The longwinded ramblings of PJ Lachmann

Fishing trip part IV ,fortune cookies, and the best grocery store trip ever

2009-03-31T19:03:00.013-06:00

Hello friends,
its been a long long time since ive written anything, and im sorry for that, and so i figured i would write something while i sit and flip between the half dozen or so baseball games that are on right now (hooray for the mlb extra innings package) so it should be a pretty good evening, and so without any further ado...

PJ vs. Ashley Fishing Trip: Round IV

now, all of my faithful readers (if there are any left) know that my friend ashley and i very much enjoy fishing, and most of you probably also know the typical results of our fishing competitions but for any new readers out there (not likely) i will briefly summarize the results. Ashley always wins. It doesnt matter what the rules are , and i change them all the time to whatever suits me most that day. In the end Ashley has always caught the first fish, the biggest fish, the most fish, pretty much any category of judging a fishing competition that i can think of. I have been steadily improving each time out and if you used some creative score keeping, you could argue that i should have won the last time, but this time i was determined to win outright. There were a few changes this time out. We were going to a different lake this time and we would be fishing from kayaks as opposed to from the shore. I felt these switches would give me a much needed boost and i felt confident as we pushed off from the shore. my confidence would not be rewarded as ashley soon landed the first fish, a fairly decent bass. at this point i decided it was time for a different strategy, i was going to copy what ashley was doing. She had tied her kayak up to a dead tree sticking up out of the water and was fishing next to these partially submerged bush things, i was content to float around aimlessly in my kayak while my line trailed behind me not attracting fish. Her method seemed to be working better and i am not above copying my opponent in an attempt to win at fishing so i went over to the tree and tied up there as well. i thought it had paid off pretty soon as i felt the end of my pole bend a bit, i jerked out of my half asleep state and yanked back on my pole. sure enough, i felt a good strong tug and thought "haha, we shall soon be tied!" but then as i was reeling i didnt feel the resistance like a fish, so i jerked the pole again and there he was, i felt him again so i started reeling again. but as i reeled i still didnt feel like there was a fish there and i reeled my line in all the way and there was the worm i had put on the hook, without even a nibble on him, and i was very confused... then i looked up and realized that the tree i was tied under had a branch hanging down that i had apparently been hitting with my pole and that had fooled me into thinking i had a fish... ashley thought this was hysterical.
Soon after this i landed an actual fish, about the smallest large mouth bass you could possibly catch, but at least i did not get shut out for the day. As it turned out, it was the last fish to get caught that day. ashley mentioned something about the fishing being bad because it had been rainy and stormy all morning and the fish dont like low pressure systems or something, which i can totally understand, bad weather puts me in a grumpy mood a lot of times too. Im sorry i dont have any pictures of our fish, at one point ashley accidentally dipped her camera in the water... now that i think about it, there is no proof of any of our fish, that means there is nothing to prevent me from saying i caught tons of monster huge fish and ash didnt catch anything, but i wouldnt do that, it would be dishonest, besides, i dont think anyone would believe me... but thats ok, because even though the fishing was not as great, it ended up being the most exciting fishing experience we have had yet.
right from the beginning of the day we saw a lot of wildlife, there were a lot of geese, and some other birds that i think might have been cranes or something, and when we were climbing into our kayaks some little frogs were jumping around the edge of the water, and there were plenty of turtles sunning themselves on logs and such. and then things got a little more interesting, when i was paddling over to where ashley was tied up to the tree i saw a snake slither into the water from the shore, and i told ash and she said it might have been a water moccasin, and i didnt know what it was because i had never seen one before, and then we started seeing more and more of them, snakes would poke their heads up out of the water and look around for a while, and then they would dive back under for a while, and then one of them started swimming right at us, he got to about 20 feet away and then he changed directions a bit and went over to the bushes we were fishing next to, ash said it was definitely a water moccasin based on his patterns, (there are a bunch at her lake in arkansas making her an expert moccasin spotter). I wanted a closer look at one but for better or worse that was the closest one got to us...

scary...

So we were sitting in our kayaks and discussing what would we would do if one of the water moccasins tried to get in our boats and i believe the consensus was panic, attempt to smack it with either our fishing poles or paddles and i would probably flip over my boat and drown, when all of a sudden we hear someone blasting away with a shotgun somewhere nearby, and this made us a tiny bit nervous because we had no idea where this guy was and getting shot by some crazy redneck was not in my plans for the weekend

Even scarier than water moccasins...

After looking around for a while we saw a guy over on the edge of the lake with his gun, and we still were not sure what exactly he was shooting at, there were a bunch of geese around there but unless he was shooting one for dinner it doesnt really make much sense to shoot 1 goose. There are way too many of them and if you are trying to teach them to stay off your property youre in for a long battle as you have to shoot a couple hundred of them before they learn to stay away. He was carrying a dead something in his hand that he dropped by the edge of the water but we couldnt tell what it was, we wanted to find out what it was but we didnt feel like going over there just then in case he was just super protective of his land. we later investigated and it was a big muskrat or something like that...

And as if all of this wasnt enough excitement, my kayak was slowly sinking the entire time we were on the lake. now these kayaks had a few holes in the bottom of them that lets in some water, i am not really sure why they are there, i think that maybe by letting a tiny bit of water in the boats are more stable, but its really not much water, just enough to splash on your feet and make your butt wet, but as i was sitting in my kayak i kept getting the suspicion that i was taking on more water, i tried telling ashley this but she never believed me, i would say "ash i think my boat is sinking!" and she would say "youre not sinking" and i would say "i am! im taking on water!" and she would say "no youre not, stop being dramatic" and i would say "im not being dramatic, my boat is sinking because i am so fat"

We're gonna take a little detour from the fishing story for a while to weigh in on a much debated topic; whether or not i am fat. i guess calling it a much debated topic would be a bit of an overstatement, the debate consists of me saying im fat and everyone else saying im not (aaron prowell is probably the only person who would agree with me, he has called me fat for years), now i guess i can maybe understand there argument that im not, i mean when im wearing any amount of clothes you cant really tell, but this past year or so since ive had my job i do a whole lot of sitting around at my desk, and all that sitting around has really taken its toll and i am as fat as i have ever been in my entire life, but people still argue with me when i mention this so i thought i would present you with some of the evidence of my fat-ness. i got a new pair of pants at some point last year, and everytime i wore them they were tight, which was weird because they were the exact same size as every other pair of pants or shorts that i own, but they were tight on me, and then one day at work i split the back of them clean open, they split right down the seam because of my fat butt, i think this is very good evidence of how fat i am, skinny people do not rip the seam on their pants, only fat people do... here is another example, when we went kayaking we got a couple of life vests, which i was very glad to have, because i am not a very strong swimmer and i would probably drown if i were to fall off my boat, but thats a whole other story, when ash gave it to me she said "here, i got you a medium, i think that will fit" and i said "im not so sure about that, ive gotten pretty fat" and she of course said "youre not fat" but then i put on my life vest and it was really snug on me, i could barely snap the little buckle across my waist and then when i zipped it up it was super tight around my chest and i showed her this and she said "wow, you really must be fat" and then we come to find out later that it wasnt a medium after all, it was in fact a large/XL.... and then of course, i made my boat sink, speaking of which, i think its pretty obvious im a big fatty so i'll get back to my fishing trip story

so im sitting in my kayak and im not catching any fish and so i dont really have anything better to do than sit and debate with myself as to whether or not there is more water in my boat than there used to be, when i first got in my kayak there happened to be a tiny little bit of water sitting in the cup holder built into the bottom of the kayak, but the water level was far below that. a little while later i checked again, and the water level was up to the base of the cup holder, a while later it was over the edge of the cup holder, I tried telling ashley this again, that i was sinking but she again dismissed me saying i couldnt possibly be sinking. a little while later and the cup holder was now 3 or 4 inches under water, the whole little cabin area of my kayak was full of water, it was like sitting in a bath tub, and i was sitting noticeably lower in the water, so i mentioned to ash that it was only a matter of time before the water started pouring over the sides of my kayak and i sank completely and drowned. as this was the most ridiculous statement i had made yet ashley looked over to my kayak and finally realized i wasnt just exaggerating about the amount of water in my boat. At this point i decided that rather than sink, and either drown or get eaten by water moccasins, it would be a better idea to paddle to shore and dump out some of the water that was building up in my kayak, so i paddled to shore and jumped out of my kayak and tried to pull it on shore, i barely could get it up out of the water because the entire thing was full of water, the whole hollow bottom part was full, apparently there was a big crack in the bottom that was letting all the water in, ash paddled over and said "oh wow, i guess you really were sinking!" i dont know why people dont believe me when i say things sometimes...
so i waited for a while until my kayak finished draining out and then i went and fished for a while longer, when my boat was almost fully filled with water again we decided it was probably a good time to quit for the day before i sank completely (i mentioned before that ash accidentally dipped her camera in the lake so there are no pictures of this fishing trip, so i had to recreate all the pictures here for you)

Hey that reminds me, i watched the movie Titanic the other day in its entirety for the first time the other day, and i have to say, my favorite part of the movie was all the rich snobby people, i realize you arent supposed to like them, they are supposed to be the bad guys in the movie, but i loved all the scenes where they were eating their fancy dinners and dressed up all nice, and then the men would go off to have a brandy and a cigar and i wanted to be them...

time to switch gears, now i might have mentioned this before, but i love fortune cookies, i love chinese food and i eat it all the time and then i get my fortune cookie and i get real excited when i get a good fortune and grumpy when i get a lame one, and when i get good ones i keep them until they come true, the other day i got one that made me really excited, it said "an unusual dream will come true." im interested to see what unusual dream of mine comes true, right now im hoping it doesnt mean a dream like you have when youre sleeping, because ive come to the conclusion that whatever part of my brain, or part of my subconscious or whatever it is that controls what i dream about, ive decided that it doesnt like me, because it seems that for the past month the only dreams i ever have are ones about my ex girlfriend, and occasionally i get a dumb baseball one thrown in there as well (dont get me wrong, i love baseball but i never had good baseball dreams) and bad dreams always put me in bad moods after i wake up, which they probably shouldnt, cuz they dont really mean anything but i take dreams very seriously and even more seriously now that i know one of them is going to come true, i hope my cookie wasnt talking about sleep dreams, but it meant dreams as in something i hope will happen, so im looking forward to that, i have some ideas as to what dream i hope works out but im not going to write about it and jinx myself, although the cookie did say it would be an unusual dream, and i have some weird ones so this could be pretty interesting...
speaking of fortune cookies, my buddy got one at lunch the other day that said "accept the next proposition you receive". I thought this was one of the most amazing fortunes ever, it gave him a very specific task and if it had been my cookie i would have definitely followed its advice, no matter what the proposition was, i realize that it could be possible, although arguably quite an elaborate and complicated prank, but if you wanted to put in the effort you could probably get me to do just about anything if you were able to rig the fortune i got in my fortune cookie, my friend trent however did not follow the cookies instructions and therefore missed out on some amazing adventure im sure, as a punishment, the next time we got chinese food for lunch his fortune cookie did not have a fortune in it at all...

so i really like to eat noodles, and ever since i moved out here i have been buying these little pesto sauce packets, and i like to make those and put it on noodles and its delicious, and then a tragic thing happened, they stopped carrying them in my grocery store!! all of a sudden they just didnt have any more, and i look every week, and ive been to several grocery stores here and none of them ever have them. i wonder if maybe i was the only person who ever bought them and i slowly worked my way through the stock they had left and when i had bought them all they were all gone, and it makes me very sad, but, being the eternal optimist that i am i check every week when i am at the store, and then a couple of weeks ago i was feeling especially lucky, so when i was looking for my pesto packet i did an especially thorough search, i pushed all the other related sauce packages to the side and dug way to the back (and kind of made a big mess) and i was rewarded for my efforts, there in the very back was a single pack of pesto mix!! oh i was so excited, if there had been a whole box of them i probably would have cleaned out the whole store. now this alone would have been enough to make that trip to the grocery store the best one of the year, but there was more to come. Ever since i moved away from new mexico my parents periodically send me salsa and green chile and stuff like that, they did it when i was at purdue and they do it now that i am in wichita. and the other day i had a bottle of salsa that they sent me that i had never had before, it was El Pinto's Wild and Fiery Chipotle Salsa. It is quite possibly the best salsa ive ever had, and thats a pretty strong statement but it might be true. I opened it when my buddy Greg was in town visiting and we both kept commenting on how good the salsa was, (it reminds me of that seinfeld episode where they are eating the fat free yogurt and they are sitting there raving about it and jerry says "this is so f***ing good!" right as the little kid walks by, haha, that cracks me up). that bottle didnt last long but i had heard rumors that the grocery store here carries el pinto salsa, and so fresh off my excitement from finding my pesto sauce i started walking to the chip aisle in the hopes of finding some, and i got there and they didnt have it, i walked up and down the chip aisle double checking and all they had was a bunch of crap tostitos brand, or pace, and all that trash, and i was devastated... all the excitement of finding my pesto was completely gone... then i remembered there was a mexican food section at the other end of the store so i started wandering back there (i am the most inefficient grocery shopper ever, i bounce around all over the place rather than walk back and forth up the aisles in order), and im not feeling too hopeful as i wander back to the other side of the store, and i even had time to think of a pretty decent analogy comparing the El Pinto Chipotle Salsa to my last girlfriend, very exciting, hot and spicy, and then inexplicably out of my life almost immediately, granted it wasnt a perfect analogy, i think the fact that i live in the middle of kansas pretty well explains why i couldnt find my new favorite salsa, and i only had a minute or two to think about it before i got to the mexican food section and there it was!!! They had my salsa!! i was super excited again, it was an emotional roller coaster of a grocery store trip

writing this has made me hungry, so im gonna go have a little chips and salsa while i watch the end of my A's game. Im sorry to my loyal readers for the huge delay between writing, hopefully it wont be near as long before the next rambling, and if anyone actually does read this whole thing could you let me know somehow, im always curious to see if anyone actually reads this stuff....

New Camera and St. Louis Game

2008-09-09T20:16:00.029-06:00

Hello friends,
wow, its a been a while since ive written anything, which is sad i guess, but ive been super busy lately. anyways, a little while ago i decided i needed a digital camera. I was taking a sailing class and i am traveling a bunch this fall, mostly to sporting events of course, and i am planning on doing a bunch of picture diary type things of college football games i go to for our college football pool, and so i got a camera. now, i am not very good at taking pictures of things, and i have no idea how to do all the fancy things on my camera so i needed some practice before the big games i will be "covering" this fall. so i took my new camera on my trip to st louis to practice taking pictures at the cardinals braves game that i went to with some friends from purdue, so here is my first group of pictures with my new camera

This is the very first picture i took with my camera, its chipper jones batting. He had a pretty good game.

The upper left field bleachers at new busch stadium is called big mac land. Its called that because Mark McGuire used to hit tons of baseballs into that section after fueling himself up on McDonalds hamburgers (and steroids). Its kind of sad, all of my favorite players growing up, Canseco, McQuire, Giambi, Tejada, were all a bunch of steroid users, i should have picked favorite players like petey does, 5'6" 150 lb middle infielders, no one ever accused david eckstein of being on roids....

Here is a picture of the peanuts i got talked into buying, i had originally decided i didnt want peanuts, because i had eaten a whole bag of them the night before at the wichita wingnuts game i went to, but i was at the concession stand and i said "one beer please" and the lady said "one beer, and you wants some peanuts too dont you?" and i said "...yes" after about a half seconds pause, and she said "wow, that didnt take much convincing, i should have sold you something expensive like a cadillac" and i said "i like peanuts...."

Here is a picture of albert pujols batting, he had a very good game as well, i was happy that both him and chipper had good games, normally when i go to games the big stars always play like crap

hey look, i figured out how the zoom on my camera works, focusing is an entirely different matter...

I took this picture in the second inning cuz the stands were still pretty much empty, it was like i was at a dodgers game

This was a cool apartment building across the street from the stadium, i think it would be pretty awesome to live downtown there and be able to walk across the street to the games like that, but then i remembered it was 94 degrees with 90% humidity and i changed my mind about how awesome it would be to live in st louis, you should never sweat through sporting events you arent personally participating in

Look, its the leaning tower of Pisa! ok, actually PJ just cant hold his camera level.... but it is a pretty cool building, its called the millennium hotel because it was built 1000 years ago.

In case you cant read it the guys shirt says "Id rather have a sister in a whore house than a brother thats a cardinals fan" which i thought was funny but perhaps a bit extreme, i wonder what his sister feels about that

Here is albert pujols rounding third after hitting a weak little homerun, you can see chipper was not at all impressed with it

The scoreboard says pujols' homerun went 402 feet, which is a huge disappointment, i dont want to see him hit little bloop shots that barely clear the wall, i want to watch him hit monster 500 plus foot shots like the one that he hit off brad lidge in the playoffs that one year, the one that turned lidge into a mental case and completely de-railed his career, although i think he might be doing better now

I took this picture right after pujols hit his homerun so i could show how weak it was, it landed in that little dirt area between the stands and the wall above the bud light sign, im pretty sure the wall used to go right up to the stands but then they started testing for steroids and so they decided to shrink the fields a bit to give all the clean hitters a bit more help, im just kidding, i made all that up, the next day in my softball game i hit a homerun that hit off the top of the fence so i shouldnt tease pujols too much about his weak home run, i should tease him more because his name is albert

Every several innings little grounds crew guys would scurry on the field and drag the dirt to make it nice, apparently cardinals managment values these guys more than the players because while they are smoothing the dirt this intimidating character patrols the field, i bet if you were to try to harass the dirt rakers this guy would probably hit you with his little stick hanging from his belt

from our seats you could see the arch and some other wrinkly looking building

In between the 8th and 9th innings all the fans were getting up and leaving, and i thought "wow, this really is like going to sporting events in LA

Oh, perhaps that was why all the fans were moving away, the enormous rainstorm that was coming from behind me that i didnt see, i apologize to st louis for insinuating they have bad fans

I thought the rain delay was kind of fun, our seats were covered so we didnt get wet, and i had never been to a rain delay before so i was excited to watch the little grounds crew guys roll out the tarp, which i must say, they did a very good job

i thought this bit looked pretty fun

This was my favorite guy on the grounds crew, everyone else had left the field but this guy stayed to make sure the tarp was stretched out perfectly

and then after making sure the tarp was sufficiently stretched out, he stood on the tarp making sure it wouldnt blow away, i appreciate the guys dedication, everyone else had long left the field, although i wonder what he thought he was doing that the enormous metal tube was not capable of...

Apparently the tarp works pretty well because after they pulled it off there was a huge puddle on the ground, the one guy in the picture is using a little broom to push water towards the drain behind the infield

Id like to think this is my same favorite little grounds crew guy, he thinks to himself "i am going to help the drain by pushing more water towards it", give that guy a raise

i tried to take a picture of the scoreboard after the game, the braves added 3 runs in the 9th after the delay to win 8-4, which i very much enjoyed, but while i was taking the picture the scoreboard image switched on me all of a sudden which is why it looks dumb, i mean im not a great photographer to begin with, i need the scoreboard to behave for me

Oh man! the international bowling museum!! unfortunately i had to drive back to wichita or i would have definately hit that up "This is my tournament!! This is my tournament!! you see these patches?!"

So those are all my pictures from my trip to st louis, there was one picture i really wanted that i was not able to get, on the drive there i passed Emporia State University, and they a big sign when you go by that says "1993 Debate Team National Champions" which cracked me up and i really wanted a picture of it, and so i had planned on taking a picture of it on the way back, unfortunately, at that time i was too busy trying to avoid getting run off the road by Drunky McSwerveson and i wasnt able to get my camera out and take a picture on time, and since it was already 230 in the morning i didnt really feel like turning around and driving by it again just to take the picture...

umbrellas, love, and some other random stuff

2008-05-26T11:04:00.011-06:00

hello friends,
so it rains here all the time, well, thats only partially true, i dont think it normally rains this much here but supposedly we just had the rainiest may in the history of wichita or something like that, i heard it rained 9 inches this past weekend, which is kind of ridiculous actually, now this isnt really that big of a deal, i like rain, and almost every night there have been awesome thunderstorms, and so i open up the blinds on my enormous bedroom window, and i lay there and watch the lightning and the rain which i enjoy, it gives me something to do while im laying there not falling asleep... so what is the problem with all of this rain? well, there is the fact that i keep having softball games and tourneys postponed and canceled, which is lame, but not what i am going to talk about right now, the real problem is i keep getting soaked walking from my car to work in the mornings, for whatever reason, my assigned parking lot is no where near the building i work in, its over a 5 minute walk (it took over 10 minutes earlier this year the day after i started doing squats at the gym again) so that is plenty of time to get wet, even when walking quickly, and you are probably saying, "you idiot, why dont you just use an umbrella?" well, i dont own an umbrella, ive never really had a need to, back in new mexico it never really rains that much, and whenever it does if you have to go out you just hurry between the car and wherever you are going and its not really a big deal. and even when i was at purdue, it rained more but it still wasnt a big deal, cuz i could always just take the tunnels or hurry from building to building and it wasnt that bad. but like i said, it rains all the time here, and i have a nice long walk from my car, and then i have to site in my cubicle (a whole other issue but we're not going to talk about that) with my work clothes all wet, and every time this happens i think to myself, i really need to invest in an umbrella, but then of course the weather always gets nicer and i forget about it until it rains on me again, but this past weekend i set out to find one, and i found lots of them, everywhere i looked had tons of those little compact pop out ones, you know, the kind that fold up all small and you push a button and they pop open automatically, and they are real nice and small and practical and convenient and utterly unappealing to me. the kind i want is going to be tall, preferably black, with a curved wooden handle, a nice classy umbrella, because to me an umbrella is so much more than keeping the rain off of me, i want to be able to lean on it or use it like a cane when its not raining, and maybe i'll twirl it around jauntily as i walk along with a folded up newspaper under my other arm. sadly, i did not find what i was looking for, although dillard's had one that was pretty close, the only problem was i didnt care for the wood of the handle, it was really light and specked, it almost looked like cork, it needed to be stained a nice dark color, so my search for the perfect umbrella continues and i guess i will just keep getting soaked until i find it, which in my opinion is much preferable to those silly little compact pop up things that everyone around here but me seems to like
now the guy from the travelers insurance commercials has a nice umbrella, although arguably its a little big...

so the other day i saw the new indiana jones moovie, which i enjoyed, and i have to say, it made me really happy that indy and marion ended up getting married at the end of the moovie, and there was the one scene where they are arguing, like they always do, and she says something like "oh, im sure youve had your share of girls since then" and he says "yeah, there were a few, but they all had the same problem. None of them were you" and she smiles at him, and then he climbs out of the top of the little vehicle they are in to go fight the russians, and i though to myself aww, they still love each other, and it made me happy, and i have to say it made me much happier that they got together in the end than a lot of movies ive seen, ive seen tons of more romantic type movies and things where i really could care less that the two people end up together, but i like that it happend in indiana jones, which i realize makes me a huge dork, but thats ok, and not totally unexpected. i do get a lot of my romantic ideals from kids moovies and things like that, there is a scene in Snoopy The Musical where charlie brown and peppermint patty are talking that i really really like, and actually, i just watched it and there was a part in the song that i had forgotten that is pretty much exactly what im looking for. of course, j is the only one who knows what i am talking about. and then of course, there is the wedding song from The Muppets Take Manhatten that i want to have in my wedding, (i also have to convince my future wife that bobby darin's beyond the sea is a perfect song for our first dance), of course, that all depends on me getting married before brother does cuz he wants to use it as well, which reminds me, before i moved out here j and ash decided that since my "type" is plain midwest girls, and i was moving to kansas, that i was going to be engaged fairly soon, they actually set the over/under at 18 months, and everyone that they told took the under! all of our friends, and ash's mom, and i think both of my parents and everyone. Johny and Ryan Page and Kelsey were the only people who agreed with me and took the over, and i have to say, ive been out here for about 5 months and if anything i am further from getting engaged than i was, although you never know i guess, i might find that girl that actually fills my ridiculously long list of criteria that i have, speaking of which, i was thinking about this the other day, the kind of girl i want would be equally excited if we were going to go on a date to either a baseball game, the symphony, or the zoo. well, maybe not equally excited, cuz i dont know that i would be trully equally excited for all of those, but all of those would be pretty sweet dates i think, and if you were to add iced cream to each of those, oh man, even better
speaking of iced cream, the other day after watching fireworks at riverfest we went to this place in oldtown here , cafe moderne' or something like that, and they had the coolest (no pun intended) ice cream machine ever!! well i guess technically it was a gelato machine but whatever, look how awesome this thing is
its this big huge shiny machine filled with yummy iced cream, and the lady there says would you like to try any and you name a flavor, and the machine spins around so that the lady can give you a sample, and its all very exciting, i read in some article they had posted on the wall that the machine cost $30,000 and they imported it from italy, it was pretty fancy. now, if you know me you know that i can sometimes tend to be a little excitable, and so you can probably imagine the look on my face as i stood in front of this wonderful contraption, im pretty sure i had my mouth hanging open and i had what my friends at purdue called my "pj excited eyes", and apparently the lady there noticed too because she said something to the effect of "you can relax, its just ice cream"

heres a couple other real quick things

im running low on shampoo so i was going to get some when i was at the store, although, because im an idiot i got conditioner by mistake cuz i dont pay close enough attention to things, so if you happen to see me and my hair looks strong, silky, and smooth, but not necessarily clean, thats why...

speaking of the store, while i was there i also got some toilet paper, i only mention this because this is the first time ive had to buy any since i first moved out here, and that was like 5 months ago, which i think is a bit crazy, and its not like i had gone to sams club or something and gotten 100 rolls, i just got a 6 pack. granted, they were "mega rolls" or something like that, and they supposedly have more paper than normal rolls, but it still seems like a ridiculously long amount of time to last...

i was at church this past sunday, and they had a baptism, and like most baptisms they give a candle to the person being baptized, or in cases of babies like this one to their parents, and so the mom of the kid was holding the candle, and she was also holding what i assume was her other son, probably around 3 or so, and after they were done with everything she told the kid he could blow it out, and he tried and tried, but he couldnt do it, he kept blowing on the candle but he couldnt blow it out, and after a while his mom got frustrated and just blew it out for him, and this cracked me up, because i started thinking of the time at state when our hockey team was helping at the Halloween carnival, and we had set up a booth where we had jack-o-lanterns with candles in them, and we gave the kids squirt guns and they had to try and shoot the candles out, and it wasnt really hard, we didnt make them stand behind a line or anything, they could stand as close as they wanted, and some of them practically put their hand in the pumpkin to shoot out the candle, which is fine, but for some reason some idiot kids could not shoot out the candle for the life of them, and whenever this happened eventually one of us would get tired of waiting for the kid and would just blow the candle out. we were dressed as all the characters from the ninja turtles so whenever someone had to blow a candle out for a kid they would yell "shell shocked!" and we would all laugh cuz we knew that meant some stupid kid couldnt figure out how to work their squirt gun, and then we would give them one of the andes mints that kent had brought, cuz for some reason he thought those would make good halloween candy... so i was remembering all of this while watching the kid in church, and i was cracking up, but it was the middle of church service so i was trying real hard not to laugh, and i ended up doing one of those stupid half try not to laugh things that only makes things worse, i dont know if anyone noticed or not...

and finally, this is my new favorite restaurant
I should say its my new favorite restaurant that i most likely will never actually eat in, my good friend kelsey sent me this picture from her trip in south dakota

My Texciting Adventure

2008-04-17T20:17:00.040-06:00

hello friends,
so this past weekend i went down to college station to visit my friend ashley, at one point while i was driving i passed this truck that belonged to the texas cement company (or something like that) and on the back it had a website texcement.com which inspired me to invent a new word, texcitment, which means when you are either super excited about something( texas sized excitement) , or just excited about something texas related, in general i enjoy teasing texans, they are very proud of their state, which i guess i can relate to but i think they tend to take things a bit overboard, like "texas sizing" your order at fast food joints and things like that, which really, that should only be the second largest size you can get, since alaska is the biggest state, i like to go to restaurants in texas and try to alaska size my order, which they dont appreciate much, and one time aaron and i were driving to el paso and there was a billboard for some beer and the caption said "texas cold" which doesnt even make any sense cuz its generally pretty warm down there, but you know the texans read that and say "hell yeah texas cold beer!", i will give them one thing, as you drive through texas you might see signs on the side of the road that say "drive friendly, the texas way" or something like that, and one thing that i have consistently seen in texas that i have never seen in any other state is if you are driving down a 2 lane road, and you are behind a slow driver they will pull over and drive on the shoulder so its easier to pass them, which is really nice, so i shouldnt make fun of them too much, but i did think my new word was funny so i kept saying it all weekend "oh man! i am texcited about this baseball game" and things like that, ashley told it to one of her friends who was from there and he liked it, so perhaps my new word will catch on ...
anyways, so while i was down there we went to a couple of texas A&M baseball games, and hung out with some of her friends and whatnot, but that is not what i am going to focus on now, saturday we went to this lake and fished most of the day, which was a lot of fun because i am awesome at fishing, and ash doesnt really know anything about it so i was going to teach her a thing or two. now ashley loves taking pictures so we took her camera and took a bunch during the day, and i thought it would be a fun thing if i showed you all the pictures and added little captions and short descriptions and didnt just ramble on forever, they say pictures are worth a thousand words, and i assume that is for a normal person so in my case its probably closer to two thousand, which means these 35 pictures will be saving you from having two read 70,000 words and having to set aside 3 hours to get through this whole thing....
Hey do you remember when i said i am awesome at fishing at ash is not? (you better, that was only about 8 lines ago) well, that was a blatant lie, i am terrible at fishing, and ash fishes all the time and is really good, just to give you an idea of how much of a mismatch this competition is let me show you a few pictures from the last time we went fishing, we were ocean fishing out in california, here is ashley with her fish, it was so big she had to use the special hook on a stick thing to pull it in
My favorite part of that picture is the face my cousin broc is making. so that is one of the many fish that ashley caught, it took me a long time before i caught anything, and i finally caught a fish and we were going to take a picture of me holding it but before we could snap the picture it let go of the hook and fell on the deck of the boat, i hadnt even hooked my tiny fish, it was just hanging on to make me feel better about myself...
so as you can see i had my work cut out for me, but i was full of unjustified confidence and i was pretty sure i was going to win, here is ashley setting up our poles for the day, i didnt really know what she was doing but i tried to keep an eye on her to make sure she didnt rig my pole funny or something and fix the competition in her favor
here is a nice picture of the lake we were at, or it would be a nice picture if you ignore the large industrial plant on the far side of the lake
the sea was angry that day my friends, like an old man sending back soup at a deli
here is me standing on the bank visualizing catching a 55 pound cat fish, that was my plan for the day cuz ash said her dad (or maybe her grandpa) once caught a 53 pound cat fish, ash said she didnt think i was going to do it and my line would probably break anyways, i told her i would just reel it in until it was near land, and then i would jump in the water and punch it in the head and drag it ashore by hand, of course then the water splashed on my foot and it was kind of cold and the idea of jumping in the water seemed less appealing...
ash insisted on taking a picture of me with my coffee from sweet eugenes, she did this because i had recently admitted to liking coffee and she thinks this is a huge deal, i am not real happy about the fact that i like coffee but it is what it is i guess
i am not exactly sure what ash is doing in this picture, i think she might be tasting the bait to see if the fish will like the worms that we had, which reminds me, the worms we had were supposedly fancy worms that had been given something that made them appear real greenish, according to the box they came in this made the fish real excited and ensured more bites and more caught fish, i dont know if i totally believe this, because unless you are a super clutch fisherman like i am and all you have to do is dip your line in the water for a second and pull it out with a fish on it (more on this later) the green stuff really isnt going to help you cuz it washes away almost immediately
(just so you know ash wasnt really eating the bait) Now this is one of my favorite pictures, because i am standing on the bank and i have a bit of a confused look on my face because my line is sticking pretty much straight sideways, in my defense it was super windy that day, it also doesnt help that i suck at fishing, and yes my outfit is completely color coordinated...
did i say i suck at fishing? i meant to say i rock at fishing, it wasnt long before i landed the first fish of the day and i was well on my way to winning the competition, at this point i hadnt decided on the exact rules of the competition, since i was the only one who had caught a fish i was winning in both number of fish and weight of fish caught so things were looking pretty good, the rules could be modified later as needed
ok, ill admit, i may have doctored the last photo just a bit, the picture below is the actual first fish i caught, and its not quite as big, but the fact remained i was still winning
pretty soon ash caught a fish to even the score, although her fish was completely minuscule, she seems proud enough of it though
a little while later ash caught another little embarrassingly small little fish, she actually went on a little hot streak and jumped way ahead but somehow most of those pictures disappeared, i think at this point the score was something like 5-1
the score at this point was pretty much unnacceptable, so then i decided to take it up a notch, i baited my hook with what i would later call my lucky worm, over the next two minutes i landed 4 enormous fishes with the same worm! it was a trully remarkable fishing performance

look at that monster!

i didnt know there were whales in this lake!
ok, so that last one was a bit small, actually im pretty sure i used to have bigger fish in my desktop aquarium back in school, but look at this next one! its almost as big as i am!
unfortunately, that last beast of a fish ate the last bit of my lucky worm, and i would go through a bit of a rough patch, actually it was about this point that i wandered off to go to the bathroom and thought it would be a good idea to go ant fishing with my toes, i was wandering through some grass and low plants and stuff and thought to myself "hmm, there is something prickly underfoot" and i looked down and fire ants were swarming all over my left foot, so i had to stop and pick them all off, fortunately most of them were just on my sandal and there were only a few of them that were actually biting my toes and foot, it was still pretty lame tho, what was also lame was that ash just kept catching fish and i didnt catch anything else for a while

pathetic...
tiny...
i dont know why but for some reason ash said i couldnt count the next fish i caught

lame...

look out! if that fish was any bigger he could swallow me whole, i imagine it was a fish like this that ate jonah

at this point you might begin to notice a trend, that for every monster fish i catch, ashley catches two little minnows
i think if you were to combine all of ashleys fish you might have enough meat to make about a half of a fish stick

here is a picture of me desperately trying to pick up a tiny ashley sized fish, normally i wouldnt care because it was way smaller than all the fish i was catching, but i was getting way behind in the score, and earlier ash had dropped one and i said if it jumps back in the water she couldnt count it, and so i had to hurry and make sure she couldnt use my made up rule against me

in the meantime ash kept catching tiny fish, they only look bigger than mine because she has smaller hands than i do (and they are actually bigger)
at this point ash was up 10-7, and it was starting to get a little bit later in the day, so we decided to set a time limit and only fish for another 45 minutes, because we are both super competitive and otherwise we would have stayed out there all day, with about 15 minutes left i was still trailing by a lot, and i hadnt caught anything for a while, so i decided i needed to switch locations hoping my luck would change, it didnt really help

while i was in my new location not catching fish ashley kept running up the score

i realize this fish is really small but if you look hard enough you can find it in the picture there

so at this point ashley was up 12 to 7, and she announced 60 seconds left, and dejected but accepting defeat i walked over to where she was sitting, and i was standing there on the shore, and i had about 2 feet of line dangling from the end of my pole, and i decided to give it one last go, and so i dipped my line in the water, and i said "heeeeeeeere fishy fishy fishy fish!" (and if you know what that is from you are awesome) and i pulled my pole out of the water again and there was a fish on the end of it!!!! it was the most clutch fishing of all time!! and i was really happy, here is the picture of me with my buzzer beater
i was pretty happy, i mean i didnt win, but i at least caught some fish, and my buzzer beater fish was pretty clutch and exciting, so i was feeling pretty good about the whole thing, and then ash reeled in her line...
what a jerk!!! she couldnt even allow me my tiny moment of glory, she had to top my last second fish with an even more last second fish, there couldnt have been more than 5 seconds left on the clock, cuz i dipped my pole in the water when she said 60 seconds left, pulled it out a few seconds after that, and we had time to get the camera, take a picture, take the fish off the hook and throw it back, and then she reeled in her line and there was her last fish, securing her 5 fish win, 13-8, no class... needless to say i was pretty dejected

ash was pretty excited
oh man, i was legitimately upset by this, i mean i knew the odds of me winning were slim, but then i was holding my own for a while, and then ash pulled away which was fine cuz she is a lot better at fishing than me, and then i got my miracle last second fish, and then ash completely stomped on what little excitement i had left, this is me, completely emotionally drained...

and what did i win as a consolation prize? how about terrible sunburns on the top of my feet! we had sunscreen but we had forgotten to put it on, and by forgot i mean did it on purpose to spite petey
actually, this picture doesnt even really capture the magnitude of how bad i burned my feet, it does a good job of showing the sick sandal lines, but this was too short after it happened and they werent as deep red as they would get, plus, this was before the ant bites really swelled up and i got yucky blisters in those spots too....yeah, my feet were not real happy with me

Ahh! I've been robbed!!

2008-03-22T21:20:00.003-06:00

Hello friends,
now, there are probably quite a few of you who read the title and thought to yourself, "I wonder what really happened", because for some unknown reason people dont ever seem to take me seriously when i say things, im not really sure why but i have sometimes been accused of exaggerating a bit, of being overly dramatic about rather mundane events, personally i think getting a kansas drivers license completely justifies the statement "im having the saddest day ever", its gotten to the point where people dont even comment if i put up something like "longing for something i can not have" as an away message or a facebook status, because they know im talking about breakfast burritos or something similar (although i mostly do that to make fun of people who put that kind of stuff up for real), the other day i put up the "Ah! Ive been robbed!!" and i got maybe a couple of responses and they were both along the lines of "what really happened" and they were definitely more of a "stop being dramatic and tell us what minor insignificant event happened" tone and not "oh no!! are you ok?" in an actual concerned manner, anyways, heres what happened
so wichita gets a lot more snow than albuquerque does, and my trucky is very squirrelly as it is, so after sliding around all over the place for a month i went to the lowes home improvement store, and i bought some sandbags, thats all they are, just 60 pounds of sand in a sort of tube shaped weather proof bag, and i threw them in the back of my truck and it weighed me down a little bit and i actually got significantly better traction, so it was all very well and good, now that its spring and the weather is finally starting to get nicer i dont really need them anymore so i took them out of the back of my truck and i put them next to my parking space in my parking garage below my building, the parking garage is pretty big but it has a whole bunch of pillars in it which make a lot of it pretty worthless for parking cars, but you are allowed to store a bunch of random stuff in that space, just so long as its not excessive, so i took my sandbags and threw them there, and then the other day i was unloading some groceries out of my truck and i looked and they were gone!!!!!! someone had stolen my sandbags!!!!! it was tragic
ok fine, so that was just another perfect example of why people dont take me seriously when i say things, cuz its not like its a really big deal, i think they were about 2 bucks each and i wont need them again for another 9 months or so but seriously, who would steal sandbags?! i'll tell you who it was, it was big slick, i dont really know who he is but there is a truck in my parking garage with a licence plate that says that and ive never met him but someone who would put that on their license plate seems like the type of person who would steal peoples sandbags, and then if you confronted them about it they would say "oh no, these are mine, ive had them forever....", which reminds me, there are an unreasonable amount of vanity plates here in wichita, i mean they are all over the place, its something ive noticed since i got here and i kind of keep an eye out for them, i am trying to figure out if there actually are a lot of them, or if because they are a different colored plate than normal ones they just stand out more, there are 3 in my parking garage alone which holds maybe 20 cars, and there are another couple in the outside parking lot that holds about as many cars, and there are at least 15 in my work parking lot, i see a new 1 or 2 i havent seen there before there every few days, and i see them driving around all over the place, when greg was here i told him that at some point i said "kansas has a lot of vanity plates" and he just sort of gave me an "ok....." sort of look, but then i pointed them out whenever we were driving and we were at outback for dinner once and there were 4 in that parking lot, and i think he believes me now, and he agrees with me which is nice because it means im not crazy and making things up...

Gregor's visit, escort services, and spatulas

2008-02-20T19:22:00.001-06:00

hey there friends,
so i feel i have to apologize that this took so long to come out, not that any of you really know it took a long time cuz i didn't tell anyone how to find it til it was done so i could have a sort of debut type thing, but it has taken me a while to write this, like most of the stories i am going to tell you happened at least 2 weeks ago, but i guess this is how its going to work now that i am a lame old adult and have to work all day, and i have at least to an extent gotten my sleeping issues under control, thats a big part of it actually, i dont stay awake all night with nothing to do but write... i also apologize because due to the long time between when these events actually occurred im sure i have forgotten things that happened and my poor readers will probably feel cheated knowing there were more exciting stories they wont get to hear, although i imagine this will still end up being plenty long enough
so anyways, my good pal gregor came up to visit me the other weekend, and we had some good times, and i thought i would share some of them with you, first off, gregor had to stay in lubbock on friday morning to take a fish test, and so he wasnt going to get to my place until about 10 at night, and then we had planned to go out after he got here, well, i already mentioned that i am a lame old man, and so i took a nap that evening so i would be able to go out and not be super tired the whole time, and i think that is sad but oh well, so gregor finally got to wichita and he buzzed me on the intercom, and i went and talked to him on the intercom, and then buzzed him into the building, which is one of the things i was super excited about moving into my new apartment, i have to buzz people in when they come visit me, its just like i had always seen in movies or in tv shows like seinfeld, and it always makes me happy except no one ever comes to visit me so i dont get to use it near enough (thats a hint for people to come visit), so he comes up and we make a couple of drinks and i give him the grand tour of my apartment, which really doesnt take that long because its mostly just big empty rooms because i have no furniture (more on this later)
so after a few minutes of "this is the kitchen area, someday i'll put a table there...." we decided to go out and enjoy some of the exciting wichita night life, we went to this place called Mort's Cigar and Martini Bar which is just up the street from my place, and we go inside and the first person i see is a pimp, which was really exciting cuz i have never seen a pimp in real life, a lot of idiots like to dress up as them for halloween and lame things like that but this was a real one, he had a bright red suit on, and a big matching red hat with a feather in it, and he was wearing lots of big gold chains, the rest of the people there were less interesting than that, but it was a cool enough place i guess, we sat and smoked some cigars and had a few more drinks and talked for a long time, they also had this big fancy cupboard style humidor on one wall, and all the little drawers had fancy placards with peoples names on them, and apparently you could rent out one of the little drawers and they would give you a couple of keys and they would hold your cigars for you, so that was fun, and after that we went home and went to sleep
the next morning we went to breakfast at this place called the beacon which is about a block over from my apartment, now, my brother and i have always wanted to find like a little coffee shop diner type place that would be our restaurant, like Monk's in seinfeld (i realize i just said i want my life to be like that show 2 times in this thing already, but i am pretty sure thats the last of that, just so you dont think i wish i was jerry or something) or the waffle house type place in Swingers, some place that serves breakfast 24 hours a day and that we would go to all the time, so the first time i drove by this beacon restaurant, and saw the sign that said breakfast served all the time, i got really excited about it, and gregor and i went and it was this awesome little old style diner type place, and it would have been perfect except for the fact that its only open for breakfast and lunch, which does me very little good, i mean i guess it could turn into a saturday morning after going out friday night type place but i still need to find something that is open all night
after our fine breakfast gregor accompanied me while i went and looked for furniture, and it was pretty fun and i actually did a pretty fast job of picking everything out, i dont even think we were there for 3 full hours, which is lightning fast for me, i am notoriously bad at making up my mind and picking things out (ask anyone whos ever gone out to dinner with me), the other day it took me 10 minutes to pick out a salt and pepper shaker, so the fact that i was able to pick out an entire living room set in under 3 hours is very impressive, although, i had pretty good idea of what i wanted, i wanted a brown leather couch, so we didnt have to sit in every couch in the store, just about 30, and it was pretty obvious which one was best, so we only had to repeat test a small handful of them, a lovely young lady named kristi helped me find my furniture, she thought i was really funny for some reason, i thought she was funny too, especially when she knocked over a fake tree trying to reach a lamp and it knocked a bunch of stuff over, i shouldnt pick on her, she was nice, she let us move a whole bunch of different stuff all over the store so we could see which tables and lamps and whatever matched my couches, and she didnt even make us put everything back, so im really excited to have my furniture, i havent gotten it yet... they didnt have it in stock when i was there that day and so they had to order it and then it finally came into the store and then they had to set up a time to deliver but i went out of town and then they were booked and so i still havent gotten my furniture, it should be here friday so that will be real exciting, although, it is going to cut down on the room i have to dance in after i hit home runs in wii baseball, i mean the kitchen, dining, and entry way area of my apartment is still empty and wide open, although my celebration dances dont tend to take me that far, unless of course i have to do a carlton fisk and keep the ball in fair territory as i hop down the baseline...
anyways, after mostly just hanging out the rest of the afternoon we had a very classy evening, we got dressed up in suits and went to one of the fanciest restaurants in all of wichita, Scotch & Sirloin, supposedly its where all the celebrities go to eat when they come to wichita, and you are probably thinking the same thing i did when i first heard that, "celebrities go to wichita?", as surprising as it may be its true, (or so ive been told, ive never seen any), but wichita is the aviation capitol of the world and so they like to come here to check out and buy their fancy private jets, and when they are in town they like to eat at Scotch & Sirloin, and i dont really blame them, it was super nice, our waitress that night was also named Kristi, which we found very amusing and so we did our fake snobby laugh that we had adopted for the evening, but the food was really awesome and the servings were enormous which is always good, (i think the smallest steak they had was 14 oz), and the wine was excellent, and i managed to make it though the entire meal without spilling on myself, which is always an accomplishment, hey speaking of spilling on myself, the other day i was out to lunch with some of my co-workers, and i was attempting to drink some iced tea, and all the ice was stuck at the bottom of my glass, but then as i drank it all broke loose and i poured about a third of a cup of tea down the front of my shirt and pants, it was pretty awesome....actually it wasnt that bad, it dried pretty well, anyways, Scotch & Sirloin is an excellent restaurant, and i highly recommend it, if anyone decides to come visit me just bring at least 50 bucks and we'll go
after our fine meal we continued our classy evening by going to the symphony, the symphony here is in the convention center downtown, in this cool round building, and being great lovers of the arts, gregor and i thought this would be a very good way to spend the evening, the first piece they played was Concerto For Orchestra by Bela Bartok, which is a 5 movement work that in my opinion should have been cut down to two, the opening and ending movements were fun and exciting, but the middle parts were not as great, we did get to use our snobby fake laughs again during the 4th movement when Bartok made a musical joke, at one point towards the end of the 4th movement the piece switches and they play "a burlesque of a theme from Shosakovich's Seventh Symphony that Bartok had found ludicrous", we only knew about it cuz the program booklet pointed it out, otherwise we would have just thought, wow, that bit sounded like crap, which i dont really get, if you think someone elses work sounds dumb, why would you put it in your own piece and make your stuff sound crappy, i never understood musical jokes, in college i took a music appreciation class and a couple times our professor pointed out some musical jokes that the composer had made and they never made any sense to me and i didnt think they were funny at all
The next piece featured a guest performer, Stewart Goodyear on Piano, as they played Franz Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Minor, and it honestly was one of the most amazing things ive ever seen in person, now i think people tend to give standing ovations way too often, and i generally try to avoid them, but i jumped out of my seat in applause when he finished because he was that good, here is a video of him playing The Blue Danube by Strauss, hes a pretty funny looking guy but he is amazing on the piano, unfortunately in this video he has his head shaved so you dont get to see him with his awesome long slicked back funny hair

i really love the faces he makes when he is playing, i could watch him play all day, the combination of how funny looking he is and how amazing he plays would entertain me for hours
the last piece they played was Beethoven's Fantasia for Piano, Chorus and Orchestra, OP. 80., which was pretty good, i enjoy listening to people sing in foreign, although, i think they should have done it second cuz it was a bit of a let down after the liszt piece, but it was still good
after the symphony was over we took about a 180 degree turn from classy night and went to this dive of an irish bar to play darts and drink Guinness, we changed out of our suits first so they wouldnt smell like cheap cigarettes and so we didnt stick out quite so much, at the bar they had this set up where people could play guitar hero on a projection screen real big on the wall and they played the music over the speakers, which at first i thought was kind of cool, but then i changed my mind, because it wasnt like anyone was super good at it, so it was kind of like hanging out almost listening to good songs, except someone was ruining them cuz they kept messing up, other than that it was fun, oh and except gregor is a lot better than i at darts and so he destroyed me all night, when after a couple of hours i finally won a game we decided it was time to call it a night
in the morning i made waffles and then he went home
speaking of bars, before gregor came to visit i tried to do a little bit of research to learn something about all the bars around here, there are tons of bars all over the area right around my place and i was just trying to get an idea about what sort of things each bar had to offer, like i mentioned earlier gregor likes to play darts so i was hoping to find out where we could do that and whatever, so i had just searched downtown wichita bars or something like that, and was skimming through some online maps and websites and such, and at one point in my search i came across a link that was for some kind of wichita escort service, i didnt even know escort services actually existed, let alone had fancy websites so i checked that out based on pure curiosity, turns out it was a pretty big deal that had operations in several different cities including kansas city and a couple of places in texas as well, (i guess people in oklahoma can get real dates), i guess the idea is you pick out a girl, and you go to some sort of event, after that you go home for a quick romp, give her a couple hundred bucks and send her on her way (you might have to pay upfront, i didnt look at the site close enough to study the payment options), somewhere on the site it had a description along the lines of "the perfect companion for a social event, office get together, or evening out", and i thought about that and i thought about how hilarious it would be if someone came to like an office picnic or something with someone who was obviously a hooker, i picture some guy with some sleazy girl on his arm and everyone else just kind of stares at them and talks quietly behind their back, i mean the site claims that their girls are real classy and can dress for all occasions so maybe i should give the girls more credit, they are professionals after all, but based on their profile pictures they had i just couldnt really imagine any of them going to some classy upscale event like an opera and blending in at all, although, that might be worth it just to see the looks on all the snobby old peoples faces, id send her home right after the opera was over of course, i have no interest in my little joke on rich people resulting in some sort of long term medical issue... gross
so i was at bed bath and beyond the other day, and i thought to myself "i need a spatula", and so i wandered over to that area and of course they had way to many to choose from which as you know always poses a huge issue for me, but i actually made this choice pretty quickly, cuz some of them were like 12 dollars and looked super fancy, but its a spatula and so i didnt really care, i was just tired of scraping the last little bits of things out of jars or whatever with my fingers, and i saw one that was like $1.95 and so i decided on that one, and then later i saw on the little cardboard tag thing that my little 2 dollar spatula had a 25 year guarantee, which i thought was very interesting and so i thought about that for a while, picture this with me
its 24 years from now, and im dang near 50 years old, and lets say i have a wife and kids, and 24 years from now they could potentially be graduating high school, (im not saying thats likely, just a possibility and to help you how distant in the future this is) and im mixing up something in the kitchen with my trusty old spatula and the handle snaps!! oh no!! it didnt last 25 years!! ive been screwed!! i demand reparations!! im going to call the company and make them give me a new one!
no, theres no way i would react like that, and i cant imagine anyone who would, personally if my spatula broke a week later i would probably say "dang, i guess this time ill get the 5 dollar one", and then i started thinking about how would you go about getting another one, do you have to save your reciept and your little cardboard tag thing as proof of purchase, and you have to file this away for a couple decades in the chance that it breaks, and then say it breaks 20 years from now are you actually going to go find your receipts, and track down the company, and either go see them or call them and make them give you a new one, and then what happens when you do go see them, and they say "let me see how you stir" and so you show them, and they say you have improper stirring technique which voids the guarantee, none of that could even possibly be worth the 2 dollars it saves you when they give you a new crappy spatula or do you suppose they just take your word for it, and anyone who contacts them they just give a new spatula cuz its not worth their trouble either, and so then i was wondering why would you bother putting a 25 year guarantee on the little tag anyways if it would never be worth it for anyone to actually follow through with that, im not a marketing major so i dont know exactly how this works, do you suppose they did some kind of calculation where they figured out the cost in fractions of a penny for the ink added to the tag to put that on there, and then compared that to the number of suckers who would actually buy the spatula just because it had a guarantee on it and see how much profit they would make, im picturing some little nerd intern in a cubicle with the worst summer job ever, anyways, so they decide to put it on there for whatever reason, and now my question is why 25 years? did they actually perform tests on their spatulas and determine that was the actual expected lifetime, or did they just make up a kind of big number since it doesnt really matter anyways, they may as well have said 50 or 100 years, or a lifetime guarantee, hell, why not just say it has a million year guarantee as long as we are making stuff up, at least that would get peoples attention
anyways, this is the kind of thing you think about when you move to a new city where you dont know anyone, and you dont have cable or internet or furniture, you sit on the floor and you think about spatulas, im just joking, thats not true, i thought about that when i was driving home from the store, and i dont really watch much tv anyways, pretty much all ive watched since i got cable is college basketball and the discovery channel, and i dont just sit around on the floor, i have some nice bar stools and an outdoor foldy type chair, although, it was pretty sad, it was the first night i lived here, and i made myself a really nice spaghetti dinner, and then i realized i hadnt put my stools together yet, so i had to eat my fancy dinner sitting in my foldy chair and eating off of the box for my surround sound system because my chair was too short to reach the counter, it was pretty sad
oh, and i after that super long rant, i still dont think ive used my spatula since i bought it...

A New Beggining

2008-02-18T19:25:00.004-06:00

Hello friends,
so i was driving home from work today, and i was thinking to myself "i had a very good weekend this past weekend, and i havent written a blog in a super long time, i think that this would be a good opportunity to do that." and i got home and i found out that some computer nerd had gotten into my myspace account and sent a bunch of comments to people pretending to be me with an exciting offer of free ringtones or something like that, (if i sent one to you i apologize) and thats really lame, and i have gotten kind of tired of myspace and all the lame things about it, things like constantly having to turn down fake girls who want to be my friend, and the only reason i got on myspace in the first place was so i could make blogs. i never update it, and my profile is almost completely blank, i think the only thing on there is my skimboarding video, and all i ever change is which seinfeld quote gets to be my headline and whether i have mack the knife or beyond the sea as my song, which is nice but i dont really have anything tying me back there. check this out

see, now if i can just figure out how to make this thing play bobby darrin songs i'll be completely set
so basically this is just going to be the new location where i record all of my ramblings, i like writing and over time ive used a bunch of different outlets, like i said earlier i did a bunch of blogs on myspace, this past fall i really enjoyed writing the weekly newsletter for our college football pool, those did generally have more specific subjects and i at least made an effort at correct grammar and some form of punctuation besides endless strings of commas, come to think of it tho, i never did the end of year wrap up issue, and for this i am sorry, especially to chelsea since she finally got her first weekly win of the year and never got to experience the joy of having her picture "taken" with her trophy, i kind of got caught up in the holiday/move to kansas season at the end of the year, hmm, maybe i should work on that... and of course, if you have been lucky, you might have been the recipient of an email from myself, which means you got your very own, maybe even personalized, 2 to 5 page mess of incoherent stream of consciousness, (lucky might not be the best word to describe that), anyways, i almost think that blogs were invented with me in mind, a way for me to share all of my thoughts and ideas with the rest of the world, which, now that i think about it is slightly arrogant, the idea that the rest of the world would actually care about what i think and want to read this, well, if you know me at all you know that humility is not exactly one of my stronger traits, and that i probably actually do believe that most everyone can benefit from reading what i have to say, at least id like to think i am somewhat amusing, but i also realize that the number of people who actually read everything i write can probably be counted on one hand, which is unfortunate... you know who i am jealous of? celebrities who are so famous that whenever there is an election, or some earthquake in some foreign country, that they get interviewed on tv, as if their opinion is any more valid or they are more well informed than anyone else, actually, thats a blatant lie, i think that is ridiculous, but i would like to be famous, and its going to happen someday, my fortune cookie from lunch the other day said so, it said "you will make a name for yourself in the field of entertainment" which is really exciting, because i have very good luck with fortune cookies and they often come true for me, so i look forward to that
speaking of being famous, when i was naming my new blog i considered including "the one and only" pj lachmann, but to be honest, that isnt even an accurate description, it turns out i am like the third pj lachmann in my family, although, each of us has had different names that made up their initials, so i didnt use that, and i settled on the title that is is now, "The longwinded ramblings of PJ Lachmann", which i think is a very good description of what this will be, i also decided that that is going to be the name of my first book, whenever i am discovered by someone who wants to pay me to do this kind of thing, which is kind of a new dream that ive developed, anyways, i should probably wrap this up since i really didnt have anything interesting to say, i just wanted to explain why i was switching over here and explain kind of what this was all about, there was a place where i could put a description of my blog in the settings somewhere, but it had a 500 word limit which just wasnt going to cut it, anyways, im sorry this one was lame, and i promise the next ones will be better, and i will attempt to add new stuff fairly regularly, and maybe if i dont write something for a while i will just post some old stuff ive done, something from the pj archives as it were, anyways, i hope you enjoy

you know what i really like about this site, it automatically saves everything i do, so i dont have to worry about writing 5 pages of super important things and then something weird happens and it all disappears, already this is one of my favorite computer things ever