Livin it One Day at A Time

I know some of you come here for the comedy.

Believe you me, I stared at my Laptop LCD for forty five minutes trying to be witty.

For awhile, I concidered making fun of Pride and Prejudice, or Ann of Green Gables, or posting about Robot Chicken (which makes me shoot milk out the nose). Unfortunately, that was not to be.

But there is a new project to be added to my ever growing list of projects.

A PINBALL Coffee Table!

I got in a Stargate Pinball Table

* WPG2 Plugin Not Validated ** WPG2 Plugin Not Validated *
* WPG2 Plugin Not Validated *

Scheduled completion time: Somewhere around 2433 .. Mayish…

Mom.. Calm down, I’m not getting married…

Yet..

Yesterday I was reading me some Single Thought as I am prone to do on a Thursday. This article is written in part by Erin Ann McBride you might know her from other great postings as the Blog War of 2005 (otherwise known as the “most comments I’ve ever gotten on a blog entry”). Looking at her blog she even referenced me me in a blog post! Reading the blog and the Single Thought column together helps fill in the gaps if you want to know where some of the articles come from.

Where was I?

Oh yes. I was reading the Single Thought article for this week and those two mentioned the following

But something funny happens on the way to the altar in our culture. We don’t start dating until we are 16, and don’t seriously date until we are 18, and yet thousands among our ranks will be married by the time they are 19 years old. The same girls that are incapable of picking a major are somehow capable of knowing that they have met the perfect man with whom to spend the rest of their lives, buy the groceries with, pay the bills with, argue over landscaping with, and plain pick out house with.

Ohh, that’s something I’ve been saying for a LONG TIME now. Alas, I’ve been told “Sometimes you just know.” Alas, I don’t believe this one BIT! I think in our culture, we get twitterpated, and decide, based on those feelings of twitterpation, that this person is the person whom you are destined to spend eternity with. From about 70% of the couples I’ve seen they are in such a rush to go from courtship to marriage that they don’t even try to learn who the person they are with is.

Later on they talk about Single Men at weddings.

The next funny thing that our beloved Diva noticed was the lack of single men in the room.
….
Outside LDS culture, it is well known that a wedding is a great place to meet other singles. Oddly enough, it is quite possible to attend an LDS reception and be the only singleton in the room. We thought about this anomaly and think we have figured it out. Outside of the LDS world, you expect to find all of the single friends of the bride and groom at the reception, but inside the LDS world (particularly outside of Utah) you don’t expect to see their friends at all. The friends generally live scattered all over the country, and choose not to attend the weddings of their friends. And after all, who would fly across the country to attend a boring LDS wedding?

My awnser to this is two fold.

1) I *abhore* going to weddings. Is it because I don’t like the groom? No. Is it because I don’t like the bride? No.

It’s because there is so much pressure as a Single Mormon Male to be married. Weddings then serve a three fold purpose.
a) you are reminded you don’t have a wife
b) you are quizzed as to why you aren’t dating all these girls
c) the married couple are busy trying to get you married to their friends.
I’ve got much more enjoyable things I’d rather do. Such as gazing at my navel and watching paint dry. Perhaps even getting my foot stuck in a bear trap.

2) The LDS weddings are boring because the culture (especially in Utah) is one of being cheap and chintzy. The entire Cheap mindset goes beyond the weddings, but it’s noticable in the weddings. My little brother Brian’s wedding (photos) was a pull out all the stops event. There was a limo, there was a DJ dance floor, there was a catered dinner.

There is such a difference between the “Lets go get some SAMS Club meatballs. Make a line, and collect as much schwag as we can” mentality and the “Lets have a DJ, rent out a building, have a big celibration and honor the married couple” mentality. This also leads into the entire subject that I get *far* more wedding invites from my “I barely know you” mormon friends than my non-member friends. It just seems that Mormon Wedding parties are so much geared for getting as much stuff as possible, with as little possible provided to the guests. I’ll rant about this at some other time.

Needless to say, I’m going to be much more inclined to attend a event where it feels like a celebration. I think it’s human nature to react with the same enthusiasm that others are.

In other news, the whiny hard drive is getting replaced this weekend. I found a Hard Drive at Circuit City that will do nicely. Whiny drive, your days are numbered.

[Serious Post]

As of late I’ve been feeling more and more stressed. Between Work, Church, and social life I’ve been increasingly under lots of stress. This is a cyclic event in my life, it happens pretty much this time every year. I know that the end of the year is the “light at the end of the tunnel”. As it is right now, this is one of my ways to relieve stress.

My hobbies, the pinball restoration, the Photography and the computer gadgets are getting ignored now for the other events that are eating my time.

I find that without the hobbies, my life becomes too unbalanced in the responsbilities category, and that artistic, whitty, *me* becomes overshadowed by the serious, pragmatic *me*. There needs to be a balance.

At the end of the day, I seek to find that balance, it’s not always easy either. Heck, I still haven’t added some of the links from the old blog. I need to get that done as well.

Right now, I’m just taking it one day at a time.
[/Serious Post]

I’ve been listening to some All American Rejects Swing Swing over and over on my Rio Carbon lately. As I am wont to do, here are some lyrics.

Days swiftly come and go.
I’m dreaming of her
She’s seeing other guys
Emotions they stir
The sun is gone.
The nights are long
And I am left while the tears fall.

Did you think that I would cry,
on the phone?
Do you know what it feels like,
being alone?
I’ll find someone new

[Chorus]
Swing, Swing, Swing from the tangles of
My heart is crushed by a former love
Can you help me find a way
To carry on again.

Wish cast into the sky
I’m moving on
Sweet beginnings do arise
She knows I was wrong
The notes are old,
They bend, they fold
and so do I to a new love.

Did you think that I would cry,
on the phone?
Do you know what it feels like,
being alone?
I’ll find someone new

Swing, Swing, Swing from the tangles of
My heart is crushed by a former love
Can you help me find a way
To carry on again

Bury me
(you thought your problems were gone)
Carry me
(away. away, away…)

[Chorus fades till end]
Swing, Swing, Swing from the tangles of
My heart is crushed by a former love
Can you help me find a way
To carry on again

My favorite light Jacket.

Has a hole in the pocket.

Not just a small hole, I’m talking, HUGE. It looks like something melted it’s way through the jacket.

How it didn’t melt into me, I don’t know. How I just noticed it, I don’t know.

How I’m going to go on living. I don’t know.

(can anyone tell I like winter apparel?)

Time to go bury the jacket.

I got up yesterday to get myself some fresh food at the local Farmers Market. Today was the very last weekend that I can get myself some freshbread and some salsa.

So in a word, I was stoked. I was all buying as much as I could.

After which I was walking back to get my truck when I found myself looking at a woman dressed up in a big PINK PRINCESS costume.

Then I spotted the guy toting around the shotgun, and wearing a SOMBRERO!

Then the lady with the Ballons showed up, and they all had some kind of pow wow. A SOMBRERO!

It was then I decided that I had just walked into the Twilight Zone. This wasn’t just a mistaken step either, I pole vaulted into the Twilight Zone.

I then headed over to the local Army Supply looking for a Pea Coat. The local place goes by the name “The Supply Sargent”, and the guy has a MILLION tractor trailers around the store. For what, I don’t know, but I decided to take some snaps.

* WPG2 Plugin Not Validated ** WPG2 Plugin Not Validated *

In front of the store were some kind of drums of Civil Defense Water. WHAT? Why? I don’t know!

* WPG2 Plugin Not Validated ** WPG2 Plugin Not Validated *

That’s a Drum of HUGE WRENCHES! Oh, I wanted one. I wanted one so bad.

But I had restraint.

After I talked to the tiny man that run the place and had a huge beard, I left.

And leaving Sams Club, I got hit up for some popcorn, from Boy Scouts.

I’m not even going to go into the rest of the day.

Now it’s snowing, if I ever needed a Pea Coat, it’s right now.. (I must have one)

A SOMBRERO!

The whine from the hard drive that runs the blog is driving me nuts.

I mean, really, how am I supposed to whisper sweet nothings into the ladies ears, something along the lines of

“BABY, YOU WANT SOME OF THE MOULDY BREAD, OR DO YOU WANT SOME MOILDY TORTILLA (pronounced Tor-till-a) WRAPS WITH THE MOULDY CHEESE?”

Needless it’s giving me a headache, and it will be getting the reboot/work sometime soon.

I was recently over at a friends house, watching me some Survivor Guatemala (So I like *one* reality TV show, big whoop, want to fight about it?). In between watching people stab random strangers in the back for a large pile of money, I ended up seeing a commercial. The thing to realize is that my friends have a PVR, so they never watch commercials. They stopped at *this* commercial and said.

“This is what happens when we are talking to our kids”.

On comes a Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper commercial. It starts off with a girl on a date, listening to the guy talk about himself when she looks down at the drink, grabs it, and looks back at him. The guy then utters the magical words “Mahna Mahna”, followed by everyone one else saying “Doo doo daa doo”

He had me at “Mahna Mahna”.

This song has some history in my family. My brothers may tend to want that history kept in the deepest darkest closets known to man, but I am not the kind of person to repress such WONDERFUL memories.

When I was still just a young pup, my family would go on many a vacation road trip. Somewhere along the line my sister Julie and I found this song.

We could go on for HOURS. I’d start off “Mahna Mahna”, she’d respond “Doo-doo-da-doodoo”. After about hour number 8 the other siblings would finally break. This resulted in them trying to out annoy us (Brian and his wierd noises) or just general threatening. It was then we realized that we had tremendous power to annoy, and we used it as much as we could.

It got to the point, I could be walking through the house, see Julie and say “Mahna Mahna” and she’d respond right back “Doo-doo-da-doodoo”. We were a well oiled TEAM!

So, in memory of those good times, here are a few links

Dr. Pepper Cherry Vanilla Commercial
The original Muppets Short
The mp3 of the muppets

Oh, and Julie “Mahna Mahna”