A Not-Quite-Week in Review

Shelly is currently disputing with me over an entry in the check registry. "Seventeen dollars for 'coffee with Shelly?'", she sputtered. "When was that?" Checking the handy column to the left, I told her it was on the 17th, but could remember no more details. "That wasn't coffee with me, that was $9, and it was at Panera's!" I can only dream wistfully of the days when even a nine dollar entry labelled 'coffee' would in itself have looked excessive.
Unfortunately, a quick visit to our online checking account, which in the interest of full disclosure is owned by my employer, proves her right: The seventeen dollars was not coffee related. Rather, it was a pizza dinner we had two weeks ago. So I occasionally mislabel things!
Module grades came back today. Guess who passed all three of them! I even passed the much-maligned 'share' module; many people congratulated me on that today, as I'm only the third in recent memory to pass it the first time. Three down, 12 to go, and then I'll be in bonus territory!
Also, as a little plug for my good friend Justin, his parents have recently come into a cache of collectable firepower, by which I mean they have inherited some rare guns. As the days when I could wantonly snap up every gun that caught my eye are over, I'm unable to assist him directly in relieving his parents of said arsenal. But for any out there considering making that move over to gun-ownership (as you should), give Justin a call and put in a bid!
Good Lord! Everyone has a MySpace page now! Jen S! You never told me you had a MySpace page (at least not that I recall, which admittedly doesn't mean you didn't)! BTW, Ju, that's the former Jen Crawford I'm addressing there, so don't get your wires crossed, pal! ;) Nevertheless, I shall hold firm against the tide! You'll have to pry a MySpace page into my cold, dead hands!
While in the MySpace world just now, I came upon a blog of an old friend whom I hadn't seen in a while, but who recently featured as fainting bridesmaid in Jen's wedding. Don't get confused now, I know I'm throwing an extra one into the mix, but her name is also Jen. Let's distinguish her from the others by giving her a distinctive suffix initial, say Jen... 'M'. Anyway, this passage from her blog caught my attention:

This morning at the Breakfast Shoppe with my parents, I
eavesdropped on a conversation the table next to us was having. Two
couples, two men, two women, all four in the 60's & 70's. One chimes
in that they hope the newly appointed government officials do something
about the need for stem cell research. She was hopeful that the
research could help so many people in the world, especially those nearest and
dearest to us. She feared that she would never see this research in her
lifetime, but hoped that her children and her grandchildren would see it in
theirs. I envied their converstation. Too many times we revolve
discussions around meaningless anticdotes and never really bother to talk about
"real issues." Are we scared to discuss such controversial topics in
public, or are we just worried that our views would be looked down upon by our
friends?

Well, there is the fact that the 'ban' on stem cell research really only bans federal funding of the research (private research is free to continue, it just needs to find other sources of funding), but that's a whole other topic. What really intrigued me were Jen's comments at the end. I think most of us know the answer to that, though. People only bring up controversial subjects around people who they know will agree with them; they don't around other people because they will either get into a heated argument or make someone very uncomfortable. If you think I'm wrong about that, next time you're out with a bunch of friends (preferably some of whom you don't know well), kindle a good, friendly tete-a-tete by saying "Illegal immigrants should be executed!" or "People who want to marry their pets should be able to follow their hearts!" You'll probably be able to count on one hand the number of minutes before someone gets furious and storms out.
Subject switch: Shelly just pointed out to me a passage in one of her law books, saying people who desire 'strict constructionist' judges don't truly understand the legal process and how law is decided. In a battle of judical and legal knowledge with the authors of the text book in one corner and Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas in the other, I'll take the guys who actually got appointed to the Supreme Court.
Alright, that's all for one night. Shelly needs a backrub, and I'm on call!

Tour de Chris

Yes, I'm aware that the above phrase probably isn't grammatically correct in French. You need to be aware that I don't care.
Today I took quite the Maryland tour, visiting places I didn't frequent even when I used to live here. However, my friends have become quite spread out in the last few years, and I had an afternoon to myself, so I decided to go see their new homes.
My first stop was the heart of Baltimore, where Justin has chosen to reside.
Ju's knowledge of the immediate area was very advantageous several months ago for my bachleor party, when he guided us unerringly to all of our... destinations. One would almost think he'd been to them before. But I digress.
Justin now has a fine home on Chesterfield Ave in Baltimore, which I found without too much of a problem. The inside was, amazingly, quite clean! For any of you who have never before been inside a dwelling that belonged soley to Justin, you can't appreciate just how startling that is. He's already made several improvements to it, and since he's looking to be there for a while, will undoubtably continue to apply his handiness and bring the value of it up even further. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures inside (and with Blogger being stingy with the number of pictures, I probably couldn't post them anyway), but I'm sure I'll be back again.
Following my departure from Ju's, I relied on his directional knowledge to get me back to I-895 North. Half an hour, three phone calls, and several wrong turns later, I consulted my hand-written directions (hand-written because of my father's printer- don't even get me started on that) and followed them without further incident to 895 (Justin's 'Oh, that's right, you can only go South from that way!' will always resonate with me). ;)
Twenty minutes or so after my trip around Robin Hood's Barn, I arrived at Jen and Tim's townhouse in Abington. Amazingly, you can see said townhouse in the picture at left- Blogger must like me tonight. I caught the two of them in the middle of putting up Christmas decorations, but they didn't seem to mind too much and let me in and showed me around. I was pretty impressed: lovely home, tastefully decorated, nice little backyard and deck. The only downside was the abundance of yappy dogs living in the domicile to the right, but that's nothing a few cyanide-laced dog biscuits unobtrusively tossed over the fence can't fix.
Regrettably, by this point I was forty miles away from Severn and on the wrong side of Baltimore, and since my grandfather was just an hour from celebrating his 91st birthday, I needed to get back. That meant I only got about an hour or two to spend with each of my friends, but I think we all made the most of the time we had. Hopefully someday in the not too distant future they will visit Shelly and I in our Chapel Hill apartment, though I doubt they'll follow up their visits with pseudo-comical internet write-ups. I hope they know they're always welcome.
Anyway, 45 minutes and one serious heart-in-throat moment with a State Trooper speed trap, I was back to my parents' house for the party, but I'll write about that another time. I have a few hours left before I have to go to bed and then drive home tomorrow morning, and I'd like to enjoy them!

News From Maryland

Greetings from Severn, Maryland! With the parentals expressing interest in the 'Hallmark movie', I took it as God's queue to me to make my exit to the computer room, which is adjacent to the living room and thus no sanctuary from the two hours of head splitting boredom that I may yet be asked to join. Please, all those reading my words, pray that I be delivered from such a fate!
We had lucky thirteen as the number of guests, fourteen if you consider the unlucky bird, which was no turducken but at 22lbs still respectable. The guest list included Mom and Dad, Grandpop, Tickie, Steve, and Scott, Danielle and offspring Christopher, Julia, and Sean, Shelly and I, and for the first time, family friends Carol and Paul, making it one of the largest Thanksgiving crowds we've ever had here. Dishes served consisted of the afore-mentioned turkey, stuffing, two types of fruit salad, broccoli cassarole (Shelly's contribution), mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, rolls, cranberries, and applesauce. Dessert? A choice of pumpkin or cherry pie. Here is a representative picture, by which I see I forgot to mention corn and lima beans.
After dinner, we tried to let things digest a little bit, but since we didn't have the two days required, we waited maybe two hours for that dessert. After that, we played Ker-plunk with the kids (guest who won, prompting a sulky Christopher to swear he "didn't care, didn't want to play again, and only wanted to watch"), Yahtzee with Tickie, Mom, and Danielle, and finally a game of Rack-o, the first round of which infuriated Shelly, who protested that the rules hadn't been properly explained to her (for any who have never played this complicated game, you have to arrange a hand of ten cards into numerical order). :) Don't worry, baby, with that smart comment, we'll call it even for you dumping the water over my head to cool my Ker-plunk victory dance.
By the way, pay no attention to the map in the last post. Looking at that, one might have expected rain up through the beginning of Virginia, but clear sailing from there on. Not so much.
Also as news, for the first time in almost a year, and the first time since our respective marriages, I saw Jen and Tim! Fortunately they were planning on being in the area to visit Jen's aunt Linda, so we got together last night for a few hours there. Afterwards, we went to Perry's in Odenton so Jen could "pick up her pizza's", wink, wink. I happened to run in to Ted Desautels, a wrestler friend of mine that I hadn't seen since high school, so I stuck around and caught up with him for two hours before returning to Mom and Dad's house. Shelly, who needed to study, had just begun to start worrying about me when I stumbled in, reeking of smoke. My beloved wife was not especially pleased.
My time here has expired. The Hallmark movie was passed up (thank you for beseeching for divine intervention), so it looks like a toss-up between It's a Wonderful Life and Deal Or No Deal. I can live with either.
Hope everyone had a...

Happy Thanksgiving!

Two there were who set out from Chapel Hill...

And hopefully two will arrive safely in Maryland sometime between 11am and 1pm tomorrow. I had visions in my head of a crisp, brisk autumn morning as Shelly and I climbed into our Jetta and hit the road for my ancestral home. Instead, I get this:
Image used with permission of weather.com, of course!

Hopefully, with us getting a nice, early start, we'll be able to get a jump on the rest of the holiday traffic. I hear most of it gets going around noon, which, if all goes well, is when we'll be getting to Severn.
I took my first set of exam modules today (which are part of a set of 15 training sessions for the credit union, in case anyone was utterly dumbfounded by my sudden switch of subject). I took three and had to get 90% on each of them. Since each was 40 questions long, that means I get to miss four. On each of the tests, I was uncertain about perhaps 6, thus meaning I have to wait a week to find out for sure how I did. Let's just hope I can hold on for two out of six...if I can just hold on for at least two out of six, I can pass!! (Geez, where have I heard that before?)
Since I'm taking my first day off from SECU tomorrow, I was told by one of my coworkers that she would miss me! Yep, LaToya, my fellow Member Service Representative, walked right up to me and said "I don't know what we'll do without you tomorrow, Steve." Ahh, I see I've made quite the impression. (Her defense: She'd been talking about Steve Sorrell, the loan processor, right before she ran into me.) The mislabeling was worth the laugh me and everyone else got out of it, though.
It's about time to get to bed, if we're going to make that 6am departure. (Who am I kidding? When have we ever left on time for anything that didn't involve tickets, metal detectors, cavity searches, and passports? Fortunately, we only had to deal with three of those hassels. But the point is, we'll be lucky to be on the road by 6:45)
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone, if you don't check in again between now and then! I'll probably blog at least once from MD, so if you get bored, come by and see me!

Of Espresso, Carrying, and Carrabbas

At last, the weekend has arrived! Not that my week was all that stressful; I did it to myself with all the late nights.
Speaking of late nights, and the unfortunate consequences of them, Carola, a coworker of mine, made a coffee run yesterday and asked if I wanted anything. (As an aside here, I just realized I stiffed her on that. I'll have to pay her back Monday). As I was busy with something, tired from lack of sleep, and generally not in the mood to make even a trivial decision, I just told her to bring me back whatever she was having. Big mistake. I should have known that Carola, having a daughter who is just on the cusp of teenagerhood, required high-test.
Half an hour later, I was surprised to find a nearly-empty coffee cup on my desk (or is it better to say it was 1/4 full?). A visit to Carola confirmed that this was not the result of a bleary-eyed, minimum-wage-earning cashier making a horrible mistake. I learned that double espressos always come like this. Curious, I swallowed half of it, grimaced, added a packet of sugar to the remainder, and finished. My productivity doubled for the next three hours. I'm surprised those things aren't regulated by the FDA.
Did I mention that I have the coolest boss ever? Denise, I found out last week, carries, making her the first woman I've met who does. You'd never suspect it, since she looks the stereotypical soccer mom. This came up again last night, when her, Carola, Latoya, and myself exited the building. We'd noticed a shady character loitering about, and Carola asked Denise, with a bit of eye-rolling, if she was carrying. Both of us acknowledged that we had them in our cars. Carola, wide-eyed, turned and asked if I was also a "gun-carrying Republican" to which I replied, "All of us are!" That's not really the case, of course, but you'd be surprised what people will believe about things they don't know much about.
By the way, while we're on that subject, here's an interesting graphic I had not seen before. I've never been so pleased to see states turn blue!
In a few hours, Shelly and I are going to have dinner at the new Carrabbas in Durham with Erika and Jason. I'm looking forward to it, especially after perusing this menu. If anyone reads this and doesn't have anything to do around 7:30pm tonight, that's where we'll be!

Pay Day

Got my first pay check today. Ka-CHING! Much better than I was anticipating, without getting into the most personal question you can ask an American, "How much do you make?" Just thought you might enjoy a bit of trivia that I learned from my Quantitative Research Methods class four years ago. Apparently people are much more willing to respond to questions about their sexuality than about their income. Go figure.
I was finally forced to break down and get some gas today. Thus begins the first true countdown on how long I can go without filling up. The previous two weeks don't count because I drove to my old job three days on that tank, which involved over 180 miles.
Still blinking in confusion over Justin's 'robo messages' comment to my Unmitigated Disaster post...
I watched the series premier of Day Break tonight. For the 90% of you who haven't seen it, I'll go ahead and blatantly spoil it for you. It's about a cop who is getting framed for a murder, yet keeps waking up and getting to do the day over and over again. It's funny watching the main character try and explain the situation to his girlfriend- he makes a couple awkward, lame attempts that she doesn't immediately believe. I kept thinking, "Ok buddy, all you have to say is 'Have you ever seen the movie Groundhog Day? Well, that's what's happening to me!'" But apparently even that small attempt at humor was a bridge too far. I doubt it will become a Wednesday night regular for me.
Good grief, it's 12:30am! Why do I keep doing this to myself?! It's Wednesday night! I can't count on the weekend to bail me out yet!
I blame this on Shelly. I was all ready to go to bed (after a marathon laundry session and more time with the ironing board than I care to remember), and she mentioned something about blogging. Overcome with guilt for going a day without posting, I rushed right in here to rectify the situation.
And now I have. G'night!

Not really a whole lot to report tonight, which usually means I don't bother. Tomorrow I have a one hour meeting after work to discuss a change in benefits, which in a nutshell means I'll be paying about $70 less for the same coverage starting in 2007. Also noteworthy, everyone is getting an hour of comp time to 'compensate' us for staying afterwards. 'Nuff said.
Shelly and I just had a violent disagreement over the meaning of a certain line from this post of Jen's blog. Specifically, this:

Last night, Hannah, Sarah and I saw Little Miss Sunshine at the Century City Mall. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed that loud in a theater, though I did laugh hard at Love Actually.

See it, see them both.

Shelly thinks the last sentence there is just a typical example of Jen's witty dialect. I believe, correctly I might add, Jen is channeling Gollum. Just repeat that last line in your head in a gutteral, hissing, yet unforgettable voice, perhaps adding a few little touches:

See it, precious! See them both!

The argument culminated in Shelly taking a swing at me with the nearest heavy object, the antique-finish lamp in our study. I was fortunately able to divert it by beaning her in the eye with the nearest available missile, my wedding ring.
Alright, so maybe married life hasn't pushed us that far yet, but the scenario wasn't total fiction either! Unfortunately, if you're not smiling knowingly right now, I can't enlighten you. ;)
Ok, I really don't need to be up this late. See you all tomorrow!

Quiet Night, Not-So Holy Night...

At least not with Law School Melissa in attendence! Shelly and I, en route to a quiet evening at home on a Friday despite our best efforts, received a call from Melissa. She was eager to come over and spend some time with us, thus relieving the two of us of the guilt we would have felt for not studying for our respective exams.
Arriving at 8:30pm, she sat and chatted with us for a few hours, plying us in lawyerly fashion with questions about our eHarmony experiences. Prompted by the inquisition, Shelly and I logged onto our old accounts and got a laugh out of some of our matches and the communications we initially wrote back and forth to each other. It's funny to think, with us married now, how fragile our relationship was at one time, and how easy it could have been cut off (which, Shelly pointed out to me, I gave her at least two reasons to do during the course of the eHarmony communication! Thank God she didn't!).
Once we exhausted our store of conversation subjects, we awkwardly sat staring at each other for a few moments. Panicking, seeking to salvage something of the evening, I grabbed the first DVD I could find and shoved it into the player. It turned out to be Shrek 2, a favorite of Shelly and I's and a movie Melissa hadn't seen since it came out 2 1/2 years ago. With Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy filling the void, we laughed until midnight, at which point Melissa went home.

...and Veteran's Day

That brings us to today, Veterans Day, a day we honor all the soldiers, sailors, marines, and aviators who have served and died defending this great land of ours. Though I doubt any of them will read what I'm about to write, I would like to thank all of them for the sacrifices they have made and the dangers they've faced, so those here at home don't have to. If we still lived in the DC area, it would be a perfect day to visit the National Mall and see the WWII, Vietnam, and Korean War Memorials, and remember the men who fought and died in those wars. Remember also the ones that came before, when our nation was young, and it was an even less forgone conclusion that we would win the wars we became involved in, when it was not just our prestige or livelihood on the line, but our very survival. Could our country stomach today a war to cleanse the evil of slavery from our shores, when the cost in lives reached well over half a million? What if our citizens at the beginning of the last century had reasoned 'we lost but a handful of Amerians on the Lusitania; is it worth 262,725 military causalities and 58,480 dead on the fields of Europe merely to avenge them?' Or sixty five years ago, if Imperial Japan had not in its foolish arrogance attacked us, would the giant have continued sleeping, keeping its senses deadened to acts like these? I'd like to think not, and I would like to believe that the answer is still no- that we will never as a nation believe that a war against a man with a record like this is anything other just, noble, honorable, and worth the sacrifice it will take to win.
But we will have to wait to see.

Will Wonders Never Cease?

I thought I was going to have a nice, relaxing day. And I am, don't get me wrong. But my point is, I thought the only real benefit to this fine Friday was the fact that I didn't have to go to work. How wrong I was.
First, my lingering presence in bed this morning somehow induced Shelly not to go to class. I've learned that no matter how considerate I try to be in the morning, I end up disturbing her a great deal, which in turn makes her get up. Since I didn't get up this morning, she slept in until it was impossible for her to make her class. Also, I can empathize with not wanting to attend a class entitled "Business Associations."
Once we finally did get up, we decided go out to breakfast together at a local place called Elmo's, which was apparently a haunt for Shelly and friends back in her undergrad days. We went there for breakfast the first time she brought me down here, and also a few months ago with my parents. (Dad found the BBQ too spicey and Mom described the waffles as "a different texture than what (she's) used too", thus forever x-ing Elmo's off their list. Shelly's memory for such things is amazing).
And then, to top it all off, whom do I get an email from this morning but my old friend and sometime roommate, Kay!
Here is a 2000 vintage picture of her as she probably hustled me in yet another game of pool. Good thing we never bet any money on it!
Whoa- don't go too deep in the Myspace.com world. I almost got lost there for a minute. Anyway, I just wanted to give her a big welcome, since I hadn't heard from her in almost a year.
And while I'm on the subject of old friends, I'd like to take a moment to thank Jen for commenting on my blog, and emailing me, and generally making a much better effort to stay in touch with me than I ever do with her. Thanks, Jen. You're a true friend!
Well, Jen, I was going to honor you with a picture as well, but Blogger apparently has decided to limit me to one picture a post now. I'll get you sometime later!

Ahhhh...

Alright, now that I've gotten some of the discontent out of my system, I can have a nice, normal, non-political blog entry. Which, everyone will recall, is the purpose of this blog.
For everyone who doesn't know, I have Friday off in observance of Veteran's Day. Since I have never once had this day off since leaving the secondary education system (and maybe not even then; I don't remember), I'll go ahead and chalk it up as yet another reason I'm exhilerated to be at this new job! At the last one, which hopefully soon I'll stop mentioning every other day, we only had seven holidays off each year, and many people worked during them anyway. Not me, though. I had the audacity to want to take holidays and weekends off.
Also, today, I was officially entered in the SECU drawing for the Secret Santa. This is a tradition that I've often heard about but in which I've never actually participated. In addition, I have learned that, on each day in December, one person will bring in food for the whole branch. I am doubly benefitted by this. First, I get to have twenty-four free lunches during the month (every day until Christmas minus the day I bring food), and second, Shelly has agreed to make my meal for me when it's my turn! It's win-win for everyone!
As much as I'd love to fill the rest of this space with amusing anecdotes, deep philosophical musings, and random snippets of interesting trivia, various considerations make that impossible, first and foremost among them being my fatigue. No, that timestamp you see is not when I wrote this. It's three hours before, in that thrice-cursed Pacific time. Blogger.com, in it's infinite wisdom coupled with lazy programmers, allows no variation for those 5/6th's of Americans who live in different time zones.
[Edit: Thanks to the timely advice of Miss Glass, I've now revised my time stamp to correctly reflect my time zone. So the lazy ones weren't the Blogger programmers but me for not doing a modicum of research.]
That being the case, I need to go to bed. Goodnight!

Unmitigated Disaster

A few weeks ago, some genius wrote this:

So if we lose control of Congress this election, so be it. Let America see
what Dems do with power once they're unleashed. America will come back, probably
running.

The harsh reality is sitting on me a little differently, to say the least. I had taken it as a forgone conclusion that we'd lose the House (in itself shocking, considering how gerrymandered all the districts are), but I truly didn't see Republicans losing the Senate. With Allen now all but officially counted out in VA, that's looking to be the case.
I'll be honest: I've been pretty depressed today. But I'm not going to come unhinged over this. Too many liberals have spent the last 6 years renting their clothes, pulling their hair, dressing in sackcloth, and saying how the entire country and our democracy are going down the tubes. I'm not going to indulge in the same behavior simply because things didn't go my way this time.
I will say that I'm extremely concerned that Democrats are not serious about the war we're in. Ever since we invaded Iraq, I think most of them (with at least one notable exception being Joe Lieberman) have used it as a club to beat over the heads of Republicans, without any concern whatsoever about how what they were saying was affecting our efforts there. The enemy understands that they can only win in the battle of wills, and most Democrats have gone around endlessly harping on everything that goes wrong and disparaging everything that goes right. There's no way anyone can possibly argue they've done anything constructive to make the situation any better. And spare me the argument that they're only concerned about the troops; if they're emboldening the enemy, they're only making the soldiers' job that much harder.
I do hope that now that Democrats have the Congress, they'll get beyond that and govern in a way that's good for the country. In one sense, I'd almost welcome them to come after Bush with everything they've been saying, because America won't like it and would probably reverse some of their gains in '08. But that's not what's best for America right now.
And as hard at it is for me to say this, in a lot of ways, we brought this on ourselves. People aren't inspired to vote for candidates who's biggest selling point is "The other guy would be worse!" Compare and contrast, ok, fine, but first you need to define what you believe, why you believe it, and why the voters should agree with you, before you point out all the reasons they shouldn't agree with your opponent.
So, Dems, you win this round. Big time. You've been saying you want to do things differently, so now's your chance. So go ahead, raise the minimum wage, cut the interest rates on government funded college loans, and all that other stuff you want to do. Republicans probably won't fight you on any of that. But remember that you're in power not on your own merits. We fumbled, you recovered. Keep that in mind when you start thinking about raising taxes, or cutting military spending, or liberalizing immigration law, or passing anti-gun legislation, or any of the other stuff you've been historically known to do.
It just might not fly.

Monday, Monday

Back in another work week. The veneer has worn off, now that the first week is over. And...still love it! It was mildly stressful today as everyone and their mother wanted to open a new account, or close out their safe deposit boxes, or forlornly linger in the waiting area for 45 minutes for someone to give them an insurance document. But on a Signature scale of 1 to 10 (with 1 being "Merely work 45 hours this week" and 10 being "You're salary? Wow, you just worked 30 hours for free!"), today barely nudged the needle off zero. But it does give me the warm fuzzies thinking what my absence is causing in good ol' Garner...
Let us never speak of the 'salsa festival' again. All I'll say is A) the part of Durham it was held in made me supremely grateful I'm a CCW holder and B) the world's most wonderful condiment did not make an appearance. Also, in case anyone ever starts a joke with the line "How many soon to be lawyers can you fit in a single stall bathroom?", look them straight in the eye and say "Seven." It's one of those things where you had to be there, trust me.
Alright, to be totally honest, it was a really good time.
Hmmm, what else is news? Ok, I didn't mention this last week, but I am in fact off on Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Shelly and I will get to Maryland on schedule after all. In order to make the trip go quicker, I'm thinking of drugging Shelly so I'm not slowed by endless bathroom stops and coffee breaks. Unfortunately, the last time I tried that, I got caught, and had to endure a stoney silence for the first 50 miles.
Well, I can't think of much else to say. I am going to make it a point to get up and go vote before work tomorrow. I understand that I'm still on the books up in MD, too, but it's probably not worth missing work and making a 600 mile round trip just to exercise my civil rights twice.

Weekly Recap

For the one or two of you that come to my blog to read up on me, I do apologize for the five day delay since my last posting. The internet at work is particularly slow, and I don't want to abuse the priviledge, so I am currently restricted to blogging (one 'g' or two?) at home. Since I've been preoccupied by that wonderful wife of mine in the evenings, that doesn't leave a lot of computer time. But I'll do better, I promise!!
Anyway, first week- GREAT! I know things will change, but so far I am still LOVING it there. So far, it looks like my medical benefits withholding will be around the same as at Signature, but in January, I'll be saving almost $75 a pay period when they change Shelly and I from "Family" ($270) to "Employee plus 1" ($195). That right there, coupled with the sharp drop in gas consumption (OPEC took a big hit with my shortened commute- take THAT, Osama!), will compensate me totally for the career change. And that's not including the slight increases I'll be making as I take and pass (one would hope) the training modules. I feel better about this every day!
Yes, I fully realize I already mentioned the shorter commute, but I left SECU at 5:38pm yesterday and was home at 5:45pm. I will also need to get gas in the next fifty miles, which gives me... oh, about eight working days.
Ok, well, bringing us to today.
Hmm, Shelly and I went out to JC Penney this morning to look for additional wardrobe options for me. They had a good sale going, and we picked up some snazzy stuff, although some of it needs to go back. I thought I'd hate having to dress up every day, but it actually makes me feel somehow better, more professional.
We watched The Breakup last night. Good movie- funny in places, kind of sad in others, which is dangerous territory for a romanic comedy. Shelly didn't like the ending. (I actually thought the ending was perfect). I kept waiting for Owen Wilson to make a cameo, but he let me down. I thought some of the best moments were with Vince Vaughn and his White Sox fan friend (forget his name, if it was ever given). By the way, the clip that shows when you go to that link had Shelly in stitches.
Well, that was quite a rambling review, but I just can't find it in me to go back and make it a literary masterpiece. I didn't like the movie that much.
Also this week, I finished Forever Odd. Dean Koontz is really on to something with this character, even though I liked the first novel, Odd Thomas, better. Apparently he thinks so too, as the novel ends with the obligatory first chapter of the upcoming sequel. I don't know why that trend annoys me so much, but it does.
Alright, I have a few hours of peace, then Shelly and I are going to a salsa festival, which will hopefully include some of the world's most wonderful condiment and not just the dancing. Mournfully, whether it does or not, law school Melissa will be there instructing, so there's no conceivable way I can get out of it.
TTYL.