December 2003

I posted the first half of my holiday vacation photos. I forgot to mention the best present I got for Christmas was hanging out with Matt for two weeks, and that my sister gave my grandmother a Betty Boop thong. Friday night I hung out at the Brickskellar with Steve, Alex, Jeff, Andrew, Molly, and Tim. The Eagles game day photos speak for themselves, though I added some to the lengthy post about painting ourselves in latex. Movie of latex-ripping to follow (maybe).

The football game Saturday between the Eagles and the Redskins was the focus of an entire day of tailgate party planning, body painting, tailgating and body-unpainting. It was the last phase that came close to overshadowing the entire weekend.

Let me start by saying that the hairs that I have left on my body — and I use the plural of the word “hair” because in some places I can count them individually — were screaming in protest all day yesterday. I have one giant, sunburn-like rash all over my upper body.

Once I told my family about Tim’s idea to paint ourselves green and white for the game, Jamie told everyone about the liquid latex they were selling at Hot Topic. My dad loved the idea, ordered over a gallon of the stuff and had it shipped overnight, along with various latex-related supplies, so it would arrive Saturday morning. Once Tim and I were returned with supplies from Sam’s Club and as Ross arrived from Berks County, Pa., we started painting.

Actually, we dragged our feet a little first. The latex is very runny in its liquid form so we weren’t exactly sure how it would turn out. We also weren’t sure if we would run out or not or how hard it would be to paint the letters on either (one of E, S, P, and N on each of us). After waffling on the details and trimming a small amount of body hair from what we thought would be the most painful areas, Dana drew the letters on our chests and the painting began.

I was the first to be painted — a giant guinea pig that wasn’t allowed to move his arms lest forearm stick to bicep. Once the polishing spray was applied I could move around freely, but the latex was pretty delicate during its application. Soon after the first layer started drying we saw just how good it was going to turn out and we started to paint in earnest. We ran through brushes like crazy but it was an easy process.

An hour later we hadn’t used half of the gallon of green and barely touched the white — and we looked damn good. Really, it looked fantastic even though we didn’t pay too much attention to detail. Only ten minutes after completion I forgot I was even shirtless and felt completely comfortable. We threw on shirts and piled into the vehicles, people in the minivan and supplies in the Element (27-inch TV, stereo and speakers, charcoal grill, 30-gallon cooler stocked with drinks and meat, Tim’s mom’s awesome cookies and my mom’s potato salad, and a 400W inverter to power the electronics directly from my battery).

Tailgating went off without a hitch. There were fans of both teams spread across the parking lot from 4:30 p.m. for the game that night. Our television was the envy of all who walked by, though Ross enforced his “Eagles fans only” policy making an exception now and then in the rare case of a humble Redskins fan. The battery was drained at one point, but we used the RVan2 to jump the Element and we just let the engine run after that. We made our way through most of the alcohol and made a medium-sized dent in the food in the four hours we were out there and it was a blast. It was freezing out and all of us, especially Dana and my mom, were a little chilly despite being bundled up the whole time. It was a relaxed affair considering all the running around and planning we had to do and worth every minute of it.

Once in the game we switched gears to passive mode and enjoyed three quarters of football without giving thought to anything except a Redskins rout and the rowdy fans around us. One fan in particular — the fat one with little breasts who flashed the guy behind us and let him nuzzle his face in her chest — was slightly drunk. Everyone else was just rowdy. For the fourth quarter we moved closer to the field since we knew that no camera was going to get us sitting in the shadow from the tier above. As soon as we spotted open seats that we were convinced wouldn’t disappear by the time we moved down and three sections over.

Several minutes into the fourth quarter we were shirtless and seconds later a wave of awareness flowed forward all the way to the field. Even though we were shirtless and green from the waist up I didn’t realize immediately what everyone was looking at. I turned around for a second to join them, only to see everyone behind us looking towards us too. In the very surreal 30 seconds that followed we led the section in a chant of E-A-G-L-E-S Eagles! while flashes popped everywhere. After several minutes the shock value wore off and we tried to watch the game with mostly everyone else. Fans from both teams alike kept pestering us to turn around for photos, and it was easier to comply than put up with their pleas. One lady even came over and knelt down in front of us to service to pose for a picture. The action never made it back to our end of the field and neither did the cameras so we didn’t get on television, but it was a great experience nonetheless. Next time — yes, next time — we’re going to keep it purist and spell Eagles no matter how few people we have.

Now, I’m going to put down in writing some tips for painting latex on myself in the future:

1. For the love of God almighty, shave! Three layers of green meant that the hairs were all knotted up between them. I was in so much pain that I couldn’t take it anymore and just went to bed with green forearms, stomach and back. I wore a sweatshirt to loosen the latex with as much sweat as possibly and it only helped a tiny bit. I eventually admitted that I couldn’t leave the house until I was finished and spent the early morning in a fetal position ripping latex off my stomach along with 70 percent of my hair. When I eventually got around to peeling it off my back, I had reached an impasse. I tried the inch-at-a-time method that had worked thus far, but my knees kept buckling from the pain. I finally took Ross and Tim up on their offer to grab the sides and pull. I bit onto the shirt I had in my hands and screamed. I stung for the next two minutes but it was finally over.

2. Use vaseline! The instructions to Deviant Latex state that if you’re going to be wearing the stuff for a while, the sweat will loosen the new skin-tight outfit by the time you’re ready to take it off. The directions were wrong. We had it on from 2-11:30 p.m. and it was as tight as ever. Granted, we were outside in the cold all night, but we were also bundled up and working hard for a good portion of that time, and I know at least two of us sweat pretty freely.

3. Finally, make every jerk who doesn’t have paint on leave the room, unless they can keep their mouths shut. The first hour I spent ripping the hair out of my body was punctuated by insightful tidbits from people who read the exact same instructions I had. “Do you think shaving would have helped?” Yes, now get the hell away from me you good-for-nothing sack of shit! I was in no mood to deal with questions about how much pain I was in or what I thought I could have done differently. The only types of question that didn’t piss me off were of the “What if you try this?” nature, except they didn’t exactly help either. There was no easy way to rip the stuff off once we put it on without prepping ourselves, we each had to deal with it in the way with which we were most comfortable. For me, biting on my belt and crying played a major part.

So, next time I’m going to an Eagles game and plan on tailgating and painting myself: one layer of the stuff, applied after shaving, with an equal amount of vaseline, surrounded with people who are either in the same predicament or have the ability to remain mute.

I attempted to post last night about our experience with Cities & Knights of Catan, but it was 2 a.m. and thought it would be a neat idea to press the “refresh” button on the keyboard just as I finished writing. Needless to say I found myself staring at a clean slate with only myself to blame; it was probably riddled with spelling errors anyway.

So again, Cities & Knights was long, long, long. So long, in fact, that it overshadowed the fact that I trounced everyone else including my dad. Ross played Gameboy and Jeff napped on the couch while they waited for us to finish. Some four hours after we started it was over and we rushed around to get out of the loft and clear our befuddled minds. Ross had already left and Tim left a short while after dinner, but Steve, Alex, Jeff, and I played Liar’s Dice and Spite and Malice for three hours with my dad sitting down to a few games.

Whereas other expansion packs add new dimensions to the game of Settlers, Cities & Knights is basically a new game. It requires an entirely new strategy and a whole new skill set. I wish I could claim my superior intellect and adaptability as reasons for winning the only game I’ve played, but the fact that everyone was tired of playing and didn’t mind trading with me after I reached 11 points hits closer to the truth.

Spite and Malice is another card game. The game consists of two altered decks of playing cards — there are cute little cats on them which mean nothing whatsoever, and some cards that can be used as either a wild or to screw over opponents in different ways. After muddling our way through the first few games because of ambiguous instructions and deducing the correct way to handle instances that weren’t adressed, it turned out to be really fun. Steve’s always a tough critic and Alex usually shies away from games with even a small amount of luck that can’t be combatted with strategy, but two hours of playing is testimony enough.

I’ll wait until the holidays are completely over before I publish the photos, but so far so good. Christmas with the family was both relaxing and amusing, and tensions were kept to a relative minimum. My dad deep-fried our turkey this year, a fad which has set fire to houses across the country in recent months. We made it through unscathed, due mainly to our paranoia. My cousin is dating some guy that spoke very little to anyone. They didn’t eat anything and he brought his own special water, and they practically made-out with each other on the couch in front of us all. I don’t know what they got out of coming over for Christmas if it wasn’t the food or the company, but since as a couple they gave me the creeps I’m guessing that was their goal. Mission accomplished, you perverts.

Present-wise, Lisa and Chris got us an assortment of drinking games, which will come in handy in those times when Mama Mia just won’t cut it. My parents gave us money inside a puzzle box that took us about 15 minutes to open, very entertaining. My gifts went over pretty well, and I love almost everything I got in return. Dia went all-out and bought me an XM radio receiver, and I feel guilty that one of her gifts to me was able to outshine everything I gave to her.

The next best gifts were the things I bought for myself. I picked up a new cell phone and an e-mail hosting service. I can now and forever be reached at my rudderow.com address and I hope to be phasing out the drexel.edu account relatively soon. I currently receive more junk mail at the former, but that’s what I get for letting it lapse for a year; within two hours of setting it up I received three messages. As for my phone, so far so good. It may be a little more than I need, but I doubt I’ll have any trouble growing into it.

Heading back down to Maryland again tonight, this time with Tim instead of Dia (she took the day off and drove to Tunkhannock last night to spend a little Christmas with her old host family). I should be getting out of here relatively soon — much earlier than I expected. And unless I hear otherwise, I have Monday and Friday off next week in addition to the two company holidays.

Tonight we’re going to the Brickskellar for beer from around the globe and hopefully back to my house to play Settlers and other assorted board games into the wee hours of the morning. Then it’s nothing but Eagles fever on Saturday, with the possibility of more games afterward assuming we (read: everyone else) have any energy left.

I’m so close to leaving right now. I wait only for a “form issue” to be settled with the client, because they need me to print a few sheets every time they think they found another error. You’d think they would have all their ducks in a row before calling but that would make too much sense. Here comes the boss….

…And he’s gone. Without so much as a hint to whether I can leave soon or not. Dia won’t be home until 5:30 p.m. anyway, but I’d like to beat traffic out of here so I have enough time at home to pack for the drive to Maryland. I’ve got four stops to make on the way down during a trip which already takes me 2.5 hours: my grandparents’ place to drop off a table for Christmas dinner (we’re all coming back this way on the morning of the 25th), Mitch’s house to borrow his camera, Best Buy to purchase a new cell phone, and the grocery store to get ingredients for the pumpkin pies Dia and I have to make tonight.

I’m going to be doing a hell of a lot of driving over the next two weeks. Besides the two trips down to Rudderow South and back, I’m driving up to Boston and then Montreal for New Year’s Eve partying and skiing. Here comes some more last-minute work….

…And my hopes are dashed. While waiting around for the form discussion to take place between everyone and their brother, the client just came up with more stuff that absolutely, positively must be done today. So now I get to consider myself lucky if I make it out of here by the usual time, let alone god-dammit-I-have-to-drive-to-Maryland-for-Christmas time.

Which means I sure as hell don’t have any more time to write.

So they didn’t get the franchise record-braking 10 games in a row, big deal. They’ll totally crush the ‘Skins on Saturday and Ross, Tim, my dad and I will be there to see it. We’ll be tailgating in the Element beforehand with a barbecue, lots of meat, Tim’s 30-gallon cooler, lots of Miller Lite and girly drinks, and my 27-inch TV. It’ll kick off the event of the year quite nicely. Once inside, we’re stripping down to our latex-coated bodies to support our team and hopefully make our way onto national television in the process. I’ve never been to a football game before and I aim to do it up right.

Rudderow.com e-mail addresses — fun for the whole family. Would have make great Christmas gifts if we hadn’t come up with so many other cool ideas instead. First come, first serve. Serious inquiries, please.

I bought a hi-8 video camera tonight for the sole purpose of dubbing a tape that my friends and I made in high school. The tape contains various scenes and props that we thought were totally cool and envisioned fitting into some sort of plot down the road. There was no script or characters, the shots were unplanned, and we had no definite plans for editing the stupid thing. Then the plans really went downhill when my dad’s secretary stole the family video camera; no one really used the thing enough to warrant purchasing another one, and every tape except mine was in the bag when it was stolen, so having a way to watch old movies wasn’t an issue either. So the tape sat for years on my shelf without an easy way to get at the footage. Until tonight, when I finally broke down and bought a camera with the full intent of abusing the Circuit City return policy. Believe me, I feel bad about it; or at least I did at some point. I looked around for places that would convert it for me, but they were $100 or more and there was no guarantee that they’d give me simple mpeg files and not a standalone DVD. Once I gagged my conscience I started feeling pretty slick.

Once I have the content recorded onto my ReplayTV, I can download it to the G4 for editing. The clips won’t be more than 5 gigabytes, so I can put them on the laptop and work on them over the holidays. I’m in a rush to get it finished by the year’s end, not only because I put this off way too long — which is definitely true — but because I’m trading it for embarrassing footage of my friend Steve shot before his wedding. Apparently, the camera guy had him and his wife run toward each other in a field of flowers and twirl around like retards when they embraced. He has never shown this to anyone to my knowledge and has no plans to unless I deliver him an edited movie by the end of 2003. It doesn’t have to be pretty, just viewable. Inserting old-timey, silent movie text screens is going to be necessary to give it some semblance of a story and even then I’ll never have the urge to show it to anyone, but dammit it’s worth footage of a cheesy wedding-spin.

However gut-wrenching this is, I enjoy seeing clips of the friends I don’t really see anymore. I love seeing myself thin and hobbling around on the duck cane Mrs. Barss lent me but which I still have. Steve is walking around with his shirt open and a 7-inch gold crucifix hanging around his neck, Alex has hair, Nathan isn’t on his high horse yet and talks to us, and the Watt brothers moon the camera three times or so. I also count about 20 swear words and we all make complete asses of ourselves every time we open our mouths. There’s really nothing to work with here, but it’s going to be damn fun to try if I can get my computer to recognize the mpeg files.

I threw my phone on the floor of PetSmart in a fit of rage last night. I dropped a call three times in a row and finally lost it. In case my throw didn’t do the job, I smashed the face with the heel of my boot five or six times.

So, I’m in the market for a new cell phone. I found one with Bluetooth and a T-Mobile contract for -$100 on Amazon (which would cover the last two months of my current phone contract nicely), but it’s been getting the same reviews for poor RF reception. It’s a great deal, but I can’t imagine another year with equally lousy service; on the other hand, I’ve grown to rely on iSync to keep my contacts current and the reception must have improved somewhat. Besides, if I find the right deal, I can just bail from T-Mobile altogether.

I’ll have to think about it for a while. Until then, I can be reached on Dia’s cell.

It was a showdown last night between Ben’s winning team name and Sean’s slightly funnier but more convoluted “Saddamizing the dirt hole really satisfies the Bush”. Sean was convinced it lost because the Quizo dude mispronounced the word “satisfies”, but everyone else was smarter than that.

We had to split into two teams because we had so many people, increasing the competition; that is, we’re never a threat to anyone where the trivia is concerned so we were able to duke it out amongst ourselves for champion of the losers. Ross’s friend Boothe was up from somewhere to do something at a hotel somewhere, and Marc tagged along after letting me into Triangle HQ to work on Christmas gifts for my family. There wasn’t anything else out of the ordinary. The rest of the usual suspects were there, it was a blast, and as usual I ate way too much.

The head of our facility decided it’s time to replace the art we have hanging around the offices, and he borrowed the theme from another of our company’s plants: artistic pictures of the press equipment. He assigned the task to one of my co-workers — a fellow Drexel graduate incidentally — and she in turn asked me if I felt I had a strong enough design background to take some photos today.

I was so excited at the prospect that I took her digital camera and took some test shots. I touched them up in Photoshop a little just to see what I could get out of them and so far they’ve gotten a pretty good response. If I get the go-ahead, I plan to reshoot the photos in earnest with Mitch’s SLR and probably my digital camera as well just to have some mediocre-quality backups. It’s going to be a little awkward staging the shots and asking people to move out of the way on my second time around, but it’ll be worth it to see my photographs (complete with a tiny little “Bob Rudderow” signiture in the corners) hanging on the wall where I work.

Only a few people know about the project so far and if it stays that way I’ll be able to hear some real opinons about my work. I have a pretty high opinion of some of the stuff I’ve done but this will be a solid test of my ability.

I am completely stuffed. I tried to justify my binging by reminding myself that I skipped lunch today, but that doesn’t make me feel any less bloated.

Now I’m staring at a bucket of raw cookie dough that I ordered from a co-worker three weeks ago. I realize that fundraisers are the biggest rip-off around, but it’s one of those things that sometimes gets people shunned at work. There’s a lot of gossip floating around and I want to make sure I’m not in the stories, only spreading them. So the concept of a bucket of raw chocolate chunk cookie dough that looked so appealing in the catalog is really quite disgusting right now. However, I’m still worried; I know me. I’m going to be tempted to bring this into the theater to see Lord of the Rings tonight “just to nibble”, and I’ll probably end up eating the whole thing. Then I’ll find a dozen excuses to not go to the gym three days in a row. I’m a pathetic human being in the wintertime. There I go again making excuses — I’m a pathetic human being during every season when it comes to diet and exercise, trying to blame it on the time of year won’t get me anywhere.

Cap’n Lardass signing off.

Our team name for Quizo won for the third week in a row. It was frustrating having almost perfect scores until the last round when we scored a measly 5 and were forced to use our joker. I guess there will be other chances. Tim and I said we’d rather win the subjective contest over the trivia anyway, especially since Ross found out that the answers can be questionable. Other possible team names included, “Gwenyth not eating for two” and “Gore is an anti-Semite”.

Matt just picked up his army boots which means that the day for him to fly back to the other side of the world has arrived. It was a quick two weeks, but we managed to squeeze in a quick reunion, a night of assorted strip clubs, a trip to Caroline’s in New York, two near-evenings of Quizo, and an all-day movie extravaganza followed by a great steak dinner.

Matt seemed interested to see what his Kurdish guards have to say about Saddam’s capture, but other that that he was apprehensive and concerned only with staying safe over the next three months. His job will be at least as difficult as it ever was. He celebrated Christmas with his family on Sunday and spent quality time tonight with his Match.com chick, Melissa. His time home went by quicker than I think any of us expected, hopefully the next three months will pass just as quickly.

The van died in late September, so I bought a new Honda Element and it was good. It’s not perfect anymore though since I now have a plugged tire. My coworker noticed the tire was really low on air, and sure enough there was a nice-sized screw sticking out of the center tread. I try to look on the bright side and be thankful that it was a fixable hole, not to mention an opportunity to try out the spare, but I keep coming back to how my car isn’t new anymore. Actually, it lost that title when I drifted onto the curb at Commerce Bank two weeks after I bought the darn thing, but it didn’t require any repair work.

Learning how to drive a standard transmission took longer it should have considering how incredibly smart I am. I got caught up with how I remembered the transmission sounding when other people drove. Whatever the excuse, I pretty much have it done now and I’ll never go back to automatic. I’m not as gung-ho about teaching everyone else on my car as I once was since if someone really wants to they can take the road I did and buy a car to learn on.

I have a bunch of old RVan pictures in a special album in iPhoto — an album that will never be updated again — and it’s slightly depressing, but I have a feeling that four wheel drive and antilock brakes will help smooth that over eventually.

I just imported what I was able to salvage from my old blog, relieving a major source of stress since September.

When Hager’s server went down unexpectedly in mid-September I naturally figured it was a glitch that would be fixed within a week. When he told me that he had no idea what had happened and that he was no longer in touch with his former company which was hosting for him. His last backup was made before a big move in early February of this year. To fill in the gaps, I searched Google and found archives for September, August and June. I also remembered that I burned a copy of my site for the months of March, April, and May to mail to Matt in Iraq before he had internet access; I sent him everything Lisa and I posted just so he could keep up with what had been going on stateside.

What I lost was minimal but still irreplaceable. Some pictures I had in my “media” folder are gone, small screen shorts that accompanied a few posts and Al’s doctored picture of Csoki Tej for instance. I also lost some posts in February that I can’t remember. The major hit was the month of July, 2003. I wrote about Tom’s party and my trip to Baltimore to visit Graig over the July 4th weekend, a personality test I took for work, and the addition of Cannoli and Ravioli to our family. That’s the sort of stuff that had me really depressed for a while.

So here I am. I had to prep all my posts in BBEdit so they’d conform to the import format:
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TITLE: title
DATE: mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss
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then fix all the links because of changes to the directory structure and archive filenames inherent in migrating from a simple site comprised of old Blogger files. Prepping the files then tweaking the import process took a few solid hours strung out over the course of several days, but the links and everything for which I had a backup should be linked and uploaded. There are a few color/layout issues that I have yet to hammer out, but I’m in no hurry to work on anything now that the old content is static.

Kung-log makes it extremely easy to post so I picture myself posting more often even though I don’t find myself in the mood to write much nowadays. I’m still shying away from some of the features that some people argue are the main reason for moving to the new system: comments, excerpts and extended entries, and trackbacks. My reason for switching was the ease of posting through a local application and site-wide search. (For example, a search for “hate”)

Now that I’ve been to Fantasy Showbar sober, I can’t imagine ever going there again, VIP admission or no. Daydreams is a lot classier, believe it or not. And the steaks at Delilah’s are highly overrated; “gentlemen’s club and steakhouse”? — they got it half right.

Cannoli is safely tucked away in North Philadelphia; so far no incidents have been reported. I felt like Dia and I were hiding a fugitive this morning. We made one last sweep of the place, put the cat in his cage covered with a blanket, and were out of there by 7:00 a.m. We’ll know by this afternoon if our ruse worked.

Agents from my apartment community’s rental office will be escorting L&I officials through all the units tomorrow to check for code violations. Besides disliking the idea of having strangers walk through my apartment while I’m not home, there shouldn’t be anything to worry the inspector. The rental agent, however, will be acutely aware that Dia and I are one cat over the limit and we haven’t paid our pet deposit for any of them.

Our solution is to have my grandparents watch Cannoli for the day and hope the other two stay hidden under the bed when they hear strange voices. I’m going to cut a hole in a flattened cardboard box and use it to disguise the litter box under Dia’s desk, and put the food and water in paper bags with their openings on the floor so anyone standing around won’t see anything except a messy kitchen. (Picturing my cats with their buts sticking out of paper bags while they eat makes me chuckle.) The plan is to leave the apartment as messy as possible to provide plenty of white noise, yet remember to hide all the cat toys.

We’re all going to have to work as a team for this one, but I think we can pull it off.

We frequently forget our best team names for Quizo, so here’s a list to remind us; I’m tired of carrying an envelope around in my pocket. Here they are, in somewhat correct order:

“Ashton Kutcher in that 70-year-old”
“Hope bloats”
“Wha’chu talkin’ ‘bout, Arnold?”
“Welcome back, assholes”
“[Mayor] Street really did have a bug up his ass”
“Jessica Lynch joins the rear division”
“Sodomy, it’s easy as 1-2-3”
“Room for two in Paris Hilton”

There were more that were pretty good, but several times we were bested by truly better names and some others we lost to the “My roommate is…” team. We may never win based on our knowledge of trivia, but dammit we’re the funniest bunch of jerks among college-aged bar-going trivia buffs in the Philadelphia area.

Chris and Lisa’s Festivus party last night was, as usual, the event of the year. The pictures can give glimpses of the fun and some pretty good portraits if I do say so myself, but they can’t illustrate just how much fun it was to watch everyone air their grievances and arm-wrestle.

Sean, Dia and I were the first ones to arrive at around 6 p.m., and people started to trickle in for the rest of the night. Mary brought Al’s saw upstairs so I could shorten the Festivus pole, the hors d’oeuvres came out of the oven and the party got under way.

Most of the night was standard party stuff: lots of mingling, snacking, drinking, a few board games and Mario Kart.

Then came the Airing of the Grievances. They were insightful, biting, humorous and therapeutic. Some people got more shots than others and I doubt most people will take them to heart, but I’m going to work on mine. They’re better than New Year’s resolutions, because you have the uncomfortable stares of your closest friends to back them up. Chris’s complaint against me was that I say mean things on my blog then retract them a day later. I agree that I could wait a few days before I post anything in anger, but that would defeat one of the benefits of having a journal. I guess I also figure that having everyone see my grievances on a daily basis can help to clear them up, but Mary is right when she stated in her general grievance to everyone that a lot of conflicts could be resolved better by a face to face talk. I can’t recall anything too serious that arose between any of my friends over the past year, but she did make a good point and I’ll have to be more careful now that I’ve got this third incarnation of my blog up.

The feats of strength started out with a group event — the human pyramid — and moved onto individual events divided into women’s and men’s categories. The guys were up first and did push-ups with Lisa on their backs, and Sean was the clear winner of those as well as the exhibition arm-wrestling following the girls’ head-to-head competition. Lara won her heat and moved onto the championship bout for a decisive win. There were some good matches during the men’s exhibition: Rob represented the Republicans well in his battle with Geof, and I defeated Ross in our match even though I hurt my shoulder doing it.

Following the holiday events we went straight back to Kart for an hour or so, then left around 2 a.m. I squeezed six into the Element when drove Greg plus Tomas and his girl Kelly (not Emily…) home before heading back to Levittown, where I fell promptly to sleep.

Well, I’ve pretty much got this thing figured out. I owe it all to my employer for forcing me to take my vacation days, one of which is tomorrow. Since I didn’t have to worry about resting up for work I stopped by Doylestown Hospital to see how Sean is handling his pancreatitis, and I’m pulling an all-dayer at the movie theater with Tim tomorrow. With loads of free time in between I dove right into style sheets and Movable Type.

The new site matches the old one — more or less, and for better or worse. Am I making sense? I’m pretty fried having juggled 20 different windows on my monitor all night. I still have to process my old entries, but that shouldn’t take more than an afternoon tinkering around with BBEdit.

Well, I’ve just passed about a dozen different geek tests, and if I’m going to stay awake through our movie marathon in seven hours it’s time to rest up.

I’m rambling, but there’s an update to Matt’s situation: he found his wallet. The dumbass dropped it under his car seat. What’s worse is that I said twice that it was probably there, and even looked for it myself. I’m glad he found it, and now all he needs is a damn cell phone or internet connection and it’ll be back to business as usual for the rest of his short visit home. I can’t believe a week has gone by already, I feel like we haven’t done anything yet. Where are the strip clubs and drinking binges? We’ll have to kick things off right at the Festivus party on Saturday.

Alright, now I’m really rambling. Goodnight.

However, that’s beside the point. It’s still not going to get me to post any sooner.

Last night’s Quizo night, however, just might. Between Greg and Geof’s mutual philosophical fellatio, Matt’s car trouble (which also caused him to lose his wallet), and my best team name — get this: “Room for two in Paris Hilton” — which earned a pitcher of beer I wasn’t around to drink, I have a lot to post about. It would have been fitting to have the first post to my new blog match the first post of my old blog seeing as how both would have detailed how I cavorted around Philadelphia with Matt all night. I simply don’t have the time. This is the first lunch break I’ve taken in over a week and when I’m not at work I can barely find the energy to do anything other than watch television and fall asleep. Last night was certainly a departure from the norm, but I was truly depressed that I couldn’t spend the evening playing Quizo with my friends.

Well, I guess I just posted. There’s a lot to catch up on, but I’m going to have to be content with these two entries until I’m done concentrating on coding the main page.

Hey, you know what would be great?… It’d be great if Bob actually started blogging again.

In the meantime, ponder the following lyrics from the top 10 song “Get Low” by Lil’ Jon and crew (rappers never perform alone):
————————————————————————————
She getting crunk in the club I mine she work
Then I like to see the female twerking taking the clothes off BUCKEY naked
ATL. Hoe don’t disrespect it
Pa pop yo pussy like this cause yin yang twins in this bitch
Lil Jon and the East side boys wit me and we all like to see Ass and tities
Now bring yo ass over here hoe and let me see you get low if you want this Thug
Now take it to the floor (to the floor) and if yo ass wanta act you can keep yo ass where you at

3,6,9 standing real fine move it to you sing it to me one mo time
Get low, Get low [6x]
To the window, to the wall, (to dat wall)
To the sweat drip down my balls (MY BALLS)
To all these bitches crawl (crawl)
To all skit skit motherfucker (motherfucker!) all skit skit got dam (Got dam)
To all skit skit motherfucker (motherfucker!) all skit skit got dam (Got dam)
———————————————————————————

Now I don’t know about anyone else, but I find them pretty damn hilarious… especially considering how the girls in da club (heh, get it) go nuts dancing to this shit.

P.S.

Bob,

Please change your password so I can’t do this anymore.

Your nizzle fo’ shizle,

Tim