Serpico Vertigo

I have the chorus of U2's 'Vertigo' running through my head.

Only the word "vertigo" has been replaced by "Serpico."

Hot Water

Coffee makers work better when you put coffee in them.

Break-Fast

There's a travel mug of cold coffee and 4 almost-overripe bananas sitting on my kitchen counter right now.

Needless to say, I'm in the office.

A Hideous Confluence of Pineapples and Meatloaf

I bought a pineapple the other day. (On sale.) I got around to cutting it up last night. Most of it went into a container, but I had a little left over, so I decided to put it in the Braun hand blender I have (but never use).

I was expecting "chopped" or "shredded," but got something the wrong side of "pureed." No matter. I was making a turkey meatloaf, so decided to mix some in there to see what would happen.

Actually, it wasn't supposed to be a turkey meatloaf -- it's just when I mixed the mush into the mass of meat, it got really...runny. Even with the judicious application of breadcrumbs, so I plopped it into the loaf pyrex.

Now, there are recipes that incorporate pineapple into meatloaf (which I determined afterwards). Some claim to be quite good. This however, was not one of them.

After an hour in the over, the outside was burnt, the inside was an amorphous mush, and the smell was of rotten ass, suitable for immediate disposal.

In Case You Were Wondering, Spyware Is Bad

For G-d knows what reason, I was adjusting my MSIE 6.0 "security" settings (I have to use it for ork), and I must have hit "enable" on the wrong ActiveX setting, because all of a sudden my machine was hit by popups, redirects and browser bar programs -- all hitting at 2:59pm today.

After running AOL Spyware Protection, Ad-Aware and Spybot, I think things are back to nermal.

I just hope I restored the proper security setting.

The little differences.

My sister ran (and finished) the New York City Marathon on Sunday.

I sat on the couch and ate potato chips.

A Stabby Start

This morning, I was looking at knife blade to check for rust. No rust. However, as I was resheathing the blade, I missed the sheath. I did not, however, miss my right hand, which was holding the sheath, so I managed to bury the tip into the side of my pinky.

That was definitely a waker-upper.

I made it to the bathroom, and a combination of direct pressure, cold water and steri-strips (a must for every well-stocked first aid kit) managed to staunch the flow. This allowed me to get to the serious work of scrubbing the blood spatter from the carpet.

Has CSI taught us nothing?

Went to Great Falls on Sunday to get a look at the leaves (just past peak color, but still nice), get out on a 70 plus degree October day, and avoid the bulk of Halloween trick-or-treat traffic.

I brought a fleece jacket along just in case. It turned out to be way too much; I spent half the walk trying to find a good place to stash it but ended up carrying it the entire time.

Also brought my digital camera along, took about 30 snaps along the way.

Just downloaded them and they looked kind of weird, in a fuzzy, soft focus kind of way.

I looked at the lens, and of course there's a nice big fingerprint on in it.

Kitchen Science

I keep buying packaged salad mixes, but for some reason, I never end up using them. So six weeks later, I have a bag of brown mush that I throw out.

This happens on a regular basis. Perhaps I should just save time and throw them directly into the trash after buying them.

Oh, and hi Kelli.

De-Moralized

I just realized that I said in my previous post: "The morale of this story" when I of course meant "The moral of this story."

Also, I keep losing my gum containers. Starbucks after-coffee gum comes in a conveniently-shaped tin, just the right size for a 5-stick pack of your typical sugarless bubble gum. It's ridiculously overpriced, of course, but the tins are nice.

Something About Corey

The last time I locked myself out of my house, I was heading out to pick up Corey at the airport. I salvaged that by getting Pauly to take me to an undisclosed location to get a spare key.

So, Saturday was Corey's wedding. I was an usher, so I wanted to be there at 3pm (4pm wedding). I left the house about 2:20pm, so I was in pretty good shape.

Except I didn't have my keys.

Which I realized 2 seconds after the door clicked shut.

I called Pauly to bail me out. Let's see, 10 minutes to get to my place, 15 minutes to the undisclosed location, 5 minutes inside, 15 minutes back...with traffic, it was going to be iffy.

I didn't have anything to lose, so I pulled a plastic card from my wallet and tried to jimmy the lock open.

Whaddya know...it worked.

The morale of this story? Always use your deadbolt.

It Is Called a Moonroof, After All

New variation on an old favorite: Left the moonroof of my car open overnight.

Fortunately, it did not rain.

I See Dead People

Misspelled "cemetery" (added an ary) in a promo; it had been up a few days.

Also, I always have to think for a few moments when try to spell "misspell," though if I get it wrong I can always claim I was being ironic.

Posited: Malls Engender Dumbness

Went to the mall for lunch and a shoe shine. After coming in out of the sun, I put my clip-on sunglasses in my front pocket. Later, I kneeled over to tie my shoe, which bent the sunglasses pretty good.

I bent them back, but between metal fatigue and the fact that I keep dropping them, I don't expect them to survive for much longer.

Also, as I got into my car to leave, I noticed some unusually high ambient noise and other external sounds, not normally heard inside a closed car. Upon a brief but throrough investigation, I discovered the source of the sounds was the fully-open passenger-side window, which I had rolled down because of the unseasonably high temperatures today.

*Whoosh*

We were soundly thrashed in kickball last night by the league champions. They had a good (but not overpowering) offense, decent defense, and phenomenal pitching -- fast, hard, with a lot of spin.

In my sole at-bat, I got out on fouls (four foul balls is an out). In and of itself, that's not that dumb, but for the fact that, of the four times I touched the ball, only one of those touches was intentional.

One pitch just hit my leg, which was good, because otherwise I would have struck out.