Archive for November, 2007

More about blowing leaves

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Anonymous Coworker
on November 30, 2007 @ 10:30 am
in house, potty humor and sex
. 9 Comments

The money shot is never worth it.

Ha! I’m awesome.

Maybe you thought I was done with my leaf travails after having written about oh so much poop, but that was just the back yard. The front yard was a whole different bag of poop. And by “bag of poop” I mean, no poop is involved in this one. Except for those last three sentences.

Anyway, as I’ve mentioned before, I share my front yard with my neighbors because I live in a duplex. We also share a wall so I can hear them screaming ridiculous insults at each other (”You’re lazier than a dumpster!” or “You talk too loud!”). Whenever I do anything like mow the lawn, clean up leaves, or burn a giant pentagram in the yard, I’ll do the same for my neighbors.

So I started on the far side of my neighbor’s lawn and began blowing leaves across his lawn towards my lawn, and when I got to my lawn I’d switch the leafblower into a leafsucker/mulcher/taffy-puller and mulch up all the leaves. Simple. Thirty minutes later I have a huge pile of leaves, ready to get mulched. And I do not disappoint. I mulched the shit out of those leaves.

But when I started getting to the bottom of the pile the leafblower started making funny noises every so often. I’d hear a loud crackling sound as the leaves and small sticks would be ground up into mulch, but every now and then I’d hear a wet, slurping noise, and then the mulching chamber would be thrown off balance for a second as something weighty was spun around the chamber, and then another wet slurping noise, and then back to the regular crackling sounds.

It would happen frequently enough that I began to be able to tell when I was about to hear the wet noise, and I was finally fast enough with switching off the blower to see something white and soggy roll out of the end of the vacuum tube. I wasn’t really interested in taking a closer look, but I leaned over anyway and was surprised to see what looked like two pieces of old bread that looked like they’d been sitting on the lawn for a while before being blown across the lawn with a bunch of leaves and then partially sucked up in the leaf-blower. And then it suddenly all clicked.

My neighbors throw stale bread out for the birds every day. I don’t know if this is a Baltimore thing, or a middle-class/lower-middle class thing, or what, but my family is guilty of this too. From time to time we’d have a piece or two of bread go stale so we’d break it up into little pieces and throw it into the yard for the birds. Not my neighbors. They throw whole pieces of bread into the yard. Daily. Sometimes there’s six or seven pieces stuck together. I’m not exactly sure where all the bread comes from, but I sure as hell knew I had already sucked up at least half a loaf, and by the time I was done I was pretty sure that the bag of my leaf vacuum contained a tiny replication of hell for people who hate leaves and stale bread.

Which brings me to the final part of this unnecessarily long story: leaf removal. The one drawback to my leafblower/sucker device is that emptying the mulching bag is a goddamned pain in my ass. The mouth of the mulching bag is unnecessarily small, so it’s really difficult to pour leaves out of the mulching bag and into a trash bag. So instead I just laid a 10×12 foot tarp on the ground and dumped all the leaves on to it. It was much easier and faster to do it that way, but leaf disposal presented a new problem. I wasn’t going to throw away my good tarp, and I had to get rid of the leaves.

So I grabbed some string and bundled up the tarp. As a bundle the leaves were heavy and cumbersome, but with a minor amount of trouble I was able to sort of lift/drag them to the waiting trunk of the car. As I left the fenced-in back yard I was met eye-to-eye with my neighbor on the other side of my house. I heaved the leaves off the ground and into the trunk of the car. I’m not sure if she doesn’t speak English, or if she just doesn’t talk to me, but she took one look at the body-sized bundle I was dragging from behind my house and stuffing into my trunk and she turned around, put her head down, and probably tried to mentally erase me out of existence.

I was only able to get the bundle halfway into the trunk, which was good enough since I was just driving it to the dumpster about 100 feet down the street. But there were a surprising number of neighbors out that day, and I could see their eyes following the man-shaped body-bag in the back of the car. They all watched as I hefted the leaves halfway into the dumpster and then eventually undid the string so that all the leaves spilled in, but I think some of them are still pretty skeeved out by the whole affair.

If only they had also known about the bread and the poo. (Nuts! I did it again! Crap! I mean darn! Sorry.)

Of leafblowers and other subjects

Published
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Anonymous Coworker
on November 29, 2007 @ 10:03 am
in bitches, devil cat, house, potty humor, sex and suhmuhmuh bitch
. 13 Comments

Last weekend I was using the ample weekend to get some crap done around the house. My list included sitting around in my jammies and watching tv, sitting around in my pjs and playing video games, humping your mom, and cleaning up all the leaves in the yard. Every year the goddamned trees make like two girls with one cup and shit all over my yard. Except none of the trees has the decency to eat their leavings, the sanctimonious, prudish bastards.

So there I am, out in the yard with the leafblower cleaning up tree shit when what should I find when I blow away a pile of leaves? Real shit. Turns out our yard is the high-traffic interstate interchange of the neighborhood. Cats can quickly go from one side of the neghborhood to the other by cutting through our yard, and apparently, squat a monster kibble-log while they’re at it. Which makes my yard remarkably similar to the Baltimore beltway, now that I think about it.

And so I stand there, staring at this revolting tootsie roll of foods past, and think to myself, “Fuck if I’m cleaning up that shit.” So with all the grace and skill of a ninja brain-surgeon I blow a single leaf, bright-red-side up, over the poop like the leaf is one of nature’s own traffic cones. “Watch out! Don’t drive there! There’s doody under that!” I guess that’s the analogy I’m making. Whatever. Shut your stupid face-hole.

I go back to blowing leaves around, blowing air under piles of leaves so that the tops of the piles don’t move but the other side of the pile explodes with deciduous detritus; or making little tornadoes of leaves in the wind that would give that freaky kid from American Beauty a raging hard-on, and then suddenly: more turds.

These were a bit more substantial, and definitely hadn’t originated from a cat. Or, if they had originated from a cat, that cat was probably pushing close to 50 pounds and was making it’s way around on a miniature Rascal. In that case, the cat wouldn’t have been able to make it through the gaps in the fence, so it’s highly unlikely. Also, I’m pretty sure they don’t make tiny Rascals. And cats probably lack the currency or insurance policy to be able to afford one. While pondering tiny cats on electric three-wheeled scooters I blew another leaf on top of the lawn land-mine and fancied myself the Princess Diana of my backyard.

I finished the leaves in the middle of the yard and began to concentrate on the edges, and like before, I was quickly interrupted by more shit. I was hardly phased at all this time; I just flicked the leafblower towards a stray leaf and deftly marked the offending area.

But this leaf-covering solution is just a stop-gap measure. The only reason I was cleaning up the leaves is because I needed to mow the lawn. And if I mow the lawn with the yard-bombs still intact I’ll splatter-paint the inside of my lawnmower like Jackson Pollock after a Chipotle Grilled Stuft Burrito at Taco Bell. Oh, and by the way Taco Bell, could you really not afford all the letters it takes to spell “stuffed”? Or were you trying to ride the ridiculous wave to Web 2.0 glory, acting like you’re the flickr of the fast food world? Well I’ve got news for you douches: the only wave you’re riding is the brown wave of the feces tsunami erupting from your customer’s backsides after they make a cheek-clenching dash to the closest bathroom, trashcan, or Taco Bell drive-through. I hate you.

So I’m at an impasse. I don’t even like seeing my OWN shit, so I’m not really at all excited about cleaning up something else’s shit. Which is why the shit is still in the yard and the lawn will be mowed in the spring.

The average age in the room was 65

Published
by
Anonymous Coworker
on November 28, 2007 @ 10:13 am
in Glen Burnie, awesome, money, sex and the worldwide information super-tubeterwebs
. 14 Comments

Last night I went to a board meeting for the community association so I could present what I had done with the website for them so far. Just finding a way to present the information to them was a hassle in itself because though the president of the board has a computer, she does not have access to the internet. So I couldn’t have them gather around her computer, and I couldn’t rely on someone having an open wireless signal if I were to haul a laptop over there, so I settled on printing out screen shots of the blog I started for them.

This turned out to be a bad idea too because the font size was tiny, but it was the only way to show the whole website on one sheet of paper. So I did my best with the screen shots and included a couple of cropped and blown-up images so that the geezers could see that yes, words really did exist on these pieces of paper I was giving to them.

As they were looking at the screen shots of the blog I was trying to describe, without being condescending, what they were looking at and how they could use it. I mean, I could have easily said, “Listen up you ancient meatbags. You’re about 10 minutes from becoming worm food, and the pictures in your hands are of a magical newsletter that exists in one place but can be seen by millions of people from all over the world thanks to the darkest sorcery and a few blood sacrifices made to the robot gods that sneak into your house and eat your glaucoma medicine while you’re sleeping!” But I didn’t. I talked about how the info from the newsletter could be added to the website, and how this could save them money on the cost of printing the newsletter, and how the cost of the new website and new email address would be free.

They, of course, hailed me as the savior and messiah that would bring 100% neighborhood participation to the community association and who would increase revenue so the board would be living like hundredaires. But not everyone thought I was the world’s greatest vibrating mustache ride.

The whole time I was talking a man of about 85 who was sitting next to me was looking over his glasses at the screen shots held at arms length in front of him. Every time I mentioned something like email, a website, a link, or the internet I thought I heard him grunt disparagingly. I made sure to say that my goal wasn’t to eliminate the newsletter, but to instead reach out to neighbors that had been missed previously. I wasn’t trying to upset the status quo, I was just adding to it.

The man sighed, took his glasses of, looked at the group, looked at me, took a deep breath and sighed a little again and said, “So you’ve created a blog for us, eh?” And at the word “blog” I’m pretty sure my mouth dropped open and I shit a brick.

Another guy threw his arms up in the air and said, “You lost me at ‘email’,” and conversation around the room started up so I was able to have quick snippets of conversation with the aged technophile while I also fielded questions from the floor.

Apparently he uses the internet to monitor his investments, communicate with friends and family, get the news, and just generally goof off. He didn’t say it, but I have an inkling that there are probably a couple blogs out there that he reads on a regular basis.

Once the questions were done I excused myself because, though I was offered a position on the spot, I had no interest in being on the board or listening to the rest of the meeting.

I packed up my things, put on my coat and hat, and slung my bag over my shoulder as I headed towards the door. Conversation about the website diminished, but as I was closing the door behind me I was sure I heard the man say, “Maybe this fella can help us set up our own server.”

And then heard the other man say, “What in the hell is a ’server’?”

Just another night at J. Patrick’s

Published
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Anonymous Coworker
on November 27, 2007 @ 10:57 am
in Mrs. ACW, beer, bitches, money, people are idiots, sex and travel
. 16 Comments

The Mrs. and I decided on a lark to head out the greatest bar in the history of bars the other night, and though the friends we called just couldn’t be bothered to meet us there on a whim and given only a few moments notice at the height of the holiday weekend, we still had a pretty good time. Well, we had a pretty good time, but it was the kind of good time that you can’t really plan because of how unintentional it was.

When we showed up the bar was relatively empty. There were maybe eight other people there aside from the two of us. The loudest were four snooty-looking douchebags across the bar from us. Dressed in clothes like they had just come from the symphony, they were drinking weird mixed drinks and talking loudly and deprecatingly about what I would generally consider my life. It’s hard to explain exactly, but they just expressed a disdain for all the things people in the middle class can do and can’t do on a regular basis. They made fun of food like casseroles made with condensed cream of mushroom soup. They suggested that we could all stand to learn a bit about the world and should spend our money on vacations to faraway lands as opposed to spending it on other things. Yeah. Just generally dickweeds.

They grew progressively drunker, and when one ordered an Irish coffee for the four of them to share, I knew it was all over. At J. Patrick’s Irish coffee is pretty much just a big cup of hot liquor. It’s also delicious, so it wasn’t long before they were all shouting “This is the best Irish coffee I’ve ever had! We’ll take four of these!” I was joking with Mrs. ACW that the frigid WASPy blond in the middle was definitely going to go home ready to bone the bejeesus out of her companion… and then vomit all over his 900 thread count sheets. Then I’m sure their maid would be forced to clean it all up.

I was eagerly looking forward to the loud suggestion from one of the men that they should swap women for the night, and of course the ensuing slap-fight/cashmere tornado would brighten my soul for years to come, but my attention was drawn to an EVEN BIGGER group of douchebags, if you can believe it. Just as Mrs. ACW and I were having a conversation about her style of dress, and I was explaining that she was “preppy-lite” at times, a slew of yuppies walked in and provided the perfect counterpoint. “That’s preppy,” I said, and our attention drifted from the inebriated foursome.

The bar had gotten more crowded, and in the meantime the band had set up and started playing. The yuppies settled at the end of the bar so we couldn’t hear them very well, but it wasn’t long before Joe, the owner/bartender, wandered down to the beer taps we were sitting in front of and while pouring a Guinness leaned over the bar and said, “That fella at the end of the bar is a real proctol orifice.”

Not sure that I had heard him correctly, I turned my head, leaned in, and said, “What?” He repeated himself, “A proctol orifice. Think about it.” He gathered his Guinness and headed back to the group at the end of the bar; we now knew them familiarly as “assholes”.

A few moments later anther bartender set a shot glass down in front of us, upside-down, and said that the assholes were buying a round for the bar. This may seem like a nice gesture, but it was clear that they were more interested in showing everybody that they had the money to buy a round than they were in creating camaraderie. And even though their dick-measuring charade was clear, we’re not the type of people to turn down drinks, so we each ordered another drink. The guy next to us was even more ballsy, and asked what the limit was. Upon hearing none he asked for Middleton’s, a rare Irish whiskey that Joe only serves on special occasions, and he never charges for it. However, the bartender rebuffed him, so he ordered two other whiskies: one for himself, and one for his wife who wasn’t drinking.

In the meantime they had requested that the band play happy birthday for the eldest douchebag of the group, and when they were done somebody shouted, “Now maybe Joe will get you some whiskey!” With that, the new-money blond that had come in with the assholes shouted “Tullamore Dew!” Of course. Of course she would want the most mass-produced “top-shelf” Irish Whiskey. It’s like when you were 16 and thought Jack Daniels was the be-all-end-all of booze. Of course when Joe brought down Middleton’s instead they were all fawning over the cedar box it came in and trying to figure out how many bottles they would have to buy to impress their friends. The blond stuck the bottle in front of a young yuppie woman sitting next to her. The young yuppie was chain-holding cigarettes. I’ve never seen anyone not smoke so many cigarettes in one sitting. I’m pretty sure the only puff she took is when she would light them, and then just sit and ash them into the ashtray on the bar. She was almost literally burning money. I’m sure her trust-fund is one roll-over from her torching hundreds and this is how she consoles herself in the meantime.

While they were ogling the whiskey and not-smoking cigarettes Joe came back down to our taps and I told him that they did indeed seem like proctol orifices, and I told him that my high-school English teacher would have said that they “didn’t know their derrière from an excavation in terra firma.” He laughed and walked away. Then he came back and said, “I like that,” before walking away again.

As they got drunk they got even more unbearable. The birthday douche had ordered a whiskey on ice, and when I walked past them to go to the bathroom I caught snippets of them talking about their boats. Mrs. ACW and I contemplated beating them to death with our pint glasses, but then decided against it lest their families buy them gold-plated coffins filled with diamonds.

Mrs. ACW and I headed out of the bar shortly afterward, but not before I suggested that if Mrs. ACW didn’t shut up I would “punch you in your head.” Mrs. ACW, being hard of hearing, and looking for a fight, thought I said, “I punch you head!” so she wrote it down on a bar napkin and laughed like crazy. Not one to be outdone, I took the bar napkin from her and told her I would blog that she said, “I eat poop sandwiches every morning for breakfast.” Then she threw a hissy fit and we went home.

All in all, a good night.

I haven’t even tasted it yet UPDATED

Published
by
Anonymous Coworker
on November 26, 2007 @ 9:39 am
in Glen Burnie, Mrs. ACW, food, nog and suhmuhmuh bitch
. 13 Comments

UPDATE: It’s pretty good. Sort of the same as regular eggnog, but a little bit more like… uh… candy? I’m not sure how to describe it. When you drink it, it tastes more like a dessert than other nogs do. If you’re turned off by sweeter nogs, you’ll probably hate it. If you wish your eggnog tasted more like melted eggnog ice cream, this is a pretty close approximation.

Wednesday, or Thursday maybe, or possibly Friday or Saturday, Mrs. ACW and I went to the store to pick up some essentials for the upcoming holiday weekend. If you know me at all, you’ll know that “essentials” means bacon and eggnog. We bought some other crap too, like cat food and chips and nacho cheese, but the trip was pretty much all about the bacon and eggnog.

You may not have noticed, but I like to try as many eggnog products as I can get my hands on, and last week was no exception. In the dairy case with other eggnogs that I’ve had a million times before was a new brand that I’d never before seen.

“Axlerod eggnong?” Mrs. ACW said dubiously as I plunked the carton into the shopping cart.

“Yeah. From the makers of yogurt and sour cream*, so you KNOW it’s going to be delicious.”

Mrs. ACW didn’t argue, she just shook her head and kept pushing the cart, and 6 pounds of bacon later we eventually found our way to the self-checkout. We typically opt for the self-checkout because a) we’re not idiots and the only problems we’ve ever had with the machines have been store related, and b) why interact with another human when you have the opportunity not to? I scanned through all the items while Mrs. ACW bagged, but when I got to the eggnog the machine balked and made irritated noises, then the light above the machine started flashing, signaling that I had broken the poor robot.

We weren’t in a hurry, but we weren’t exactly thrilled about the prospect of hanging out in the store for 10 minutes while some employee pulled their head out of their ass long enough to come over and reset the machine, so I set the nog aside and scanned the rest of our stuff, paid for it, and prepared to return the nog to the dairy case. It was unfortunately at that moment that an employee finally lumbered over to see what the problem was.

“What’s the problem?”

“This eggnog won’t scan, but it’s fine. I’m going to put it back.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure what? I’m putting the eggnog back.”

“Are you sure you don’t want it?”

“Yeah. I already paid for everything else.”

“I can ring you up at the cashier station if you’d like.”

“Really, it’s okay. I’m putting the eggnog back.”

“Are you sure? It’s no trouble.”

And on and on ad nauseum. She was the most infuriatingly helpful person I’ve ever encountered at that store, and it took me by complete surprise. It turns out that some dunderhead had put the nog out before it had even been entered into their system, so she said she’d sell it to me for 2 bucks, which is a pretty good deal considering that the shittiest, month-old donkey-nog is typically at least $2.50.

By the time we got home I was so confused about the whole experience that I put the nog in the back of the fridge and forgot about it until now. When I taste it, I’ll be sure to let you know if it’s got chunks of cottage cheese floating in it.

*Just in case you don’t click that link, you should know that Axelrod doesn’t even list eggnog as one of its products, so I either have a counterfeit nog that will strike me blind, or they’re so embarrassed by their nog that they don’t like to advertise that they even make it. Both prospects make me very leery.

Thanksgiving is for bitches.

Published
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Anonymous Coworker
on November 22, 2007 @ 1:57 pm
in uncategorized
. 5 Comments

Gobble, gobble… beeotch.

Worst pizza ever

Published
by
Anonymous Coworker
on November 20, 2007 @ 9:40 am
in Mrs. ACW, family and food
. 20 Comments

If you haven’t gathered from prior posts, my family is pretty much completely bonkers. They’re great, and I love them, don’t get me wrong, but like many people, when I turn and objectively look at my family like an outsider might, all I see is balls-outside-of-pants crazy.

For example, my family (and by “family” I mean my dad, mom, her parents, and her six brothers and sisters, their spouses, and their children (my 12 or 14 or 16 cousins or whatever), as well as the 3 or 4 great-grandchildren) is rabidly insistent on getting together. Memorial Day, Labor Day, Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc. These all require an event that commands no less than the total attendance of the entire extended family. Days like St. Patrick’s and Valentines have fallen by the wayside now that almost all of the cousins have gotten old enough to drink and bone their significant others. But every other holiday requires compulsory attendance. I guess we could opt to just not go to some of these events, but then you have hear about it until the next year. If I missed Thanksgiving, I’d be hounded about it until the next Thanksgiving. It’s ridiculous. In fact, the craziest part is that my relatives are only interested in having everyone in the same house. Once we’re all there most of them could really give a shit about the other people in the room. It’s really bizarre.

So now it should come as no surprise to you to learn that my nuclear family celebrates a pre-Thanksgiving every year on the weekend before Thanksgiving at my mother’s behest. This is a relatively new tradition, started once we were all old enough to drive and were invited to Thanksgivings of friends and girlfriends. Because my mother wouldn’t be able to see us ALL DAY on Thanksgiving, she had to get her extra time in with a pre-Thanksgiving. So now the three sons, wives in tow, dutifully participate in pre-Thanksgiving with my parents. My grandparents are usually there too, because: hey, why not?

We have this miniature Thanksgiving with all the same traditions, but with a much smaller crowd, and a much more skewed age distribution. There are six people between 25 and 30, four people between 59 and 90, and one person below 3. And of course we have to keep the 2-year-old entertained because she’s the only one that needs entertaining. Everyone else is not giving a shit that anyone else is there.

And we finally come to why I started writing this post in the first place. Saturday night found me sitting under a circular card table set up in the living room for four unlucky people to be exiled during dinner, playing “dishes” with my niece. “Dishes” primarily consists of taking all the play dishes in the “dishes” bag and dumping those play dishes all over the floor, refilling the bag, and repeating. I wasn’t going to have any of that bullshit, especially not from someone much smaller and stupider than me, so I used my superior intellect to convince my niece that we should be making food. We took cups, plates, and bowls of imaginary ingredients and dumped them into a tin, shook the empty tin, and then my niece delivered the “food” to someone else in the room.

The process wasn’t without problems though. When we were making pizza and I was dumping in the flour, oil, water, sauce, and cheese, I asked my niece what she wanted on the pizza.

“Cookies.”

Despite this being a repulsive and disgusting pizza topping, I obliged, “Okay, we’ll have cookie pizza. What else do you want?”

“Cookes.”

“Right. Yes. There are cookies on the pizza. What other toppings should we add?”

“Pizza.”

“(sigh) I’m pretty sure that you’re not quite clear on the concept here, so I’ll pretend you didn’t say that. Any other normal toppings?”

“Juice.”

“No. We’re not putting juice on pizza. That’s gross. And messy. We’ll just have your terrible cookie pizza with extra cookies.”

“Pizza!”

“Right, yes, pizza. If you can even call it that anymore.”

I sent my niece off to deliver the cookie pizza to some oblivious guinea pig who’d have to ingest the unpalatable slop. Moments later she returned, empty tin held out in her tiny hands. “More.”

I decided pizza was out of the question because of how badly she ruined it last time, so I suggested we make cookies instead. It seemed like that’s what she wanted to make anyway. I dutifully went about adding the imaginary flour, sugar, water, eggs, crisco, and chocolate chips. She had, in the meantime, found a small truck and was pushing it around my kitchen, basically violating every health department restriction in the process. Then she told me the truck wanted to watch what we were doing. She’s clearly insane, and now I had her stuck in my kitchen. What a nightmare. I put my attention back to my cookies lest she suggest that the truck needed to empty it’s diesel bladder into my gastronomic opus when I heard the voice of one of her parents, outside the confines of the tiny kitchen under the table.

“Are you making cookies down there?”

I looked at my niece, who was now pushing her truck through a flan I had set aside for dessert, turned my head toward the voice and said, “She’s not doing a goddamned thing! I’m doing all the work down here!”

They laughed, oh how they laughed, but I was the one laughing when I put the flan in the empty tin and sent it out to be eaten, delivered by a tiny malevolent sadist.

Emails with my brother

Published
by
Anonymous Coworker
on November 14, 2007 @ 10:50 am
in awesome, food, potty humor, the worldwide information super-tubeterwebs and word nerd
. 22 Comments

I wasn’t even going to post anything today, but then this one wrote itself.

ACW wrote:
The FDA says it’s fine for the meat industry to spray meat with carbon dioxide so that the red color of meat lasts longer, in some cases long past the shelf life of the meat. So how can you tell if the meat is bad or not? Buy it, take it home, open up the package and smell it. Thanks meat industry!
http://tinyurl.com/23qnpa

Mokie wrote:
Or, on the other hand:

“Since then, food retailers Giant, Safeway Inc and Tyson Foods Inc have stopped the practice.
On Tuesday, discount retailer Target Corp asked USDA for approval to add a warning to the label of meat that has been treated with carbon monoxide sold in its stores.”
So pretty much as long as you shop at a reputable store you’re going to continue to get decent beef.
Or you could just save all of that hassle and just buy organic.

ACW wrote:
I’m not shopping at Gunt or Slaveway.

Mokie wrote:
YOU ARE A GUNT

ACW wrote:
YOU ARE THE ONE WHO IS A GUNT. FURTHER, I SUSPECT YOUR GUNT MAKES ITS OWN GRAVY AND YOU EAT THAT GRAVY SLATHERED OVER DEEP-FRIED BROWN SUGAR, THUS INCREASING THE SIZE OF YOUR GUNT AND SUBSEQUENT GUNT-GRAVY OUTPUT.

Mokie wrote:
YOU ARE THE ONE WHO IS A GUNT AND IT IS NOT ME WHO IS THE GUNT. SAID GUNTITUDE AND GRAVYMAKING APPLIES STRICTLY TO YOURSELF AND NOT TO ME.

ACW wrote:
GUNTLY GRAVYSMITHING IS IN TOTALITY AND PERPETUITY WITHIN YOUR GUNTISH PURVIEW. AFOREMENTIONED GUNTITUDE BY YOU, HERETOFORE AND FORTHWITH REFERRED TO AS GUNTOSAURUS, CANNOT BE APPLIED TO ME.

ACW: 1
Guntosaurus: 0

My community association is worse than yours

Published
by
Anonymous Coworker
on November 13, 2007 @ 10:34 am
in Glen Burnie, house, people are idiots and the worldwide information super-tubeterwebs
. 28 Comments

For the past two years I’ve been getting newsletters from my community association about once per month. Each month they bemoan the dismal membership levels and the non-existent meeting attendance. And for two years I’ve been trying to make it to one of the meetings so I could tell them exactly what their problems are, but they kept distributing the newsletter that announces the time and location of the meeting on the DAY AFTER the meeting has taken place. Sometimes I don’t get the newsletter until a WEEK after the meeting has taken place. These newsletters are HAND DELIVERED. If they arrive late it’s because someone specifically fucked up. You can’t even blame it on the post office. It’s just stupidity.

The other problem, I found out after attending my first meeting last night (the newsletter was delivered a week early!), is that everyone on the board of the community association is older than me by about 30 years. Maybe 40. Of the 15 people at the meeting, everyone there looked like they had been retired since Gerald Ford was in office. This explains why they don’t have a website or email address. And why none of them have ever used the Internet. Ever.

I quietly took a seat in the back of the room and waited for the meeting to unfold. It started with a bunch of procedural nonsense of making motions to open the floor for revisions to the agenda for the evening, an agenda that existed only in the notebook of the president and that only contained two items: hear from zoning office, and hear from police. I was wondering if I could do enough damage to my brain with a plastic chair to forget the whole meeting when the guy from zoning took the floor. He explained that zoning should be called for just about three things: trash and old vehicles on property, commercial vehicles parked on residential streets, and businesses being run out of residences. And that’s when all hell broke loose.

People started shouting about different things but they all eventually settled on the day care services that people run out of their homes and how the children at the day care were always yelling and screaming, and how with 20 kids in a house the traffic on the street had become “gridlocked” in the mornings. These were the types of old people that act as the basis for all the “evil geezer in the woods that eats children” stories. They literally seethed with unbridled fury at the very thought of children. They hated kids. The conversation eventually turned to Halloween, and how on Halloween two neighborhood ruffians had shouted at a community member and her tween aged sons, calling them “effers” and “dykes” (wtf!?). Then the “neighborhood security” guy, aged at about 150, piped up and said that people noticed that cops had been shining their lights on peoples houses on Halloween and nobody knew why.

This then launched a huge discussion about how many trick-or-treaters people got on Halloween, and it seemed with our one kid we had the least. Another house saw only 10, but apparently everybody else saw between 88 and 150. The woman who saw 88 kept mentioning that she “had made 88 snacks,” and that she “gave out 88 snacks”. At first I figured she meant candy, but she then explained that she takes a bottle of Sunny Delight and uses a rubber band to attach a granola bar and a box of raisins to it. This is what she gave out to kids. The kids “love it” apparently, but I think it explains why we don’t see any trick or treaters. By the time they leave her house they must be thinking, “I guess we should quit while we’re ahead” and then don’t go any further. There was a fierce discussion about who had seen the most kids ever, but I think someone made a rule that you couldn’t count trick-or-treaters before the year 1900, so everybody gave up.

Then the two cops at the meeting stood up and explained how they were starting a “bikes on patrol” unit for our neighborhood. Apparently a police officer had been there at a previous meeting and explained the very same thing, but everybody had irrelevant questions anyway, all of which eventually degraded to people talking quietly, nodding solemnly, and agreeing that there were “numerous” houses in our neighborhood that were “making or dealing drugs in broad daylight.” However, when questioned none of the members could remember an exact address. Maybe due to them being physically decrepit and moments away from turning into dust, or because the houses they were thinking of probably didn’t have anything to do with drugs, and had everything to do with children. Hateful shrieking children.

Then conversation exploded again into three very important topics: whether the Christmas newsletter should be printed on red or green paper; an ugly new house with a big new ugly garage that everybody wanted to see torn down and couldn’t the police do something about it?; and whether the treasurer could continue distributing the newsletter on a street where a “schizophrenic” woman took all her clothes off and hugged the trees in her yard. The treasurer was easily 278 years old, and I was pretty sure that his genitals had been non-functional since well before the Kaiser was assassinated. And yet he was positively brimming with delight at the possibility of ogling a mentally ill woman. A vote of two people conceded that he could continue to deliver newsletters on that street.

Finally at the end of the meeting they asked me to introduce myself, and asked me if I was at the meeting because I wanted to raise any particular issues. I used the opportunity to register my dissatisfaction with the delivery of the newsletter and then suggested that a website and email address be added to the newsletter so people could stay informed without having to wait for the newsletter. When they stared at me blankly I said that I could create the website and the email address. When they continued to stare I said, “On the Internet.” Some said, “Oh!” while others continued to stare blankly. One person gasped, and I’m sure another recalled an episode of 60 Minutes where robots from the future came out of the internet to eat their diabetes medicine. Then they all looked at me like, “This man can control the Internet!”

The president thanked me, dismissed the meeting, and then called me forward to get my phone number so she could contact me “once I had the Internet set up.” She explained that she, “had an internet at work” but she was only allowed to “use the internet at lunch” and she could “only get so many internets at work” because “they monitor how many internets we send out and that come in” so she asked me to “keep her off any internets” that I send.

And thus begins my plan to stage a coup to overthrow the Community Board and replace it with a tyrannical governance of robots controlled by me. Via the Internets.

I do not recommend drinking this

Published
by
Anonymous Coworker
on November 12, 2007 @ 12:52 pm
in beer and nog
. 11 Comments

But other people do.

This weekend I started my holiday-season-long quest to add eggnog to alcoholic drinks, rather than the other way round. You don’t have to add many spirits to eggnog before you realize that whiskey, bourbon, and scotch in eggnog are all going to pretty much taste the same, and that tequila, jagermeister, or peach schnapps are all pretty much terrible ideas.

So I decided to go the route of adding eggnog to other drink recipes by replacing a specific ingredient with eggnog, or just adding a little eggnog to the mix. This weekend I had an eggnog White Russian (nog russian? White Nog? White Noggian?) and it really wasn’t very good at all. I thought, “Yes! This will be the perfect candidate for replacing one dairy substance for another!” But it’s not. It’s really bad. It tastes like you just cleaned out a pot of old, burned coffee with nog instead of water, and then drank the hideous slurry inside. Somehow the milk (or half and half, if you prefer) keeps the coffee flavor to a minimum, while the nog brings the coffee flavor out, all bitter and with a filthy raging coffee hard-on.

In fairness, I don’t really like coffee, but I do like Kahlua drinks, so that might be part of the problem. Different permutations were concocted with varying degrees of Kahlua, vodka, and nog or Colonial Custard, but I found all of them to be utterly repellent. Well, not utterly, because like naked ladies, nog makes everything better. So I guess I’d say that this is better than just drinking vodka and Kahlua (a Black Russian).

Further, in an attempt at full-disclosure, everybody else thought this drink was balls-tinglingly delightful, so there you go. While you’re trying that, I’m going to find a way to get eggnog into a Dirty Kmart.

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