Explosive Logorrhea

I kind of wish more interesting things would happen so that I had plenty of topics for posting. But then that would mean there's a much higher chance that I got screwed. Cause that always makes for a good story. Of course, then I have to deal with all that crap.

Sue and I played two full rounds of golf this weekend. I think I'm getting her really hooked on it. She's asking a lot of questions about how to play and what she needs to change up. And not just on the course either. Now, I'd like to say it was so that we had a nice hobby we could share as a couple. I mean, I'd like to say that. But it would be a lie. Yeah, see - when it's something that's just my hobby and I say something like "Hey, there's this $180 putter I want to buy because it's nice, I need a heavier putter, and it's marked down to $100 at the discount place" if she doesn't play then the response is "Wellllllll, maybe for your birthday" (which is in the fall and does me little good this summer). On the other hand, if she plays then the response is "Hey, that's a good deal. You think they have women's golf shoes on sale there?"

Actually when we were out on Saturday morning there was a slow group way ahead of us so we ended up waiting at the tee several times. The guys immediately ahead of us were waiting there as well a few times. We said hi and chatted briefly while while for the hole to open up. At one point, Sue stepped into the porta-potty and I said hi to the guys. I had mentioned earlier that it was only Sue's third or fourth time playing. One of the guys said she had a nice swing. I agreed. The guy asked if I taught her and I said yep. I felt pretty proud of that one. Of course, I sliced the next tee shot, lost the ball, took a stroke penalty, got pissed off, and ended up taking, like, a nine on a par four. In short, I felt just the tiniest little bit of pride and choked like hell. So, you know, about like you'd expect.

I'm seriously looking forward to tomorrow. The whole week has seemed longer and longer. I've got a pile of vacation time I have to spend before October. Well, OK, maybe "pile" is a little strong - it's fifty-one hours. A little over a week. Mind you, that's just the part I have to spend or I loose it. That doesn't include the amount I'm allowed to carry over the October boundary. Anyway, I've got a little better than I week that I have to spend. We don't have any plans to take any big trips between now and October, so I don't have an easy place to dump it. What I decided to do instead is just start taking off Friday afternoons - possibly all day Fridays, depending on how the work-load is on a given week.

Tomorrow I'm taking off before lunch then I'm going to play golf. I convinced a few other guys to take off and go golfing as well. The only rules for who can go this time is that you can't be any good at golf. Most of the people I know who play are pretty decent - so I couldn't ask them. One guy said I discriminating against his handicap. I said that's because his handicap is a two and, technically, I'm discriminating because he's not handicapped enough. I've been looking forward to going out all week. I think I'm so looking forward to it because I have no responsibilities when I'm out there. Hell, as long as I don't accidentally kill anyone, I've had a good day. Hmm, OK, that last sentence could apply to pretty much all my days.

I'm just hoping the course has dried out. It rained a good bit earlier in the week and was ungodly humid yesterday. So the ground didn't really have a chance to dry out too much until today. If it's too wet, they won't let you drive carts on the course and I just don't like to walk. I did it once and, well, that was pretty much enough of that. I'll take two steps out of the cart to hit then two steps back in. That's about all I want as far as walking. Then again, if my options are to walk 18 holes or go back to work, I believe I could get past my aversion to walking.

The other day I went to KFC for lunch. Right next door is a small Mexican grocery store with a little lunch counter in the back serving tacos, burritos, and so forth. I've known it's there for awhile and never went in but always meant to. I finally stopped in there.

I developed a taste for a few Mexican food while living in California. Not many of them, but a few. I figured the little store would have some of them. Sure enough, they had a couple of things I liked. They also had a number of other things that looked interesting, like dried mangos with chili powder or dried apricots with chili powder or prunes with chili powder. I ended up not getting any of those. Well, on that trip anyway.

I wandered over to the candy aisle (such as it was) to see what they had. Pretty much all the items there were in bulk. You can't buy just one - you have to buy eight. They had these little plastic bottles with what looked liked powdered candy. Think pixie sticks only in a small plastic bottle. There was watermelon, strawberry, and salt & lime. I passed on those. Then I found a pack that looked interesting. It was in the same size plastic bottles only this was liquid. I couldn't tell what the flavor was but it was red, so I figured strawberry or cherry was most likely. Could be something like raspberry or cranberry, I suppose. Since it was only five bucks, I decided to give it a try.

I went back to work and cracked open the ten-pack to see how this Mexican liquid candy was. I squirted a big dose in my mouth and OH MY GOD. It was the most foul, disgusting, nauseating thing I have ever tasted. Yes - I'm including throwing up in there. I immediately spit it out into my trash can. I actually thought to myself "I have to go lick a dead racoon's ass to get this nasty taste out of my mouth." I downed a pint of Sierra Mist, ate a bag of Reese's Pieces, had a smoke, and ate two peppermint candies. All one right after another. That mostly got me through the afternoon, though I was gagging a little bit still at dinner.

I was also trying not to giggle through dinner because I was going to try to get Sue to try it. I was just not going to mention the whole "lick dead racoon's ass" part. I played it real cool and got her to try it. She cussed me for about an hour over that one. Of course, I was laughing so hard I didn't hear hardly any of it. Then I told her I wanted her to try it because I just didn't know how to describe how unbelievably awful that stuff is. She said it tasted like rancid hot sauce and I suppose it does a bit.

Turns out the flavor is chamoy. According to Wikipedia that's basically a vinegar-based brine for vegetables. There's just no part of that that ends well.

Oh, I had to buy a ten-pack of that shit. So I'm trying to get some of the guys at work to try it. I'm calling them out on not being man enough to try it. I mean, I tell them the "lick a dead racoon's ass" story up front so they know what they're getting in to. So far I've only found one guy who would try it and he admitted it was truly foul.

On the other hand, I have the most kick-ass Halloween candy this year.

Man, the first day back to work after nine days off is just brutal. I get in and my Windows account is locked out. Apparently my password expired sometime over my vacation and the system naturally was like "Well, fuck you then." So I called the off-shore help desk (Yeah, the outsourced to ... shit, I don't know. Somewhere in Latin America. They did finally make all the helpdesk monkeys - I can call them that because I used to be a helpdesk monkey - learn English.). Ended up sitting on the phone with a guy who just Could. Not. Go. Off-Script. I said I couldn't log in and that the error message said my account was locked out. He said I should reboot. I said "OK" instead of "Wait, that's retarded. Are you an idiot? Because if so, I'd like to ask for a different helpdesk monkey. ... Yes, a non-retarded one please." I reboot and - surprise! - that doesn't fix it. He has me log in with the magic account that lets the user reset the password.

I'm kind of glad I didn't shoot my mouth off (too much) because I forgot the answer to the third security question. I mean, I set those bastards over three years ago. Yeah, I knew most of them but being as you have to set up four security questions, you're pretty much bound to drop one of them. So I told HDM that I couldn't remember the answer to number three. You know what that SOB did? He reset my password. I gritted my teeth to not scream out "MOTHERFUCKER!!! WHY DIDN'T YOU DO THAT TWENTY MINUTES AGO?!?!" I used the temporary password to go in and change my security questions so that I could unlock my account so that I could log in so that I could change my password. He wanted another reboot in there to ... hell, I don't even know. Script said to reboot, I guess. I said I was going to skip that reboot and instead just reset my password here on this screen that says "Reset Password." You think that might work HDM? Maybe? Yep, it worked.

A total of twenty-seven minutes of my life on that shit. Pretty much set the tone for the day. On the plus side, a lot of people took off last week so we were all trying to remember where the hell we were. I would say I was doing well to remember my passwords but, well, that didn't play out like I thought it would.

Yeah, I've been slacking off on writing recently. And by "slacking" I mean "not doing a damned thing". And by "recently" I mean "the last month and a half." And by "yeah" I mean ... OK, that one's just fine.

I've been getting back into golf. I played a bit when I was a kid but not much and I was never what you'd call "good". That may be because I didn't play much. Hard to be worth a damn if you never practice. I bought some cheap clubs a couple of years ago and played a few times. I got invited to a company tournament about two months ago and was just awful. Since it turns out that I keep getting asked to play, I figured I'd work on improving. I'd go to the driving range now and then or play nine holes. Well, I started to actually like it. Then I worked on convincing Sue to try it out. I taught her the basics - how to hold the club, how to stand, how to swing, and so forth. We've been going to the range now and then and she'd been using my clubs just to see if she liked it. I kept trying to convince her to get a cheap set of clubs and we'd go play.

Last Sunday we went out for the first time. We only played 9 and she did pretty good for her first time out. She as nervous about a poor showing. Once we got out there and she saw how everyone on the course played, she didn't have as many worries. Everyone looses a ball in the weeds now and then. Other people accidentally hit into the other fairway on occasion. She wouldn't be the only one on the course to flub a shot and only move the ball about fifteen yards. After she saw all those things and more happen to other people, she calmed right down.

I took off the whole week last week. I have to burn some vacation time (I still have to dump a little over a week between now and October) so I took three days last week and ended up getting the whole week off due to the holiday. I didn't have plans other than to be a bum. I ended up playing a lot of golf this week and Sue went with me a couple of times. I even have a favorite course now. It's the one closest to the house. Well, that's not the reason it's my favorite but it sure doesn't hurt. That course is just about the perfect level of difficulty for both of us right now. There's an easier one and a much harder one about fifteen minutes from the house. Apparently, there's a fourth pubic course in town but that's the one furthest from the house. And it was flooded a couple of years ago and they just re-opened the whole thing. I'm not in too much of a hurry to try that one out.

I'm hoping I stick with this for awhile. Mostly because I drop $150 on a new driver (OK, it works really well for me and I love it) and $100 on a new putter (on sale, mind you - it was originally almost $200 and it's a really nice putter). I'm not even going to count the number of balls I lost. I'm going to have to go to Sam's club next time I buy golf balls because I need 'em in bulk.

I got an email from the hosting company yesterday that said my little blog here was hammering the server and so they disabled the database. Well crap. So last night I went in and started slashing things to get it fixed. The problem was that I couldn't check the fixes because ... wait for it ... the database was disabled. I ended up just blindly trimming things until it, you know, looked right. I sent a reply email back saying that "Well, yeah. I guess it's fixed. Turn the db back on and we'll find out." I got a reply back that said "We've escalated this to Level 2." OK. I checked it tonight and it looks like we're good. I think. If they turn it back off tomorrow we'll find out. That's what the SQL errors were about.

After lunch today I stopped in a little Mexican grocery store. You don't see a lot of those in Iowa. I've been thinking of stopping in there for a couple of years but never did. Since I had time today and I was right there, I went in to check it out. I bought a couple of things including some Mexican candy. It had everything in Spanish and English on the label and it didn't look like it would hurt me. I bought a ten-pack of the "liquid candy" because that was the only option. Everything there was in big batches like that. But I figured I'd give it a try for five bucks.

I got back to my desk and cracked one of the little candy bottles open. It was the most godawful thing I've tasted, quite possibly in my entire life. I immediately spit it out into my trash can. I actually thought "Man, I should go lick the ass of a dead raccoon to get this awful taste out of my mouth." What I ended up doing was eating a bag of Reese's, downing half a large Sierra Mist, having a smoke, and eating two peppermint candies. That got me through the worst of it.

Naturally when I got home, I had Sue try it. I did ... sorta ... absolutely not mention that licking the ass of a dead raccoon was, in fact, preferable to tasting this "candy". Hell, I thought it was funny. Sue didn't. Then I told her about me trying it out and how much I hated it. I said I really wanted her to try it but there was no way she'd taste it if I told her the truth. I mean, you really can't describe the taste. I just don't have the words for just how throat-chokingly bad this crap is.

I need to find any half-way decent reason to put this poster up at my desk. Then lobby for it to be a world-wide law that it must be present on the comment section of any online forum. Perhaps tattoos for repeat offenders.

We had a brush pile out back behind the shed since last fall. There was a big bush that died last year and Sue cut it down last fall. We never got around to hauling it off before winter came. This past weekend it had finally gotten on my nerves and since it was the one weekend in June we were home, we cleaned it up and hauled it off. Unfortunately, it also rained pretty much all weekend. Saturday morning I'm looking out the back door and Sue asks if I really want to do this and if we should wait. I stuck my hand outside and said "Well, at least it's not a cold rain. Might as well go on ahead."

So we put on the oldest, rattiest, trashiest clothes we had and headed out. By the time I walked the twenty yards to the brush pile I was pretty much soaked through. I staged the sticks (pulled them up from behind the shed and set them on the concrete patio-thing) while Sue put some old blankets and stuff in the back of the Defiant. Then we started loading the sticks in to the back of D. By that time, not only were we soaked through we were also coated in mud and dead leaves and all kinds of shit.

Once the Defiant's cargo bay was fully loaded, we tossed some towels over the seats and headed out. We didn't change clothes because we were heading over to the town compost heap to unload and we'd get just as funky-nasty there as we did at home. Fifteen minutes later we were over at the compost heap, raking out the back of D as quickly as we could. We were finally done by 11:00. Still raining. Whole damned time.

We decided to swing by Culver's for lunch. Drive-thru only. I mean, I'm not even sure they'd let us in the front door the way we looked. Probably some kind of health violation. Culver's has this thing where they never have actual food for you. If you order a meal, as opposed to frozen custard (which is what they're famous for - and rightly so), you have to pull over to the side, put the little plastic number on your window, and wait for some guy to bring it out to you.

I ordered a lemonade with my lunch and when I got the window - it was pink. I looked at it and asked the girl at the window if this was pink lemonade. She said yes. I asked if they had regular lemonade. She glanced at the fountain and said no. I was too angry to think of anything else so I just sat it in the cup holder then pulled over to the waiting area. The whole time we were sitting there I was stewing over the pink lemonade. I ordered "lemonade", not "pink lemonade". If they could not fulfill my order, they should have said so instead of fucking it up.

After the guy brought out the food, I started to head out. Just as I backed out of the parking spot and before I cleared the parking lot, I rolled the window all the way down and tossed out the entire pink lemonade. Cup and all, right out into the parking lot. Now, it was still raining so it wasn't that bad. But Sue was, apparently, quite shocked by all this. I know she was shocked because she said "I found that shocking."

I was a bit surprised. I mean, she knows me pretty well and I really didn't think what I did was that out of character - especially given my hatred of getting pink lemonade when I order regular lemonade. She knows that's a thing. So I said "Well, it's not like I threw the cup against the front window and screamed 'REGULAR LEMONADE NOT PINK, COCKSUCKERS!' ... and then ... poop on the lawn." She turned to look at me, confused. I said "Because that was Plan B." She blinked, once, slowly. I said "Yeah, just so you know: All my Plan B's end with 'and poop on the lawn.' That's why I don't go to Plan B very much." Then I had to explain that if someone sees you pooping on their front lawn, well, they have to give serious consideration if they want to mess with someone that crazy. Though I would love to hear the 911 call where the distressed business owner is reporting it.