*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!!!!