Sunday, February 05, 2006

Unlike my normal well thought-out blog entries, today I'm just going to ramble. Yes, ramblin' thoughts from me to you. It's kind of just a weekend summary, but not nearly as interesting. Buckle up, kids.

Friday was a typical work-at-home day. After brushing my teeth in the morning, I didn't really look at myself in the mirror again until it was time to take a shower at the end of my work day. I noted that several tufts of hair were sticking straight up.

At this point I recalled that I had actually been out of the house for lunch with my buddy, Pablo. He said nothing to me about my wayward locks. This is probably due to one of the following reasons:

1) He's even less observant than I am (unlikely)
2) We don't really have a hey-let-me-give-you-hair-advice-or-maybe-a-blowjob kind of relationship
3) Since Pablo's hair was similarly tousled (but on PURPOSE, in a stylish way), perhaps he wrongly theorized that my hair-do was also intentional.

Beats me.

Friday was also my parents anniversary. A few days earlier, my sister called to remind me. My sister and I aren't terribly alike. She's not a computer nerd and I'm not....well... well, I'm not very grown up. We do, however, get along pretty well. One of the facets of our relationship is that we each have our own roles. For example, one of her responsibilities is to remind me of our parents' birthdays and anniversary. We had this conversation last week, and in fact we've had it once a year for the last 5 years or so.

Sis: You know it's mom and dad's anniversary on Friday, right?
Me: Oh, yeah, right! I forgot.
Sis: Now, do you remember which anniversary it is? Is it their 50th?
Me: Oh, crap! I hope not. Man, you asked me that same question last year. Maybe I wrote down the answer...

(I didn't)

Me: I can't find it. I have no idea if it's their 50th, or maybe 49th, or some other year.
Sis: We have to know. It's ok if we don't do much for them on their 49th anniversary, but we have to do something nice on their 50th for sure.
Me: I know. I know.
Sis: Ok, how will we figure this out?
Me: I'll call them and ask them.
Sis: Excellent. What will you say?
Me: I'll say, "Hey, you guys! Your anniversary is coming up! Congrats!"
Sis: Good, and then what?
Me: Then, I'll say, "Wow, how many years is it now?"
Sis: Ok, what if they say, "50".
Me: I'll say, "Whoa! 50!"
Sis: Good. That's good. Now, you realize that you cannot implicate me in this. You cannot let them know that I do not know how long they've been married.
Me: I know. This is my job. I'm the designated idiot.

It's my burden to carry. Also, it was their 48th anniversary. I wrote it down this time.

On Saturday, the wife and I helped host a baby shower. Other folks were in charge of bringing food and decorations. The wife and I were tasked with making our house presentable and baking a cake. Since I'm an idiot in the kitchen (not a designated idiot, but a regular one), I was tasked with making all the clutter in the living room disappear. This took many hours. I could describe it, but I did a decent job of describing a similar task in an earlier blog post. Let's just say that the garage was so crowded afterwards, that not only was it difficult to open the car door, but when I did manage to drive the car out of the garage, and close the garage door, it crunched an old baby-stroller, which pressed down onto the hose faucet, which then spent the next two hours flooding our garage with water. The living room looked nice though.

The baby shower was crowded, long, and boring. I don't know how all those people feigned interest in baby gifts, but I wasn't born with that gene. "Oh, look, another baby toy/sleeping-device/onesie/decapitator! This one is yellow! Lovely, just marvelous." The whole experience was horrible and testicle-shriveling.

Today , I ran in a half-marathon race. I was hoping to set a personal record and finish it in under 90 minutes, and I was super pleased to accomplish that goal. The race went so well, I'm not sure how I could run one faster. That might require actual dedication to this lame-excuse-for-a sport. So, just as I retired from marathoning, I may retire from half-marathoning. 10Ks, here I come! At this pace, I'll be running the 100 meter dash exclusively in the next couple years.

And just like that it's Sunday night.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

That wasn't on purpose? Looked pretty programmer-hipster to me.

--Pablo

zelda1 said...

Yuck baby showers. I'm not a man, but I still hate them. I would rather just go, drop off gift, get cake on my way out, and that's that. But no, you, especially if you're a woman, have to sit and play stupid games and then pass around the gifts and if you've seen one blanket, you've seen them all, and by the time I leave, my face hurts from all that forced smiling. Lately, I have been sending gifts and saying, I'm sick. That gets me off the hook, but then I don't get the cake either.

Mike said...

Pablo, I can see why you'd think that. I am generally so hip, stylish, and well put-together, that you assumed I was adopting "a look". Sure.

Zelda1, cake schmake. I'll take a free afternoon over cake any day.

dolface said...

may i suggest writing a cron job to remind you of your parents anniversary? that way you don't have to keep track of wherever you wrote it down, and you get big nerd-points too.


and congratulations on the pr!

Mike said...

I could write a cron job (honest, I could!), but I chose instead to stick the information in every relevant nook and cranny I could think of in my Palm Pilot.