Quick tip No. 1

Don't store your hand sanitizer and glasses cleaner spray bottles near each other. Especially if they are similarly sized and shaped.

(Maybe I'll make "quick tips" a regularly occurring item on my blog... hmmm... can't think of a better way to inform the world of the stupid things I'm prone to do, so why not?)

Need another reason to like Neil Diamond?

Well, here it is.

I heard this on the radio the other day, and it made me like Neil Diamond even more. I guess the guy got some flack for doing a Christmas album when he's a Jew. I am so glad the Hanukah (Chanukah?) song he decided to go with was Adam Sandler's Chanukah song. So here it is. Enjoy.

That dentist clean feeling!

I don't care for it.

I know almost everyone hates the dentist. I'm not particularly fond of going. But some people like getting their teeth cleaned. They like the running their tongues across clean teeth, the deep clean feel, all that. I don't like it.

I have very sensitive teeth. I don't like how they feel after the cleaning. I like the clean feeling, sure, but my teeth are super sensitive, my gums hurt from the constant pressure and scrapping, and I can feel my teeth the rest of the day. You know, because you can't usually feel your teeth. I can just see all 3 of you that read this licking your teeth now, trying to feel them, but you know what I mean. Your teeth are just there. Most the time, you don't feel them. After going to the dentist, I feel them and they sorta hurt. I don't like it. Even if they ARE super clean.

So screw you, dentists. Me and my sensitive teeth don't like you.

(yes, I also have one cavity, so I'm bitter about it. On top of it, it's because a seal in an old filling is gone. Stupid, crappy dentist and his shoddy filling seal work...)

Happy Thanksgiving!!! (my iPod won't let me write in the body of the post)

You may be a winner!!!

Anyone want further reason to hate car salesmen? Here goes...

So this weekend, I was helping Hayley find a misplaced item. I was looking through our stack of mail and came across an ad for a car dealership. The ad caught my eye because there was a key attached to it. I looked a little closer, and the mailer--addressed to Hayley--said we may have won a brand new Charger. For fun, I pulled the key off of the ad, and used it to scratch off the "scratch here" box to see if I was a winner. Three silver cars means you win. Any other combination of silver and red cars means you lost.

So I start scratching and the oddest thing happened. I scratched away to reveal three silver cars... I was a winner! I was a little shocked, and said, out loud, and in an incredulous voice, "I'm a winner...?" Hayley responded asking me what I meant, and I told her we might have won a new car. She immediately said, "Yeah, right..." but came over to look at the advertisement. We both kind of looked at each other and wondered what in the world was going on. There was a telephone number printed on the ad, so I called it. A recording asked me to enter a number from the ad, then told me, "Congratulations! Your prize is being held for you. Please see your local dealer at [address] to claim your prize!" Again, not much help on figuring out what was going on.

So, we had a couple errands to run and decided, what the heck... if the dealer told us we didn't win a car, we'd simply hate them forever and never buy a car from them. When we pulled up to the dealership, a 12 year old with uneven, scruffy, facial hair trying to hide his acne approached us. I told him we had this ad and it said we won something. He had us sit down and went to get a little notebook. He started asking a few questions (address, name, car we drive, you know...), and I butted in by saying we really weren't looking for a car, just wondered about this prize we supposedly won. He said it could be one of four prizes. The new Charger, an ATV, three gold coins, or $1,000 cash--all with no strings attached, but he needed to get our information first. He asked about the car we drive and if we were looking to trade it in. Again, I said no. At this point, our 12 year old assistant went off to get one more scratch card so we could find out what we won.

Left to ourselves, Hayley and I wondered if this was worth it. I said I hoped for the thousand bucks, but wondered what we could get on eBay for the three gold coins. Well, the pre-pubescent came back, I scratched the card, and lo and behold.... THREE GOLD COINS!!! What luck! The sixth grader then left again, and Hayley and I shrugged our shoulders at each other and waited for our prize. The kid came back with three dollars. In coin form. Sacajawea and Ben Franklin coin dollars, to be exact. Here they are in all their glory:


So yeah. Stupid car salesmen. As we drove away, Hayley wondered, if we had said we were looking for a car, would our second scratch card have been pulled from a different stack... possibly the you've-won-a-thousand-dollars stack? Maybe even the you've-won-a-new-car stack? Very probably... One thing's for sure though. I couldn't stop saying "THREE GOLD COINS!" The rest of the day.

Could I be SAD?

Just a quick post...

So SAD is Seasonal Affected Disorder that people get when it's all wintery outside and dark and they get depressed. Well, I'm not depressed in the slightest, I promise. I was just telling Hayley that I don't love going to work before the sun comes up--or just as it is rising--and coming home after it goes down--or just as it's setting.

I like snow. As much as a person who doesn't ski or snowboard can like the snow. I just don't like driving in it. What I do like is that the break room in my workplace has a whole wall of windows, so I sit right next to the window to soak up as much natural light as I can. Luckily the wall of windows is on the South side of the building, so the sun shines right in. I openly voice my opinion of how dumb I think it is to close the blinds in that room if they're closed when I get there. Hopefully THAT nonsense will stop.

So, while I'm not dreading winter or anything--and I'm actually looking forward to seeing a little snow--I just wish the winter could come and still have normal amounts of daylight. That's all. I'm not mopey or sad about it or anything. In fact, there's one particular day in winter--January, specifically--that I'm REALLY looking forward to. :)

Tagged!

Hayley tagged me. I was actually just thinking that no one does tags anymore. Not that I'm complaining, it's just I don't blog much anymore because mostly I could just put links to Hayley's blog. So here's a tag (from Hayley even) to give me a higher post count for November. :) Enjoy!

Five Things I don't leave the House without

1. Wallet
2. Keys
3. nu... phone
4. iPod (now. I had never had an iPod before the Touch, and I really like it)
5. One inverted nipple

Five Cartoons I watched when I was Younger

This depends on what you mean by "younger." When I was a small kid, the cartoons I watched were different than when I was a teenager... yes, I watched cartoons as a teenager. I think I'll list a mixture of both.

1. Loony Toons (with Bugs Bunny)
2. Tiny Toons (with Babs and Buster Bunny)
3. Transformers
4. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
5. Anamaniacs

Five Things That Terrify Me

1. Heights
2. Lawn gnomes (Seriously. They're so freakin' creepy!)
3. Clowns
4. Having onion breath
5. ........hungry cannibals?

Five Things I hate/dislike that everyone else seems to like

1. Mafia Wars on Facebook
2. Twitter
3. Macs OR PCs (Not that I hate either... I just have no strong feelings one way or the other, and it seems like everyone else has a strong preference...)
4. Dancing
5. the TV show Glee. I don't get it

Five Things I want to do before I Die

1. Go to Chicago with Hayley
2. Retire without debt and with enough money to not have to work during retirement
3. Have a yard in which to do yard work
4. Go on a cruise with Hayley (sorry, Hayley. Totally stole that one from you. But it doesn't mean I want to do it any less!)
5. Write a book, maybe?

(I know, not super exciting things... but I'm kind of a practical guy. At least there's two fun vacations in there!)

Five People I tag

1. Katey
2. Diane
3. Caron
4. Cindy
5. Erin

(Some of the tags are to see if you still read my bloggy blog. :) be sure to comment when you post!)

Seemingly random thoughts

hmmmm... I'm sure everyone is sick of looking at that duck... so here's something new.

Hayley asked me to blog today... but I can't think of anything to blog about! So here are a few thoughts going through my head right now. Are you prepared for the madness?? To help, I'll separate thoughts by bullet points.

• I watched V last night. Didn't really grab me right away and it felt like they had re-written the pilot episode a bunch of times, finding that they needed to move things along quickly to keep the audience interested. (If you haven't seen the episode yet, you may want to stop here.) So the aliens show up, start doing nice stuff, taking people on tours of their ships, and start giving clues that they're not entirely well-intended. But it seems like in that first episode, two months or so passed... Also, I wasn't a huge fan of the acting. The saving grace was Juliet from Lost was in it, and so was Alan Tdyk. So we'll probably give it a couple more episodes.
• I like Cash Cab. I'm watching it now while I wait for Hayley to get home from parent teacher conferences. Mostly because I love trivia. I may or may not have 3 trivia aps on my iPod Touch. Even thought I like Cash Cab, I'd rather have Hayley home...
• I caught up on a bunch of stuff at work today. With so many RFPs to work on, my desk got kinda cluttered, and I was behind on one of my monthly reports. Now I'm good to go, my desk is cleared, and the other projects I'm working on are doing just great. Yay for being on top of things!
• Hayley let me make picaditas for dinner the other night, and I'm going to be making one of my favorite salsa recipes soon, too. Dinner didn't even suck that night! Pretty soon I'll be wearing a sombrero, pancho, and want to make agua de Jamaica (pronounced huh-mike-uh) for Hayley, too! ...kidding!
• I'm looking forward to the holidays! I like the spirit of the season, the hot chocolate, and extra time with Hayley. I'm not looking forward to driving in the snow, however...
• I'm looking forward to the last season of Lost! It starts in 2010 sometime... so I've got some time to wait, but it'll be fun once it starts.
• I'm looking forward to going to Chicago with Hayley! She has a list of stuff we're going to do on her blog, and I sometimes click the links and get excited.
  
• I like the Dr Pepper pajama pants I'm wearing right now. Comfy.
  
• I kinda want a Reese's peanut butter cup right now. And for some reason, I pronounce it ree-seas, not ree-sez. Whatev.
  
• I'm still wearing my brown work socks right now.
• I find it interesting that my thoughts got increasingly shorter. Must be time to stop.
  

There ya go. What's going through your mind?

Look at this...

Ok, so you've heard of those motivational posters, right? They've got a little phrase and a picture that are supposed to be inspiring, and they show up all over corporate America. My work is not exempt. We've got more than a couple on our walls... Here's an example of one.


I can't really tell what it says there, but you get the idea... Nice little picture, inspirational quote. Not really that impressive, but covers the walls and makes management feel a little better. So there's another website that makes fun of these types of posters. They use the nice little picture, but the supposed "inspirational quote" is really kind of mocking at the original idea of what these sort of posters should do. Case in point:


Well, thanks to the interwebs, we get all sorts of these, not just the classy kind of mocking posters like the one above. Now people make them just to make fun of goofy pictures or just dumb people. Observe:


I'm getting to a point here...

So with these sort of images running all over the place, and because I work in corporate America, I get various email forwards with bunches of all types of these pictures. The only real constant is the black background/frame, then a word or words in a large font, followed by words in a smaller font. Some are funny, some are not.

Today I got a forward with one of these types of images... I'm not proud of it, but I couldn't stop laughing. It's not that it's dirty or anything, it just really may not be that funny to anyone else. But I seriously could NOT stop laughing. Every time I thought or said the words "look at it," I would lose control. I even started crying, I was laughing so hard. Other people were laughing at it with me, but mostly, I think they were laughing at me and how crazy I was to think it so funny! Even after work when I was telling Hayley about the image, I started laughing uncontrollably. She also laughed; again, I think because I'm a dork more than because she thinks it's funny...

With my pride on the line, and the knowledge that you'll all think I'm a big, giant dork, here is the image that I think is so dang funny.

Isn't that hysterical?!!! Even when I went to upload the image just now, reviewing it made me laugh. I mean, it's a giraffe, right? It looks like he's pointing at that duck. Look at it. hahahaha!! LOOK AT IT!!

Ok, let the name calling begin.

Ingrid Concert

On Saturday, Hayley and I and two of her sisters and a niece went to the Ingrid Michaelson concert. It was pretty rad. I knew Ingrid before I met Hayley, but I have grown to love her music much more since we started dating. I'm now quite a big fan.

The concert was pretty awesome. Ingrid is a funny girl. Sure, she's obviously just ended a relationship, but at least the music produced by the breakup is good. ;) Ingrid, hope you get over that soon!

Anyway, I had a great time. Sure, I stood in one spot for like 3 hours (maybe 4? Hayley?), but it was worth it! And just to show you, I'm going to share a video I took. The song is called "The Chain." It's one of my favorites because Hayley and I sing different parts in the round at the end. It's fun. Anyway, here's the video. Hope you enjoy!