cashews in it though. I'm just going to try for a plain-jane chili since I've never made it before. Sort of create a base line for further experimentation. I harbor NO hopes of ever taking on Gene and his Slap Your Momma chili team, though.