11 days ago...

Note: I started this post a week ago. It was intended to be a report regarding the happenings of May 20-25 or thereabouts. I did not finish it and then went on vacation to Kansas where they do not have internet access yet. When I last left this post, I had made through my report of Saturday (May 20) morning, and was starting on Saturday evening. I will now do a half-assed attempt at finishing it...

Friday: We went out for tacos and to see DaVinci's Code with a couple of gay guys. Their gayness had no discernible effect on the evening whatsoever. Ms. Brick and I split an order of steak fajitas. They were enjoyable, although not remarkable. The margarita I had cost $6. I have drinks at home.

DaVinci's Code was mediocre. I was not on the edge of my seat and my heart was not pounding. I had two thoughts constantly running through my mind during the movie:

1. What is the deal with that self-mutilating albino monk-guy?
2. That hot French chick that looks like Maura Tierney looks like a hot, French version of Maura Tierney.

Too bad no one knows who the hell Maura Tierney is, or else #2 might have been funny. (She played Jim Carrey's wife in Liar, Liar. Also, for the benefit of those readers named Scott, Liar, Liar also featured two prominent members of your spank bank, one Shannon Whirry, and one Krista Allen. I think it's time to dust off that VHS copy of Lady in Waiting.)

Saturday: Ms. Brick took me to this cosmetology school to get a facial. Facials are cheaper when you get them from people who are learning to give facials. Since meeting me, Ms. Brick has been appalled at the condition of the skin covering my head. "Your nose pores are huge and clogged with shit." I have consistently failed to care about this.

She got a facial there a few weeks ago and quickly made another appointment. In the process she made an appointment for me, too. "What the hey, free facial," I thought.

So we get there, and the facial giver tells me to go into a changing room, take off my shirt, and put on a robe. She then led me into this dark room that had a bunch of padded tables. She told me to take off my robe (I still had pants on) and lie down. She covered me with a blanket (I still had pants on). Can you please tell me WTF the point of the robe was? I had it on for approximately three seconds. I could have made the ten-foot journey from the changing room to the facial-receiving table shirtless with no problems.

Other people were in the room getting facials. Quiet Enya/Enigma-type music was playing. I bet if you get a facial from a person that has finished facial school you get your own private dark room with quiet Enya/Enigma-type music playing.

She put a shower cap on my head and proceeded to rub my face with various goops and lotions for an hour. It was pleasurable, but she didn't properly clean out my nose pores. Maybe she hasn't taken that class yet.

Saturday 2.0: Baldo and Mrs. Baldo came for a visit. Mrs. Baldo is great with child. This causes her to walk slow. We went out for Woodchucks, then went to Matt's 32nd birthday party because he is old. Nothing happened. I got Matt this book. It had been sitting on my shelf for a year or so. I picked it up and said: "Hey. Matt will like this and it is in pretty good condition. In fact, it looks new. I know I am never going to read it again and I could pass this off as something I just purchased."

Sunday: Played basketball with Baldo and Scott. Final score: Me 1, Scott 1, Baldo 2. I think. I know I wasn't the guy with 2, but someone always ends up with 2 while the others win 1.

We made then made plans to go out to lunch with our companion females. First we had to retrieve Ms. Brick and Mrs. Baldo from the corner coffee shop, where they were playing Scrabble with a homeless person. He was making up all kinds of fun words like "equipt" and "ipute." Scott did a good job of telling the homeless dude that the game was over. I would have just stood there and let the game continue, having no idea how to address or approach the homeless guy.

We went out for Mediterranean food. We were going to eat at the top floor of Scott's place of employment, but Ms. Brick and Mrs. Baldo decided they didn't need to bring ID's, which is required to get a guest pass to visit Scott's place of employment.

We ate lots of pitas.

Monday: I went shopping for cereal. Frosted Flakes were on sale for $1.50. Score.

More coinage.

There has been a new development on the coin front. A while back I wrote about how I had a ton of change, and spent a few hours putting it into rolls. The rolled change sat for a while until I finally decided to take it to the bank. If you recall, I took my rolls of dimes in first and this was when I learned of the magic coin counting machine.

You can read the entry here if you missed it.

Well, I finally took my pennies to cash them in. 40 rolls of pennies have been sitting in my desk at work for a couple months (I spent all my nickel rolls on pop; 13 nickels = 1 Diet Pepsi). I did it in chunks. 10 rolls at a time. It takes a long time for the machine to count 500 pennies.

For the first batch, it came up a few cents short of $5. I had a few extra pennies in my pocket so I threw them in there to bring the total up to $5 even. When the machine finished I printed the receipt. It said “rejected coins” at the bottom. I didn’t think much of it or question what happened to the rejected coins. I just took the receipt to the teller to get a $5 bill (actually, I ended up getting 5 of these:



, but that’s not relevant to the story).

Well, today I took my last batch of pennies to trade in. I opened the rolls and dumped the 500 pennies into the machine. While standing there waiting I noticed something that looked like a trash slot. “Hey I’ll throw my empty coin rolls in there,” I thought. On furthur inspection, it turns out it was the “rejected coins” slot- the place where “rejected coins” are sent. There was a bunch of nickels and dimes in there. I knew they weren’t mine, because I didn’t put any nickels or dimes in the machine. I grabbed them and threw them in with my pennies. The machine promptly spit most of them back, but it took some of them. After a few tries I got it to accept all but three nickels, which I put in my pocket. The free money added up to about a dollar. Sweet.

I guess, like me, many people don't question what happens to their “rejected coins.” The location of the slot is not readily obvious. That’s good news for me. I just found a new source of income. I will now stop by the coin-counting every afternoon to check for “rejected coins”. No I won’t.

But I should.

Honesty.

My boss's boss's boss here at Hyperglobalmegacorp wants to have a 30 minute one-on-one meeting with each of us to "get a feel" for what we do. He is coming over to this building tomorrow for three hours to meet with the six of us. Somehow I'm not nervous and I'm looking forward to it. I was planning on going in there and just start qouting Peter Gibbons verbatim. For example:



Me: "Well, I usually show up about fifteen minutes late. I go in the back door so Lundberg doesn't see me, and then I just sort of space out for an hour. I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I'd say in given week I only do about fifteen minutes of actual, real work."

Then today we were deciding who was going to go when and my boss says: "So, Brick (that's what my boss calls me. This blog and work are the two places where I'm known as 'Brick') when do you want to go. By the way, can we go talk?"

Me: "What, are you worried about me meeting with the boss of the boss of the boss?"
Her: "Yeah."

I think she was worried because I never talk. Ever. Never. Never ever ever. In group meetings I refuse to speak. And on the few occasions I do open my mouth I'm kind of blunt. So we go into one those little side conference rooms:

Her: "You tend to be a little too...honest."
Me: "Yeah."
Her: "I'm worried you're going to go in there and tell him you don't know what's going on and you don't know what you're doing and everything is a mess."
Me: "Yeah."
Her: "You can't do that."
Me: "Oh."

I closed by telling her I would try to be positive and not be all "Office Space." So there goes my plan. So I don't really know what I'm going to say but I'm hoping it will be hilarious.

Then later today we learned that the boss of the boss of the boss is bringing in a "resource utilization" consultant. Sweet. This is going to be just like Office Space after all. My boss is freaking out:

Her: "I just know it's going to look like we have all this free time and we suck at time management."

Well, I better go. I need to finish my TPS reports. I hope I remember to use the new cover sheet this time.

Extra plate.

Yesterday at lunch Ms. Brick and I went to this Italian place. We don't usually go out to lunch, but the night before we got into a huge fight about how I'm a loser and I guess that's cause for going out to lunch the next day.

It was kind of a fast-food place, in the sense that you stand in line to order your food and then wait for it and then take to a table to eat it. It wasn't a fast food place in the sense that they put your food on a glass plate before putting it on the plastic tray.

We decided to split an order of lasagna. Ms. Brick asked for an extra plate. We go up to pay:

Ms. Brick: "Lasagna."
Cashier lady: "Is that an extra plate?"
Ms. Brick: "Yeah."
Cashier lady: "There's a $2 charge for an extra plate."
Me: "THEN TAKE OFF THE EXTRA PLATE YOU FUCKING WHORE!!"
Ms. Brick: "No extra plate, then."
Cashier lady: "I see an extra plate."
Me: "THEN TAKE IT OFF!"

I did, in fact, yell at the cashier. I did not call her a fucking whore. Is she a fucking whore? Possibly. I have no information regarding this fact, nor does this have anything to do with the fact that they charge $2 for extra plates.

The exchange concluded with the cashier saying something to the effect of: "I'm just doing my job, sir" and then removing the extra plate.

I feel bad for yelling, but if she doesn't like getting yelled at, she should complain to the owner about their dumb extra plate policy. Actually, it wasn't so much the dumb extra plate policy that pissed me off, it was her "I see an extra plate" comment. Ms. Brick made it clear we didn't want the extra plate after learning of the $2 fee. Cashier lady should have then just removed the extra plate from our tray and completed the transaction, but no, she had to make a rude comment.

We proceeded to eat our lasagna from one plate without difficulty. Also Ms. Brick got us water cups. I put water in it to start but as we left I filled it with pop. Payback time, bitches.

I then stayed at work until 9:30 because I am the still the only person in North America at Hyperglobalmegacorp that knows how to do uploads.

I played cell-phone Tetris on the train ride home. I got 163 lines. Cell-phone Tetris is way more advanced than the Gameboy Tetris I used to play as a child:



The graphics are all in pretty colors, there are two drop options for the blocks (you can insta-drop it, or just speed up the drop), also, when your block is dropping, there is a little outline of it at the bottom of the screen that shows where the block will end up on your stack if you do an insta-drop. Also you get to see the next four blocks you will get instead of just one:



I must say that game control on the Gameboy was way better, although in the phone's defense it wasn't designed to be a game machine. Believe it or not, it's primary function is to be a phone, and for a phone it's a pretty good Gameboy.

When I got home I watched game 5 of the Suns-Clippers series until 1:15AM. It's a good thing Ms. Brick went to sleep at halftime or else her head would have exploded. Despite their best efforts the Suns won. The game went to overtime after the Suns had 19 point lead in the third quarter. Steve Nash did his best to throw game away with two turnovers in the closing minutes and the Clippers had a three point lead with three seconds to go. Raja Bell hit a 3 to force a second overtime and the Suns pulled it out.

I think I am going to change the name of this blog to "Lunchtime Fun with Brick."

Super bonus day.

I usually don't carry cash in my wallet. I usually just keep my credit cards and driver's license in there, and shove my cash into my pocket. Therefore, I never expect cash to be in there. Today I checked my wallet for some reason and it contained $10 that I forgot about. That's like free $10.

Then I went down to lunch and the lunch special was the buffalo chicken wrap. I love the buffalo chicken wrap. It's chicken with buffalo sauce, lettuce, tomatoes and bleu cheese. Wrapped. The simple availability of the buffalo chicken wrap is cause for celebration, but today it was the lunch special: wrap, pickle, chips, cookie, Coke, $4. Awesome. Then, just when I thought my day couldn't get any more awesome, the cashier lady gave me two stamps on my frequent lunch-purchaser card to put me at the required nine stamps for a free lunch. Can life get better? I submit that it can not.

At this point, you're probably wondering how I can disappear for a month and then just come back and start writing like nothing happened and I never went away. Let's review some of the e-mails I got:

"Are you going to go a whole month without posting?"
-Scotty Win

"Where are your posts?"
-Ms. Brick

"We're WAITing..."
-Ms. Brick

To that I say: It's my blog and I'll do what I want, so stfu. I'm just kidding. Feedback is appreciated. At least I know my two readers care enough to write me.

I just haven't felt any creative energy in the past month or had any desire to write. The blog became more like work rather than a creative outlet, so I accidently took a break without planning to. That's the way it goes sometimes.

I've also been focusing a lot of my energy making money to pay for a small party in September. That's when Ms. Brick becomes Mrs. Brick. This is a topic I've been avoiding and need to write about in depth sometime. ("Oh, you want forks? There's a $2 per head fork rental fee, plus $3 per head for fork liability insurance, plus a $1 fork usage surcharge.")

I told Ms. Brick that if she signed up for online casinos she could make a lot of money for the wedding by bonuswhoring. I signed her up for a Neteller account and I've been whoring all the good sign-up bonuses. So far I've turned $100 into $763 (it was over $900 at point; variance happens, and I don't want to hear about it, honey) . I've got a long way to go. Only $14,237 more until the wedding is paid for. Yippee. Just kidding. I've only committed myself to making $3,000 this way. I don't know if that's going to happen, but we'll see. Do you know what it's like grinding blackjack for hours on end to clear bonuses? It's like I got a second job counting beans to help pay for our wedding.

Ms. Brick would like me to point out that she has been doing all of the work towards planning this thing and I have done nothing. I fully admit this. But I'm the one that got the second job counting beans.

Moving on. I've also been watching a lot of Suns games. The playoffs kick ass because all of the games are on TV. I would never get to see the Suns otherwise. Some of the regular season games were on ESPN but I could never remember to watch them.

The first round was awesome. Ms. Brick started watching the games with me. She is hilarious. It's like me 15 years ago, only less (I should point out that after the Suns lost the '93 finals to the Bulls, I spent the evening crying face down in the grass in my backyard, she hasn't been taking it that far). She couldn't care less about the Suns, but near the end of some of those close games she would be screaming at the TV. Her favorite thing to say was: "C'MON, YOU BETTER GET IT IN!" And then if they miss: "OH NO! NO!!!!" She doesn't know any of the players' names except for Steve Nash, but there she sits, freaking out as if her life depends on the outcome each game. At one point during the Suns-Lakers series I had to go to another room to watch. The rest of the playoffs should be fun. Luckily, the first two games of Suns-Clippers didn't go down to the wire so she remained subdued.

That's all for today. Please stay tuned for wedding planning updates.

If you want something entertaining to read, read this Vegas trip report from some guy on 2+2.