2005-07-24

Shannon wakes me up around 4 or 5 in the morning, my sleep apnea noise is bugging her, so I grab my pillow and head out to the couch, stopping for some O.J. along the way. It's about 10 o'clock when Shannon emerges from the bedroom to sit on top of me/wake me up. In the back of my mind, I'm thinking "we should go to church", but I don't say anything because I don't really want to go. Shannon never says anything about it either, so I guess she didn't really want to either. What good Christians we are!

I pester Shannon about making the chocolate chip cookies that she was planning to make for our company that never showed up yesterday, as I'm hungry. While she gets to work on that, I wander into the office and peel about a month and half worth of days off of my page a day calendar. I had sworn off ever buying page a day calendars a long time ago as I'm just too lazy to attend to them every day [pathetic I know] but people keep giving them to me as gifts. My current calendar is "The Onion: AD NAUSEAM" which I got from Jeff for Christmas and/or my birthday. It's actually rather amusing. Anyhow, what's motivated me to catch up with it this morning is that I was planning on logging the day's activities on the back of the peel offs so I can accurately reflect what is going on in my blog later on.

While I sit on the couch reading through the various pages, Shannon comes in and turns on the non-Eddie Murphy, old-timey version of "Doctor Doolittle". I half watch it with her until they bring out some sort of 2 headed llama, and then I decide that the movie is just too lame to bother with. So I log onto UltimateBet for some more free poker. I horribly at first, losing all of my free chips rather quickly. I get replenished for free and play a little more smartly with my new stack and end up doing about as well as I have the previous few days. While I play, I continue to half concentrate on Doolittle, which really is an awful movie in my estimation. The songs are terrible, the plot rambles on endlessly and veers off in the most random directions, and then you're presented with an ending that provides no closure whatsoever. I don't know if the were setting it up for a sequel [did they do that in the old days?] or just gave up or what.

Movie over and poker bug scratched for now, I start playing some Pikmin 2 while Shannon gets ready to go out. I don't play for long, as Shannon gets on my case that we have to be ready to go so we can make it our friends' house before the "Pampered Chef" party that is being held there is supposed to begin. I pause my game and then jump the shower. Amidst getting ready, I sit down at the computer to check my e-mail and for any new woot.com or ytmnd.com activity.

Woot.com is a daily deal site, the sell one item every day at a deeply discounted price. Occasionally you find something interesting/worth buying. Ytmnd.com ["You're The Man Now Dog" - spoken by Sean Connery in "Finding Forrester"] is an amusing website. You should go check it out. It consists of various sub sites that do fun stuff with various images and sound bytes that usually relate to whatever's hot in pop culture today or whatever themed fad is popular on ytmnd.com. [NOTE: Do NOT go there if you do not want the new Harry Potter book spoiled]. It's hard described what goes on there exactly; you just have to check it out for yourself. Some fun ytmnd links:
http://yourethemannowdog.ytmnd.com/
http://sexmap.ytmnd.com/
http://vaderfortune.ytmnd.com/
http://vadercoaster.ytmnd.com/
http://tcruiseko.ytmnd.com/

Moving right along, we're both finally ready to go so we head on over to Cassie and Corey's house. I wasn't too thrilled about going, and I was trying to remember why I had agreed to in the first place. I think was interested in the kitchen gadgetry, but when it comes down to it, I wasn't really comfortable with the idea of spending the afternoon with a bunch of strange women. And we don't really need any new kitchen gadgetry. The stuff that Pampered Chef sells is pretty expensive, you can buy the same quality stuff [if not better] at a Bed Bath and Beyond [which sends out several handy 20% off coupons every month]. Luckily for me, Cassie's husband Corey was there.

I don't know Corey so well; we've only hung out a few times and always with our significant others. He and his friend Dan were hanging out in the basement playing darts and drinking some O.J. and rum concoctions. Not having anything else to do, I joined in the drinking and had about 5 or 6 tall glasses of the rum mixture, getting a fairly decent buzz on while bullshitting with the guys. They were admittedly not very good at darts, so the game they had going on when I arrived never really ended over the course of the next few hours. Corey's a nice guy; I always surprise myself when I remember that he's a few years younger than we are. And his friend Dan is a pretty cool dude too.

So while drinking and watching them play, I was also assaulted by their dog, Reggie. Reggie is an 8 month old lab-golden retriever mix, and he is a pretty big dog already. He weighs in at 80 pounds, and the vet says he's probably going to get a bit bigger, gaining another few inches in height and another 40 or 50 pounds. Being as young a dog as he is, Reggie is hyper and likes to do all of the normal puppy stuff like jumping up and play biting and licking and slobbering etc. The only problem with this is that since he's a really big dog already, it's a bit much to take as you really get covered in drool and knocked around when he plays with you. Corey kept him in line for the most part with a water spray bottle. He seems like a pretty good dog that will be fine in few years when he gets to that age where dogs mellow out.

The one problem I had being in the basement with the dog was that my allergies began to kick up over the course of the afternoon. Nothing too bad, certainly not as bad as it would have been if they had cats, but enough to make me sneeze with some regularity.

Eventually the party up stairs was wrapping up, as Shannon was beginning to make excursions into the basement to smuggle us snacks and laugh at how "drunk" I was. Whatever. At some point, Corey insisted we stay over for dinner, and since I was having a good time [and I'm not one to turn down free anything] we agreed. We had some steaks, fries, green beans and corn on the cob. After dinner we went into the living room where I quickly fell asleep from a combination of feeling full, still a little buzzed, and congested from my allergies.

I was woken up and we left Cassie and Corey's around 7:00. I felt kind of funky from my allergies and the drinking, so I wanted to go home. But Shannon wanted to go by her parent’s house for a bit first, so we headed over that way. She hadn't seen her family in a while since they've been vacationing on their boat, so I didn't put up a big fuss. Along the way, I remembered that I had to still collect monies from Tom, and since I hadn’t heard from him and his place was on the way, I gave him a call. He was on his way to the movies, and I was just a tad upset that he hadn't tried to contact me at all during the day, as there was now no way that I was going to get the monies today. He tried to delay getting me the money till Thursday, but I reminded him that my dad needed this money about 3 weeks ago, and in the end he grudgingly agreed to drop it by our apartment tomorrow.

We get to Shannon's parent's house and say hello to everyone, and then plop down on the couch while they watch a rerun of "Cold Case". Being around their dog, Bear Bear, doesn't do much to help my allergies, so I'm hoping we don't stay long once the show is over. Her parents and sister have some dinner while watching the show, and I grab a small bowl of baked beans for "dessert". With the show almost over, her dad heads out to go down to the Tap Room, but before he does, I give him a few mortar fireworks that I had promised him a couple of weeks ago. I head back inside to get Shannon as "Cold Case" is now over, and she gets up to go. Progress is stalled, however as she and her mom pick this time to have a half hour conversation in front of the door about god knows what. Defeated, I go back to the couch and watch some TV movie about Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis until they finish. We head for home about 9:30.

We get home, and I set the TiVo to record the west coast showing of the Martin and Lewis thing, and then get back to my paused game of Pikmin. I playing until I can get to a point where I can save, and then it's time to head for bed. Just as I get settled in bed, Shannon comes in the room and decides that it's time pull off all of the sheets and fluff the mattress pad. So I crankily help her with that, and jump into bed and go to sleep.