Mild Amusement

Every now and then, I attend a conference for work. For the most part, the point of attending these conferences is that I'm supposed to learn some stuff and meet some people. The proportion of those two things changes a bit depending on the conference, but that's the basic formula. Of course, there's also some amusing anecdotes thrown in every now and then. This is a tale of that last part. Recently, I had to attend a fairly large conference. I was warned in advance that there would be lots of people there, to the point where you had to go in with a plan lest you get sidetracked. I did my homework, so I mostly knew where to go and how to navigate the crowds. The one item that I left somewhat unsettled, however, was a meeting with a vendor we work with. We agreed on a time and a general area, but left it at that. Me being me, I arrived early to make sure I didn't miss the guy or keep him waiting. When I got there, though, I quickly realized that I was not going to be...

Planning for the Mild Wedding is in full swing, so the Mild Fiancée and I have been spending a good amount of our time working on various wedding tasks. As one friend of ours put it, wedding planning is an exercise in project management. There's a good number of tasks, but so long as you meter them out, things get done. Even better for me, the Mild Fiancée is a pretty good partner in crime for that sort of thing, so a good chunk of it has been surprisingly straight forward. That said, there have been a few amusing stories here and there as a result. I'm sure there will be a few more posts about it all once it has all passed, but one of my favorites involved the wedding invitations. We'd already sent out the Save the Date announcements by this point, so our loved ones knew about the relevant dates. However, once the invitations went out, we had to have a lot of the mechanisms in place (i.e., a wedding website, a functional RSVP mechanism, a registry). In this particular ...

It’s funny how reliant we are on the Internet. There are entire parts of my job that I haven’t bothered to memorize, because I simply don’t need to. Rather than memorizing which C# class lets me parse file names correctly, I can search for that sort of thing. Sure, there are some that I’ve learned through sheer repetition, but for the most part, I don't bother with information that I can find via Google. I say that because I found myself in an interesting predicament earlier today. I had a couple of hours to myself at a coffee shop, with the full intent of writing some blog posts and a story or two. Normally, I would dig through my email and my text messages for inspiration, since that tends to be a good source of humor. Alas, it was not meant to be this time around. I was at a coffee shop I’d never been to before, so I didn’t know what the protocol was for the Internet. I paid with a credit card, but the person behind the counter made no effort to give me any kind of rece...

As the Mild Fiancée will tell you, I'm the kind of person who reads labels and follows instructions. She's more likely to go off script when it comes to recipes , but I do as I'm told. I don't know if there's an ironclad defense for this, but it's served me well enough over the years. Well, as it turns out, reading labels can lead to hilarity. First, let's start with the infamous teaspoon incident. It has become lore in the Mild Fiancée and I's relationship, and I laugh about it every single time. The background for this particular story was that I was sick. I had a pretty nasty cold going, complete with the runny nose and sinus issues that plague me from time to time. The Mild Fiancée had some medicine in the cupboard, so she gave me some in the hopes that it'd help calm my symptoms. And I swear to you, I felt better within minutes. That stuff was magical. I was impressed by this magical elixir, to say the least. I immediately went about trying ...

Bread has always been a staple for me. We owned a bread machine in my house when I was growing up, so there was usually a loaf of bread somewhere around. It also played a prominent role in the infamous "mandatory" breakfast , so it's a part of the Mild Fiancée and I's lore, too. The Mild Fiancée likes to bake, as well, so we tend to have flour and eggs lying around the house. I help out where I can (I eat the bread, too, after all), but I'm by no means an expert. So, whenever she says that we need a certain ingredient for our bread, I tend to go along with it. That was the case when she suggested that we needed vital wheat gluten. Now, this is not something that I have ever shopped for before. I didn't really make bread, I certainly didn't make wheat bread, and I don't ever try to add gluten IN to the food. Still, we decided that we needed vital wheat gluten, so we set about to shopping for it. At one point, we decided to see if Amazon could deli...

As I've written about for the last few weeks, the Mild Fiancée and I traveled to Miami recently . We had some interesting moments getting checked in, but all in all, it was a good time. That was especially true for the Mild Fiancée. See, she was on vacation at the time. That meant that she was free to explore as she wanted. She found a bakery that had guava and cheese pastelitos  (that last word basically means "pastries"). We had Cuban sandwiches for dinner one night because she found a place that had good ones. Heck, she even took a SoulCycle class because there happened to be a gym offering those classes near the hotel. Of course, the beauty of this plan was that she had the freedom to explore. If she wanted to hang out at the beach or lounge by the pool instead, that was also an option. And she took up the pool option. I have the text messages to prove it. Better yet, because she went to the hotel pool more than once, she struck up a conversation with some of ...

The backstory for this post was that the Mild Fiancée and I were traveling to Miami. We'd thought ahead and packed some snacks (read: pizza), so things were already starting out well. We even managed to impress one of my coworkers in the process, drawing chuckles from all (read the previous post if you want the details). Alas, things were not going to be quite so perfect the whole time. When we arrived at the hotel, we strolled up to the counter and gave them the information for our reservation. I've done this a bunch of times, no big deal. They found our reservation, but then the guy behind the counter grabbed the phone and started talking to someone. I didn't think anything of it, and let him do his thing. It turns out he was trying to find a room with a really good view. That was awfully nice of him, so we chatted amongst ourselves as he went about his business. Eventually, he was satisfied that the room was up to snuff, so he put the phone down. The catch, however,...