Archive for the 'Life' Category

I feel like I’m repeating myself a little bit. It wasn’t a week ago that I was complaining generally about bad drivers. Last night we were driving on the rural back road on our way home and some guy in front of us in a truck was going back and forth between accelerating and riding on the person’s bumper in front of him and letting off the gas until he was going 10 miles per hour in front of us forcing us to slam on our brakes to avoid him. A couple of times he put on his right turn indicator or his hazard lights. Once he almost ran off the side of the road. At first I thought maybe he was drunk. Then I thought maybe he was looking for a certain house or road and wasn’t too sure of where it was at night. Krissy was convinced that he was just a jerk and wanted to make people mad. I don’t really know what was going on. He never turned off the road, and he seemed to start driving normally when we got into the city again. It was just a little scary, though. Have you ever had an experience like that? Let’s hear about it!

One of Krissy’s coworkers is getting married in just over a week and the people at work decided that they wanted to go out to eat with him and his fiancee. We went to this brewery/Italian sports restaurant called Oggi’s. It was pretty distracting as there were around forty TVs all over the restaurant. When we ordered our food our waiter hesitated for a moment when I ordered a calzone. I guess I didn’t understand the menu very well. There was a heading that said “Pizzas & Calzones” and under that heading there were about sixteen different pizzas listed. I found one that seemed to have a good combination and just assumed that I could order a calzone made from the same ingredients. I guess I missed that the top nine-tenths of the page was the pizza section and the bottom one-tenth was for calzones. The calzone was pretty good. The sauce was on the side, though, and I wish that it had been inside the calzone. When the check came I thought it was the bill for the four people sitting next to us. Krissy had a sandwich that was $8.00 with a $2.00 soda. I also had a $2.00 soda, but the total was $30.00! My calzone had cost me $15.00! I thought it was going to be about half that. As it turns out the base calzone with nothing on it costs around $7.00 and it costs around $1.50 for each additional topping. I asked for their “special” pizza in a calzone form. That was like five or six extra toppings!

When we left I told Krissy, “I just ate a video game!” That was the most expensive calzone I’d ever eaten.

Krissy has been doing a lot of Christmas shopping online. She and I both suffer from a disorder that makes it very difficult for us to stop ourselves from buying something if it appears to be priced well below its value. On the bright side, order at least our Christmas shopping is almost done!

I have taken to keeping my thumb over the horn (which is idiotically not placed in the middle of the steering wheel) just waiting for people to do foolish and idiotic things. It drives me nuts and I often wonder if the people are ignorant of the law, just making an honest mistake, or purposefully breaking laws just to get one car-length ahead. I feel like it’s my obligation to let them know that others notice when they do dumb things and force good drivers to avoid them. Sometimes I wish I could just let people hit my car and then have to pay for their inconsiderate driving. If I were in a position where money were not an object then I would allow the guy who starts in the rightmost left-turn lane and ends up in the left lane before the turn is over to just plow into the side of my car. I could just get another one and let the insurance take care of his idiocy.

Dr. Laura said that she listens to Saturday Night Fever to sedate herself while driving so she doesn’t explode at the inhumanity on the road. I don’t know what sond would do it for me. It still doesn’t change the fact that the only reason bad drivers don’t get into accidents more often is because of all the good drivers around them who suffer.

Have you ever been to the Rodeo? I can remember being in Vernal, Utah as a kid during summers and being close enough to the Rodeo to hear the crowd. I never thought about it much then, but we never decided to go. I never hear anything about rodeos here in Southern California. I’m sure there are a number of smaller ones in Valley Center or other areas. After looking around I found what looks like the most interesting rodeo around. The Huston Rodeo looks like they have real cowboys that know what they’re doing. I could never pull off the kinds of things that they are doing. Not top of all of this they have some of the biggest names in country music coming to perform nightly. If that sounds interesting you can take a look at who is performing and get Houston Rodeo concert tickets. It makes me wish I had some friends in the area that I could go visit so I would have an excuse to check it out. I bet my mom would like this. Maybe I’ll see if she wants to go!

My cell phone disappeared while we were house sitting, but today we got a call that it has been located! The worst part about not having it is that I don’t ever know what time it is. I don’t wear a watch anymore since my watch battery died. I have enjoyed having a free pocket though. Too many gadgets to carry around nowadays.

“Awwww… nothing gets chocolate out, see?” I got a Chocolate Blast from Baskin Robbins and on the way home I realized I had dribbled little droplets of chocolate on my favorite shirt. They weren’t on the outside of the container, but rather on the underside of the lip of the plastic lid. I never even saw it coming. I checked online to see how to get chocolate stains out. I hope it works. The last time this happened was the first time I wore my Homestar Runner t-shirt. You may be wondering, “Do you even have a Homestar Runner shirt?” Well, I do, but I ought to throw it away. I dropped a glop of a Wendy’s Frosty on it and went into the bathroom to try and clean it off. It never came out all the way, so it went into the pile of work shirts.

Why must chocolate taste so good and yet behave so badly?

I started to learn to program with BASIC. Then I learned C. Now I have a class that requires me to use Java. Java is all about Objects. I find myself struggling to grasp the concept. Just when I think I have it then I find something else that I’m not quite getting. I am working on a simulation program demonstrating preemptive multitasking on a single CPU system. No matter what I do I can’t seem to get rid of redundant methods in two of my classes. There has to be a good way to take care of this problem, but everything I can think of just adds complexity to the program, which is what I’m trying to avoid. Maybe I’ll post again with a solution, if I ever find one, that is.

Krissy and I went out with Kevin and Vicki to take advantage of Olive Garden’s Neverending Pasta Bowls. It’s not a bad deal at $7.95 per person. I was looking forward to it all day, so I made a point not to snack at all after lunch. I still couldn’t finish my first bowl. I think part of it is because they give you soup and bread sticks before the pasta ever comes. On top of that I got two sausages for an extra two dollars. No one at the table finished all of their first bowl of pasta. I figure that their secret must be that no one can eat more than two servings anyway, so we’ll call it “neverending” and people will get all excited about all you can eat pasta. I bet they make a lot of money even though they don’t charge very much. I mean, how much does pasta really cost anyway?

I would do it again, though. It’s good food. I’d rather have neverending soup bowls, though. Their Zuppa Toscana is amazing!

Krissy and I got home last night after being away for five days house- and babysitting. When we sat down and checked the Freevo there were nine shows recorded ready to be watched! We only got through two and a half of them before Krissy fell asleep. Having things automated is great. I told Krissy “That’s what you get when you marry a computer science major!”