My Goodness

• by GeekMan • In Breaking News, Geek Life, Home Ownership •   6

I’m feeling pretty good right now.

HoBiscuit and I closed on our very first apartment yesterday and we couldn’t be happier. I mean, we’ve sold off all of our blood, replacing it with Fluffer-Nutter in order to make the final down payment, but still we think it was worth it. Especially around snack time when we use small knives to cut ourselves and bleed onto toast and crackers.

Mmmm, love that Fluffer-Nutter goodness…

Now that we have our very own place to live however, we’ve found that it just doesn’t look or feel exactly the way we KNOW it could look and feel with a little remodeling. Especially the kitchen, which is soooo small that we won’t both be able to work in it at the same time without one of us crawling into the oven to let the other pass by.

Just guess who’ll be getting into the oven.

Anywaste, we’ve decided that the best thing to do is remodel the kitchen and leave the rest of the place alone for now. Mostly because after checking our nonexistent budget and exploring other methods of raising cash we’ve come to realize that selling off body parts no longer brings the premiums they once did, which means we can’t afford to do anything but the kitchen until the market price of human spleens goes back up.

Damn you ebay.

All of which brings us back to yesterday’s question. Everyone assumed I was asking if it was better for a PERSON to look good or to feel good, when I was really wondering if it was better for a PLACE to look good or to feel good. See? I can be clever and enigmatic with the best of them. Face it, I’m smarter than any of you and you’re all feeling inferior to my obviously greater intelligence! I’m a genius living amongst cavemen! I’m like a virtuoso stuck in a polka band, an Einstein forced to ride the short bus, or a Picasso made to paint Pokemon cards!

…

Why are you looking at me like that?

*smack!*

Ow!

See?! This is exactly why I don’t talk at parties.

My Problem

• by GeekMan • In Geek Life, Traveling •   6

Yesterday my computer died and I lost my post. I’m trying to rewrite that post but in the meantime here’s something to keep you busy.

Facts;

  • While traveling to California I was “accidentally” hit on the back of the head with a cane by an old lady trying to stuff an entire body-bag full of knitting materials into the overhead bin above my seat.
  • While in California two very polite police officers kindly explained to me that people do not jaywalk to cross a street. As an added bonus, I was given a piece of paper as a ‘souvenir’ to help me remember this life lesson in the future.
  • While driving the roads of California I discovered that Californian maps lie. For what seems like a fairly straight road on a map will be discovered as being a twisting, narrow, dizzying and dangerous Highway Of Madness, also known as Highway 1.
  • While in California I discovered, much to my dismay, that I am no longer impervious to sunshine. Whereas on the east coast I used to be able to lay all day in the sun without fear of a burn or even any type of significant tan, in California I seem to be unable to spend more than 30 seconds out of doors without looking like I’ve been covered in orange paint and dipped into an industrial deep fryer.
  • Before vacationing in California I had a wife who was excited to visit ancient caves, climb tall mountains and walk forest trails. After vacationing in California I have a wife who has discovered she is afraid of the dark & enclosed spaces, who feels faint at the thought of climbing stairs past the second floor of an apartment building and who loves nature only when viewed in air-conditioned comfort through car windows while going 55mph.
  • Contrary to commonly held easterner beliefs, the west coast is not always warm. It would have been nice to know this before I packed my suitcase full of sexy, super-tight weightlifter shorts and spandex wifebeater t-shirts.
  • In California almost everyone is a plastic surgeon or has had plastic surgery. I know this because as I walked the streets in the above mentioned outfits I was accosted by every third person I passed and told that they, or someone they knew, could help me with my “little problem”. Usually through an implant or attachment.
  • In New York, should a local tell you to walk a seemingly long distance to a destination, one can walk the 30 blocks without thinking of it as being too far or too difficult. In San Francisco, should a local tell you NOT to walk the three blocks to your destination, one should immediately jump in one’s car and drive there instead of attempting to walk the three vertical blocks. This is because when you wake up in the hospital after your heart attack you will be ridiculed for the rest of your life.
  • In California I met two wonderful and charming people who were nice enough to overlook my inherent Geekiness and talk to me without projectile vomiting on my ugly face. They kept up this charade of touchy-feely, good-natured comradeship almost all day. However, as HoBiscuit and I were leaving it was entirely unnecessary for one to turn to the other and stage-whisper, “Thank god they’re leaving! If I had to spend another minute with that ugly, stupid, stuck-up jackhole I think I would have died. As it is, I think I should take a Liquid Plumber bath to wash the touch of his filthy eyes off my body.”

After careful examination of these facts, I believe I have discovered what the greatest problem in my life is;

My problem is California.

It’s California’s fault that my life is so pathetic. It’s California’s fault that my computer froze up yesterday and caused the loss of my Greatest Post Ever™. California is the root of all evil in the world, California is slowing down the closing on my new apartment, California gave me this paper cut on my finger and California makes my anus bleed when I wipe too hard with industrial-grade toilet paper. California is my Kryptonite, my super-powered arch nemesis and my personal anti-christ all rolled into one.

But damn, it’s beautiful out there.

Geek Sleep Now

• by GeekMan • In Traveling •   3

A most eventful vacation.

HoBiscuit and I totally enjoyed our vacation, even with all of the driving we needed to do to cover all the ground we wanted to cover. In a nutshell, our vacation can be summed up with the following sentence. Fly, drive, see, drive, meet, drive, see, drive, meet, drive, see, drive, fly and drive some more. If it’s something to see or do in northern California, we’ve seen and done it.

9 days and 2,046 car miles later we’re back home and damn tired.

I’ll tell you all about the trip, including the infamous meeting of the mindless, in the next few days. Right now I’m just too exhausted to write anything other than we had a fabulous time.

Well, that and trucker tans suck. Big time.

The Day After Tomorrow

• by GeekMan • In Breaking News, Geek Life, HoBiscuit, Traveling •   8

Look out California, here we come!

For the first time since we’ve been married, HoBiscuit and I are traveling together on what some people would call a ‘vacation’, but what we call a ‘Destination Of Convenience’, or DOC. DOC means that we’re going to California for a wedding and tacking on a getaway week for ourselves because we really need to take a breather from all the work we’ve been doing. Now don’t be sad, we’re not going away forever and I promise to tell you all about our trip when we get back. Come on now, there’s no need to cry. Turn that frown upside down…

Oh stop it! I’ll be back on June 7th, you big crybaby.

Anywaste, we’ll be going all over northern California, from San Francisco to the Oregon border to Yosemite to Monterey, so even though I’ll try to update this site with stories of our travels while we’re there, if I were you I wouldn’t be holding my breath. During our stay out west, we’ll also work in a day to meet and greet two of my favoritest Bloggers ever, despite the fact that the Governator has declared our meeting to be an act of terrorschism. And if our meeting doesn’t cause an interdimensional rift of cataclysmic proportions, then I guess we’re just not trying hard enough. Jules, JadedJu, Hobiscuit and GeekMan will meet in California this Saturday, and the world will quake beneath our feet.

May god have mercy on us all.

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.
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It All Starts Here

• by GeekMan • In Experiments •   15

Blogger Tag.

If someone tags you, you must name and link the person who tagged you (for example, GeekMan got me!) and then tag someone else by writing “Tag! You’re IT!” in your Blog with the word “You’re” being a link to the person you want to be ‘it’. It’s up to the person you ‘tagged’ to figure out that they’re ‘IT’ and then tag someone else. I know it’s silly and childish with no real point to it, and I also know that a game like this has been done before, but I think by actually forbidding people from telling the person who’s “IT” that they are, in fact, “IT” makes it more interesting. It will certainly let you know who actually reads your site as opposed to those who just say that they do. And wouldn’t it be awesome if someone you admired and read every day ‘tagged’ you?

Tag! You’re IT!

Fun With Google – Part II

• by GeekMan • In Experiments •   2

Smart-bombing Google.

According to this highly reliable, non-partisan website’s latest internet poll, 87% of the world’s internet users who have an epidermis and are not mentally retarded are in love with the person who writes for this witty and wonderful website. Now, even though I fully acknowledge that 50% of all statistics are completely made up, this is one statistic that I think is 73% accurate. This guy is considered the world’s best at what he does, and what he does is write the world’s best funny stories.

He’s like a humor deity made flesh for our amusement.

And, although I’ve made fun of this guy on many occasions in the past, it should be obvious by now that deep down I’m in awe of his abilities and would love to one day be thought of as even half the writer he is. I mean, he’s everything I’ve ever aspired to become. He’s the world’s greatest humor writer, ever! The best of the best! The High Priest of Low Humor!

I have a shrine devoted to him above my toilet.

Now, even though his latest post might be considered by some to be a self-aggrandizing, ego-stroking piece of Google-bombing fluff, I beg you to overlook it and dig a little deeper because I honestly believe he is one of the greatest people writing for free on the internet today. So do yourself a favor and check out his website every day because, in my own humble opinion, he just may be the greatest writer in the history of the internet.

We are all blessed to have him in our lives.
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