It’s definitely Monday
Posted by Dubbayoo | Filed under General, Work
First, the alarm goes off at 5:20AM. I decide to hit snooze and skip the morning workout. Unfortunately, I didn’t hit snooze. I hit off instead. Next thing you know it’s 7:00AM and I need to be out the door in 15 minutes. Thanks to a quick shower and light traffic I’m only 10 minutes late.
I get to work only to find out we haven’t been getting email since about 5pm Sunday. A not-so-quick investigation reveals the BadMail directory has used up the remaining 3GB of free space on the server. I cuss the previous Admin’s partitioning choices then install a script to clean the directory out every Sunday at 9PM. Everything was back to normal after 4-5 hours. It’s really hard to navigate a server when it doesn’t have any free space.
Oh well…job security.
I’m such a wimp sometimes
Posted by Dubbayoo | Filed under Amore & Vita, General
I’m watching this reality show with John Force, NHRA guy. He grew up poor bout is absolutely loaded now and has 3 teenage daughters. They are just spoiled rotton and he’s goin nuts about it. They’ve got drawers full of $200 sunglasses and $1,000 monthly credit card bills that they don’t even pay. They seem to have no concept of the value of a dollar at all. He reaches his wit’s end and takes them to see the very same trailer home he grew up in. On the way there the girls are flipping through catalogs and whining about spring break trips to Cabo or somewhere.
They get to the trailer and the current owner lets ‘em all in (no doubt pre-arranged but such is reality tv). John is talking about all the simple things they got by on and he’s getting all teary-eyed. He really seems like a great guy. I start thinking about my dad raising us 2 kids on a military salary. I’m sure money but had to be tight but if we were poor I never had a clue. He made a lot of our furniture himself, even some of the toys I had. I’ve always said when my parents pass on I don’t want to be left money or their house. The only thing I want is some of my dad’s old military uniforms and a wooden truck that he made for me when I was a small boy. It has a handle on top to steer the wheels. I’m pretty sure I can picture where it is in the garage now. I remember him taking a part-time job at Sears to make extra cash when he was a fucking Lieutenant Ccolonel.
Next thing you know I am sitting on the bed crying like a newborn baby. I mean like heaving crying too. I’m calling my dad right now. Call yours.
Edit – Actually there is one more thing I want. My dad still has a ’63 Chevy Impala, the first car he ever bought. It’s older than me and it still runs. I want to restore that.
Can’t think of a neat title
Posted by Dubbayoo | Filed under Amore & Vita, General
My Lil Belle Bottom…
Ya gotta just luv her sometimes. Friday she’s whining about having to go out with her coworkers because there’s potentially some people who will be there that she’d rather not have to deal with if possible. I convince her to go because she’s too young to be sitting at home alone on a Friday night. There will be plenty of time for that later. Against my advice she goes for the skirt (with thigh slit) and heels; a decision which will haunt her later on.
I ask her to call me when she gets home if at all possible. Her friends have a habit of letting her drive home a bit too tipsy for my taste so I usually worry. When she does call I can tell within 3-4 words how inebriated she is. A few times I have been absolutely furious when she calls on the way home and it’s pretty clear she would fail a sobriety test.
Anyway, fast forward to 1:20AM Saturday morning and the phone rings. It was another sweltering night that finds me laying in my own wet spot. Reaching for the phone is just the excuse I need to move to the other side of the bed and out of the wet spot.
Belle has made it home safe and sound….sort of. She left her phone and purse in her coworkers car so she had to drive to a pay phone to tell me she got home okay. I appreciated that even more when she tells me that not only is she standing in the pouring rain shelling out quarter after quarter to make this long-distance call; she has tripped and fallen on the way to the phone booth so she is bleeding in several places.
I tried to call her back but it seems my VOIP didn’t like the payphone because it didn’t ring. She then tries to call me collect and that fails too so she pumps in a few more quarters and calls back. This girl has a future with the Postal Service because the mail would clearly get thru on her watch.
Her brave efforts to ease this old man’s mind inspires a lil twist on some Donna Summer lyrics:
She works hard for her honey
So hard for you, honey
She works hard for her honey
So you better treat her right
Make that meal a Supersize combo, chief!
Posted by Dubbayoo | Filed under General, Work
I feel good…da na na na na na na
like I knew that I would…da na na na na na na
I feel nice…da na na na na na na
like sugar and spice…da na na na na na na
So August 10th is my 2 year anniversary at work. Technically, it was May 10th but they don’t count the 3-month probationary period. Friday my boss came in to tell me what my raise would be for the coming year. I was expecting about the same dollar amount as last year and to my surprise it was DOUBLE that amount! Yes, Vriginia…there is a Homey Claus. Now my crack habit can continue undisturbed for at least another year. I’m really curious to see what this year’s bonus and profit-sharing will be.
I’m still trying to get back to what I was making during the dotcom heyday and this is a big step toward that. Although I love my job I’m not sure how much closer I’ll get staying here. Surely I’ll continue to get annual raises but eventually my salary demands will outstrip what the position is worth my employers paying. My skillset already exceeds what I earn by another $12-15K in my opinion but since I don’t use all those skills now I can justify them not compensationg me for them. We’ll see what happens but probably another year or so and it’ll be time to jump ship and swim for a bigger one.
What a weekend
Posted by Dubbayoo | Filed under General, Sports, Uncategorized
First off SoCal’s Floyd Landis whupped all manner of stinky French buttocks at the Tour de France. This makes 11 of the last 23 years that we arrogant Americans have stolen their beloved event. Meanwhile the French haven’t even had a guy on the podium since Laurent Fignon in 1989. No wonder they hate us. We should have let Germany have the place in WWII. Yessiree, American cycling in the post-Armstrong era is in good stead with Floyd, Levi Leipheimer, Dave Z, Tom Danielson, and big George Hincapie. We just need a few guys in that 20-25 age group like Tyler Farrar to start showing themselves and we’ll be set for the next decade.
It’s like Africa hot here and has been all weekend. Weather.com says it’s 85° and feels like 93°. Now understand something. I’m from Atlanta where it’s 85° or more everyday from April thru October. An 85° day isn’t even hot enough for an Atlantan to talk about…unless you don’t have A/C. Here in Los Angeles few homes near the water have A/C, much less apartments. Basically the heat comes in the apt and there’s no way to get it back out so it’s even hotter inside than it is outside. Fans, which we have in copious quantity only do their job when you’re directly in the line of fire. Everytime I got up to do anything I immediately burst into a sweat. I refuse to pay $600 for a portable air conditioner than I would only use 3-4 weeks a year. So I shall continue to suffer. Pretty sad to think I couldn’t wait to get back to work today just so I could be in an air conditioned room.
On a positive note we finally got a brief thunderstorm. Thunderstorms are the SoCal equivalent of snow; they only happen 2-3 times a year. It’s the closest thing to a change of season that we have. There is an old joke that the four seasons of California are Fire, Earthquake, Mudslide and Riot. In actuality they are Day, Night and Thunderstorm.
Monthly Funnies
Posted by Dubbayoo | Filed under General, Jokes
Once again, The Washington Post has published the winning submissions to it’s yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.
The winners are:
1. Coffee (n.) the person upon whom one coughs.
2. Flabbergasted (adj.) appalled over how much weight you have gained.
3. Abdicate (v.) to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
4. Esplanade (v.) to attempt an explanation while drunk.
5. Willy-nilly (adj.) impotent.
6. Negligent (adj.) describes a condition in which you absent-mindedly
answer the door in your nightgown.
7. Lymph (v.) to walk with a lisp.
8. Gargoyle (n.) olive-flavored mouthwash.
9. Flatulence (n.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are
run over by a steamroller.
10. Balderdash (n.) a rapidly receding hairline.
11. Testicle (n.) a humorous question on an exam.
12. Rectitude (n.) the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
13. Pokemon (n) a Rastafarian proctologist.
14. Oyster (n.) a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.
15. Frisbeetarianism (n.) (back by popular demand): The belief that,
when you die, your Soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.
16. Circumvent (n.) an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.
Read the rest of this entry »
My worst day ever on a bike
Posted by Dubbayoo | Filed under General, Sports
I feel like I almost died today. At 10AM I went out for a 45 mile bike ride…not really a big deal as I do that most every Saturday and sometimes again on Sunday. Usually I eat two meals before I go out or have one and a fairly large dinner the night before to top off my glycogen stores. I also add a scoop of Accelerade to each of my water bottles for another 40gm carbs. I usually end the ride feeling like I could have done another 20 miles easily.
Well, today didn’t quite go as planned. First off it hit 91 degrees today. Second, I had next to nothing for dinner last night. This morning I had a bowl of cereal and some yogurt at 8:30am. The route is a simple out and back loop. The first 5 miles of the ride are mostly downhill which obviously means the last 5 miles are mostly uphill.
My heart rate is averaging about 160bpm, which means I’m 5 beats in the red as far as anerobic threshold goes; translation – if I don’t slow down I’m gonna be a hurtin puppy in about an hour. I try to stay around 155-160, although I get up to 180bpm on super steep hills. I got about 2/3 thru the ride and I’m realizing I’m not having a good day. I’m getting passed by ass hats I can normally stomp pedaling with one leg. No shit, a guy about 60 passed me like I was pedaling backwards. Granted this is California – the cycling mecca where the 60-year olds are still riding 200 miles a week. Even on the flat section it was all I could do to keep the pedals going around. I managed to draft behind two chicks for about 3-4 miles. They didn’t really have great asses however the Buttman was desperate. I would’ve glued myself to Richard Simmons’ onion if he had been there. Knowing the hills I have to climb to get back to my car I’m trying to conserve what nonexistent energy I have left.
The cardinal rule for fast recreational cyclsts (the leg shaving ones) is “never put your foot down during a ride….ever”. Don’t stop and rest…only punks get tired. Don’t click out of your pedals at stop lights…do a trackstand and balance yourself like a real man. Chicks dig the trackstand. Just call me Girlie Man because I stopped twice on the hilly section even though I made it up at a pretty good clip. After that I was just an absolute zombie. On the final 2 miles which are virtually flat I stopped about every quarter mile and slumped over my handlebars completely exhausted. I didn’t have the energy to do anything. One guy stopped to check on me and apparently I managed to say something legible. I was on the verge of hallucinating. I had to pee but there was nowhere private to go on this street. I seriously debated just peeing on myself standing right there.
On a few of those rest stops I think I actually went to sleep right there on my bicycle. The last time I stopped I was less than 150 yards from the finish. I could see the parking lot my car was in right in front of me and I was seriously contemplating thumbing a ride that little distance. You ever see the people wobbling like fools at the end of an Ironman or a marathon? I was about 5-10 minutes away from being that guy. I have no doubt whatsoever that if I had sat down on the curbside I would have been there til weeds grew around me or I got arrested for vagrancy…whichever came first. Carbs are good. God bless the carb.
