Brothers

First, I have some great news! I finally have my car back seven weeks after not being able to drive home. It’s been a long journey with a lot of phone calls to and from the repair shop, but now it’s done for good. A big thank you goes out to the friends who picked me up an hour from their house and drove me all around town over the weekend before finally driving me to the place my car was stored. Also, a big thank you to my parents who let me use their credit card after mine got declined. Finally a big no-thanks-to-you to my bank for once again locking my card and not answering the phone on a weekend.

This past week was pretty great. We won our volleyball game on Wednesday and I would like to attribute it to the fact that people are now showing up for both games AND practices which means we are starting to know how people react and their capabilities as servers, setters and hitters. This coming week we have three games in three days, so we’ll start to have a good grasp on people’s game time skills.

On Sunday (while visiting my friends) we went and saw an improve group perform at a local venue. It was hilarious and really well done. The audience was full of a lot of little kids, so most of the suggestions were about sports or jumping rope, but the cast took it in stride and made for some good times with what they had been given. Improv seems kind of like my life set on a stage for everyone to see; I think I could do it.

The flight I took to get from here to where my friends are was on a brand new airplane. It still had the new leather smell and we were threatened by the flight attendants that if we spilled anything on the seats or carpet, they would toss us out. When I left my home airport, shorts were appropriate. When I landed, I quickly found out that was no longer the case. I, thinking the entire nation is currently like wherever I am at the moment and being the incredibly intelligent man I am (handsome, too), packed only shorts for the whole weekend. It turned out that wasn’t a terrible idea because the weather warmed up considerably in the afternoon; I will not be repeating that anytime soon though.

One of my friends back home had his brothers in town for the weekend and said he doesn’t think they look similar at all. Take a look at the picture below and see if you concur. When I saw it, I accidentally picked out the wrong person as my friend if that gives you any indication as to their similarity.

Fingers

I have realized that there has not been a single point in the past three and a half to four week where I have not had at least one finger that was too swollen to bend all the way. Between the basketball and the volleyball, I have really done a number to my hands. Either that or I’m supremely clumsy in regular day-to-day activities and needed something to blame it on. I’m pretty sure that’s not it though.

One of my friends back at home has shingles but seems to be a trooper. He hasn’t let it stop him from going to work or doing any of the other various activities that he usually enjoys. I’m a bit concerned for his coworkers health and safety though I suppose as long as everyone at his work has either been vaccinated against or already had varicella, there shouldn’t be any major problems.

I found out on Monday that my car is going to be delayed another week. That means the repair shop will have had my car for six weeks. I am expecting it to look like a Ferrari when I get in there. I want it to be yellow. With a racing stripe.

As an added bonus, the repair is also going to cost about $1,300 more than they originally estimated. I don’t know if that means they would have originally called it a total loss if they had known that beforehand, but now the repairs have already been started, so my insurance company has to keep paying to have them get it back in working order. I just know I’ll be more than happy to be back behind the wheel of my own car instead of driving around in other people’s cars. There just isn’t a car that feels quite the same as mine does.

All that said, I am going to be flying Southwest to pick up my car, so thankfully I haven’t had to pay any change fees for changing my plane ticket three times. That doesn’t mean the friends meeting me on the other end of the plane ride are any too thrilled about having to move their plans around to accommodate me, but I figure they will get to the point of forgiveness soon and then we’ll quickly arrive at the point where we can laugh about it.

Dinner

Yesterday we went to the shooting range and had ourselves a grand old time firing round after round of ammunition into paper targets downrange from us. It was one of those moments where you realize it was completely unnecessary but it was fun and the people around us were fun to laugh at. We took two people who had never fired a weapon before so watching them shoot anything for the first time was kind of a riot. After that, we started inviting people over for dinner and quickly realized we may have gone too big too fast.

There were 15 people who ended up taking us up on our invitation and headed our way yesterday evening. I decided at around five that I needed to go to Sam’s because there was no way for me to feed that many people with the slim pickings that were available in the house. We made a quick trip over there while I was on the phone trying to get some good recipes that would feed a lot of people quickly.

All the running around was worth it and made for a lot of fun with a lot of people. After dinner we all sat down and played some Catchphrase. Hearing some attempts at trying to get a disparate group of people to say some of the phrases was incredibly humorous and we were all laughing by the end no matter if you were on the losing or winning team.

I found out my car won’t be ready this weekend as was the original plan, so I had to change my plane ticket. Thankfully the new date works out just as well and makes for a fun weekend with some people I know. I won’t be sad to get my car back though. It’s been over a month and the work seems to be going kind of slowly. My mom says that what happens in small towns like the one my car is currently residing in.

Volleyball has been going really well. I have to go sometime to pick up some knee pads for the games because hitting the gym floor with your bare knees is a great way to end up with no skin on your knees and blood all over the floor (neither of which is condoned or encouraged by the gym).

We’ve been dog/house sitting this past week. I’ve been sleeping on the couch and the dog we are sitting sleeps with me. There is an L shaped couch and I start on the long side and Vader (the bull terrier) starts on the short side. By the time I wake up, he has shoved himself beside me and is starting to nearly push me off. As a bull terrier, he is really solidly built and compact, so there isn’t a lot you can do just by shoving; you have to pick him up and put him somewhere else to move him.

Alice

One of my friends who lives here had her mom come in to visit this past week, so we decided we were all going to see Alice in Wonderland together after work one day.  It turns out they have family members that are basically from my hometown and we’ve probably met at some point.  I’ve always heard ‘it’s a small world’, but who knew that was true?!

The movie was really good though, so that was a lot of fun.  If you’ve read the book, you won’t be disappointed; they change things but give valid reasons for doing so.  I realize I just used the phrase ‘valid reasons’ with a book where a girl falls down a rabbit hole and meets a cast of talking animals while drinking liquid to become tiny and eating cake to become huge, but it’s all about what you’re willing to accept as reality in a story.  Also, they did mercury-induced insanity justice.  The Mad Hatter wasn’t just insane, he was also kind of moody.

To compound our problems at work with slow Internet speeds, we went to work on Wednesday or Thursday morning this week to find that the power was out for exactly half of every room.  That means two of the computers in our room were turned off and two were working, half the lights in the building were on and half of the printers worked.  We decided it was time to work from home that day.  We were also wondering who creates schematics of a building that has one circuit powering half of each room and then presents it with a straight face to the building planners?  It just seems you would be bettered served with rooms that either were powered or weren’t.  The half power idea just seems absurd.

I got put on a few more mailing lists for a couple web projects I work with and it has DRASTICALLY increased the amount of spam I am receiving each day.  We’ve skyrocketed from approximately 50 messages a day that my account automatically got rid of to around 300 a day.  Of those, about 20 a day make it to my actual inbox.  I’m flagging them all as spam, so hopefully the adaptive filters get good enough to start catching it soon.  I don’t typically get too many valid emails a day on my personal account (I’d estimate 20 or less a day) but when you have to sift through all the crap and ads for various erectile dysfunction pills or ways to increase the size of certain body parts, it gets old quick.