Tag Archive: Work


I am the slacker, goo goo g'joob

Written Thursday, November 29, 2007 @ 11:28am

GPS Map I know, I know. It’s been more than a month. Excuse the fuck out of me, I’ve been busy! Okay, I’ve been lazy. Sometimes I don’t feel like writing, or I’m just too distracted. Some stuff has happened in the past month — none of it really that interesting — but here goes.

The image here is a screen capture from a new page on wafwot.com. My new cell phone has a GPS chipset in it, and I’m running a cool little program that automatically uploads my current position to a database on my web server. The web page then plots the points using Google Maps or Google Earth. It so totally kicks ass! You can view my latest trip, or previous trips, or even see my current location! I don’t always have the program running on the phone, however, so the web page may not always show my latest position. The program is called TrackMe, and was written by Luis Espinosa. The web interface was written by jcleek/Slacker, also of the xda-developers forums, and I’ve even contributed a tiny bit to the web code. Check out my GPS tracking at gps.wafwot.com. If you have Google Earth installed, load up my KML file at http://www.wafwot.com/gps/routes/wafwot.kml. It’s pretty damn cool.

As I mentioned, I got a new phone. I’m such a technology whore when it comes to phones. My last new phone was only April of this year, but I was using it for so much, I was getting frustrated at the slow speed of the phone and the Int0rn3ts.

My new phone is an AT&T Tilt. Here’s another picture. This bitch smokes! It’s got more gadgets than Sean Connery and Roger Moore combined! Windows Mobile 6 Professional powered by a 400 MHz Qualcomm processor, a 65k-color tilting TFT touchscreen, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, 802.11b and 802.11g Wi-Fi, stereo Bluetooth 2.0 with support of up to 6 simultaneous pairings, a 3 megapixel camera with 10x zoom and autofocus, built-in GPS, quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, 3.6 Mbps tri band UMTS/HSDPA (that’s right, 3.6 megabits per second, baby), 256 MB of flash ROM, 128 MB SRAM, and a microSD expansion slot with support for 32 GB memory cards. I currently have a 4 GB card in the phone, because they don’t make 32 giggers yet. (My god, look at all them Wikipedia links!)

Oh, and it’s a phone, too! Imagine that.

The GPS chipset and large microSD card lets me run TomTom Navigator on the phone for voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation. I was amazed at how accurate TomTom is, at least on roads that have existed for more than a few years. It’s the dog’s bollocks, man! Of course, we drive the same route day after day after day after day after… but it’s nice to have for those trips around accidents, or the rare time I get lost. I’ll be fucked by starving Pygmies before I’ll stop and ask for directions! I’m a guy, damn it! We’re not supposed to ask for directions or the monkeys will fly out our asses, and we can’t have that.

It’s a beautiful thing when I can be secure shelled into work via VPN, chatting on a jabber server, live tracking my journey on Google Maps for the world to see, and surfing the web at DSL speeds — in the palm of my hand — while doing 75 miles an hour northbound on I-5. Don’t get your panties in a knot, I’m a passenger at those times. If I was driving, I’d be text messaging, too! Ha ha!

Okay, enough about my geek toys. What else has happened? I had some work done on my truck. Early in November, I had Les Schwab put on four new Wild Country tires. I bought the truck with the old tires on it, and they were getting a little thin in the tread department. The new tires are nice and quiet, and with winter on the way, it feels good to know my ass (and LDriver’s ass) will safer… because we all know how I worry about LDriver’s ass.

Just before Thanksgiving, I took the truck to Hilltop Texaco here in Oak Harbor. The soul-crushing commutes to Seattle on Fridays were taking their toll on my engine. After doing a hundred miles — forty of which are at 70+ miles per hour — the truck was running rough and felt like it needed a good tune-up. So, during lunch on one of the three days of the holiday-shortened week I worked from home, I took my F-150 to Hilltop. I sat in their waiting room for nearly four freaking hours, tortured by FOX News and watching people shovel popcorn down their esophagus like their name was Moses and they just got back from his little pow-wow with God in the mountains.

Anyway, the mechanics at Hilltop put in new spark plugs, new wires, a new distributor cap, a new rotor, a new serpentine belt, and tuned and scoped the engine. They also checked the electrical system and the brakes. The truck passed all it’s tests, but still runs rough at idle once it’s up to running temperature. Damn it all to hell, I hate vehicles, sometimes. Nearly five hundred dollars, and I still have the “trouble” I took the truck in for. It rides much nicer, sounds better, and even shifts gears smoother… but what the fuck, man?

Speaking of Thanksgiving, Tina and I had a nice holiday. We didn’t go anywhere, or do anything special. We’re boring like that. But, I had a nice nine-day span of being at home, coupled with turkey, stuffing, cranberries, and football. It was a relaxing weekend work-from-home four-day weekend string of days. I wish I could do that more often! Like once a month! Fuck, think of the gas (and money) I’d save. As it is, I spend more than $90 a week in gas.

Okay, there ya go. Not so great, but it catches you up a bit and prevents me from going the whole month of November without an update. December should be a little chattier.

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After all this time!

Written Monday, October 29, 2007 @ 2:42pm

proairhfa.png Well, here we go again. Every winter since 2002, I’ve been contracting some evil breath-stealing, snot-producing bug that slams my ass to the floor harder than Triple H in a title match. I’ve talked about over, and over, and over again.

Before I go any further, don’t get the wrong idea. I don't get my ass slammed, I never have had my ass slammed, and I hate “professional wrestling.” I just used the name for the cultural reference. If I had said Olympic gold medalist Rulon Gardner, would you have understood the reference? Yeah, I didn’t think so either… hence the lowbrow direction I took.

Anyhow… instead of waiting until this annual virus wrapped it’s cold black hands completely around my lungs and squeezes nearly every bit of oxygen from me then going to the ER, I went to see a doctor. Alright, I was cajoled and badgered into seeing a doctor. It seems the fuckers at The Company don’t really care about me, they just don’t want to do my job for five or more days while I’m convalescing in the hospital. How touching.

I went to the doctor last week, and he did the standard weight, height, temperature, blood pressure, ears, nose, throat thing like all doctors do… then asked what’s wrong. “Duuh, I’m sick.” I told him that the first cold of the season hits me like a Rosie O’Donnell fell on my head from the Skydeck of the Sears Tower. He broke out his stethoscope and asked me to take several deep breaths as he listened to my back. Is it me, or do they keep those things in liquid nitrogen before they’re needed? Jesus fuck, that thing’s as cold as a brass toilet seat in the Yukon!

Sure enough, my lungs were crackling like a California wildfire, and a pot-smoking Iron Maiden headbanger with an ‘82 Volkswagen Rabbit that fell of its jack onto his chest could inhale more air than I could. Goddamn. What a long way to go for a joke that wasn’t that funny. My writing skills are rusty.

So, the doctor fired up the nebulizer and gave me a healthy dose of the same old medicine I’m used to — Albuterol. After hittin’ that mist for five or so minutes, I was breathing much better. I was as jittery as a meth-addicted chihuahua after a quadruple-shot latté, but I could breathe. Again the icy cold stethoscope was on my back and I was being asked to take deep breaths. The doctor said I sounded much better, then told me the news…

He says I have asthma.

Asthma. Can you believe that shit? I’ve been going to that ER in Coupeville for five years, and they only ever treated the symptoms. Never once did they even think I might have asthma. I questioned it. I asked the doc why I only had problems in the winter. He told me that asthma can be triggered by cold weather, or the common cold. Color me astonished! When I questioned why the ER never diagnosed asthma, he said that by the time I went to the ER, the symptoms of influenza were bad enough and there was enough lung butter (not his words) in my chest that a correct diagnosis was nearly impossible. Maybe I should have made those follow-up appointments with my doctor after the ER visits, huh?

I was sent home with a prescription for ProAir HFA (Albuterol sulfate, a picture of which is seen above), instructions to keep treating my cold with over-the-counter medications, and an appointment for chest x-rays at the hospital. Two days later, I went and had my close-up with the x-ray tech. I was in and out within an hour, but had to wait all weekend long for the results. I got a call from the doctor’s office the following week; he said my lungs were “normal.” Whatever normal is, the doc didn’t see anything to be concerned about.

After nearly two weeks, I feel much better. I still get as winded as West Virginia coal miner running the New York City Marathon, but… that might have something to do with my fat ass. I’ll find out more at my followup appointment on November 15.

Previously on Battlestar Galactica, I wrote about The Company moving into a smaller office space at the Active Voice because the Westin landlords needed more space for the evil telcos. Well, I’m here to show you some pictures of my little (and I do mean little) workspace in Seattle… here, here, and here. That’s it. A nice step down from my office in the Westin, eh? I’ve even caught myself peering around the cubicle walls a couple times. Will the similarities ever end?.

Over the “walls” are techs that answer calls, laugh, talk, eat, fart, tap pens, ad nauseam. Behind me at my “seven o’clock” is LDriver and his “I don’t need no stinkin’ headphones” overly loud LiveLeak videos (thankfully not all the time since he’s too fucking busy). Phones ringing all around me… I’m constantly checking to see if my phone is ringing. It’s like I’m watching a tennis game or something — back and forth — monitor to phone, monitor to phone, monitor to phone. I swear it gives me a headache! It’s a good thing I have my Sennheisers to keep out all the noise.

Okay. That’s enough for now. Happy Halloween. More to come in November.

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Well we're movin' on down

Written Sunday, October 7, 2007 @ 1:59pm

The Company Award…to a smaller office suite in the sky. But before I get to that, I have to associate my use of “The Company” with the movie Office Space. In the past, I likened “The Company” to some Government-funded project, using “The Company” to hide my employer’s name. However, I watched Office Space (again) last weekend, and laughed at the similarities between Initech and the company that employs my sorry ass. We’ve got burnt out, over-stressed, and underpaid employees working with Lumberghesque managers. Hell, we even have an employee that went around asking co-workers if they’ve seen his red stapler, which was left on top of my desk after running a network cable. Some of us are a little worried that he might even set the building on fire someday. It’s been several years since I watched Office Space, and now that I work in an environment that closely resembles Initech, I found the movie highly comical. So, from this point forward, whenever I mention “The Company,” just imagine the workplace dynamics of Initech from Office Space and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what I’m talking about. Excellent.

Okay… It was around this time last year I wrote about The Company moving to a nice big office suite in the Westin Building in downtown Starbucksville. The idea was to combine the Redmond office and the Oak Harbor office and put everyone in one large office and create a big happy work family. That worked about as well as FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina. In Oak Harbor, we had a happy workplace that was pretty much free from the typical office environment. We all liked each other and got along well, we liked our managers and our managers were understanding and accommodating. We had regular staff meetings, and we all knew our place in the office. Then we moved to Seattle, and the oscillating fan started flinging poo everywhere. I’m sure that most in The Company don’t see it, but there’s a definite perception that the people who went to Seattle from Oak Harbor don’t get the same consideration that the people from Redmond get. It’s like The Company is the United States and us Oak Harbor people are North Korea trying to become a nucular state… we’re just not recognized! Shit, there’s even one person that seems to act like we have AIDS, or something… barely eking out a grunt in response to a morning salutation.

But, the real purpose of this update is to talk about a move. With all the talk of needing more space, expanding, and being directly connected to our network in the prestigious Westin Building, The Company is moving… into a space that’s half the size of the current space, and only marginally larger than the old Redmond office we moved from about a year ago.

Don’t get the wrong idea. The Company didn’t blow its wad on pay raises for managers and owners then go and buy Porsches and Ferraris. No, the Westin Building came to us and asked if we would be willing to move. Apparently, the building is completely leased — no vacancies — and the evil Telcos need more space. Since The Company leases the entire floor, the building management saw disrupting one company for the most floor space a win-win situation. Our new space is directly next door to the Westin, and directly connected like the Westin. Commute times won’t change; only the mailing address will. And since the Westin asked us to move, they’re reimbursing for the relocation.

Anyway… since the new office is so small, there’s not enough room to give everyone a private office. Not to beat a dead horse, but in another display of preferential love, all but one from the former Oak Harbor crew is being crammed into a cubicle no bigger than a prison cell or the Unabomber’s cabin… and they have walls and a door! Even our tech support manager of over seven years is being shoved into a three-wall but no-door corner in a fantastic show of appreciation. Attaboy! On the other hand, everyone from the former Redmond office is getting a private office, albeit small. C’mon, tell me that appears fair. I currently share a large office with one other person in my department. I have a large desk with three monitors, a mini-fridge, a microwave, a bookcase, and some framed pictures. I had the same setup in the Oak Harbor office. In the new office cubicle, the microwave and fridge are gone. The bookcase? Gone. Picture frames? Gone. I ain’t got no stinkin’ walls come next week. I get to keep my desk, though. Woohoo. In all fairness, the new private offices are much smaller than the current offices, and The Company is getting rid of quite a bit of unneeded furniture. But I can’t help but see the favoritism. Maybe I’m out of line with my opinion, but this isn’t the first example of bias and I doubt it’ll be the last.

I’m starting to feel a little nomadic, too. First I work in Oak Harbor, then in the Westin Building in Seattle, next week it’ll be the Active Voice Building… and all I want to do is move back to the old Oak Harbor office and hold a normal 8-to-5 job with a normal “commute.”

A year ago, Tina and I were looking to move to the Seattle area, or at least close enough so that I didn’t have a soul-crushing commute from Oak Harbor to Hell and back. I still want to own a house someday, but the housing market took a giant shit, making it really difficult to do so. And the median home price in King County is $500,000. Who the fuck am I? Rockefeller? Holy fucknuggets, man, you have to be paid like a king to live in King County. While I might qualify for a house that expensive, I still have to pay bills, buy groceries, and put gas in my truck. Jesus Christ, half a million dollars? People have lost their motherfucking minds. For that reason, we’ve put buying a house on the back burner.

That’s all I got on the big move. Wasn’t really worth waiting for, was it?

One last note on football. I finished up writing about the move while the Seahawks played a dismal game against the Stealers in a Super Bowl XL rematch. The ‘Hawks were shutout, and played like a high school team. But what pissed me off more was the FOX announcers. Joe Buck and Troy Aikman called the game, and they did nothing but praise the Stealers, like they were sucking Pittsburgh’s cock, or something. It seemed like a rematch in more ways than one. So, in honor of their play calling, and because I’m concerned about their haberdashery, I present them with a new lobster bib.

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Ridiculousness Redux

Written Friday, September 14, 2007 @ 4:45am

We've all had dead pussy at one time or another.Okay. If you don’t live, work, or talk with me on a regular basis (you’re probably better off, but…) I’ll bet your curiosity was somewhat piqued by the upcoming topics which ended my previous blog update. Let’s start with the sack of dead kittens, shall we?

If you’re a regular reader of this periodic bullshit, you’ll know that I live with a distant relative of Doctor Doolittle… third cousin, twice removed, or some such nonsense. Tina is like an animal magnet; if it’s got fur or feathers, it’ll be at my back door looking for attention or food. There’s almost a goddamn zoo in my back yard at any given time — neighbors’ dogs, rabbits, deer, birds, and stray cats. Across the road, there’s a rooster that cock-a-doodle-doos all goddamn night at a mercury-vapor yard light. Poor bird is more confused than a blind lesbian lost in a fish market. I should set up turnstiles and collect admission… sell popcorn, hot dogs, and soda. There’s been stray cats coming to the back door for years. I’d like to say there’s been a fucking parade of pussy at my house but someone would throw the bullshit flag, I’m sure.

One of the descendants of these mangy feline bitches had her own litter of kittens. This latest batch of felidae happiness is like the third or fourth generation. I thought we may have escaped the cavalcade of cat fucking this year, but I should be so lucky. Tina and I were barbecuing one evening, and we thought we saw little paws and a little tail under the crawlspace cover. Sure enough, the next day, there were three kittens frolicking on the patio. A closer count revealed there were four. Sonofabitch. It wasn’t long before they were getting attention from Tina, who was already leaving water for the heard of creatures that adopted my back yard as their wildlife preserve. I swear I’m going to change my last name to Perkins.

Long story quasi-short, we weren’t feeding the cats. Mama cat was hunting and bringing food “home” for her babies. For as many animals that enter my back yard, there were twice as many dead gophers, dead baby bunnies, dead mice, dead snakes, dead moles — all without heads — that were left on my patio. Why the fuck do cats eat the head first? Like foods high in omega-3 fatty acids, maybe it’s “brain” food. Ha! I crack myself up.

Then we saw the kittens acting lethargic. One Sunday afternoon it started to rain. Before the rain, one of the kittens was sleeping in the yard, enjoying the sunshine. Once the rain started, I notice the kitten still in the yard getting wet. I thought that was odd for a cat, but, the next time I looked outside the kitten was on the patio. By the evening, one kitten was in the water dish, up to it’s chest in water, and another had its paws on the rim. They weren’t responding to noises or “hissing” sounds to scare them out of the water. I did some Googling, and we believe they had feline distemper. Hell, they could have eaten a poisoned mouse or rat and fell victim to the poison. It could even have been antifreeze poisoning. We don’t really know.

By Monday morning, there were three dead kittens on the patio. The fourth looked stronger and might live through the ordeal. When I got home Monday evening, I went outside with a shovel and a garbage bag to dispose of the kittens. It was like The Kitty Killing Fields out there; the patio was littered with the carcasses of tiny little cats. What are you supposed to do with a trio of dead cats? There’s all kinds of jokes about swinging dead cats, but they’re somehow not as funny when you’re staring into a plastic bag o’ feline death. “You can’t swing a sack of dead kittens in Portland without hitting a drunk, pill-popping, no balls pillow biter.” Well, maybe those jokes are still funny. Oh, relax! It’s not like I said, “You can’t swing a sack of dead Jews in New York City without hitting a Arab taxi driver.”

Anyway, back to the heart-warming story of what to do with a bag of lifeless baby cats. Tina said I should bury them. Yeah, let me dig a deep hole in the back yard and create a kitten mass grave. Who am I, Hitler? Screw that. It’s too much work. They ended up in the trash dumpster. Island Disposal trucks its garbage to Seattle, where it’s put on a train heading to the Beaver State. That means there’s a sack of dead kittens decomposing in a landfill in Arlington, Oregon. Rest in peace, little ones, with the used condoms, banana peels, bloody Band-Aids, shitty diapers, coffee grounds, empty beer cans, and used tampons of Washington State.

To make this story even sadder than it already is, the fourth kitten died on Tuesday night and followed its siblings on the next train to Oregon. Mama cat continues to meow and call to her dead babies. Yep. Life is fun at my house.

I’ll follow that uplifting story with a hilarious story of cock waving. As you should all know by now I commute to Seattle on a daily basis. One day in August, we’re heading back to Oak Harbor, sitting in downtown Seattle traffic. We’re behind a bus waiting for the traffic light at Howell and Boren when we see what appears to be a local whack job on the sidewalk making lurid gestures at the passengers of the bus. This was highly amusing to watch. He was pointing at the bus, grabbing his crotch, and muttering something in “whack jobese,” which is a relatively new language based on the highly complicated mutterings of the North America Retard.

He grew tired of the bus and continued on his happy way, and we knew we were next. He saw LDriver watching him and started hollering, “What? What?!” LDriver decided to fuck with the guy and blow him a kiss. I don’t know what went through this nutter’s brain, but he proceeded to unzip his pants, drop trou, and wave his scrote and shlong at us. Jesus Christ! Everyone in the car broke out in uproarious laughter! People in other cars were laughing! Wotta riot!

LDriver thinks the guy’s perfectly sane. Why? Because his response to people watching him is to demonstrate the mechanics of a mushroom tattoo? I personally think the dude’s as unbalanced as FOX News at a Democratic National Convention. Here you have some weirdo, obviously a few McNuggets shy of a Happy Meal, shaking his grapes at us like there’s not a bus load of people watching him! What the fuck? How can he not be crazy?

When the light changed green and we started moving, Mr. Dick Flapper was still standing there with his hand full of frank and beans. LDriver yelled out, “It’s got to be bigger. Much bigger!” It was hysterical, and I was too shocked to snap a picture with my phone! Shit! We still laugh at that today, more than a month and a half after it happened. Good times!

Thinking about the other topics I have left to write about, I think I’ll skip one. I have a tale of Tina’s sister Michelle, who ended up in the hospital with life-threatening injuries. However, I don’t feel comfortable writing about her dire condition, so I think I’ll let Tina do the talking. When she writes about it, I’ll link to her blog entry… or you could just subscribe to her blog to keep up. No one’s really sure how she ended up in the condition she’s in, but the police are finally involved. Certain members of her immediate family are fucking inconsiderate, selfish, “what’s-in-it-for-me” asstards who should be ashamed, absolutely ashamed of themselves for attempting to use the situation for financial gain! They know who they are, and I don’t give a tiny peanut-shaped shitlet if they read this. Let them come up to Seattle and confront me face-to-face. C’mon, motherfuckers, I goddamn dare you!

Let’s move on. I don’t need to stroke out over all that drama.

If you haven’t figured it out, I obfuscate the name of the company I work for, and only mention them as “The Company.” I pretend I work for some covert Government-funded project called “The Company,” or some such shit, just to keep a modicum of anonymity. In reality, I work a humdrum job for an ISP’s Hosting/Domain Registry department in a Seattle skyscraper. I make sure people’s web sites are on the, uh, Internets.

Late last month, we had our company picnic. The Company catered the affair with pulled pork, beef, and baked chicken, with baked beans, corn bread, lots of beer, and other picnic type foods. Why we don’t just cook hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill at a BARBECUE, is beyond me. I guess pulled pork is an American barbecue food. Hey, free food is free food, and who am I to complain?

Before the picnic, one of my co-workers and I were jabbering about cheesecake. She read my Rocket Science blog update about cheesecake and cheesesteaks, and we decided to bake cheesecakes for the picnic. We didn’t tell anyone, we just agreed to make cheesecakes. Of course, it turned into a friendly competition between us. We talked smack about each others cheesecakes before they were even baked. When we showed up at the picnic, we had our cheesecakes ready. Here’s a picture of mine, and here’s a picture of hers. Mine had real Ghirardelli chocolate on it, and was made with 6 bricks of authentic Philadelphia cream cheese. Her’s had hand-picked blackberries from Issaquah. BlackBerrys are for email, not cheesecake. Mine was thick and hearty, sure to give you a heart attack like a good New York-style cheesecake should. Her’s was thin and creamy, like it came from a box. I’m sure to catch shit for poking fun of her cheesecake… but it’s just that, poking fun. Her cheesecake really was very tasty.

Once The Company found out we were having this little bake-off going on, they turned it into a full-blown competition, with voting and a prize. Most everyone got a tiny sliver of each cake, and they had to vote by placing a raffle ticket in a cup representing my cake or hers. When the votes were cast and tallied, she won by a vote of 13 to 12. I demanded a recount, as I’m sure there were hanging chads somewhere, goddammit! Her prize, get this, was a gift card to The Cheesecake Factory. How ironic. We both agreed the contest was a tie, since both cakes were very good, and the voting was so Floridaesque.

And I know I mentioned an upcoming move… but I think I’ll take a pass on that, too. When I know more and can safely talk about it… you’ll be the last to know, I promise. Besides, I’m tired of typing. You got two blog updates in one week. Go get drunk, smoke weed, rejoice, wave a flag, hump redheads on your lunch break… something… just leave me alone for a bit. I gots a life!

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Long time, no see

Written Thursday, June 7, 2007 @ 9:25pm

big headed baby Holy fuck, it’s been a month and a half since I’ve updated this little waste of time. I have no excuse, except being exhausted from work… that, and I’m a lazy dick.

As most of you who read this bullshit already know, my days are hella long, but shorter than they were last Nobember. I’m up at 4:00am (commonly referred to as o’dark hundred). I leave the house just before 5:00am, get to work by 7:30am, leave work at 5:00pm, and if there’s no Asian drivers or left lane vigilantes, I’m home by 7:30pm. Bedtime rolls around at 10:00pm and I get to do it all over again in 6 hours. I hate this, but it wasn’t too bad, as open tickets in my department were usually completed by mid-afternoon. I was able to start an update during lunch, possibly complete a rough draft during the slow afternoon, and put the finishing touches on it before going to sleep. That all changed when the company that employs my sorry ass purchased an ICANN-accredited domain name registrar (as I mentioned in my April 10 update oh so long ago). My department handles all the issues from domain registrants. While things are starting to calm down, it’s still a huge drain on my time. I’ve probably spent a total of 8 hours looking at the Hosting ticket queue since the Registrar came online in late March. It feels that all my time is monopolized in the Registrar queues, which are usually filled with an assload of spam, sprinkled with a smattering of “English only from the knowledge of retarded registrants it comes from the translator.” Sometimes it’s like talking to Yoda’s retarded European cousin, Yodaski. “Goodly English I speak not. My domain name, renew I must or expire it will.” So, I guess what I’m saying is… I have an excuse. Laziness aside, after a day at work lately, I don’t want to go near a computer… weekends are spent sleeping… and sometimes this blog feels like work, and I can’t have that.

Speaking of work, things are going swimmingly for The Company. I don’t know much about it, and I probably shouldn’t talk about it anyway… so I’ll only mention that they signed a big contract that promises to take The Company to a whole new plateau. It’ll be nice to see us grow, even if we become something resembling an aborted Comcast fetus. Maybe us indentured servants will see a modest pay increase out of it all. It sure would be nice, since the price of gas is robbing me for all I got… like a ten dollar whore in a by-the-hour no-tell motel. Fuck, I need a low interest, long term loan just to pay my share of the carpool gas… goddamn raghead terrorists and their gas-peddling pusher refineries! At least the price is dropping some… I spend $45.00 at the pump now instead of $46.30. Time to buy a Pepsi.

Funny that I mentioned fetuses, because it’s definitely fucking spring. I have a house full of parrots that are full-swing into their springtime (albeit masturbatory) humping cycle. There’s more birdy jizz in those cages than in Lindsay Lohan’s stomach after an all night bender… and that’s a lotta jizz. Nearly every woman I know seems to be in their springtime mating cycle, too. Jesus Christ! They either just had a baby, are pregnant with a baby, want to have a baby, or being called “baby.” It’s like a fucking barnyard, man. I swear I heard Marlin Perkins narrating in my office last week. “We’ll wait here while Jim passes out some protection, and I’m not talking about the kinda of protection you can get with an insurance policy from Mutual of Omaha.”

The picture of Nirvana’s Nevermind cover was photoshopped (although I used GIMP) by me to be a crude representation of a newborn in our office. The baby was actually a girl, but the news was the baby was “6lbs 14oz, 18″ long, 14″ head full of hair!” Now, I’m a bright young old man, and I know the 14 inches referred to the circumference of the head, but I couldn’t help think of a baby with a giant head, and a 4-inch body. It made me laugh. Speaking of Nevermind, the baby in that picture was three months old in 1991, and the parents were paid $200 for the shoot. If you want to feel old, take a look at this picture of Spencer Elden (that’s his name) in 2005. Goddamn, I’m ancient! I remember the day that CD came out! I wonder if girls giggle and want to see his wiener for comparison purposes. Punk-ass fucker probably gets more trim in a year than I’ve seen my entire life. I’m not bitter.

Is anyone sick of all the Paris Hilton coverage on every fucking news outlet on the planet? It’s absolutely incredible that her in and out and in again prison fiasco is monopolizing the headlines. The bitch was born with a gold-plated platinum spoon wedged in her face. If her last name was Green, or Smith, or Nahasapeemapetilon… and she worked at a nail salon, McDonald's, or a Kwik-E-Mart she’d be just another dumb, talentless cunt with small tits. She’d be living in a mobile home with a cocktail of cum from every mullet-wearing hillbilly in the trailer park oozing from her orifices. She literally has nothing to contribute to society. Seriously, do you think the world would miss her if she fell into a well in Midland, Texas, never to be heard from again? I say we take her, Nicole Richie, and all their socialite friends, cut off their heads, arms, and legs, toss the body parts in a bus, fill the bus with concrete, and send the whole goddamn thing into space on a collision course with the Sun. Or we could just kill ‘em.

Okay, now that I’ve probably startled the shit out of you with my overworked imagination, I’ll wrap this update up and call it published. Let’s hope it’s not another six weeks before another diatribe graces this site.

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420

Written Friday, April 20, 2007 @ 10:29pm

Cingular 8125Yesterday, I got a new cell phone. Well, I ordered it Tuesday, and it arrived yesterday… so I guess, I really did get a new cell phone yesterday. Seems like I get a new one every year. Last year I bought a v635. This year it’s a new smartphone. The Cingular 8125 has one major flaw; it runs Windows. However, I can over look that glaring technological pimple for all the other cool shit it does. It’s got bluetooth, Wi-Fi, infrared, USB, a miniSD memory card slot, a 1.3 megapixel digital camera, a QWERTY keyboard, and a 65k-color quarter VGA screen. Oh, did I mention it’s a cell phone? It’s freakin’ awesome. I can surf the ‘Net for porn, use jabber to chat with my two friends, or shell into my Linux machines or the servers at work… and I can still make calls to order calzones from Pizza Factory. Imagine that! The picture here is a shot of my phone, which I also uploaded to Wikipedia since the article for the HTC Wizard needed an image.

I had, just had, to run an errand in town today. I still had the nebulizer I used to inhale the medication I needed when I had pneumonia. It had to be returned to the medical supplier or I’d have been the next Jim Carroll, sucking dick in the men’s room for money to pay the goddamn bill.

My 5am-to-8pm daily commute has made doing things in town a fucking production, requiring a scheduled day off, an official Congressional order, and a high level of coordination rivaling that of Cirque du Soleil. If we need to run even the smallest errand in town, we have to burn a vacation day (or feign illness) in order to complete that errand. The amount of bullshit we’re forced to eat when asking for a schedule change is out of hand. There’s a really long story that goes behind all this, but I don’t want to get into it. Let’s just say that my carpool was asking to have “work-from-home” Fridays that would allow us to telecommute. So earlier in the week, I requested today off if (and only if) we were still driving to Seattle. If telecommuting was approved for Fridays (and all of us were working from home), I wouldn’t need the day off. Okay, let me simplify this as if you were a 2nd grader: I was to have the day off if we’re driving, or I would work from home if we weren’t driving. And as predictable as the rising cost of gasoline, the word came down yesterday that telecommuting was denied, and we would not be working from home. Bastards!

So, I was working from home today. I was logged into the support queue with my X-Lite softphone, tunneled into the company’s VPN, and connected to our jabber server. I was handling my tickets and doing my thing. One of my pet peeves about the jabber server is chat etiquette. It drives me crazy that the people I work with have to start off a conversation with a stupid question — “You there?” Jesus fuck, people! If my online status says I’m available, there’s a high goddamn likelihood I’m at my desk. Just spit it out! There’s no need to ask for my fucking twenty. One of my co-workers asked me this question shortly after 3pm today, and I replied accordingly. They’re jealous nappy-headed hos because I was working from home, and they had to drive into Seattle. They campaigned, via broadcast message, for everyone to send me a jabber message… “hey, you there?” As you can see by the clips of my jabber log below, everyone who asked got the same basic response, regardless of who they were. It was all in good fun, though.

<Twigg> hey you there?
<Twigg> hahahahahahha
<wafwot> fuck you
 
<Ocelot> hey you there?
<wafwot> I’ll say to you what I said to Twigg…. Fuck you.
<wafwot> C’mon…. get the boss to ask me.
 
<mike> you there?
<wafwot> fuck you
<wafwot> LOL
<mike> your number one too!!
 
<mermaid> I’m to harrass you
<wafwot> Okay.
<wafwot> Just don’t ask if I’m here.
<mermaid> I was told to but I dont want to go with the crowd
<mermaid> I’m cool like that
<wafwot> ‘Ata girl!
<wafwot> Coolest in the whole building!
<mermaid> I know I know
 
<All> Hey u there?
<wafwot> fuck you
 
<wafwot> A broadcast messgage?
<wafwot> You ass.
<Ocelot> hahahahahaha
 
<paul> hey, you there?
<wafwot> Ffffffuuuuuuck You!
<paul> hehehe
 
<the boss> ‘hey.. you there?’
<wafwot> fuck you
<wafwot> lol
<the boss> Ouch hhaha you would not like it
<the boss> what a nice guy.
<the boss> where is that pen I sign your check with? hahah

I so wish I had the wit about me to mention to “the boss” that he doesn’t sign my checks… they’re automatically deposited. Muhahahaha!

Just before lunch, my new phone rang. It was Ditech. He took the day off to move car parts from his garage to Bellingham. I think he took the day off to celebrate 420, but I could be wrong. It’s been known to happen one or two… hundred… thousand times before. After work, I drove out to his house and helped him celebrate the “holiday.” During the 45-minute trip, I realized the “Spring 2007 Hey You There” campaign took to the highway. My carpool buddies were now sending “hey you there” text messages to my cell phone. It was pretty goddamn funny once I had a good buzz kickin’.

As we passed the pipe around just outside the door of Ditech’s basement, he told me they were fixing up the house in order to put it up for sale soon. He told me that the carpet in one particular room is haunted by a mysterious piss odor caused by a former owner, and no amount of cleaning has removed the stink. This was highly funny to me in my state of bakedness. He told me most of the time the carpet in the room doesn’t smell. But sometimes just walking into the house, the stink hits you so hard, it makes Ike Turner seem tender. I couldn’t help but laugh. Not in a mean way. Phantom smells are not something you take lightly. If I’ve learned one thing in my 40+ years on Planet Earth, it’s that jocularity and noxious clouds of urine shall not be fucked with. I don’t make this shit up, people. No, I was laughing because my THC-induced imagination went immediately to a new direct-to-video movie of “Scooby Doo and the Lethal Piss Stink of La Conner” (No, I’m not talking about the Swinomish Tribe. That would be mean.) I couldn’t help but picture Shaggy and Scooby, clinging to each other in a quivering embrace of gayness in the back of the Mystery Machine because they saw a Specter of Pee floating towards them, laughing like Ed McMahon. Fred, Daphne, and Velma solve the case, but Shag and Scoob bumble through and somehow expose the true identity of the Pestilent Pee Phantom as Old Man Meriweather… who of course would have gotten away with it had it not been for those meddling kids. We had a girly giggle over that. I was hilarious! Ditech was worried his tale of tinkle stink might make it to my blog… but I wouldn’t do such a thing for the same reason I don’t make fun of the Swinomish. It was after 9pm by the time I got home from Ditech’s house… thanks to that period of time you have to wait before driving while stoned… so you don’t draw attention to yourself. Paranoia is a stoner’s barometer… or something.

So, that was my 420. Hope your’s was twice as fun. Pass the bong. And the lighter… dumbass.

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April Ramblings (Miscellany, Part 4)

Written Tuesday, April 10, 2007 @ 7:57am

Internet Map It’s the return of the crappy blog title! Run away! Flee! If you have a better suggestion for a title… keep it to yourself or start you own fucking blog.

Before you go clicking on the image in this update all willy-nilly and shit, be advised that this image is 4000 pixels square, and fully 11+ megabytes in size. If you haven’t joined the rest of us in the high-speed 21st century, it may take you while to view the full-size image. But if you’re on dial-up, and you simply must see the full-size image, go ahead and click on it, then go masturbate to the bra and panties section of the J.C. Penney catalog. Hopefully the download will be finished before you are… If you’re wondering what it is, it’s an Internet map showing a visual representation of the whole network… as of 2003.

I picked that image because it deals with work, and work is a pain in my large, pasty white ass lately. The company I work for recently bought a domain name registrar. So, we’re no longer reselling domain names for some registrar; we are a registrar! We’re now like the drunk hillbilly brother of Go Daddy. Being a domain name registrar brings a whole new class of customers. Domain name owners make Hosting and DSL customers look like members of Mensa International. Many are from other countries who write emails in their native language perfectly… but English? Not so much. Thank Douglas Adams for the Babel fish. “Am achieving swapping of name server in the dominion example.com, yesterday hice is changing and still not itself live.” What you say? Havening to breach a language and technological barrier should garner me some hazardous duty pay, I swear to fuck!

Ninety percent of their issues are renewing their domain name because they let it expire. They get pissed off because their shit is broke, and it’s somehow our fault. They bitch because their domain name expired and they never got a notice. Do they think we can’t check email logs? We can tell them the exact minute on the exact days and to which email addresses the four different renewal notices were sent.

My favorites are the domain names that expired more than 30 days ago. These domains are so far past the expiration date, they’re placed in a redemption status and no longer in our database. To restore a domain name in redemption costs the owner $99. Oh my God! You would think we kidnapped their baby and was demanding some outrageous dollar amount as ransom. “Pay up or the baby dies, motherfucker!” They get so pissed off! I own 7 different domain names, and you know how many times they’ve expired? Zero! I have never let one of my domains expire accidentally. I had a dispute with a couple of them because of a milquetoast cocksucker and his Sleestak wife, but that’s a story from the past that doesn’t deserve even this many words in my blog. Of course, that’s just my opinion… I might be wrong.

Speaking of my domains, December marks 10 years that I’ve owned wafwot.com… the domain name this blog is published at. And just in case you’re a complete dee dee dee, “wafwot” is an acronym for What A Fucking Waste Of Time… Hence the name of the blog. Pretty goddamn brilliant, eh?

Since 1997, this domain name has been a mail server and a testbed for various open source packages and web page designs… and a conglomeration of useless shit I’ve shared with people from time to time. This blog is the longest wafwot.com has been used for anything useful… and I kinda like it. Now if I just had the time to update it more frequently. This update took me four fucking days to write. I started it on Saturday afternoon as I was watching The Masters, but I’ve only managed thirty minutes here, an hour there, or forty five minutes during my lunch hour…

For anyone that gives a tiny seahorse-shaped shitlet, I’m feeling much better after my latest bout with pneumonia, or “new-moan-ya,” as my Dad used to type. I’m still only getting about 2250 ml of air with my incentive spirometer, but I admittedly haven’t been using it much. Of course, I feel like shit (but for a different reason) after I received the bill from the hospital; a whopping $1371! Those shit-wiping, pill-pushing, vomit-mopping, over-priced bastards! My insurance should cover all but about $350 or so…

Okay, that’s all I have for the time being. Sorry for the long delay between this update and the last. My commute and work schedule being what it is, it’s difficult to find the time to write.

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Alzhiemer's?

Written Thursday, March 22, 2007 @ 1:02pm

Auto Lockout Kit The aging of Wafwot continues. I had one of my worst-ever Senior Moments earlier this week.

I drove my truck to Seattle on Monday because our regular carpool driver was working in the Oak Harbor office. So, like any other day, I was up before the rooster across the street. Since I’m still coughing due to pneumonia, I didn’t get much sleep Sunday night/Monday morning, and I was dog-ass tired. I jumped in the shower to wash hair, face, pits, crotch, and ass… in that order… hoping that the shower would wake me up more. By the way, have you ever noticed how mighty a fart sounds through wet ass cheeks in the shower? It brings a smile to my face, no matter how tired I am.

By 4:55am, I was out the door and picked up one other commuter and headed south to Seattle. It was an easy trip, and we pulled into the Westin parking garage before 7am. I parked on the 5th level — like we do every day — put the borrowed keycard (that gets me in the garage for free) in my sun visor and hopped out of the truck. I locked it and headed to the elevators to get into the building.

Monday was a busy day at work, but whenever you’re busy, time seems to fly by quickly. However, by 5pm, I was ready to get the fuck out of Dodge.

As I was riding the elevator back to the 5th level, I was searching, in vain, for my keys. They weren’t in my pocket. Before heading back into the building to check if I left my keys on my desk, I checked the ignition. Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck! There’s my motherfucking keys! It the ignition! Fuck!

I could have sworn I had an extra key at my desk, but I checked all the drawers and cabinets of my desk, and there was no key to be found. The CTO of our company gave me a wire clothes hanger, but after 30 minutes of fucking with it, I realized the hanger was too flexible. I called Tina to have her find a locksmith in Seattle for me. Tina called me back at 5:45pm, and gave me the number of Abel Locksmith & Road Service on 12th Avenue South. I called them and they said they’d be “right over.”

I learned a couple things that day; always have a spare key in my wallet, and in the native tongue of locksmiths, “right over” means about an hour. Shit. By 6:45pm, I met the locksmith outside the parking garage… because his truck height is 6-feet 10-inches, and the parking garage height is 6-feet 8-inches. Simply excellent.

Johnny McBreak-in shoved a wedge between the glass and door skin in order to get various wires and rods shoved into the door. He spent 15 minutes wailing and yanking on his tool before he gave up on the driver’s side door. I mean, he was pulling with so much force, he bent his tool. And yes, I know I just used “yanking,” “pulling,” and “tool” in the past two sentences. What of it?

This “professional” locksmith had much better luck opening the passenger side door in only two minutes. He reached in and grabbed the keys from the ignition. I tried opening the driver’s door with the key, but couldn’t turn the key to the unlock position. What the fuck now? After dicking with it from the passenger side, we realized that all that zealous yanking pulled the plastic door panel over the lock pin… uh, lock knob? What in the sweet and sour hell are those manual locking knob thingies called? Anyway, once the “manual lock plunger knob doohickey” (technical term) was back in the hole it’s supposed to be in, the door unlocked properly.

The whole ordeal cost eighty fucking dollars — eight zero period zero zero — and two hours of time. I wasn’t even kissed as he was fucking me. Wotta rip off! No matter… we were heading out by 7:00pm and all my windows were intact. One good thing about leaving Seattle at 7:00pm is there’s no traffic. I was back in Oak Harbor by 8:35pm (average speed of 60 mph) and there wasn’t a slowdowns to be seen in that shithole called Everett.

Two items of note: I’ll probably get reimbursed by my insurance company since I have emergency road service coverage on my policy… and I now have a spare key in my wallet, at my desk at work, and at home. Monday was the first and last time I will ever be locked out of my vehicle.

Fucking Wal-Mart… I went there on Wednesday for bird seed, cough medicine, milk, cereal, pop, and a few other items we needed at the house, including cigarettes (not for me, I don’t smoke). I did my shopping and got in a line with a cashier.

Normally I use the cool self checkout at the Wal-Marché, because I’m all about self gratification. But since I needed cigarettes, I hit a line with a cashier. She scanned all my items like a good smiley-faced monkey, but couldn’t seem to get the cash register to by-pass the age check on the cough medicine. Fucking safety checks. God forbid a teenager puts down their heroin needle for a bottle of Delsym. On top of that, the chick wouldn’t sell me cigarettes at that register, giving me an excuse of company policy. I had to use lane one where the tobacco products are sold. I complained that I would have gotten in that line if I had 10 items or less, but I had about 16 items. I’ll be damned if I’ll violate the sacred Item Limit at the Wal-Mart and have some hoarse-voiced, yellow-fingered little old lady holler at me because she couldn’t buy a new pack of Benson & Hedges menthols before she slipped into another nicotine fit.

So how fucked up is that? Wal-Mart puts the cigarettes behind one register with a 10 items or less limit, then forces customers to buy cigarettes at that register only. Fuckers. I had to pay for my 15 items at Register Three (with a credit card), then take my “must be older than 18 to purchase” cough syrup to Register One and make another credit card transaction. Dicks.

There ya have it, another quality update. I don’t want to hear any more bitching… ’til next time.

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Weazin’ and Coughin’

Written Saturday, March 17, 2007 @ 12:57pm

102.9°F Temperature I’m sitting at work yesterday, trying to catch up on my work between phone calls, and I get an email from Die-Tech: “I need a new blog from you please, my life has dulled in the wake of no new blog from you in 14 days!“

At least he asked politely.

I should apologize for being so lazy and not updating my blog for more than 2 weeks. I do have a good goddamned excuse though. I was busy dying of pneumonia. Once again, I contracted “the pneumonia” and it landed me in the hospital. I couldn’t fully breathe, I was coughing more than a Volkswagen Rabbit burning ARCO gas, and was running a temperature that was a degree or two below the surface temperature of Venus. The picture here is of my digital thermometer two tenths lower than my highest temperature of 103.1°F (39.5°C).

I went to the ER of Whidbey General Hospital, where they took my temperature, blood pressure, hooked me up to oxygen, connected me to a heart monitor, and drew what seemed to be a gallon of blood for testing. After the sixth vial of blood, I joked with the vampire tech, “If you take any more, I might need a donut and a glass of juice.” He didn’t think that was funny at all. He didn’t even crack a smile. What a great bedside manner.

After a bunch of waiting, and waiting, and waiting, an X-ray technician named Vu came to take me to the X-ray department. He wheeled my hospital bed down the hallways like he was driving his rice burner down I-5. If I had hair, it would have been a blowin’ in the breeze. They have a new digital X-ray machine at WGH, so after a two quick snapshots of my lungs, Vu pushed my bed back to the ER like he was in the M*A*S*H Olympics. (Remember that episode?)

Six days later, or what seemed like six days later, Nurse Dave came in with two pills and a needle. The pills were 500mg each of Zithromax, and the needle was a pint of pudding. Okay, maybe it wasn’t pudding, but Nurse Dave jabbed that thing in my right arm and injected some thick-ass antibiotic into the muscle. That needle was in my arm for a long time. When I got home later that night, I was bruised to hell around the injection site, and it felt like a there was a golf ball under the skin. Fuck!

The doctor finally came back in and said he was going to send me home only because the hospital had no open beds. They sent me home with an oxygen tank. Yes, like some old cigar-smoking septuagenarian, they wanted me to tote around an oxygen tank with one of those nasal cannulas wrapped around my ears and stuck up my nose. Who am I, Mick Jagger? Pass the Geritol.

When I went into the ER, my O2 saturation was 84%. Pretty low. They put me on two liters per minute, and my sat level went up two percent to 86%. They pushed the rate to four liters per minute and it didn’t really help. So why would they send me home with a tank prescribed at two liters per minute? Maybe I’m a cynical fucker, but I think they just wanted to jack my final bill up. My insurance is good, but not that good. I took the tank home, but didn’t turn it on. I had the home medical supply company take it from the house as soon as they could. I need to get the phlegm off my lungs in order to get more oxygen and breathe easier. And they call themselves doctors…

I also took home a nebulizer, and a prescription for Zithromax and Albuterol. The nebulizer is basically an aquarium air pump on steroids. It pumps air into the inhaling apparatus which turns the liquid Albuterol medication into a vapor, which is inhaled… like some medication bong… which is not nearly as much fun as a real bong. The Albuterol gives me the jitters and makes me a little ill. The Zithromax was no fun either. I had to take another 1000mg the day after leaving the ER, and 500mg a day for 5 days after that… and it also made me feel a little sick and turned my poo a nice consistency of chocolate pudding.

I missed 7 full days of work, and did a lot of sleeping. I didn’t even look at my laptop during my convalescence. I’m feeling much better, but I still get short of breath just walking down the hall. It’s going to take a long time to heal completely…

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Fucking Snow, Again!

Written Thursday, March 1, 2007 @ 11:13pm

Snow on I-5 Excuse the lateness of this update. I started writing it on March 1 but finished and published it on March 2.

When we left work yesterday evening, the start of the soul-crushing love-fest that is our nightly drive home was like any other. The roads were dry, the surface streets were clogged (like they ate too much cheese… draw your own conclusions), and all appeared normal. But then we tuned in KOMO AM 1000 and heard about severe winter conditions in Everett and Marysville. Our cell phones began to ring. Worried loved ones were concerned that we might be stuck behind a recent 50 vehicle pile up (story – crash pictures) on I-90 near Snoqualmie Pass. Our commute doesn’t take us anywhere near I-90, thankfully, but the weather on north I-5 had us worried. By the time we made it to the northbound express lanes, the traffic slowdowns had already begun. Every day, we drive past a digital road sign that reports travel times to Lynnwood and South Everett. Normally that sign reads 30 to 45 minutes to South Everett. Tonight, it read 65 minutes. Fuck. As we got closer to the sign, we realized we misread an “8″ as a “6.” Eighty five minutes to make a 20 mile trip. Do the math, people… that’s 4¼ miles per hour. Four and a quarter! Jesus fucking cajun-style Christ! To be fair, that electronic sign is for the main line, not the express lanes. But considering the express lanes weren’t going any faster than the main line, it’s close enough for government tolerances. We tired quickly of the traffic radio, and switched to a CD of The Crystal Method.

It was slow going. After the express lanes ended, it was snowing quite heavily. We were driving in and out of snowsqualls up to Lynnwood, where it was snowing continuously. It wasn’t sticking, just making the roadway wet. Traffic flow sucked. The HOV lane was moving at about 20 miles per hour, where the regular lanes were stop and go. We finally made it to South Everett a full two hours late. The snow was coming down solid, and made for some pretty cool pictures with our shitty camera phones. Here’s a photo, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and even a short movie in MP4 format. Pretty cool new image viewer, eh? If you’re JavaScript-phobic, you probably just saw those images open in your browser. Yawn. People with JavaScript enabled saw the web page dim, and the images appear on a new layer, resized to fit your screen resolution. It’s fucking amazing. You know how I know? Because it’s fucking amazing!

Enough cock waving. By the time we got through Everett and Marysville, we were in a full-on blizzard. I’m not sure, but think we may have been experiencing whiteout conditions… but what the fuck do I know? The snow was coming down so fast and heavy, the headlights were reflecting off it, making it near impossible to see the roadway. The snow was also starting to collect on the slush between the lanes, which meant it was getting colder outside. Our speed wasn’t very fast. This picture of the car radio shows the average miles per hour we were traveling from downtown Seattle to Marysville, and the outside temperature. Pretty fucking swift, eh? I think we broke 25 miles an hour once or twice before things got worse, and they did get worse.

There’s a point where there so much snow that the highway eventually gets completely covered. We reached that point around Smokey Point, and it was not fun. The road was eerily free of traffic. It was us, a Subaru about 200 feet in front of us and a pack of other slow moving vehicles a mile behind us. Previous knowledge told us there was a highway under the car, but we couldn’t see it. “Where’s the lane? Shit!” We were literally driving by braille! As soon as we’d drive over those little bumps or reflectors on the center lines, we’d steer back into the lane until we hit the rumble strip. It’s funny now.

Several dickholes in 4×4 SUVs thought they were impervious to bad weather. Many were wrong. There were vehicles galore that had slid off the Interstate and were now stuck. One Dodge Durango driven by some old fuck sped by us faster than a priest leaving Chuck E. Cheese's with an 8 year old in a duffel bag. A couple minutes later, a cop pulled onto the highway, and his lights came on. Tardboy had spun out, and was now on the side of the road pointing the wrong direction. It appeared that there was a tow truck pulling a station wagon out of a ditch, and the Durango had to avoid the obstacle, and over corrected, spinning himself around.

A couple miles after that spinout, the highway was just wet, and we were back up to 70 miles an hour through the Skagit Valley. All that fucking snow was caused by the Puget Sound Convergence Zone, which we drive through twice a day. By the time we got back to Oak Harbor, it was 9:30pm. Ninety seven miles in 4½ hours. That’s an average of 21½ miles an hour. Fucking snow! We were home just in time to grab a bite to eat and go to sleep to do the whole goddamned thing over again in 6½ hours. Pass the melatonin… and the antacid.

Today was the day we picked up a former co-worker for a trip to the Westin. He had a convention to go to in the hotel. Yesterday’s wintry boot to the coin purse almost put a damper on things, but the powers that know nothing north of Everett forced us to make the 97-mile trip anyway, in the face of sure death on icy highways… and they were icy until Lynnwood, where they were just wet. It was good to see Jake/Di-Tech again, even though we suffered partial hearing loss from his maniacal, Ed McMahon-esque laugh. Good times, though. Made the commute seem shorter, and that’s always a good thing.

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