Mild Amusement

I recently realized that I use some variation of "my friend" quite a bit when writing. I don't refer to people by name, even when the whole point of the post is to describe that particular person. Sure, I refer to my brother and sister plenty of times, but unless you've actually met them, you don't know their names. Most of the time, the names themselves don't really matter, anyway. The humor of the stories is always in the situation or in the words that were said. I'm not going to lie, there are times when including the name would add some juicy bit of gossip to the mix. If a particular story involves a woman I'm romantically interested in or a person I don't particularly care for, it suddenly takes on a little  je ne sais quois . I'll bet it would add an extra bit of humor here and there, but it's not worth it. I'm not trying to feed the rumor mill, and I'm giving you permission to hit me upside the head if I start that. Besid...

I don't quite remember when it happened, but sometime earlier this year, I resolved to write blog posts a little more regularly than last year. It's not like I was neglecting this blog, but I pretty much did it haphazardly last year. For example, I wrote a grand total of 2 posts in August of 2010, but I wrote 8 of them in February. At some point, I figured it couldn't hurt to even it out a little. Also, a fairly well-known programmer claims that it's going to make me awesome to stick to a schedule. Anyhow, I've resolved to write at least one blog post per week. I can't save them up or just decide that I don't want to write that week. Nope, I am holding myself accountable for at least one post per week. Incidentally, I am granting you all permission to hit me if I don't stick to this schedule, to put more skin in the game. Now, that's nice and all, but the point of my writing is to be amusing. I may not amuse everybody with every single post (the...

The other day at work, I was talking with a buddy of mine as we were walking to the kitchen area.  I had to get some water, and he had to grab his lunch, so we were just catching up.  When we walked in, though, we immediately noticed a mess in the sink.  There was water all over the place, and someone had decided that it was okay to just leave it like that. I grumbled, and my buddy shook his head in disapproval.  However, I needed to use that sink, so I cleaned it up a bit.  It's not like it was hard: all I had to do was grab paper towels and wipe the counter a few times.  Of course, that made me even more annoyed, because the person who made the mess could have easily done the same. The worst part of it, though, was that someone had used the pop up " safety cone ."  If you've never seen one of these things, the link in the last sentence is probably a good place to start.  If you're too lazy to click on the link, it's a collapsible c...

My parents got me a watch for my birthday, and I finally got around to getting it fitted to my wrist last weekend. It's a decent looking watch, so I figured I'd start using it every day.  In fact, as soon as I got it fitted, I put it on and walked out of the store with the watch planted firmly on my wrist. Now, I haven't worn a watch in a long time.  I used to have one that I liked, but the battery went dead on it.  I got lazy about replacing it for a little while, and shortly thereafter, I had grown accustomed to using my cell phone to tell the time.  In fact, I use my cell phone as an alarm clock, as well, so I really don't need any other devices to tell time.  It's not that I have anything against wearing a watch, it's just not a habit for me at this point. So, the very next day, I got up to go to work, and went about my usual routine.  Note, my usual routine doesn't involve "put on a watch," so I went about my business and completely forgot...

I'm old school enough that I tend to avoid using force against women.  I'm not generally a fan of force/violence in every day situations anyway, but it's less of an option in my mind when the other person lacks a Y chromosome.  Still, I think I may have been tricked into using force against the fairer sex.  Now before I get vilified, let me explain. I was in Disneyland with a Mild Ex, and we were walking from one ride to the next.  There were a bunch of people around, as usual, and we were navigating the crowds.  There was a group of rowdy teenagers off to our right, and we were trying to avoid them by walking around them.  However, one of the guys was being sillier than the rest, and he was literally backing into us.  So, I put out a hand to make sure he didn't crash into us, and gave him a light push in the back to make sure he knew there were people behind him. And that's when I felt a bra strap. Yup, that "dude" was actually a girl.  No...

The company I work for is looking to lay people off later this year. It's a stressful time for everyone involved, and no one quite knows what's going to happen. People are understandably worried, but my take is that I can't control it, so I'm not going to spend time worrying about it. Yes, I know that I could lose my job. But all I can do is do my job, and hopefully do it well. After that, I'll let the chips fall where they may. In fact, if I start getting too caught up in all of this, I give you permission to smack me to keep me honest about it all. However, this attitude, combined with my natural smart ass tendencies, means that I tend to laugh at things that might not seem so funny to others. For example, we get email updates about news items pertinent to the company, and the most recent one had the following two (paraphrased) headlines right after each other: "Company well positioned for future, doing well" and "Company needs to restructure...

A while back, my friend talked me into running the Kaiser Half Marathon . There was actually a group of us that decided to run that race, so we'd all been fairly diligent about training. I had to skip out on a 10 mile run a couple of weeks before the actual race, but I'd been pretty good up to that point. All in all, I felt like I was doing a halfway decent job of training, so I was shooting for 2 hours or less. And seeing as how that was roughly the midpoint between my San Jose time and my Vegas time, it seemed like a reasonable goal. On the morning of the race, I got up early (side note: why can't there ever be a race that starts at 10AM or something?) and got all ready to go. I had opted for picking up my race packet that morning, so I actually had to be there even earlier than most people. Given that, I figured I'd skip breakfast at the house and grab a banana or bagel somewhere near the start line. They generally have something for the participants, and it...

A friend of mine recently posted a Facebook status message that said, "if you like it, put a ring on it, don't be mad once you see he want it ... just trying to be subtle." I get that she was trying to be cute about it by quoting a Beyonce song (I'm not linking to the music video because I think it's goofy - Beyonce spends half the time waddling like a duck). But really now? Normally, a well placed smiley can let you get away with all sorts of ridiculousness because you can play it off like you're joking. In this case, not even one of those smileys with the tongue sticking out could save that comment. If you said that sort of thing out loud in the company of two or three people, you'd probably get at least one odd look. Heck, if I was one of those people, I'd give you two stink eyes just to make a point. I have no problem with you wanting more out of a relationship, but that's something you work out with the other half (if that ratio is a...