Moving Days........

I always hated to move. I would stay in an apartment long after I should have left simply because I hate moving. And when I DID move to different apartments, I always tried to get a ground floor apartment. Why? I didn't have to move heavy things up stairs and it seems that when I walk I sound like "I'm trying to stomp a mime to death" (ex-neighbors words). But as I got older, I got better at moving. All my furniture can be broken down to man portable loads. I know exactly what size boxes I need and how many I need to move. I have packaging for ALL my fragile stuff. One of my buddies from school was the king though. Even after he graduated, everything he owned could fit into his Country Squire LTD station wagon. Everything. ALL his crap. He was like a Bedouin, able to pick up and move within 2 hours. I love helping guys like that move.

You know who I hate to help move? Chicks. (Not you, my loving wife, you are the great exception!) Especially single ones. Why? Because often times they've never had to move themselves. Their daddy moved them, or their brother, or boyfriend, or SOME GULLIBLE GUY who they roped into doing this. Also, because women have heavy stuff. Not just sofas and dressers, but RANDOM things like a 60 lb ironing board or something. Or a microwave made out of granite. Also, women LOVE to live on the upper floors of apartment buildings. The first floor? The easy floor to move stuff to? Pfft. Please. Since she's not the one dragging that 500 pound bureau up 3 flights of stairs what do she care?

And I know I sound angry here. I guess I kinda am. Waaaaaaay back in the day, YEARS before I even started dating Lemur Queen, I was a hot single guy. Well, hot in my mind at least. But I was always on the prowl for the ladies. So, when a girl would ask me to "come over" for a while on a Saturday, after coyly asking if I was free, I would say yes. Because hey, a girl just asked me over! But then I find out that she's moving, and then never talks to me after I help her move. I had friends who enlisted my help to move their girlfriends, only to have those girls BREAK UP with them hours to days after she was moved. Turns out she had wanted to leave him for a while, but didn't want to do the labor of moving by herself, so she stayed with my buddy until the move was done. Crazy thing, is this has happened three times, to two separate friends. I knew one girl (who was really, really hot. But also insane. As in "Daddy Never Loved Me" type stuff. Also, would only wear all white clothing on certain days of the week. But I digress.) who would actually go out on a ton of dates with as many men as she could wrangle so she would have a large pool of willing and able men to help her move. Of course, once this backfired on her. She dated about 5 guys (telling me the whole time WHY she was doing this) for about a month, and then the week before she was to move, she asked them all for help. Well, the guys found out what she was doing, somehow. The day before she was going to move all of them called her, broke off the relationship, and told her she was on her own for her move in day. If my back hadn't been the one to suffer for that, I would have laughed my ass off to hear those phone conversations.





Also, when I was in college, we had this group that helped move in Freshmen. The New Friends, or some crap. After my freshman year I volunteered every time this came up. Why? Two reasons: 1) get to move in one day before EVERYONE into the dorms, thus avoiding clutter and chaos and 2) scope out hot freshman women before the rest of campus. After the first year of doing this, I realized that (2) as a waste of time. I was not George Clooney. I can't pick up girls like that. Only Assholes, Douchebags, and George Clooney can do that. And I, my friends, am no George Clooney. So I made dang skippy my room was all set up, then I'd go see what/who was coming in this year. Every year there were hot girls. Every year. And you know what? They ALWAYS had a ton of crap with them. And they never lived on the first floor. Well, lucky for us....they brought they're Father with them to move said heavy crap! Oh, wait, he has a "bad back" and can't move stuff (how'd he get it into the trailer?). But that's ok, Freshman Barbie has a brother with her. Oh wait.....that's either a really handsy brother.....or.....it's the Boyfriend from Back Home. Boyfriend ain't TOUCHING the heavy crap. He's too busy groping the girl who's going to dump him in a few weeks for a Theatre, English or Religion major. So, I just gave up and started helping the guys move. Why? I'd see the girls in the cafeteria for the meet and greet. And, I'd see what freshman guy had the coolest stuff, so I'd know where I could hang out and play some Playstation. Rock on!

Like Rats on a Ship.

I've heard about rats leaving a doomed ship, but what about when that ship is stocked with cheese and milk and no cats? The rats swarm. Thus it is now in our little coastal town. Memorial day was on us recently, and more long holiday weekends will follow. So a town that typically has about 70k people swells to around 100k on the weekends. You think I'm kidding? Try finding a place to eat out in the summer. Everywhere is packed. Even Wal-Mart. ESPECIALLY Wal-Mart, who am I kidding? And they're filled with this:

I guess what really kills me is the traffic. It gets pretty congested during regular weekdays here. Our roads suck. So throw in thousands of extra vehicles, and it gets BAD. And the majority of those are not from here, so are not used to the streets and traffic patterns, and thus slow things down even more. I know you and "the family" are going to have a nice, relaxing vacation pal, but how about snapping out of your Jimmy Buffet fantasy long enough to find the damn gas pedal and USE IT. I need to get to work.

Behold the AWESOME!!!!

So, for anyone who ISN'T a comic book person, or married to me, DC comics has been having this "Blackest Night" event in their story lines for a while now. Blackest Night deals with the Green Lantern facing off against what MIGHT me the apocalypse of the DC comic universe! Unless all the heroes can band together to defeat it! (spoilers: they do). But as part of the ad campaign for the story DC release plastic fun rings for each of the power ring corps shown in the book. I have been collecting them for a few months now, and my collection is complete. This is a picture of that awesome:

You are FIRED! But you need to give us some overtime first.......

Ugh, wish I was kidding! Fat Rock here, with fun news. Seems Chubby Industries has had a rough patch of business, and as such has had to cut the hours of the production and manufacturing staff by 20%. Yes, twenty percent pay cut. But here's the kicker: On the weeks we are NOT on reduced hours, we have to work overtime to keep the schedule from getting behind. Yes, you heard me right. Furlough time.................but with overtime.

Damn.

Eve Online

Now, this is the stuff. Better then World of Warcraft. Better than Everquest. WAAAAAyYYYYYY better than that steamy pile that is City of Heroes. Eve Online is more complicated than all 3 of those games combined, and has a wider variety of roles and abilities. Like a big-ass diamond, the facets of Eve are limitless. The learning curve is steeper., but the fun is limitless.


Essentially, you're in space. The empty void of space. But the void is what you make it. There are hundreds of thousands of players, all working in this void, trying to make something. Individual players join corporations, groups of like minded players who use teamwork to accomplish their goals. Corporations can join alliances, which can consist of up to thousands of players. Alliances can band together into coalitions, informal treatieas and the like. The economic and diplomatic tools used in this game would even give Kissinger and Greenspan a run for their money. But don't take my word for it. try it out.

Azalea Festival.

(Note to Self: Insert Gay Joke HERE)

Yeah, so I went to the Azalea Festival Garden Tour recently. I was not forced to go, but wanted to go as I get ideas and inspiration for my home garden when I see what others have done. I went last year, and because of that I was able to go out and sunburn myself so badly I couldn't go to work for two days because I was tilling, moving earth, laying brick (not to self: insert poop joke here) and preparing a new garden for my wife's enjoyment. Well, the garden kinda flopped the first year. We're doing a lot better this year, and I have the added bonus of not being referred to as "Lobster Boy" at work.

So to get fresh Ideas, we went to the Garden Tour. The Azalea Festival Garden Tour is put on by the Wilmington Garden Club, who are kind of like the Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Freemasons, The Emipre from Star Wars, and Opus Dei all rolled into one. Seriously, they're like a shadowy secret society that wears sundresses and ridiculous hats. They have a set member count (354), they are all women, they have a waiting list of several years to even be considered to join, and there's like a generational hierarchy to it. It's creepy. Like that men's club from Stepford. But they put on a darn good garden tour.

So we went for the second year straight. Every year we go we get to see a part of Wilmington that we never knew about. Last year we discovered Forest Hills South. This year we got to cruise the gated community of Landfall and gawk at houses we will never be able to afford. But we also got to see a number of lovely gardens. My favorites we're the old gardens. The ones that were made over YEARS of work. Like ours is turning out to be. There were several homes that were around 80 years old, and the gardens were from decades of toil. They took out breath away. Then there's the noobs. Yes, I used the World of Warcraft term Noob (new or inexperienced person, from the words New and bOOB) to describe a garden. Bite Me. The noobs hired someone to make them a garden. And make it fast. The result is a garden that looks " just fine" but has a sterile look to it. Last year almost half the tour was like that. This year only a few gardens were noobs. And now a few photos from our favorite, a garden that was designed by a housewife (she was also a botanist) and made entirely by her and he husband. It was designed to have something blooming every month of the year.

They made that garden themselves. And it was awesome.

Mutually Assured Destruction

Many of you may have been Cold War Children like I and Lemur Queen were. We knew "Duck and Cover" and all that. We knew of the Evil Empire, the Iron Curtain, and the USSR(CCCP). But most of you kids have never heard of that crap, as schools no longer teach actual history, but feel good crap about things that don't matter. So, this post is about the modern application of the timeless doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Basically it goes like this: one nation won't do something stupid (launch nukes), because it knows that if it does another nation will launch nukes enough to kill them both.

A lot of times marriage is like that. But different. With us it's about hair. Lemur Queen has gorgeous hair. Jet black, a little past her shoulders. It's like a waterfall of midnight. It's great and I love it. Way back in the day, before we started dating she tried one of those "styling" bobs and cut her hair short. She said it looked bad on her, and she let it grow back out.

Now it's summertime. It's hot. Long hair is hot. Beautiful, but hot. Lemur Queen was thinking about getting a "Pixie Cut" for the summer, as she seems to have forgotten what happened last time. She was looking at this:

But when she says stuff like this all I can see is this:

So to counter this I've had to grow my own "nuclear option", so to speak. I have grown out my goatee. I haven't trimmed or cut it for 4 months. It's getting long, and starting to develop ear lock type curls. But it keeps growing. Lemur Queen noticed it's length last week when I just got out of the shower (I usually style it so the length doesn't show, I didn't have the opportunity at that time) and asked when I was going to trim it. I asked if she had decided not to cut her hair.

Then she realized it was a mexican standoff with hair. If SHE went nuclear and got a pixie cut, I would go nuclear and go full Pai Mei on her. "Who's Pai Mei?" you ask? He's a famous Shaolin monk, immortalized in film and saga. Also, he kinda looks like this:

Wait, that's a bad pic. This is more like it:

Yeah, that is EPIC. And that's what's gonna happen if she cuts her hair. And she knows it. So it's a waiting game until the first cold snap, then I'm clear. She won't cut off all that insulating hair once fall hits. But until then I need to be strong, and threaten the woman I promised to cherish forever of the possibility of my trying to make myself look like a catfish is she trims her locks.