And have you noticed the rise of invented terminology used to describe the next snow storm? Each time a system threatens to dump copious tonnage of snow, the weather guessers coin some faggoty blended word term that exaggerates reality. Snowpocalypse! Snowmageddon! Snowverload! Snowzilla! Blizzaster! Snowlocaust! Even Snowtorious B.I.G! SnOMG people, it’s just fucking snow! Come down off the ledge and have a cup of cocoa, you pussies!

Anyway… back to my tale. Wednesday morning I woke up at 5am to about three inches of snow already on the ground, and it was still coming down to beat the band. I got ready for work, kissed the little woman goodbye, and left to clear the snow off my truck. I started at the front, but by the time I cleared the hood, the windshield, the side, the roof, the tonneau cover, and the other side, there was a quarter inch on the hood and windshield again! It was flat out dumping snow on Whidbey Island. And while I’m talking of snow removal, I want it on record that I clear my entire vehicle of snow, not just the windows like other lazy motherfuckers do. If you’re one of these inconsiderate bastards that can’t be bothered to clear your roof of snow, I hope you slide off the road and drown in a pool of your own blood and vomit when someone else’s sheet of roof snow blows off and hits your windshield.

Leaving my driveway at 5:45am, the highway was compact snow and ice. It didn’t appear that the State or County had sent plows out yet, and I was thankful for new all-weather tires and 4×4. I hadn’t even made it out of town before I passed several cars that were fishtailing or spinning their wheels. North of town, several people were trying to push spun-out vehicles up the hill. At least five disabled cars were scattered across this part of the highway, all facing different different directions. The tire tracks in the snow no longer followed the normal lanes as other traffic navigated around around these stranded cars. Many cars and several big rigs were either stuck or parked on the side of the highway. A couple of people spun out and were facing the opposite direction, while others were either in the ditch or stuck on the median. One poor sonofabitch rolled his truck at the bottom of a hill, obviously the victim of stupidity.

While the winters in the Puget Sound region are normally mild, the occasional snow storm does happen every year. I would think that drivers would either get used to staying home, or get used to driving in snow. Of course, I’m completely wrong. People are goddamn idiots when the white stuff falls. It just amazes me that people don’t know how to handle winter weather driving. Yeah yeah, I have a big truck with four-wheel drive, but before I bought that truck I drove a 1968 Mustang coupe. “Marty” (as Tina called the Mustang) was a 2,700 pound rear wheel drive vehicle with lots of torque, no limited slip differential, and all its weight up front. I’d argue that there is no other vehicle more difficult to drive in tempestuous weather than the 1960s Ford Mustang. However, for 15 years, I drove that Mustang everywhere in all kinds of inclement weather, including snow and ice. The difference is I know how to drive in snow, and stupid Toyota-driving Flips do not!

This snowstorm was no different. Drivers in front-wheel drive compact hybrid roller skates were out in force Wednesday, and they were the bane of my commute. Every time I approached an incline, the vehicle in front of me would slow down. Why on earth would you do that? You want to speed up slowly to use momentum, then maintain speed in order to climb the hill. I found myself screaming in vain at the jackasses who slowed down! One shithead in a mid-1980s Ford Aerostar van did exactly that — slowed down at the bottom of the hill and ended up spinning his wheels halfway up. Without missing a beat, I moved into the oncoming lane (since it was clear) and passed the moron.

My commute to work is 27 miles, and it normally takes me 35 to 40 minutes. In this snow, it took me an hour and 15 minutes to reach the office. When I got out of my truck, the grille and front end was packed with snow. The windshield was also caked with snow, except for where the wiper blades kept a clear path. With the shear number of stranded vehicles and the rate of accumulation, I called my boss and told him Highway 20 hadn’t even been plowed yet and the snow was piling up fast. The decision was made to call everyone else and close the office for the day. I spent a total of 20 minutes at work before heading home, which took even longer. The snow and ice was causing havoc with a traffic light which was only allowing one or two cars to pass per cycle. Coupled with the downpour of snow and visibility, the return trip home took an hour and 45 minutes.

Whidbey Island saw nine inches of snow fall in five hours. Parts of Burlington and Mount Vernon saw more than two feet of snow! Snowmageddon, indeed! And the guessers were predicting the snow would continue through mid-day Thursday, and the arctic Canadian air would invade the Puget Sound region for several days. And they were right. Daytime highs weren’t even breaking freezing. Of course, this led to more hyperbole from the newscasts about broken pipes and frozen homeless people. Hand me my slippers.

Just like school districts, I made a late start on getting ready for work Thursday. I left the house at 7:20am instead of 6:20am in hopes the roads would be less treacherous. The outside temperature was 22°F, and light flurries were falling. There’s a set of three concrete steps leading to my front door, and the top two were iced over. I don’t know if I was in a hurry, admiring the snowy scenic view, or just plain tired, but when I stepped on that top step, my feet went out from under me like Charlie Brown after that bitch Lucy snatched the football away.

The full heft of my fat ass came crashing down on the steps like an over-sized sack of hot meat. All I could say was “son of a bitch!” I laid there for about two minutes — unable to move — before the cold of the snow and ice permeated my jeans. Still unable to make my legs work correctly, I pulled myself up to the lower step and sat there for another couple minutes before attempting to stand up. I considered myself lucky I didn’t break anything or crack open my skull, but my ass just below my tailbone was sore as fuck. Yes, I think I injured my coccyx!

I made the trip to work with my truck’s heated seat on. While the heat may have given me swamp ass, it made my lower back and ass feel better. At work, I couldn’t sit normally in my chair. I was leaning to the left on one cheek, like I needed to rip a good fart. To make things worse, I was experiencing tingling in my feet and had to stand still for a spell before attempting to walk. Simply excellent. In the restroom at work, I was able to get a peek at the upper portion of my right ass cheek, and it was turning a glorious shade of purple. By the time I got home, a giant hematoma had formed, and my ass cheek felt like it was on fire. It looks dreadful, like giant purple Sea of Tranquility on my pasty white moon.

There was no way I was going to be able to sit in a chair at work without suffering through waves of ass pain. I called work and left a message saying I wasn’t going to make it in, and spent the day in bed, avoiding any pressure on my ass. Everything on me was sore; my ass, back, neck, shoulders, and upper arms. I felt like I was hit by a school bus. I don’t think a three day weekend of rest could hurt more.

As I type this update on Saturday afternoon, it is once again snowing on Whidbey Island and the temperature is 26°F. The pain in my ass has been reduced to a dull throbbing thanks to Tylenol, but it still looks like a dark purple facsimile of the far side of the moon. Let’s hope I didn’t damage anything permanently.

The year 2010 was ugly. Like waking up in bed with a hangover next to a naked Barney Frank in a Michelle Obama mask ugly! For me, it started out with a swift kick to the bait and tackle when my supervisor, Eeyore (as he was nicknamed), called me to the conference room and proceeded to tell me that The Company was heading in a new direction and my services would no longer be needed. However, the written notice of my termination said the reason was “due to ongoing inadequate performance over a long period of time.” I don’t know what Eeyore’s donkey chow-eating ass considers “inadequate” or “long period of time,” but I was only written up once in October 2009 for leaving several tickets in a queue untouched for a day or two. Three months does not a “long period of time” make, especially since I was employed with The Company for more than five and a half years. It wasn’t normal practice for me to ignore tickets either, but the migration of an archaic web server broke many company-provided cgi scripts, and it was my job to fix them… on top of my normal load of handling four separate ticket queues by myself. Whatever.

I went back to my office, packed up all my office flair, and grabbed LDriver to head home. Just like dealing with a family death, there are stages of grieving when you lose a job. I think I was done with denial by the end of the first day. Anger ended and acceptance began at sunrise the following day when I realized I didn’t have to make that soul-crushing commute to Seattle ever again. Of course, depression started when living on unemployment (a.k.a. “unenjoyment”) and finding a new job closer to home became more and more difficult. It was enough to make me enter a seldom-expressed stage of grieving: revenge!

On the world stage, a giant earthquake leveled parts of Haiti in January. It was the third deadliest earthquake of all time, and it was rumored to be caused by a runaway Prius. This led Toyota to recall over 8 million vehicles for several reasons, including magical pedal-pushing floor mats, sticky accelerators, an anti-lock braking virus, as well as general smugness and/or ugliness.

February brought a Super Bowl win to the Saints who beat the Colts. While Peyton Manning cried, Saints fans celebrated the best thing to happen to New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina. February was also the start of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, BC. Being only 100 miles away from Oak Harbor, I really wanted to at least visit Vancouver, but my jobless situation prevented discretionary spending. One positive in not having a job is I could watch as much Olympic coverage as possible on NBC. In further sports news, Tiger Woods gave a televised apology for his infidelities. This made everyone’s jaw drop to the floor simultaneously, causing another giant earthquake, this time in Chile.

In March, I was fully on the job search hamster wheel, rewriting résumés and cover letters, scouring the State’s WorkSource site as well as other online job listings. In Washington, you have to make three job search contacts each week — and keep a contact log — in order to receive your weekly pittance. With a fair amount of free time on my hands, coupled with the occasional trips to the WorkSource office or job interviews, I had plenty of opportunities to go shooting with my camera. I took many photos during my jobless time, and I dumped nearly all of my shots on Flickr, and created a new blog at photography.wafwot.com. It’s a better way to spend a day than watching Bewitched and All in the Family reruns, or FOX News which was covering the Obamacare politics pretty heavily in March.

Princess Pelosi is infamous for saying crazy fucking shit, but her comments about Obamacare to the National Association of Counties stating “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy,” ranks up there as the stupidest things ever said by a human being, let alone a politician. Clearly the Botox in her Liberal face has poisoned her mosquito-sized brain. Seriously, Pelosi’s “pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it” remark makes Jessica Simpson’s Chicken of the Sea comments sound genius! Of course, by the end of March, King Obama signed the bill into law even though the majority of Americans didn’t want it. Out like a lamb, my fat white ass.

April saw yet another giant earthquake, this time in China. The Earth must have been mad at humanity in 2010, because a volcano under Eyjafjallajökull (which is Icelandic for “how the fuck do I say that?“) erupted, grounding planes throughout most of Europe. Not to be outdone in the shock and awe department, the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, sending thousands of gallons of crude oil per hour into the ocean. BP initially lied about the severity of the spill; they’re British, they had to scale it down a bit. April also saw Apple’s release of the iPad, basically an expensive iPhone for people with giant hands, but without phone service. In Arizona, lawmakers passed SB 1070, which made being of Mexican descent illegal. Cops were instructed to start rounding up wetbacks and throwing them into concentration camps for extermination in August… so said MSNBC. White power, motherfuckers!

After three months of job searching, it was time for a change. Family genetics left me with a head of gray hair, and no one wants to hire an old fat-ass. So, while watching the 2010 Stanley Cup playoffs, I started applying Grecian Formula to my giant old man head. It took a few weeks to see my hair changing a nice shade of graphite, like I was rubbing pencil sharpener shavings on my scalp. And my head smelled like a book of burnt matches. Clearly this wasn’t working. So, I gave Tina my berries and went to the Wal-Mart for a box of women’s hair dye. Good God, what a scary ordeal that was! After leaving that color on my head for a twenty minutes, I looked like Ronald Reagan in 1981… but with less wrinkles. To me, I looked ridiculous. Good thing I have hats.

Overly concerned about the continuing flow of oil into the Gulf, our Supreme Overlord made a couple trips to Louisiana in May for some photo ops. The media was plastered with video showing Obama standing on the beach — surrounded by black globs of oil — staring benevolently out at the water. It was the least he could do between rounds of golf. Meanwhile, Congress held hearings about the spill, and suggested we melt down defective Toyotas and fashion a giant drain stopper. When the giant the giant bathtub plug was shot down, Congress decided to outlaw deep sea drilling. The way the Administration was acting, you’d have thought the Gulf crude was leaking into their morning bowl of Wheaties.

By June, I was about fed up with with the job search rut. I had interviews at several companies in Skagit County, and all but one said “no,” and that one didn’t say “no” wasn’t saying anything yet. Frustration and depression were setting in quickly, especially when the Flyers lost the Stanley Cup finals to Drunken Queef and the Chicago Blackcocks.

One position I applied for was for a network administrator at a local casino. I won’t say which casino, but it rhymes with “two day shit” if you say it real fast and put the emphasis on “day.” Their application wanted more personal information than a new car loan, which started me (and Tina) on a 10-day scavenger hunt. Things like driver’s license and Social Security number were easy. But they also wanted a copy of my criminal record, driving record, and high school diploma. High school diploma? Sweet baby Jesus, it’s been a quarter century since I’ve seen that! After turning the house upside down in a fruitless search, I called the school for a copy. They told me a replacement diploma would cost $25 and take a couple weeks. Just as I was about to give up, Tina finally found my diploma — the last item I needed — in the very last possible place it could have been. I spent several days polishing the turd that is my curriculum vitae, then emailed my application to a friend that worked at the casino. He printed the app and all the supporting documents and submitted it for me. After several weeks, I got a phone call for a job interview. My Ronald Reagan hair and I drove the 70 miles to Marysville for the interview, which was a bit ambiguous. You know how there’s more than one way to do things in much of life? It’s not any different in the IT world. Several of their questions could have had more than one answer and still be correct. However, you if you didn’t have their answer, it counted against you. I thought I did well, but found out that no one answered their interview questions correctly. This told them their questions were flawed, and they subsequently withdrew the position. Excellent.

I continued the three weekly job contacts into July, living my own personal Groundhog Day. The BP spill was still spewing oil into the Gulf. However, BP was finally able to stem the flow with something they called “LMRP,” which I think is a British acronym for Lick My Royal Posterior. With the well capped, America could now focus it’s full attention on more important things, like LeBron James‘ eeny, meeny, miny, moe game of where to play basketball, Lindsay Lohan‘s 14-day jail sentence, and the excitement of World Cup Soccer (yaaawwwn). I was still using my huge amounts of free time to take photos around Island and Skagit counties, until I got a phone call from that one company that hadn’t said no. It was nearly two months since I interviewed with them, and had written it off as another failure. But when they offered me the job over the phone, I gladly accepted without hesitation! I was happy to be employed again, but sickened by the fact that I had just helped Obama lower his jobless percentage.

August was a good month; I had a reason to wake up in the morning. I was hired as the IT Manager of an aerospace company. It sounded pretty cool until I realized it’s a start up company that hasn’t built a plane yet. They’re setting up the fabrication facility using the assets of a company they bought out of bankruptcy, and they didn’t even have an IT department yet. So, I am the manager of one (me), but it’s my job to build the IT department, and I like that idea a lot. With my second paycheck, I went to the local Sprint store and bought the EVO 4G. I had it rooted within four days of owning it.

Also in August, the East Coast was attacked by giant bedbugs which prompted NASA to extend the Space Shuttle program in order to plan an attack of planet Klendathu. Up in the panhandle of Florida, the Messiah and his family vacationed in Panama City on the Gulf Coast as a publicity stunt showing the waters were safe. To maintain his “first black president” hue, he went swimming with the crude oil globules. Unfortunately, the Gulf was oilier when Barry got out of the water, so the First Family finished their vacation in Martha’s Vineyard by playing golf and shopping. Obama also put a another woman on the Supreme Court, and Planet Blago was downgraded to Douchebag Blago.

By September, the midterm elections were coming to a head. Balack Osama and his Congress were about as popular as a hooker with cold sores, and they knew it. When they began campaigning in their home districts, they didn’t talk about Obamacare, they talked about being a witch or worshipping Aqua Buddha. In the entertainment industry, Tony Curtis died, the tragic victim of a runaway Toyota.

October was uneventful for me. I was living the dream with a full time job, and enjoying the work. I designed a logo for the company and built them a simple beginner web site for an Internet presence. At the company’s main offices, I was building new cubicles and computer systems for a contingent of Chinese engineers on work visas. I was also supervising new Cat 6 cable runs at the airport facility, built a Linux router/firewall, and deployed a new Asterisk phone system.

Elsewhere in the world, yet another earthquake off the coast of Sumatra killed over 400 people, terrorists in Yemen tried sending printer toner bombs to the U.S. via UPS, and a gaggle of Chilean miners trapped in a mine for 69 days were rescued with a giant mechanical tampon applicator. A bright spot was the news that the International Space Station surpassed the record for the longest continuous human occupation of space, unless you count John Dingell‘s white ass planted in his House seat for more than 55 years. What the hell kind of name is “Dingell” anyway? Sounds like a piece of shit stuck to the hairs of his mudcutter.

In November, I was invited to watch the Manny Pacquiao vs. Antonio Margarito fight on pay-per-view at my boss’ house. He had a $150 in bets against Pacquiao with a couple people at work. Needless to say, Pacquiao beat Margarito like a Mexican piñata, and broke his right orbital bone. Ouch. My boss paid his bet in $1 bills. Awesome.

Also in November, the Democrats were beaten like Margarito by the Republicans in the 2010 midterm elections. The jackasses lost the House majority, several Senate seats, some governorships, some state legislatures, and Dancing With the Stars. It was the biggest game of musical chairs since 1948, and the largest for any midterm election since 1938. If you listen very carefully, you can still hear Princess Pelosi crying in her Zinfandel.

Three days before Thanksgiving, it snowed in Western Washington, and everyone dropped a rectal plate. I was a little worried about the accumulating snow. Not because I can’t drive in bad weather, but because other people are complete retards when the pavement is anything but dry. When I left work, I put my truck in 4×4 low and headed out, adjusting my speed for the road conditions. Fifteen miles from home, got stuck in a long line of traffic. There was apparently an accident in Deception Pass that blocked the entire highway and snarled traffic for hours. A trip that normally takes me 40 minutes took ten minutes shy of 4 hours. Told you they were retards.

Then, while millions of Americans were cooking their junk at the airports in full body scanners, Tina and I went to Thanksgiving dinner at my boss’ house. The night before Thanksgiving it snowed again, but it was no trouble for my truck. We arrived right on time, had a great meal and enjoyed the visit. The very next day, Obama was punched in the mouth by a Latino man angry that the Administration was allowing Arizona to gas beaners. The resulting cut to King Hussein’s upper lip required 12 stitches.

December saw a federal judge in Virginia rule that Obamacare is unconstitutional. In response, the Justice Department said, “Nuh uh!” The 2010 Census numbers were released in December, showing that the U.S. population grew 9.7% to 308,745,538, the smallest increase since the 1930s. Was it a coincidence that the unemployment rate was 9.8% and the population increased 9.7%? The world may never know. In response howerver, Joe Biden said, “These new motherfuckers need to get a job to help America’s recovery.” Elsewhere, Obama dropped to his knees and blew the Republicans in order to hammer out and sign the GOP tax compromise bill, then repealed don’t ask, don’t tell to the delight of butt pirates everywhere. Hmmmm.

At work, the company sprung for a Christmas meal for all employees. The food was catered by Haggen Food in Burlington, but needed to be heated before serving. Not having a stove at the office, my boss planned on having his wife heat the food at his house which was only about a mile away. I asked why we just didn’t heat the food in the oven, and was told we don’t have an oven at the office. “Um, the hell we don’t. We have a 55-foot curing oven,” which I often refer to as the Jew Cooker. Needless to say, our Christmas meal was cooked in the Jew Cooker. Here’s a crappy cellphone picture.

And that about covers it. There was lots more that happened in 2010, but this is all I can muster in my glossed over Reader’s Digest edition. I, for one, am glad to see 2010 in history’s rear view mirror. Let’s hope 2011 is better for me and our troubled country. Peace, bitches.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.