So. After tonight, I have something to look forward to: Frickin' Vacation. Tomorrow, Trish, Cillian and I are heading up north to Mackinaw City for the weekend. It should be a lot of fun. Trish and I have had trips before, but they're always just peripherals to going down to Ann Arbor for her nephrologist appointment, so this will be the first time that we've gone on an overnighter with no other purpose than to enjoy the hell out of ourselves. It will also be our first with The Little Bear.

I had a bit of a problem at work last night. I got a panic call from our head office saying that they were missing a deposit slip for a deposit 5 days ago, and that according to the bank, the deposit was never even made. I freak out and start digging through our Daily Envolopes (where we put our copies of deposit slips, refund tickets, discount slips, cashier reports, etc.), to no avail. As I'm on the phone with the lady from the office, the store decides to get busy, so I have to cut her off to go tend to my job. When I had some downtime, I opened up our safe and started digging through that motherfucker, to find that the A.M. deposit from 10 August in a paper envelope, buried in the rear corner of one of the two small "cubby" compartments in the safe. I call my D.M., Ryan, and tell him that I found it, all is well, and don't freak out.

Thought you'd like to know.

Sheez. It appears as if I've proved myself a horrible blogger yet again.

I've been shit-busy with work and family stuff lately, and I've been rewriting the back end... again... For no reason. I've also been rebuilding/tearing apart/rebuilding/tearing back apart/re rebuilding/buying parts for my damn bike. I've decided that I won't be putting any more money into it, and I'll just be getting a new one this fall. It's pretty gay.

On more current matters, Trish, Cillian and I are going to be taking off for a day trip to Yogi Bear's Jellystone Campground on Monday (I think it's Monday...) as well as planning our first Mommy/Daddy/Baby vacation up to Mackinaw City around the middle of this month.

Cillian's been walking, which has increased his hell raising efficiency a full 300%. He's now able to get into things 3 times faster than before, as well as squeeze through gaps in makeshift barriers that he can get through upright, but not crawling. A change in strategy is required. I'm thinking a 6' high chain link fence around the living room.

Work has been kicking the shite outta me. On Wednesday, I was there until 11:30PM. On Thursday, I was punched out at 11:59PM but didn't actually lock up and set the alarm until something like 12:30AM. It was the same person's problem both nights, and after I set a goal for them on Thursday, to try to avoid the Wednesday problem, they actually managed to move slower. I'm not overly happy with this entire situation. I also had to go into work last night on my day off... but I get today off instead, and I'd much rather have payday off than the day before payday.

Anyway. I don't know what I've got planned for tonight, but I'll try to update more often. Promise.

I know that Trish likes her job and everything, but them not letting her have tomorrow off so she can spend it with her son on his first 4th of July is downright shatty. Granted, yes, she's the low (wo)man on the totem pole, but everyone else at her work got it off, so I have to get up and take Cillian to the parade downtown by myself today, so it's going to be family sans mommabear.

She gets off work at a decent time tomorrow, so we'll all be able to hit the fireworks and probably take my mom, dad and Ryan (brother, living in Chi-town) to some post-'works karaoke.

Putting my bike back together, hopefully I'll be able to ride it soon if the weather holds up...

So, I've been neglecting my blog yet again.

But I have a valid excuse that involves activity outside of my computer.

So there was a garage sale down the street from my house about a week and a half ago, so I looked out the window, and right in the front yard, I saw them: drop bars. So, being the opportunist that I am, I snatched a few dollars and jogged down the street. When I got there, I saw a 27" road bike with a few parts rusted all to hell. But, seeing as they were only asking 5 dollars, I snagged it up and rode it home, finding that it actually rode pretty well for being a worn out piece of junk.

It's withstood a couple of long rides, the couple of miles back and forth to work a few days, and a nice 16 mile ride around town with my brother during one of the few nice days (Michigan has been getting drenched by the leftover dregs of the storms that have been causing all of the flooding in the midwest). I looked at it about 4 days ago and got an idea: Summer restoration project!

I've spent the last two days taking the blasted thing apart, and it's now in pieces in my garage. I went out last night and got a bunch of parts for it (chain, cables, pedals, etc.)

More to come...

Okay, so back in the day when I was all depressed and all that, I used to think to myself "Wow. The world would be much better off without an insufferable load like me in it.". As I was sitting in the tub last night after work, I really started going through and dissecting that statement, and I realized some things.

Firstly, the odds are that if you're reading this, we're alike in at least one way: The world doesn't even know we exist, let alone does it care whether or not we're in it. We're not famous, we're inescapably mundane. To quote Fight Club, "We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world." Compared to the people that the world "cares" about, we're mud.

Secondly, I'm not entirely sure that I'd want to be the sort of guy that the world knows about. Sure, there are some famous people that are great philanthropists, but there are a lot of "famous" people that I think the world would truly be better without.

Dubya. President Of The United States. Douche bag. Do I even need to elaborate on this one?

Pat Robertson. Televangelist (Host of The 700 Club). Also douche bag. This guy's a pretty big nutjob. When Ariel Sharon had his last, debilitating stroke before his unfortunate death, Robertson claimed that the poor old man's stroke was retribution from God for pulling the IDF out of the Gaza Strip, where they were defending The Holy Land from the "infidel" hordes of the Palestinians.

Jerry Falwell. Pastor. Bloody cunt rag. Falwell claimed that the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City were the result of a rise in homosexuality and witchcraft. (Now, don't get me wrong, I ain't down with no witchcraft, but witchcraft isn't why the attacks happened. And homosexuality is definitely not the cause.)

I'm all tuckered out already...

Sweet. It's raining again. I don't think that we've gone a day in the last four where we haven't gone an entire day without there being some sort of precipitation. It's pretty funny, considering I spent as much on a pool as I did, and I have yet to actually use it.

Trish and I went to karaoke last night, I think that I pretty much only did songs from Rockaraoke Vol. 1, with the exception of Love Shack, which we had to sing twice because this drunk dude kept pestering us to sing it after the first time (for those of you not in the know [read: everyone], Love Shack is one of Trish and I's karaoke standards that we've sung every time we've ever done karaoke).

Post-karaoke, we went to Burger King, where we found out that their shake machine was done, so I was sort of pissed and not altogether happy. We ended up just going to Speedway and getting iced tea.

I'm in the market for a cheap (I mean cheap, as in quality doesn't matter all that much) road bike, so if anyone has any ideas as to that, fire 'em my way (That means you, Justin)

Peace.

I was up most of the night last night (at least until 2am) getting my commenting system written, tested and live; so you people'd better start commenting and shiz.

My computer is almost in it's previous glory. I got Ubuntu 8.10 Hardy Heron back up and running, I have most of my audio codecs (Ubuntu doesn't by default have the MPEG Layer III codec installed because it's copyrighted software, and Ubuntu is all about open-source) so I can listen to music, and I've downloaded a pretty good share already.

Trish has been working her deliciously cute butt off at Hallmark the last few days, this is the third in a string of three eight hour days in a row, which is a lot of time to someone that hasn't needed to work in a year or so. I'm really proud of her, although my days off are a lot more boring without her around. I spend a lot of time pining over her whilst she's without. She's been really messed up by her medicine lately because she's been prescribed higher doses than she's ever taken before, and her blood pressure medication was making her all dead, so she's halted taking that, and she seems to be doing really well; I just hope it keeps up.

I bought a little 120" family pool yesterday, and when Nick and I tried to fill it up with the air compressor, I was attempting to change attachments and hurt myself. I was using two wrenches to counter-tension bolts, when one gave way and knocked a chunk out of my right-index-finger knuckle. I think I probably bruised the bone because it's real sore in addition to the normal pain of having skin ripped from your body.

Taking off now.

"Mark my words: We're taking over the world."

Again with the brutal negligence of this poor blog. I used to have some regular readers, or at least my StatCounter led me to believe that, but I'm sure that any regular readers that I had have now moved on and started to read other sorts of mindless drivel on the 'net. Time to start building a new base, methinks!

There are a couple of reasons why I haven't been updating hardly at all, most of all being the obvious: my little boy. I've been waking up with him in the morning and spending almost all of my time then taking care of him (not that I'd have it any other way, mind you), and then, by the time that I have any free time at all, I have to get to work. And with Trish working, it's harder and harder for me to steal a few minutes away from responsibility to update this thing. The time that I do spend on the computer is spent messing with my OS and getting thing set up the way that I want.

I actually ended up breaking my Ubuntu, so now I lost all of my configuration settings, which will require me to reset everything.

A lot of stuff that nobody cares about to be sure, I'll update again soon, I promise.

I think I've found a new obsession, at least until I get my hands on what I'm obsessing over.

My obsession is getting my hands on a 6" Batman: The Dark Knight Joker Figurine. They're almost impossible to find anymore, they sold out within the first couple of days of their release, even though they have no value, since they were produced and released after Heath Ledger's death. The figures originally retailed for anywhere between 10 and 12 dollars in The States, but now that they're sold out, the only ones available are from price-gougers (i.e., the ones that bought PS3s on release day so that they could turn around and sell them for $1,000 dollars on eBay) on eBay and Amazon (and other online retailers that vend through them) for as little as 70 bucks. It's pretty sad and pathetic.

Some sweetness to put on top of that though, I got my hands on a new bike today. It's a 24" Huffy Santa Fe Surfstyle Cruiser, and it is the most comfortable bike that I've ever bought for 90 dollars.

PayPal severely perturbed me over the last week. My hosting with SurpassHosting expired, thus suspending my account (which includes my email... Whoops. I made a payment to get my hosting reinstated on 12 May, and it only just cleared today. I think that next time I'll be paying directly with my Fifth Third bank card.

Nick is trying to sell me his footy boots, because they wreck his feet something horrible. I already have some boots that cost me a grand total of $5.30 (including tax. They're adidas Baraca III's from like, '06 I think), and they suit me just fine (although before July or so, I plan on getting my hands -- or feet, as the case may be -- on a pair of adidas Telstar II's, which are basically the budget version of their new K-leather adiPUREs). Nick's boots are Kelme Champions in white and silver K-leather which he got on sale, so he got a great deal. Long story short: I'm not buying 'em.

Touching on football: This summer is going to be slightly depressing. I have baseball to watch (My Tigers are currently rather depressing in their own right), sure, but this past fall/winter/spring, I've been keeping my self busy by following my European club of choice (Liverpool F.C.), who were knocked out of the UEFA Champions League by Chelsea F.C. by winning the second game of their two-game knockout round match-up at home, and their last game of the domestic (EPL) season was Sunday before last, so no more L.F.C. until next fall. This doesn't make me all that happy.

I've got another Tig's game in Detroit to go to on June 13th, so that's kind of the day that I'm looking forward to. I always try to keep an important event in my mind that I can aim for, so I can make it through the crap that seems to dump itself upon my by the tons.