Well it's been three months, I think it might be time to take down my previous rant. It's been a weird couple of months for me. There's been a lot of new things to be coupled with the same old things. Now it's time to share.
I guess the strangest thing that has happened is that for the most part I have rejoined the realm of the living, as some people like to consider you day-workers. Since April 6, 2009 I no long work the overnight shift. With the exception of two Friday nights now, and tonight as well, but what matters is that I now see the sun, which is good. In the last week or so of working nights I noticed that seven years of the night shift has made me awfully pasty. Not really sure what that is all about, but apparently lack of direct sunlight makes it hard for someone to get a tan.
Here are some things I learned in my first three weeks of working during the day:
- 5:30 AM is a god-awful time for someone to be woken up. Who in their right mind willingly subjects themselves to this?
- If you don't have be awake at a specific time the following day, it might be a good idea to shut the alarm on your phone off. This prevents you from unneccessarily awaking at the aforementioned god-awful time of 5:30AM.
- Traffic sucks.
- Traffic really, really sucks.
- If you are awake during the day, you don't have free nights and weekends to call every number at 10AM. This could lead severe overages in your minutes allowance, which in turn leads to a much larger bill. Something I learned today when I opened my cell phone bill.
Onto traffic. I have this urge to start a petition to make rubber-necking punishable by death. Seriously people, yes there is a disabled vehicle or an accident on the side of the road. There is NO reason for it to impede my travel, and those who cause it to, should be killed.
With my girlfriend down in Maryland for the next three months, we take turns visiting the other. It wasn't so bad the first two months of the traveling weren't so bad. I would leave work Friday morning at 7AM and get to her apartment around 10AM. Three hours not so bad. Coming home wouldn't be so bad either, since I would leave around noon or so that I could get home and take a nap before I went to work at 11PM.
However last weekend was the first time I had to go down on a Friday afternoon. I got on the New Jersey Turnpike at Interchange 10, sat in traffic until just after Interchange 8. Only took about 20 minutes, not too bad I thought. That's where I was wrong, because about 3 miles later I hit more traffic due to a car fire at Interchange 1 (that's almost 100 miles away). I rerouted myself at Interchange 7A to take 195 West to 295 South and take that directly to the Delaware Memorial Bridge, also this turned out to be a mistake because I managed to sit in another 30 miles or so of bumper to bumper traffic.
A three hour trip took me about 4 and a half hours. Bob got to Maryland in a rather surly mood.
Saturday we decided to go Washington, DC for the day, and my luck with traffic continued to be horrible. Sat in traffic for about 1 hour (just to go about 3 miles). Why was there traffic? No clue, we got moving after about 3 miles with no sight of an accident or construction. It was ridiculous.
Sunday afternoon I hung out at her apartment until about 6PM, since I didn't have to work until the next morning, figuring I would get home around 9PM or so. Could I be any more wrong in that guess? I think not. I sat in 2 hours of traffic just getting to the Delaware Memorial Bridge. That usually takes 45 minutes or so. Then sat in another 2 hours of traffic on the Turnpike again from between Interchanges 4 & 5 until Interchange 8A. I didn't get home until 11pm.
Traffic truly, truly blows.
Moving on though, in one stretch of 24 hours I had two streaks snapped. For 16 years I had not vomitted. I could proudly claim that I was "Vomit Free Since '93!" Thursday March 26, 2009 will be a day I wish never happened. I worked Wednesday night, and when I got home I came down with a bad case of diarrhea. Let me tell you it's not fun having the runs when you are trying to sleep. Every hour or so I would wake up, run to the bathroom, then go back and fight to fall asleep. Finally around 3PM I just gave up. I took an Immodium and decided to take a shower. While in the shower I started to feel like I was about to throw up, and quickly jumped out and proceeded to vomit like crazy. My 16 year streak ended... and it's not like I really had anything to throw up but the water I had just drank.
I also came very close to calling out from work, but decided against it, since I wanted to go see my girlfriend the next morning, and I would feel guilty not going to work, yet still feel well enough to go down to Maryland. The next morning as I am driving along I get caught doing 87 mph in a 65 mph zone, and get a ticket. There goes another 7 year streak, since I had not gotten a ticket since I was 19 years old. At least the State Trooper was nice enough to drop it down to 79 in a 65 which saved me 2 points and $100.00 at least.
But hey, on the bright side I didn't sit in traffic that weekend.
I've also decided I kinda like Twitter. I don't really "tweet" a whole hell of a lot, mostly because I don't think people people really care what I am doing every second, and I don't really have many followers anyway, but when I do think of something to "tweet" I usually do. I also activated my phone for it, so it was fun to be sitting in traffic last Sunday and texted my "tweet" about "Rubbernecking should be punishable by death."
So if anyone reading this, also has Twitter, or decides to sign up for it, you could follow me by going HERE and clicking the follow link. Then you will be subjected to the random thoughts that strike me. Which sometimes even scare me.
Also if several people here sign up for Twitter I might try to find a way to add our feeds to this site, which might be fun to do. It was an idea I had a long time ago when the shoutbox was getting spammed, but then threw it away when I got the Human Verification Script installed.
Some other random thoughts:
- I think the internet community should really retire the "LOL". It's overused and not really true. I could probably count on both hands the number of times that I have typed "LOL" and actually been Lauging Out Loud. Most of the time I laugh quietly to myself. As such I agree with Dmitri Martin, and have started to use LQTM whenever necessary.
- "The Karate Kid" is a movie I used to hate. I don't know why I hated it, but recently while on Facebook and staring at the "What's On Your Mind?" box, the words "Sweep the leg!" popped into my head, and I was unable to dislodge them for quite a while. Which made me go out and by "The Karate Kid" and watch it again. I actually like that movie now.
- The LivingSocial Pick Your Five Application is fun. I just wish they could expand it to Pick Your Ten sometimes, since some of these things really require a lot of though to pare down to just 5. It got to the point where I actually considered getting a pad out and weighing the pros and cons of two different options for number 5 on the list.
- I think I may have shocked Greg by uploading the comic within 8 hours of him telling me there was a new one waiting, AND writing a new newspost.
So anyway, if you have made it this far into the newspost I guess I should apologize to everyone (except Greg, since I refuse to do that) for my lack of updates to the site of late. There have been times where I was having computer problems, but at other times I was just way too lazy to take the 10-20 minutes it takes to upload the comic.
I'm going to try to improve upon that, but I refuse to make promises.
Also it should be noted that it's playoffs time. So I must say this, LET'S GO RANGERS!!! One more win and we knock the Capitals out of the playoffs, and I surely hope the Rangers rebound to play a better game Sunday afternoon after last nights dismal display. I was watching that game and to me it seemed that I was watching the Capitals play the Devils or something. It was like Capital shot = Capital goal.
Also I want to know one thing. How come every time I go to a sporting event I always get stuck sitting next to a drunk asshole who irritates the ever loving shit out of me? I went to a Rangers game in March and the guy next to me was so annoying I didn't really enjoy the game as much as I should have. It's irritating as all hell.
And I really wish I was wearing my Rangers jersey last weekend on the train to Washington, since some Capitals fans were on the train going to the game and they were badmouthing the Rangers. Even after losing Game 1 to a team they should sweep (at least according to the Capitals Fans) they still decided to talk shit. I didn't get to watch the game, nor did I want to find out who won or lost since my brother DVRed it for me, it was pretty obvious when I got on the train to go back and all the Caps fans were quiet. I would have loved to debate them on why the Rangers are better than they think, but my girlfriend didn't want me to get my ass kicked by a bunch of upset Capitals fans... I just wish I had the jersey to gloat with...
I am really fighting the urge to not get political in this newspost, so I might want to end it here, before I go ahead and get political.
So this is the end of the newspost, which seems like a logical place to stop... |
