Traveling

Designer Geek

• by GeekMan • In Breaking News, Home Ownership, Rants, Traveling •   3

TV is my friend.

I am completely and totally in love with the show Designer Guys. I don’t think it’s simply because I’m in the process of buying an apartment that has me so infatuated with these guys and although I’m sure that’s part of the reason it’s just not the whole story. I mean, if buying an apartment automatically meant that I would like all home decorating shows then I probably wouldn’t still find Richard Lowell so repulsive, and I definitely wouldn’t need couch-restraints to keep me from throwing things at the TV whenever I watch the so-called ‘designers’ on Surprise By Design screw up another person’s home by using materials so cheap that you just know everything’s going to fall apart in a week of real-world use.

A balsa wood coffee table? I mean, honestly… balsa wood?

I think the main reason I like these guys is that they don’t have an arbitrary budget imposed upon them by a clueless producer who wants to show the world that anyone can have a stylish, French country living room for under $1,000. Anyone who’s ever tried to decorate a room in their own home knows that making it look the way you want costs money. Sure, you can cut corners by making your own couch out of spare cardboard boxes, some fabric remnants and a roll of toilet paper, but let’s be honest here. It will never be a nice couch. And no matter how much you may paint, stain or buff that IKEA dresser, it will never, ever look like an antique English bureau.

Even if you do paint flowers on it.

In other news, I woke up this morning with the feeling that something was amiss with my body and after spending the last three hours collecting clues I think I’ve figured out what’s wrong. See, my first clue was my nose; it was trying to escape my face by slowly liquefying itself from the inside out and running down both my face and my throat. Then, my eyes and eyelids began waging an ecological war, with my eyeballs turning into a vast ocean of salt water and my eyelids turning into a desert of itchy, stabbing pain. Now my throat has entered the fray by becoming both dry and coated with mucus forcing me to clear my throat and then cough from the pain. All of this leads me to three possible conclusions.

  1. My body is so filled with disgust at finally discovering that I really am the world’s biggest Geek that it is self destructing in the hopes of bringing about extinction of all Geeks.
  2. Having made my final plans to leave on a weeklong vacation to California with HoBiscuit in two days, Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Californian government have launched an all-out biological war on my body in order to keep us away and thus save the West coast from utter annihilation.
  3. It’s allergy season and this is a particularily bad day for allergy sufferers.

Have I mentioned lately that I fricking hate allergies?

Weekend Update

• by GeekMan • In Breaking News, Geek Life, HoBiscuit, Rants, Traveling •   4

I feel violated.

This weekend HoBiscuit and I went down to Virginia as moral support, and living/breathing second opinions, for friends who are moving there in a few months due to a job offer. We drove all over Virginia looking at over a dozen apartments in two days trying to help them find the ‘perfect’ place to live in for a year until they decide whether they’ll stay down there or come back to NY.

I, for one, hope they come back sooner.

Anywaste, we were in the parking lot of some apartment complex when my wife, the Lovely HoBiscuit, starts screaming and pointing at me. She’s hopping from foot to foot as if she were doing the pee-pee dance and turning in circles while screaming “Ew! Ew! Ew!” over and over again. Now, I’ve grown used to the reaction HoBiscuit has when the mind altering, GeekMan-isn’t-really-Quasimodo, love-potion-like cocktail of drugs I give her wear off, but something told me this was different.

The fact that she wasn’t pointing at my face gave me my first clue.

Then I noticed the feeling of a little extra weight on my back. And the weight was moving. Now, since I have the quick reflexes of a striking viper and the mental dexterity of a flying walrus, I quickly deduced that I was being attacked by some sort of creature that could sting me to death, like a giant Geek-killing wasp or a flesh-eating woodpecker. So, taking into account my years of training as a Green Beret Bonnet, I did exactly what I had been trained to do under such circumstances.

I panicked.

I started turning in circles while trying to swat the thing on my back and screamed at HoBiscuit, “Get it off! Get it OFF! I’m allergic to stings. Help me or I’ll die! Get it off! Get it off!” All the while HoBiscuit is screaming at me, “Get it off! Get it OFF! Don’t come near me! I’m not touching it! It’s disgusting! Get it off! Get it off!”

As you can imagine, you’ll never see either of us on Survivor.

Finally, after what felt like forever, I realized that it was not some super-sized stinging insect on my back, but a large, slow-witted and harmless cicada. Sighing in relief that I would not be dying this day, I calmly asked HoBiscuit to flick the little thing off me so we could go look at the apartment with our friends.

The look of horror I received was not encouraging.

After calmly explaining to HoBiscuit that cicadas are harmless bugs that would never hurt her, she calmly told me that she didn’t believe my lying ass because it looked dangerous to her and she would rather watch it eat my empty skull than risk touching it. After trying and failing to reach it myself, and after calming her down from hysterical to moderately anxious, she agreed to help me remove the bug as long as she didn’t need to actually touch it to do so. Then, trusting fool that I am, I turned my back to my wife and calmly waited for her to remove the bug. This may help you understand why I wasn’t prepared for her to start dancing from foot to foot while hitting me with her purse while screaming, “Ick, ick, ick!” Now, all you nature people out there shouldn’t worry because the cicada flew away before HoBiscuit was able to calm down enough to properly aim her Handbag Of Doom.

On the other hand, I’ve got three broken ribs.
Continue reading →

Wandering Fool

• by GeekMan • In Traveling •   4

Or; The GeekMan Cometh.

I’m headed down to Orlando Florida this Sunday where I will hopefully have time to once again cause great destruction and mayhem throughout the city with my Blogging cohort Solonor The Moderately Dangerous Man-Ferret.

He’s got a utility belt and everything.

So, should you live in or near the home of a certain anal retentive mouse with a high-pitched voice, you are cordially invited to have dinner with the Geek and the… uh, Solonor which should make for an entertaining evening since Solonor truly does take after his name. And, as everyone knows, Solonor is Lilliputian for “Not of the Sun” which of course is the exact wording used by Nostradingus to describe Satan.

Anywaste, I’ll be back Wednesday. If Solonor doesn’t kill me, that is.

Super Perfect Happy FunWorld

• by GeekMan • In Traveling •   2

I’m going to hell.

Most people wouldn’t look at it that way, of course, but then again most people aren’t jaded and bitter about traveling the way I am either. This weekend I’m headed down to the sunny state of Florida, where citrus fruit and neon colored houses grow like weeds. And, although I am an old and decrepit individual, I am not going down there to retire like so many other New Yorkers. Quite the contrary actually, I’m headed south for work, not pleasure.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t try to have fun, right?

So, once again I’m throwing my heart ego heart on the ground in the hopes someone will pick it up and show me some love. You see, I happen to know that some of my readers live in Florida, so I’m giving them all fair warning that I’m coming down so they can either pack their bags and flee the state like so many rats from the Titanic, or they can clear their schedule and plan on having a meal with the man behind the Geek.

My money’s on them running, how about you?

Air Sickness

• by GeekMan • In Geek Life, Traveling •   Comments Off on Air Sickness

“Excuse me, sir. Would you mind if I sat next to you?”

Putting my book down on my lap, I looked up at the woman standing in the aisle. She was dressed in a typical business woman’s suit, light grey with a cream colored blouse or shirt under the jacket, and she was looking longingly at the open window seat next to me. I had just been congratulating myself for being lucky enough to get a seat without any neighbors so I could stretch out and relax for the 5 hour flight, but of course the Gods Of Aviation could never let that happen.

Sometimes I truly hated the gods’ sense of humor.
Continue reading →

Jet Pain

• by GeekMan • In Traveling •   6

Yes, it is true, I’m leaving you again.

I’m headed to Vegas for work tomorrow and will probably be gone for about a week. And because I am such a self-abusive loser, I will once again expose my fragile ego to the masses and invite everyone who wants to meet me to come on out to Vegas for lunch or dinner. And of course, once again I will have no takers.

Come on people! I may be a Geek, but I’ve still got feelings!

Honestly, I don’t know why I keep trying. I mean, it’s just like back in third grade when nobody wanted me to sit with them during lunch and I had to sit on the floor next to the bathrooms and eat my FlufferNutter and bananas sandwich all alone. Crying at how cruel the world was and making empty vows of revenge on all the cool kids. And all they ever did was point at me and laugh… and laugh… and laugh…

*sob*

Oh man, see what you did? Now I’m crying! That’s it, I hate you all! I’m taking my toys and going home and I’m not going to talk to you for at least a week! So there! Are you happy now, Poopie-faces? Huh?! Are you happy?!

*sniffle*
Somebody get me a tissue.

Lump

• by GeekMan • In Breaking News, Rants, Traveling •   6

I checked into my hotel room at 11pm.

Doesn’t sound ominous, does it? If I were in a movie however, that sentence would be accompanied by an extreme close-up of my frightened eyes and some scary music because what happened to me when I opened my hotel room door was very scary indeed.

I saw a man in my room.

That in and of itself is usually a little scary because, you know, finding a stranger in a room you thought would be empty can be a disconcerting to almost anyone. But it wasn’t just that I saw someone in my room when I thought it would be empty that sent me screaming from that wretched place, vomiting up my own bile-covered lower intestines in disgust. No. It wasn’t even the fact that said man was overweight and out of shape. Nope. It wasn’t even that he happened to be asleep, snoring like a rusty chainsaw on the only bed in the room, completely covered in sweaty body hair and nothing else that caused my eyes to spontaneously burst of their own accord like giant, overripe, festering boils. What was it then, that caused such a violent reaction from moi, The Mighty Geek?

The fat, ugly naked man was sleeping on top of the hotel bedspread!

Oh god, just writing this for you is conjuring images in my mind that are close to overpowering my gag reflex. I should have doused the poor man in gasoline and set him ablaze to put him out of my his misery. Obviously the poor man was mentally impaired, or emotionally unstable, to have even touched one of those wretched, disease infected things and I would have been doing the world a favor by removing him from the gene pool. Instead, I quickly closed the door, went back down to the front desk and asked for another room. When the attendant asked me what was wrong with my current room we had the following conversation;

Hotel Clerk:
“I’m terribly sorry sir, but the computer says the room is unoccupied. Are you sure there was someone already in that room?”
GeekMan:
“Well, miss. Either there was someone in there already, or this hotel has a massive roach problem. Which one would you prefer it to be when I write about my stay here on the internet?”
Hotel Clerk:
“I see. Allow me to give you one of our suites to compensate you for the inconvenience of finding another human being already occupying your room.”
GeekMan:
“That’s what I’m talking about.”

See people? With the right motivation, communicating with lower life forms is possible!

Life’s A Beach

• by GeekMan • In Traveling •   5

And then it’s October.

I’ll be in Florida for the next six days, but I’ll be back on the first of October which is also the day the cable company says it will be fixing my internet connection. Be evil, mean and nasty amongst yourselves until I return, at which point I shall spank you all and send you to your rooms without supper.

But you can still have Sumpoosie. Because I’m just that kind of guy.

Winds Of Change

• by GeekMan • In Breaking News, Poetry, Quickie, Rants, Serious, Traveling •   11

For there’s a change in the weather, there’s a change in the sea,
So from now on there’ll be a change in me
My walk will be different, my talk and my name,
Nothing about me is going to be the same
I’m going to change my way of living if that ain’t enough,
Then I’ll change the way I strut my stuff
Cause nobody wants you when you’re old and gray
There’ll be some changes made today,
There’ll be some changes made

For there’s a change in the fashions, ask the feminine folks,
Even Jack Benny has been changing jokes,
I must make some changes from old to the new,
I must do some things the same as others do
I’m going to change my long tall Mama for a little short fat,
Going to change the number where I live at
I must have some loving or I’ll fade away
There’ll be some changes made today
Oh, there’ll be some changes made
Continue reading →

It’s That Time Again

• by GeekMan • In Poetry, Quickie, Traveling •   3

I am very tired.

I’m headed to the airport in a few hours to catch a plane down to Boca Raton, FL where I’ll be subjected to all sorts of client whims and fancies as I do my little freelancer song and dance for another paycheck. Since I don’t know if I’ll have the time to update while I’m away, I thought it would be nice for me to leave you a warning about the probable lack of content until Thursday of next week.

And, uh… I’ve done that now so…

…

Ahem. Soooo…

…

Hey, why the hell are you still reading this? What? You’re waiting for me to get to the funny? What funny? I have no funny. There’s no funny to read here. Move along now. Go on! Run along home! Go ahead. Beat it kid, ya bother me. Scram! Get lost. Shoo.

…

Dammit. You’re still here.

Well, if you’re that starved for entertainment, let me try scaring you away with some of my Horrible Self-Serving Haiku (Patent Pending).

Notebook conundrum
A decision must be made
I await your thoughts

I’ll be back Thursday
Don’t forget to leave a tip
Thank you and goodnight