I stayed home from work yesterday, and totally slept the day away. I could have, should have stayed home today, considering Anvil didn’t verify. He’s as sick as a dog too. I have a headache and my attention span is like

Saturday, we also sat down and watched 2012. Good movie. In some spots it felt like it was dragging on. And there could have been more special effects, but all in all, a good disaster movie. Is it worth buying it on Blu Ray? I don’t think so. Rent it on Blu Ray? Yeah there you go. Maybe I’m just a movie snob.

Sunday was just a beautiful as Saturday, so I pushed away from the coffee and got my running gear on. By running gear, I mean my basketball hightops, and some Walmart shorts. 45 minutes and 3.1 miles later We arrived back home. I swear it was over four miles, but Crystal’s GPS watch doesn’t lie. I could have kept going, but Crystal forgot her inhaler, and we needed some water. I really wanted to be there when she cracked the four mile mark. Maybe this weekend, we’ll try again.

So yeah, I’m just going to post this and maybe go and nap on the couch. My headache is coming back a bit.

Tuesday Tuesday Tuesday. It truly feels like a Monday. Claims has been really slow. It’s also lonely. My partner and I only work two day together. It just makes the day go by so much slower, if there’s no one to talk to. The store manager is inm Florida for the annual meeting, so verification was over the weekend. Unfortunately, our main printer is down, so I can’t print out the bill of lading, so all my partners hard work can’t go out this week. Been getting the run around from Vonage. I’ve been trying for three days to find someone to help me get a return authorization for some product that we don’t carry any more. It’s slow going. Out of the four numbers I have either found or have been given, 3 were disconnected. I hate talking on the phone, I’ve logged about 3.5 hours. I’ve done some pretty good doodles of the Enterprise while I waiting, huh? Today I finally gave up. When I finally got through to the same department I was talking to yesterday. They made the mistake of asking for my account number. Now I don’t have an account number, and I told 3 tiers of customer service agents this. I finally said,

“You guys have no clue what you are doing. I’m just going to file my claim, and you guys will pay, its as easy as that.” and I hung up before they could reply. I filed the claim, and that’s that.

Random thoughts of the day:

- Why do I have the soundtrack of RHPS running through my head?
- Other than blood, what makes the grass grow?
- Why are hot dogs so yummy?

Ok, time to go and watch some Top Gear. And grunt, like a man should grunt.

SUDDEN DEATH OVERTIME

My biggest fear. Crystal is laughing on the couch to my left, and I am sinking into the couch. I tell her, all I want is a good game, well I’m getting it. Another 20 minutes that will feel like an entire work day. My heart can’t take much more of this. It jumps in my throat every time Team USA has the puck.

Ok, Some back story for a second. In the second period, I was eating some of Crystal Baked Doritos. I gave Mal a corner of one. Well he loved it. He licked all the cheese off of both side, and came back looking for more. I bet* Crystal that if the Canadians won, she has to eat the chip, if they lost, I would eat it. Sidney Crosby is a Hero! Something like 9 minutes in to the overtime period, he scored the game winning goal. I jumped up and screamed WOOHOO, and EAT THE CHIP! She didn’t. In fact, I gave her numerous chances to do so. I think the last time was just before we went to bed. SO when I got up this morning I put it in a baggie and hid it somewhere so I can bring it out again at the 2014 Winter Olympics. We’ll see who is laughing then!!

The question is now, What the hell do I do with myself now that the Olympics is over with? I know, The summer games are in 2 years, but it’s not the same if its not on home soil. Well I have some plans:

- DVR DVR DVR.
We have two hours worth of Caprica, Survivor, Survivors (BBC) and Sparticus.

- 5k St. Patrick’s day run
Its on the first day of Spring!

- My Birthday is coming up in 3 months!

- Vegas Baby! in 9 months 2 days

I think we’ll keep busy.

* Sadly though, she didn’t take the bet.

Ô Canada!
Terre de nos aïeux,
Ton front est ceint de fleurons glorieux!
Car ton bras sait porter l’épée,
Il sait porter la croix!
Ton histoire est une épopée
Des plus brillants exploits.
Et ta valeur, de foi trempée,
Protégera nos foyers et nos droits
Protégera nos foyers et nos droits.

Congrats to Team Canada, who beat Team USA in over time to win the gold!

Final medal count for Team Canada:

14 Gold, 7 Silver, and 5 Bronze

Been watching a lot of the Olympic coverage. If you call watching 90% of the events after the fact. A couple of time we were watching the speed skating, and I already knew the out come. I think the only events that were live, that I noticed have been the hockey games. Speaking of Hockey, it’s going to be USA vs. Canada on Sunday afternoon. Go Canada! We watched some of the awards ceremonies, for when Canada won medals, it fills me with pride that we are doing so well. Technology is awesome during these games, because everything is so connected. I can keep up even while I’m work.

Work has been slow. Most people have already spent their income tax cheque’s, so they are back to buying the basics. Since they are buying the basics, less are coming back as returns. Which makes my job a blessing and a curse. Less returns means less claims. So we have to find other things to make the day go by.

The initial excitement of going to Vegas has faded. Which is a good thing because I don’t think I could have handled myself being like that for the next nine months. I was just a little *too* excited. I’m still very excited but its more controllable now. The same excitement of me getting my new phone has waned as well, which is even better than the Vegas excitement, because I think I was really starting to annoy Crystal. All in due time. Work has told us that we’ll be getting a bonus cheque this quarter, so I’m going to put some money aside for Crystal to go on Ebay and look for a phone that she wants.

So, yeah, I think that’s all I really have to say now. Been a boring long week. I’m glad its over. In fact when I go back to work, it’ll be a new month.

My wife is pretty awesome, she’s playing the tragically hip for me, because I said that I never get to hear any of my music. She rocks.

On Saturday, we all climbed into the Escape to go up to the Emerald Square Mall to hook Brian, my father in law up on my Sprint plan. And to try and talk him out of getting the HTC Hero as his phone. (Really I wasn’t trying to be selfish, its not that that’s the phone I REALLY want…) I didn’t think he needed it. He doesn’t have a facebook, a twitter account, and email address, text message or anything. He doesn’t need to sync it to gmail etc. Plus like I pointed out, the entire front of the phone is glass, and he works in construction. You do that math.

So after about 15ish minutes of walking back and forth he settled on another touch screen, I think it was the Instinct. I walked up to the counter, and tried to get this really uninterested Indian guy to help us. (I think we walked into the wrong Sprint store as there are two of them. The other one must have had the nicer guy that we talked to a couple of weeks back.) I gave him my phone number and my last name. We waited for him to plug it all into the system. He then told me he couldn’t sign Brian up for a phone because I was only approved for 3 lines. I had no idea. I felt gutted. I apologised like mad to him. We’ve only been bugging hime for at least 8 months to just give up on the pay as you go plans and get a real phone (he currently has a Razr phone).

So yeah I feel terrible.

Now on to the next thing. Last week, he bought our airline tickets and our hotel reservations through Expedia.com. and we’ve been getting the “OMG YOU HAVE TO CALL US RIGHT AWAY OR WE’RE GOING TO KILL A KITTEN” type emails. It seems Delta airlines has been screwing around with the flights, but not talking to Expedia. So Expedia gets confused and freaks out. I know its more than nine months before we fly out there, but its annoying to have received 4 emails in 3 days. I’m so confused about when we are leaving, and Crystal hopes that she’s not going to get these emails every day, because that would suck.

It’s Sunday. That means I’ve already finished the laundry. I’ve actually folded it. Its still sitting in the kitchen, but its folded. I’ve been trying to get into that habit as I’m pulling it out of the dryer.

It’s Sunday, and I am bored.

I like it, but one of my twitter friends says I need an accessory to go along with this new look.

Heh. I have yet to hear something back from Crystal. She’s either busy and hasn’t looked at twitter, or she has, and hates it. either way, looking back, I should have kept it so she could have seen it. I look bad ass, for about 3 seconds.

We found the phones that we want. Its the HTC Hero from Sprint. This is a pretty awesome phone. It runs the Android operating system, and according to the propaganda, has over 20,000 apps for it. Plus a full web browser, not the mobile web that we have now. Its a touch screen with no hardware keyboard. I’m pretty cool with that, because of our iPod Touch. It takes a little while to get used to, but if you text as much as we do, we’ll be pros in no time. I’m a gadget type of guy. I had earlier been wanting to get a Blackberry Tour, but after just quickly playing with this phone made me forget about the Blackberry very quickly. Plus the onboard camera is a 5 megapixel, a steep upgrade from the 2 megapixel that I have now. I do actually use the camera a lot. infact my old 5.1 megapixel camera is collecting dust because I prefer to only have to carry one thing around. Plus I’m prone to forgetting things.

I’m a sort of an instant gratification type of guy. I see something, I want it, if I have enough money, I’ll get it. Finding the phone I want, and finding out Sprint will give me $175 credit for an upgrade if I resign to a two year contract is awesome. What’s not awesome, having to wait three months to get my new phone.

We Are More by Shane Koyczan

we are the true north
strong and free
and what’s more
is that we didn’t just say it
we made it be.

It actually wasn’t that bad. I was more worried about driving in Boston as opposed to driving to Boston. Honestly, I thought it was going to be worse. Only twice I couldn’t make it over to the lane I wanted, so we went around the block, and tried again. Second try was always the charm. Plus we got to wait at like an intersection with 8 or 9 streets merging into one. That’s always so much fun. We missed the traffic going in. We just caught the tail end of the morning commute. And as we were leaving in the afternoon, I got a great laugh out of the miles of traffic trying to get into the city. It was crazy! Then there was slow down due to shoulder work. The workers, other side of the highway, watching the traffic. Needless to say we made it to the Museum pretty much on time and no worse for wear.

Thanks to one of my Assistant Managers, we got in for free. Dawn if you could only see this post, Thank you so very much! We had tickets to the Exhibit area’s, the Imax, and the Planetarium. Sadly the Planetarium is closed for a year so they can do renovations on it. That’s sad because, I’ve never been to a planetarium. Roger Williams Park has one here in Providence, but we always seem to get there at the wrong time, and their museum is very small so we blow through that too fast and would have to end up waiting around for an hour or so. Anyways, the museum was packed. I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I was hoping that they would realise that it was Crystal’s birthday, and they would have closed the museum to everyone else and we could go through in unencumbered. So as we slowly wandered we decided that we wouldn’t pay the extra $52 dollars to go and see the Happy Potter exhibit, and would just enjoy the rest of the museum. Besides, we walked past it, and while it might have been cooler inside the exhibit, all I saw were the movie posters. I can google them and save myself 50 bones.

On a side note, Crystal brought her really good camera, so I’m sure after she finishes playing with her birthday present from her mom, she’ll work on her photos, and will put my little 2 megapixel cell phone camera to shame. But for right now, she’s busy, and all you get is me! Deal with it. Heh.

The first place we went to was the Blue Wing, one because it was the closest, and 2 we really didn’t know where to start. So we wandered around playing with the little exercises. We stopped and looked at the dioramas, and 3d models of mapping of Mount Everest, and how the Egyptians built the pyramids. I could have sat down and looked at the Pyramid diorama for a few hours. I think those are the neatest. There’s so much detail in it. I found the doors to the Theatre of Electricity, only because there were some very very loud bangs coming from it. Crystal was worried that it was on of the special exhibits that we had to pay extra for, but I said if it was they would tell us, and then we would just leave. It wasn’t and we went in, and you could just smell the electricity. And it was so loud. Around the corner Crystal got to drive a Mars rover, and surprised the guy there by driving it right the first time.

By this time, I was hungry. Hey in my defense, I only had 3/4 of a pot of coffee, and that was all. And it was 11:45ish. So we went to their food court. It was ok. It wasn’t up to the par of some of the places we ate at during the week. But it filled the tummy. We got a couple of cheese burgers, onion rings, and a very bruised apple. (If I had known it was that bruised, I wouldn’t have picked it up.) We sat at a table with some very well behaved children and their mom and dad. Dad was kinda clueless, and mom had to rely on the little boy to get the forks and the knives.

The last stop of the day was the Mugar Omni Theatre. I was really hoping that we could see Adrenaline Rush: The Science of Risk, because Dawn said it was the best film they had there, and its been there forever. But I really didn’t want to see it at 5 pm, then deal with rush hour traffic wilst trying to get out of Boston. So we did the 1 pm show. It’s brand new, like yesterday was its first day being shown. Its called Arabia. It is a very good film. It goes through the golden ages of Arabia, and talks about their faith. I could really get behind Islam more than Christianity just simply because Islam’s main focus is “Go forth into the world and learn.” I like that idea. Anyways, I’m not here to get in to religious debate. The movie was wonderful. Its been simply years since I’ve been in the omni dome to see an Imax movie.

Simply a great day. Great company. Crystal says she had an awesome birthday. Today, we’re off to get her birthday present, and to watch some Olympics. GO CANADA!

W00t over 1000 words!

And it’s going to be even longer, as I totally forgot to mention, that on Thursday Crystal registered for the Las Vegas Marathon! Mind you she’s not doing the full, but the half. How awesome is she? If you really need an answer, is totally completely freakin awesome! And as of yesterday, she booked our flights to Las Vegas! From December 3-8 We’ll be staying at the Luxor, in a whirlpool suite! Sweet!

Ok, now I’m going to shut up. Enjoy your weekend!