By Your Powers Combined...

Before I had a blog, I used to whittle away the hours on a message board, conversing with all manner of nerds, geeks and shut-ins interesting people from all walks of life. The interaction with all these characters is what made it fun and kept me coming back, but it's a little harder to reproduce that kind of dynamic on a blog unless there's an active comments section. As it is, some people don't even read the comments. It's true! Because of this, and because fermicat gave me the idea, I'm just going to copy and paste my last comment and count it as a new post, but make just enough subtle changes that you'll have to read it all over again.

Yes, I've been lagging lately. Ever since I moved at the end of last sumer, time hasn't been my friend. It's not that I haven't done or seen anything worth noting all this time, it's just I never seem to have enough time to put it into words, and now there's too much to write about and I don't know where to start back up again. Here's what's been accumulating in the queue...

• We moved into the town house. I had a little story about moving day. That was last August, I think. The last time I posted on a "regular" basis. After that I had little time because...
  
  
• Mr. Schprock's arch-nemesis, Ms. Smith made the last few months of the year, right up to the holidays, a living hell. She actually made me feel sorry for Joe. Don't worry, things are back to the way they should be and I want to throw rocks at him again. But for a while there, I was conflicted.
  
  
• In October, we hired a new full-time employee, Amy. And Joe's been making the workplace awkward and creepy ever since. She's read the Joe-kus, so she knew what to expect.
  
  
• Meanwhile, yet another employee has been perfecting his...talent.
  
  
• In March, Christy came back up to visit Jose, and we went to the Olive Garden, where we talked about a previous time at the Olive Garden where we heard a father make a very unusual offer to his son...
  
  
• I found some more information on the Cannibal King song, that I thought I'd share against your will.
  
  
• Over 20 years later, Large Marge still frightens children. I have a story of how I inadvertently gave Brianna Claymation nightmares.
  
  
• At the beginning of April, I spoke with Trina, who as most of you know, fell through a roof and ended up with Sloth face. This one was supposed to serve as an announcement as to what happened to her and why she hadn't been posting, but it turns out she actually managed to TYPE OUT A LONG-ASS POST USING ONE FINGER before I even put this one up. And I DID write a message on her blog, so more of her readers would see it than the few crossovers we've got between us. So it's a few weeks late now...but I'm sure there's still somebody who didn't know about it yet.
  
  
• Don't laugh, but I actually contemplated concluding my story about Nick and Hedie's wedding, which was supposed to be posted on 2nd Anniversary of the wedding (and the 11th anniversary of Spleen Day). But then the Trina thing happened and I wasn't sure which one to post that Monday, so I ended up doing neither. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
  
  
• Man, I sure procrastinate alot. That wasn't going to be a post. I'm just saying.
  
  
• I took last week off from work because Brianna had April Vacation. We watched a bunch of movies, made a fort out of cushions, and went to a carnival. It was the best week ever.
  
  
• Two squirrels were found (very) dead in my grandmother's pool. I imagined a little squirrel CSI team trying to solve the case. I was hoping to get some gruesome photos but...
  
  
• Holy crap! My grandmother's pool is gone! It's not there anymore, they took the deck and everything. I think Carmen San Diego did it. The worst part is, it contained evidence pertinent to the squirrel case! Also, my childhood memories are crumbling around me at an alarmingly rapid rate!
  
  

So that's how far behind I am. There are a few more, like the one I wrote when that comedian killed himself and the singer from Boston died (yes, he committed suicide too, but we didn't know that at the time). some of these things are time-sensitive, and if I don't publish them right away, they're sort of rendered irrelevant. I still have an account my my wrote of a dazed old woman wandering around my grandmother's driveway. That's at least two years old, before all the moving and sleeping on the floor craziness.

Anyway, do I just move on to something else, or try to catch up? While I'm writing these, what if something else happens that's too good not to share but I don't write about it because I'm still working on something from November and I fall behind even further. I need a designated "blogging time" I think.

Well, what should my next post be? It's up to you. The power is yours!

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Local Man Hit By Bus

Crap. I spent the last hour, and most likely the next one, trying to print an A6 envelope on the color printer. The multi-purpose tray has markings to show where an A6 envelope should go, but that size is inexplicably absent from the preset options for envelopes. It has A7, but not A6. Why did they bother marking it on the tray then?! There is a "custom" option, so I entered the A6 size in there, but it was positioned wrong and cut off most of the type. Oh, and it created big black imprints of the folds on the other side of the envelope all over the front.

I haven't been lucky enough to need to print on a pre-made non-number 10 envelope on this printer until now, but others in the office who've had to deal with it in the past said the best way to do it is to resize the document to 8.5 x 11, set the printer to the thick card stock setting, and tape the envelope to a regular piece of paper. And to avoid the imprint from the folds, I need to put thick paper in the envelope. We only have a limited number of envelopes, so before I taped any more of them to paper and filled them with other, smaller paper, I've been running practice sheets through until I can get the position right.

No matter what I do, they keep coming out wrong. It either cuts of the type, or prints everything but not in the area where the envelope is supposed to go. And I can't just move the envelope in those cases because it has to be on the same edge of the paper that is picked up by the printer's grippers. WHY IS THIS SO FREAKING HARD?

After noticing that I was just a smidgen visibly frustrated by my never-ending string of failed attempts, my boss suggested that I could print out the envelope copy on regular paper and glue it to the face of the envelope. It's a fair enough solution, and the envelopes are about the same color and brightness as our printer paper, so if I place it right at the seems no one will no the difference. But it's going to drive me nuts if I can't figure out why the damn envelopes won't print the way they're supposed to, so I'm going to keep trying until I get it right. Or the vein in my head pops. Either way, it's not looking good for that post I was planning for this morning. But I may lose my mind and throw the printer out the window onto Newbury Street.

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For Real This Time

Ok. There's going to be a new post tomorrow morning, or may God strike me down with a Fung Wah bus. And by morning I mean before noon. Ish. Eastern Standard Time.

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Don't Read This

18 days ago, I mentioned something about doing a Joe post. Then work got busy again so any hopes of hearing new Joe-isms were crashed. And now for the past few days I've had a cold. Nothing too bad, just a little coughing, lots of sneezing (at least 1 in 5 with gross, mucusy projectiles), and a constant nose drip. I mean literally CONSTANT. It refuses to stop running. How much more can possibly be in there? I'm starting to fear that eventually, my nose and, maybe even my entire head, will just dry up, shrivel and fall off.

I tore through a box of Kleenex yesterday, but all I have to show for it is a trash barrel filled with hardened, crumpled up tissues and the assurance that in a couple of days, I'm going to have those gross sores all under my nose.

But I've just made a medical breakthrough. If I stick Kleenix in my nostrils and hold it in place with a piece of tape that runs across the bridge of my nose to my cheeks, I can stop the dripping, and hopefully avoid the horrible sores from too much wiping. I've been wearing it now for twenty minutes. So far, so good! Take that, you lousy cold!

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Purple Monkey Dishwasher

For some reason, TV executives seem to think that shows with ongoing storylines are bad. People would rather casually watch a string of standalone episodes rather than seeing a serialized plot drawn out over several episodes, seasons, or God forbid, the entire run of the show. Apparently, people who don't watch any given show regularly may sit down to watch one day, but rather than being drawn into the story, they're confused by the addition of a character than wasn't on when they last caught the show months earlier. Worried that they'll lose these casual viewers, they flood the schedule with filler episodes, significantly limiting the number of episodes devoted to the show's ongoing story arch and effectively pissing off all the people who actually tune in every week. Enough with the pointless filler episodes already! Screw the casual viewers, let them watch Dancing with the Stars or find out if they're smarter than a fifth-grader. My money's on "no."

The Dead Zone is a good example of this offense, specifically last year. There were eleven episodes last season, and maybe three of them had anything to do with the main storyline that they'd been building the previous four seasons. And they weren't even sure if the show was going to be picked up for another season; you'd think they'd try to wrap things up.

Why am I talking about this? Well, I've still got a Joe story coming. It even explains why I briefly saw him in another light, why I sort of dropped of the face of the Earth near the end of last year, and even the origins of the mysterious black smoke monster. But I've still got some fancy visual aids to go along with it that I haven't finished yet. So here's some filler.

The nurse from Brianna's school called yesterday. Brianna wasn't feeling well, so Michele got out of work early to pick her up. That meant I needed to find a ride home, so I emailed my mom and asked if she could pick me up. She wrote back that she would be at the eye doctor with my dad to pick out new glasses at 5:30, and to call her on her cell phone when I get to Braintree.

There's no phone service underground, so I always have to wait until we get out of the tunnel to make a phone call. All the stops after that are open-air, so I usually call when we're at the JFK stop to say I'll be in Braintree in about twenty minutes. Yesterday when I got out of the tunnel, I had a weird voicemail message. I listened to it twice, but I couldn't make out anything the guy was saying. It didn't help that the wheels thundering down the track and all the background noise all but drowned out the message, but it sounded to me like he was speaking a different language. A few months ago, I got a rambling, nearly two minute message in Arabic, so I thought this was another wrong number. When we got to JFK, I called my mom's phone. No answer. So I called my parents' house. No answer. Did she forget about me?

I decided to try Ryan's phone. But I didn't enter is number into my new phone yet and I couldn't remember it off the top of my head. I guess that's the danger of technology. When I was five, I could remember all kinds of numbers and dates, but now that we have these little devices that store all that information, at some point I just stopped memorizing all these new numbers because I had them stored on a computer. Curse you, technology!

Anyway, I had to call Michele to ask her to call Ryan, who of course gave me hell because I should have had his number in my phone and she put it in the day she got hers and it just went on like that. She called me back a few minutes later to say that Ryan told her Glenn left me a message to call his phone. So the indecipherable voicemail I got was actually my brother mumbling into the phone. Well that's the end of that mystery.

I did have Glenn's number in my phone, so I called and I heard my mom's voice. I said I was on the train. She said, "Yeah...?"

"Well, you're going to pick me up right?"

"What?"

"You are going to pick me up, right?"

"Who is this?"

"You know who this is! Are you going to pick me up?"

"Who do you think you're calling?"

I wasn't really in the mood for this. "Glenn's phone." I sighed.

"Sorry, you've got the wrong number."

"Fine. Whatever." I hung up, or hit END really, since you can't hang up a cell phone. Less than twenty seconds later, I got a call from Glenn's phone. It's my mom.

"Hi, sorry, I didn't realize my phone was dead so I had to use Glenn's. Where are you?"

"What?! I'm on the train. I just told you that!"

"No you didn't.

"Yes. I did. I just called you and told you where I was, and you were being all weird and joking around."

"You didn't call here."

"Yes I did! Just now. You said I had the wrong number. Ha Ha. Very funny."

"I swear you didn't call this number. We're sitting here at the eye doctor's."

"...Well then I guess I did have the wrong number. I thought you were just being a jerk. But I called Glenn's phone. I hit the speed dial. How did I get a wrong number?"

Yes, it seems when I entered Glenn's number when I was setting up the speed dial, one of the digits was wrong. Being a new phone, this was the first time I called his phone. And by sheer coincidence, the woman who picked up when I dialed the wrong number happened to sound a lot like my mom. I really thought she was trying to mess with me. My family does stuff like that.

No one really knew all the details of exactly what happened until we all were in the car (except my dad, who was left at the eye doctor's to decide where to have dinner. I went home and had cereal, so I don't know how that turned out for them.) My mom was glad that I couldn't understand Glenn's message, which was actually "Mom's phone is dead, call mine." Because to her, it sounded like "Mom's dead. Call me." I can see where that would have caused even more confusion.

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