Thursday, January 13, 2005

If I don't talk about my birthday I'll never get around to it. Short response is that it was fun, but nothing spectacular.

Highlights
  • I spent 14 hours across two days in one spot on the couch watching football. The playoffs rule.
  • I planned my birthday meal 6 months in advance. It's a big deal to eat chocolate cake and spaghetti when you are on Atkins. Predictably it was scrumptious, and predictably I felt like I was going to die afterwards. It was worth it though. Melissa-w made her yummy chocolate cake, and Melissa-m made a special recipe of spaghetti for me. Very good stuff.

Presents.. umm.. not so much.

  • Melissa got me a Frank Sinatra CD so that I have some Rat Pack stuff to listen to when I'm in the mood, and surprised me with the Clerks Xth Anniversary Motherfuckin' 3 Disc set Yo! I haven't watched it yet, but I love Kevin Smith movies.
  • The in-laws got me a gift card to Barnes and Noble. Usually those sit in your wallet for a while until you realize you still have it, then you pick a day and go spend it. Not so this time. Less than 24 hours after receiving it I'd used it to pick up hard back copies of A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings. Then I used the Amazon gift card Cory got me for Christmas to pick up A Storm of Swords to complete the collection.
  • Nana sent me $100. Very predictable, but very very special. I really love her.
  • Melissa-m made me the yummy spaghetti, and then to top it off gave me a birthday dollar bill. YAY! :)
  • Brian bought me a drink at the gas station for $1.07

Still to come - The parents, Nana and possibly Mawmaw and Russ and Elizabeth are coming down this Saturday to take me to lunch and be with me for a late birthday. They would have come last week, but Melissa-w was sick and they didn't want to catch teh SARS.

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Last weekend was my birthday, so I guess I should say something about that. First though, I HAVE to talk about my lunch. I realize that the following story will probably make people think less of me, but that's ok. It's that funny.

Well to me at least.

This is the story of lunch (1-12-2005):
I ate late today, because I was busy fixing Incompetent Monkley's wireless problems. My usual lunch involves saunterin across the street to Texas Children's Hospital for a Subway salad, and today was no different.

On my way back, salad and Diet Coke in hand, I was almost all the way across the street I realized that I didn't remember picking up a plastic fork to eat the salad with. I clearly remembered getting a couple of napkins and remember picking up a straw for the Diet Coke, but nothing in my mind about the fork to eat it with. "Surely I got one though, right?" I thought. "Even though I don't remember picking it up, I can't imagine not grabbing a plastic fork while I was standing there. I mean, they're RIGHT THERE, and I do this EVERY DAY." Confident once again, I entered the building, stepped on the elevator and pushed 12.

Back in my office I shut the door and prepared for my daily lunch ritual. Half the lights off, prepared to look at fun things on the Intarweb. I emptied the plastic sack of all of it's contents, and whaddya know, NO FORK. "Crap, no I have to go find something." I left my office and headed to the little kitchen on our floor. After thoroughly scouring the area, the best I could come up with was an enormous stash of plastic knives. I figured with some of these I could figure out a way to ingest my food that didn't involve me goign back across the street for a stupid fork, so I picked up 3 of them and headed back to the office.

Once in the office I proceded to apply every bit of problem solving power I possess to use some combination of these three knives to get the salad from the plastic bowl into my mouth. The problem here is that salad ranks only slightly above soup on the hard-to-eat-with-a-knife scale, so I had plenty to tax my brilliance (*hehe*).

At first I tried stabbing with one knife, like I've done with my pocket knife on occasion. Unfortunately that didn't work nearly as welll this time because salad != steak on the eat-with-a-knife scale. Ok, well let's make a fork out of them. Unfortunately, while I was able to actually construct a three pronged fork out of these three knives, the resulting fork was enormous, and the bites it was snagging involved me detaching my jaw to get them in. Back to square on. The next idea I had was chopsticks. I started trying to snag the food with a pair of knives held like copsticks, but because of their shape, the 'chopsticks' ended up being more like scissors than grabby things. SO! now that I have even smaller pieces to try and eat I'm back to the drawing board once again. Finally I hit upon an idea that actually worked. The knife became a really crappy spoon. Because the knife was so terrible at the task though, it ended up being more shovel than spoon. Thus I proceeded to scarf down my food like an animal, thoroughly ruining the normally pleasant experience of lunch for the day.

Lunch over, I started to clean things up to throw away (ahh the wonderfulness that are disposable things). This process involves putting all my trash in the salad bowl, resealing the lid, putting all of that back in the plastic bag it came in, and tossing the entire suite of garbage into one of the numerous trash bins outside my office (seriously, I have 3 garbage cans withing 6 feet of my door). Well, as I'm putting the bowl back into the sack I glance in, and.... my plastic fork is staring back at me mocking me.

Oh what a day.
(I'll get to the birthday later)