Drinky time!!

I'm a big fan of the India Pale Ale... so tonight I'm gonna drink my fill. And probably some of your fill as well. I'm greedy.

I go through cycles of liking different beers. Right now I'm all about IPA and Belgian-style white beers. I went through a long phase of drinking beers with lime, and blondes, and all sorts of other stuff. I drank almost nothing but black and tans for about a year. In the spirits department, I used to drink vodka, then gin, and now I drink Scotch almost exclusively.

Then, I guess it is back to the grind of school. Yay and such.

The week that was...

• Six quizzes
• Three tests
• One Physics midterm
• 10 hours sleep, total
• 12 beers
• and a partridge in a pear tree

Holy fuckadoodle. Next week? Nothing. Nada. Zip. I'm showing up to class, coming home, lots of napping. I've got a little online work to do, but I'll knock it out tomorrow and get it out of the way.

My wife brought home a 12-pack of beers for me, knowing how much I needed it. Kids... I am fucking wiped out.

I haven't slept in days

...no, really. Since like Saturday night? Who knows at this point? One night, they all blur into one long night, as an example:

From 10:00-12:30, I lay listening to a podcast and slowly rotating like a rotisserie chicken. Then I transitioned to the guest bedroom, so my turning wouldn't wake my wife. A few hours after that I got up and got online for a bit. Then back to the bedroom, and an hour later back to the guest bedroom. Lots of cats climbing on me looking for love...

... a quick aside here. I'm a dog person. Always have been. My wife has always been a cat person. We have a dog and three cats. The dog loves my wife more than life itself... possibly more than I do, if you can believe it. It isn't like the dog has anything else going on in her life to distract her from my wife. The three cats are crazy in love with me. You know those really old high school movies/TV shows where the quarterback walks by and smiles, and the little pack of girls all start giggling and blushing? That's the way my cats act around me sometimes. At night, the dog sleeps in the bed and they can only bug me one at a time. When I am taking a nap during the day, or especially if I am sleeping in the guest bedroom, I get 2-3 cats at once, all wanting a piece of my attention. Doesn't really improve the insomnia, believe me...

ANYHOO! Every night this week has been like that. I had a physics test today. I studied ALL DAY yesterday, went to bed at 10:30, slept maybe an hour between then and 3AM, got up and took a practice test, then slept maybe 90 more minutes and woke up at 6:45. Tried to take a nap after class, totally failed at it. Tomorrow I can't sleep in, I've got a lab and a test in the AM.

Tonight? Probably won't sleep at all. You'd be surprised at how well you can get by on 30 minutes here, 45 minutes there. My typing is a disaster, and who knows what weird shit I did on that one physics problem? It is sort of scary to think about it, and I'm sure I'll think of it about 3AM. And 4AM. Possibly 5AM too.

This weekend I'm planning on sleeping in Saturday morning... until Monday morning.

Hell Week

Because sometimes you have to pay for Spring Break...

It is Monday. Thursday I have the Physics mid-term, which is 40% of my grade. Eight questions, 80 minutes. Yeah. Friday I have a Calculus test. In the meanwhile, I have to take quizzes and tests for two chapters in my online class. So basically, on top of the 20 or so hours I spent during Spring Break studying and doing homework, I have to spend big chunks of every day cramming in as much work as possible.

And this is the easy stuff. Maybe I've been a little too relaxed this semester. I needed to get the constant stress under control... which has meant letting go of my ridiculous over-preparation. This week, I find out if I let go of too much.

Just a quick note about being sad and pathetic:

When I was a 15 year old kid, and Hugh Hefner was 63, Hefner married 27 year old Kimberly Conrad, and they had a couple of kids. Gosh, he was the MAN!

Now, 21 years later, Hugh Hefner is 84 years old. He just broke up with his three fake-boobs and bleached-blonde pretend girlfriends, and last I checked he was pretending to date a set of twin chicks in their 20s.

At some point, an old man dating young women just seems desperate and pathetic. Hefner inserting his old ass into a bunch of recent movies? Even sadder.

I earned my beers today...

I mean, come on! How many other husbands would get up at 7:00 during their vacation, run to the store for cleaning supplies and stuff, scrub a bathroom and replace the shower curtain... and do most of the laundry too? (I don't touch my wife's stuff, maybe she washes it funny or hangs it strange. I do my stuff, plus towels and sheets and whatever.... EDIT: What the hell, I washed her stuff too. ) That was my day. Did all the dishes, cleaned most of the rest of the house too... and I'll probably get stuck cooking dinner too. Yeah, I'm fucking awesome.

Plus, strangeness from the pets all day. The dog gets weird when I clean, but she got triple weird when I was cleaning the bedroom. I don't know what her deal is, but she was just milling around and being underfoot and annoying. The cats... well...

Do you ever feel like a stranger in your own house? That's what it is like, living with these three cats. I come home from buying the shower curtain and Scrubbing Bubbles, and the cat dish is smashed on the kitchen floor. I walk in the door, and they are all standing on the counter, looking at me like "Yeah, so? Now we need food, and some fucking cat snacks while you're at it. Don't take all day, either."

So, yeah. These yummy beers are my reward. I earned them!!!

Funny Puppets; New Phones

Went to see Jeff Dunham last night. It was cool, although he didn't come on stage until an hour after what the tickets say... silly Guitar Guy opening act and a 30 minute intermission sort of dragged it out for awhile. It was really funny though, except for some red meat thrown to the red state idiots. There were a lot of grey-hairs in the crowd, after all. We saw all the cool puppets: Walter, Achmed the Dead Terrorist, Jose the Jalapeno (on a stick!), and of course Peanut.

Yes, I know it is non-hipster humor, and you can consider me as lame as makes you feel cool... we had a good time, even though we cut out before he was done with the Bubba redneck puppet. It was just too late, and the wife had to be up early.

I stayed in bed until my phone showed up this afternoon. Droid, baby!!! DROID! Once again, we bought the cool phone, but at least they were buy-one-get-one-free-ish. The "-ish" being that we'll have to wait a month or so to get the rebate money back, but no worries. They also billed our account for the phones so we can put that off at least a month as well. It is good timing on the phones as well. My wife should start getting a phone allowance from work that will cover the cost of the Internet access, and her computer just crapped out. I'm sure I'll be able to fix it this week, but in the meanwhile she's able to play with her phone. Yay!

Since it is a Droid phone, I downloaded an R2D2 ringtone. Again, Yay! Next, $50 worth of silly apps and games!

Beer News for Monday

I'm actually a little bit ahead of the curve this spring break week. I promised myself I would take the five sections of Physics homework and do one section per day, and then take the sample midterm over the weekend. So far, I'm half an assignment ahead of schedule. So I guess I'll have a couple of beers?

Yay beers!

In other news, I'm getting seriously pissed off at the anti-vaccine/autism idiots this month. The guy who helped start this fraud has been discredited, and a "vaccine court" (with generous rules that gave the anti-vax cretins the best chance they will ever get to prove their case) has recently rejected the very best "autism is caused by vaccine" cases that the fruits could present. It is done, it's over, Jenny McCarthy needs to STFU and go back to sucking cock for walk-on movie roles. Oh, wait... she doesn't have to do that, since Oprah has decided to give her a show. Oprah, the biggest cunt in the TV universe, has never met a crackpot or quack that she didn't love and give a career boost to, so no big surprise there.

Yay beers? I might have to dip into the Scotch later...

Tonight's meal: tropical shrimp stir-fry over steamed rice. I'm not sure how long to cook the mango, but we does our best.

Been a weird week...

Yeah. Here are the highlights:

• Got my Godzilla fuzz pedal from Devi Ever... what a nice chick, right? She threw in an organic sour apple lollipop in the box with the pedal. Anyhoo, it sounds like a monster, although I'm not sure what I'll use it for. I've been on a real big 70s kick since I bought the Fender Strat and the really clean Egnater amp. Lots of Pink Floyd and some "Sultans of Swing."
• Still looking into recording options... I don't want to break down and buy a microphone and digital recording station. That sort of thing costs money. Unfortunately, the amount of pressure the amp produces at even moderate volumes tends to overwhelm the microphone on my camera.
• Spring break has officially started. We kicked it off with a nice relaxing dinner at Carrabba's... the full deal: calamari appetizer, salads, I had the grilled shrimp and scallops and my wife had a pasta dish with artichoke, mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes and grated ricotta cheese, and then we had bread pudding and tiramisu with an expresso for me and a cappuccino for her. Good stuff!
• The night was sort of screwed up when we got home, and the beers in the fridge turned out to be spoiled nasty bad. Vinegar bad. Tasting a few to determine that both 12-packs were totally bad was enough to leave me physically ill for the rest of the night. Yay.
• We're losing our minds waiting to buy new cell phones. Our contract allows new phones with the new contract discount a week from yesterday. So, 6 days to wait. We wouldn't care, except that right now there's a "buy one get one free" sale that will save us $200, and we're scared that it will end before we can take advantage. $200 buys Joe a new toy...
• I changed the look of the blog. I'll be experimenting with it for the next few days, and we'll see if I can settle on one thing.
• No mention of school... because this is the calm before the storm. The week after spring break is where things get hard, but we'll burn that bridge when we get to it.
• Final Fantasy XIII!!!! I've been playing those games since I was a kid, and I'm glad to be back to them after a decade-long hiatus. Cool graphics and what I hope is a good story? I am unsure about the game so far, but we'll see.

Sleeping Pets EVERYWHERE!!!

Having three cats and a dog is tons of fun, and a constant source of amusement... and sometimes too much cute for words. I left my office to get something to drink just now, and as I walk out the door what do I see? Randall, our kittyboy, and Ginger the great brown bunny hunting dog, napping curled up together in the spare bedroom. A few steps further, and to the right? The two little girls cats, Ellie and Lucy, sleeping on a couple of chairs next to one another.

Way too much cuteness... I'm sure they'll screw up and break something any minute.

In the meanwhile, I was going to do some cleaning and maybe run the vacuum cleaner. Don't want to wake up the kiddies!

I'm a winner!!!

I never win stuff... until now!!

I posted some stuff over at the Devi Ever forums, and next thing I know I get an email from the Queen of Fuzz herself, letting me know that I'm getting a free one of these thangs, just because they give away random stuffs occasionally just for being part of the community.

Yeah, I know... I was hoping for the million dollars, but this is a close second!

Things on Joe's mind...

• I'm doing way better in school this year. My grades are more than acceptable, but I'm not killing myself for those extra few points. An A is an A is an A, whether it is 103 or 93. I'll take the 93, no skin off my dick.
• Mrs. Chili has been hounding me (ok, hinting and one overt request) to post an audio clip of my guitar playing. I'm not against the idea... except now I've become something of a tone snob, and my microphone options are limited. I tried to record a quick 30 seconds, and it was so boomy and noisy that I refuse to accept it. I have spent a ton of cash on my gear, and in person it sounds like what you would expect a professional set-up to sound like. I'm trying to figure out how to record that, so I can get down my live sound so other people can hear it.
• We got a new cat, so now we're sporting three cats and a dog. They have brought up to a weird tipping point though... like three pets wasn't at all an inconvenience, and four pets is a GIANT HASSLE!!
• Drinking is actually good for me. It was a mistake last semester to go cold turkey. It seemed like a big old awesome plan, but it made everything into a giant big deal. It blew the drinking out of all proportion, and made everything school-related seem to be so very important. School IS important, and there's always a case to be made for drinking less, but none of it should mean that much. I'm not an alcoholic, and I'm a good student. I don't need to go to extremes about either.
• I've lost my interest in arguing with people. I'm right, if you disagree with me it means you're wrong. I came to my positions through hard work and brain sweat. There's no reason for me to rehash the same stuff over and over again, and I certainly don't need to find people online and yell at them.
• I just watched "Jennifer's Body" and I have to say that the Megan Fox haters need to STFU. It is a decent movie, and she's not just pretty but also pretty damned good in this movie. I can't say I understand the tastes of the critics or the average movie-goer, but I watch A LOT OF FUCKING MOVIES, and this one was better than most. I also liked "Terminator: Salvation" just fine... maybe I'm screwed up, but I think maybe I'm just a better judge of movie.
• I'm reading a book about the evidence for evolution, and I have to say that I'm even more saddened by the fact that half of Americans deny biological reality. I'm not surprised though, because no one in the mainstream media or anywhere else is really telling the "story of evolution" in a way that people understand. One of my biggest frustrations in the world is that the assholes who are wrong are willing to put their lies into understandable soundbites, and the people who are right are too snobbish to talk on the level of the average person.

Got my new baby home... second attempt.

Well, I broke down and did it. Between savings, selling stuff, and some left-over cash from my student loan refund, I bought myself a new Fender Stratocaster. Yay for me!

She's pretty, she sounds great, and now I'm good for guitars for at least another year or two. :)