This Post Has Cat Hair All Over It

My roommate moved out to go to grad school in Texas. This means that my cat now feels it is safe for her to leave my room during daylight hours. She comes hopping down the stairs as soon as I come home because she is hungry and has eaten all her food. It is her belief that if she is cute enough I will feed her before the designated time; thus far that has proven to be false, but she persists in her efforts. She is a fat cow and would eat until she burst if I ever filled her auto-feeder. Thus, she attacks me whenever I try to use my computer. Her favorite is to try and rub her face on my hands as I type on the keyboard; this is evidently nearly as good as me actually petting her. Also, my cat sheds like she's trying to win some kind of international competition that I was previously unaware of; I hope that she is winning.

I was trying to quickly cover AJ's chair with this plastic bag on Wednesday when I heard Travis chuckling. I looked up and saw AJ calmly watching me struggle with the too small bag. "How long have you been there?" I asked. "Long enough." Long enough indeed, I am a huge dork some (all) of the time. Well played, AJ, well played.



Don't ruin the magic!

This is what happened this afternoon when Bryan and I were left alone in the office for our lunch hour. I cannot watch it without laughing.


Oh, and an update on our word tax: we collected $3.35 at 5 cents per utterance of the word "Crazy." Next week's word is going to be "like."


A few weeks ago, AJ was going to engage in a challenge: 52 Dates in 52 Weeks. It sounded impressive and I was considering joining him in participating. So I made a profile on a free online dating site and looked around, which was what AJ was doing for his challenge. I decided not to do the challenge, mostly because I didn't think I could come even close to succeeding. However, I did message a few people and end up going on a date. It was this evening and I would say it went OK. We went to Simon's and AJ did not stalk me like he threatened to. The food was good, but she seemed super nervous.


Hobby Hoedown: I've been clearing some blackberry bushes on the back corner of my property. There is a rusty old swing set buried underneath them so it is slow going and I have no idea what I will do with the swing set pieces when I am done; they are quite unusable.

I've been playing Heroes of Might and Magic, mostly as the Necromancers because I love zombies.

The Pokemon challenge is moving along slowly, I'm training up a dark pokemon for funzies. I believe I'm up to 80 pokemon (of 256 *cringe*) and have 10 of the 16 badges

I'm rereading the Harry Potter books. Well, actually I'm rereading the first three then just reading the exciting parts of the last four. Cheating, I know. I'm on book two right now, which is definitely the winner of the "What children's book title could most easily sound super dirty?" question: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.


Story Time: The Story of My Parents' Marriage

To this day none of them will admit which of them did it. It's as though they all four took a solemn vow in the back of that station wagon as they drank copious amounts of booze, to never, EVER reveal which of them did it.

What is "it" you ask? Either my Uncle Larry (my dad's older brother), Uncle Jim (dad's brother in law), or Brian (his college roommate) wrote the word Why on my father's left shoe and Me? on his right shoe. We are fairly certain that it was not Brian because he is a math teacher in Shelton and we don't think he can spell that high. Anyway, when my parents knelt towards the end of the wedding ceremony one half of the congregation chuckled in hushed amusement and the other gasped in horror.

Now, my grandmother would likely have murdered her new son-in-law and all his kinfolk if it had not been for the SIX CASES of champagne that had been purchased for the reception. Uncle Larry made certain that no one's glass was ever empty. Everyone was drunk. It was THE party of 1985. Even my elderly great-grandparents. My Great Uncle Glen, who has never been heard to utter more than five words at a time, was found passed out in a hallway with a lampshade on his head.

The only sober person was my mother, mainly because she was under 21 and would be driving them to their honeymoon in Oregon. Thus, when the time came, they helped my father into the car where he promptly fell asleep in the passenger seat. Now, my mother has this issue with deciding which direction of the freeway she should be getting on. To this day she will have to ask my dad or whoever is navigating, "Do I want to go North or South?" Only for this trip her navigator was sleeping off a God's Own Drunk. Dad woke up from his little nap just south of Seattle where he promptly informed my mother that she was driving them the wrong way. They arrived safe and sound, though somewhat later than anticipated, at the hotel in Oregon that night.

The Day That REFUSED To Quit Being Awesome

I feel like this exchange I had with Malo on Wednesday is a perfect preface for today's blog post:

“…and you just ate that blue one. What if that blue jolly rancher was one of the other jolly rancher’s mother? What if by watching his mother die you’ve activated his latent mutant powers and he is now the master of magnetism, capable of shooting a coin through your brain???”

“You know what’s sad? Our Pokemon discussion at lunch is no longer the weirdest conversation for the day.”

Part One: Pop CocksNo, that is not an unfortunate typo. Our boss brought a bag of candy back from an event the night before and include were these mini-size bags of Pop Rocks.

Now, as you may or may not have noticed, these bags look very much like condom packets. This is undoubtedly what gave Malo the brilliant "billion dollar" idea to create and sell "Pop Rock Condoms" or Pop Cocks, as we would market them.

None of us doubted that this amazing invention would sell well, first in Seattle at a variety of events (most notably the Erotic Art Show) were we could have a table or perhaps a booth. AJ even thought of a 2.0 concept: Glow in the Dark Pop Cocks!

However, I'm sure some of you more practical readers are already wondering how a group of non-scientific persons are going to create this marvelous product, get it passed by the FDA, and then mass produced. Well, we had that same worry, particularly about the FDA part. So, what we decided was to create instead was a glue/lubricant (or glube, if you will) that could be applied to the exterior of a condom that the Pop Rocks would then stick to. At our booth we would sell condoms, Pop Rocks, and our specially made glube; we would also have bananas on hand to perform demonstrations.

If any venture capitalists are interested in providing us with some start up capital, please comment below; I'm certain Pop Cocks will soon be a household name.

Part Two: The Word TaxAJ frequently replies to our advice with, "What do you expect? I'm a crazy person!" The rest of us are often guilty of starting stories with, "Do you want to know what's crazy?" or when telling a punch line saying, "And the crazy part is..." Thus, it was decided by the group (or possibly declared by me) that there would be a 5 cent tax on the word "crazy."

Proceeds from the word tax go towards a fund that shall provide for a boxen of donuts once sufficient funds have been gathered to purchase said boxen.

When asked why the tax had been implemented and whether or not it applied to synonyms, I replied that synonyms were exempt from the tax because the purpose was not to eliminate things that are crazy (far from it!), I simply wanted to elevate the vocabulary usage in our department. Thus, many things were said to be "insane," "weird," "preposterous," and so on.

Then they asked what would become of the tax once we had been trained not to say "crazy" anymore. I told them that I would select a new overused word and transfer the tax to that word and "crazy" would once again be free. Bryan asked why and it was Malo who answered in a stuffy British accent that we would all be speaking like perfectly dignified gentlemen sipping tea and saying "pip, pip, cheerio guvnor!"

I laughed and excitedly shouted, "Yes! Exactly! I've always wanted British co-workers, but since I've never had any I've decided to slowly make all of you British!"

We made about 50 cents today.

Part Three: My Awesome Dance Moves

I cannot dance. At all. When dancing I do the White Man Shuffle because I like to participate. I believe I mentioned my attempts to duplicate the AJ Dance in a previous post, well AJ was trying out some new moves today like the Shopping Cart, the Hitch Hiker, and other, similar ridiculous joke-dances. However, he wanted to know what he looked like while doing these dances so he asked someone of similar dancing ability to show him what he danced like. I was happy to oblige.

Several hilarious, sadly video-free (they were too busy trying not to wet themselves) minutes later, they were requesting dances that AJ hadn't even been doing just to see what I would do.

Part Four: AJ Throws Water On Me

Leftover from a prank that took place several years ago, Malo and Bryan have a bag of Pop-Its, the small, harmless fireworks that make a loud SNAP sound when you throw them against a hard surface. Occasionally, they will randomly throw one, usually to startle AJ because he has the funniest reaction when frightened (also, he is the easiest to frighten). Today, AJ had his steel water bottle in hand when a Pop-It was thrown. I was standing right in front of AJ so when he spazzed out the contents of his water bottle wound up almost entirely on my shirt. I was fairly drenched and laughing hysterically. I didn't bother changing my shirt or anything, but I did stay in our department until I dried off.

Story Time: The "Pitchfork Fishing" Story


Pretty much all of today's post was Story Time, so I'll make this a short one.

My dad and uncle grew up before the Environment was discovered. They were also quite poor and tended to get pretty sick of eating Spam. Thus, when the salmon were running in Blackjack Creek they would take a pitchfork down to the creek, climb down underneath Lund Ave bridge and spear them some salmon. They would then carry the fish and pitchfork back home, smiling brightly because they knew there would be no Spam tonight!

Well, as you can imagine they caught some real whoppers and people, sometimes including police officers, would be driving by, slow down, and ask them where they caught those beautiful fish. "Blackjack Creek," they would truthfully reply.  After a few times of being asked, "where are your poles, boys?" and having to quickly come up with a lie like, "uhhhh...we left them down at the creek so we don't have to carry them back tomorrow!" they decided to be a little less conspicuous and leave the pitchfork at the creek as well as their imaginary fishing poles.