Pages of nothing

9/8/2010
9:47:33 PM

So how's your day?  Really I have been putting off blogging, not because I don't want to blog, quite the opposite actually, but that if I do blog I might succumb to diarrhea of the mouth (or keyboard) and just not stop.  Thus when urge has struck me I have found comfort in just diving head first back into the book I have been reading.  Before you all get all like "You aren't done with that yet?" as much as I am enjoying it (and I am) it is a tome of a book, checking in at over 600 pages, so it isn't like I can just sit down and bang the thing out in one night.   Plus it isn't like work has been helping all that much on the free time front.  I have come to refer to my scheduled 3pm punch out time as a "suggestion" because I am lucky if that is the time I actually leave anymore.  It could be 3pm, it could just as easily be 5pm, it just depends on the work I have left to do on any given day, and trying to keep two stores running is a juggling act that I wouldn't wish on anyone.  Too frequently it becomes the "Bitch at Matt Fest" (this year's performing artist will be Kansas) when as soon as something goes wrong or isn't up to par, rest assured I will be one of the first in the line of fire for it.

Prime example, one of the things I had been working on is getting beverage reps to start showing up at our other location.  I do this for two major reasons; 1) it gets the ordering off of our hands, it is much easier to simply walk a rep through but have them do the order than to place it yourself and 2) the reps get a chance to look in the coolers and see how they want them laid out.  I have ideas in my head to be sure, but at the end of the day it is their space (they are paying for it) so they should get some if not all of the input on how they are stocked and with what product.  The problem arises when the reps are dragging their feet about getting a rep to visit the store on a regular basis.  It isn't a problem for us, we do far too big of numbers for them to just toss us aside, but for a smaller store like Universal where you may only sell 20 cases or so the motivation isn't the same.  Nonetheless I had been working with the reps from our four major beverage distributors (Pepsi, Coke, 7 Up, Arizona) trying to get them to start putting the other store on a regular schedule for ordering and delivering.  What I was getting back was a lot of talk and not much else.  Then Ed shows up the other day at that store and starts complaining about all of the open spaces in the coolers.  Hey I am not stocking the coolers, so I don't now if they have product or not, and I have been coaxing the reps trying to get them to show up with little to no results but that didn't matter, it was just a reason for me to catch flack for the store not having enough product.  The only plus was that while I have been playing good cop with the reps, it gave Ed the opportunity to play bad cop as well.  One by one he drug them all into his office and told them point blank that if they don't start sending reps to all of our locations then they will not do business in any of them.  So if Pepsi wants to piss us off by not stopping by to take a 20 or so case order, fine, they can forget the 125+ cases a week we order from them in our main store.  We pay Pepsi between $2000 and $3000 a week just for the main store, they want to flush $100,000 - $150,000+ a year down the drain because they can't be bothered to place orders for all of our stores, that's their call.  But then Ed can do that, he has that kind of pull, I don't.  So I am left to the prodding, coaxing sort of thing, saying that ideally I want us all to make money.  If Pepsi makes money from us and we make money off of their product then everybody wins.  

Don't get me wrong, I can do Ed's kind of math, far to often in my personal life I do just that, but while I have some authority at work, I don't have the kind of pull that would result in us just dumping a contract out of spite.  I have done similar things in the past, like the place I used to go to get buffalo wings.  It wasn't much, an okay place, but it was close to my apartment and they had some other stuff on the menu that I did like, so I would go in from time to time and maybe get an order of wings and fries, or maybe a sandwich (my favorite was the cajun chicken) but pretty much every time I was there I would end up spending like $10.  Sure $10 isn't a big deal, at least in this day and age, but I would go as often as two or three times a week, so now I am up to $20 a week (sometimes more but for the sake of argument we will stick with $20).  Well all of a sudden they start closing early, you go to get something to eat and the door is locked or they say the grill is off and after a couple of these moments I just said "fuck you" to the place.  My $20 can be spent elsewhere, because while my order may have looked small, over the course of a year I am dropping over $1000 in your establishment, which means you now have to find a way make up better than a month's worth of income to pay one of your employees because it no longer comes out of my pocket.  We all have bills to pay and you just made yours a little bit harder.   Needless to say, the place is no longer in business, as a matter of fact the place that is there now is the Cuban restaurant I mentioned a few blogs ago, with in people time could be months, I really don't know.  Blog time has become almost the inverse of dog year's on this page.

I share because I care, so I share this with you, I am having a naked Incredible Hulk moment.  I was at work today, bending down looking for items I needed to order for the grocery order that comes in on Thursday and I heard a rip.  That is never a good thing, first thought of course was that  had ripped my shorts and my ass was now hanging out, but that wasn't the case.  Instead it turns out I had ripped my boxers, apparently my manhood, or fat, was more than they could contain.  Now that I am at home just sitting in front of the computer I am like the undressed David Banner after changing back from the Incredible Hulk, what little clothing I am wearing looks like I had exploded out of it in a violent rage.

I maxed out my Coke Reward points again this week.  Amazingly I still have plenty of caps left from when we closed our one store and got rid of the out of date product, but for whatever reason I have been finding caps everywhere in my travails to and fro, enough so that over the course of the last few weeks I have probably maxed out a week on just the ones I found.  Now I did do a blog giveaway the last time I got to 2000 points, I am debating doing that again, though I am nowhere close at this point, only 659 so far, but I did get myself a free year of Pogo as well, so over the course of the last few weeks I have probably spent 1600+ points and still have some left.  Of course I am all about free stuff, so there is the greedy side of me that gets involved here as well.  I may run into a prize or two that I just must have, in which case all bets are off.  But I have been doing quite well in other departments of free stuff, over at Swagbucks I am now up to $160 bucks in Amazon gift cards, though obviously I have spent some of that money I still have roughly $60 in my Amazon account that I haven't decided what to do with yet.  Plus I have another gift card pending and I am probably halfway to yet another.  My numbers are small compared to some of my Facebook friends though.  I don't know how they roll up the money they do, but they are doing far better with the app than I am.  My big free scoop though was over at Marlboro.com.  As I mentioned before, I signed up with most of the cigarette vendors simply because I wanted coupons, which I can then take to work and have knocked off of my charge sheet, whether I actually buy the tobacco product in question or not.  Well I get emails from some of them, including Marlboro and a few months ago they started a Marlboro Rewards program, where every day they highlight a location in Marlboro country, which is usually some place in the western United States, like the Grand Canyon for instance.  When you go to the page, there ae three links, one is a star rating of the location (1 to 5 stars) that you can vote on, one is usually a picture gallery of some sort, either snap shots or one of those interactive photos where you move the mouse around and get differing perspectives of the shot and the third was always a link to some related item, say the place was a all night diner, the third link might take you to a list of similar 24 hour places.  They were all easy clicks, just get in, get out jobbies in my vernacular, with the stipulation being that for every link you clicked on you would add a point to your reward meter.  The meter had three levels of prizes, all of which were decent for being free and all.  My hope was that I could at least stay in level 2 and cash out for the $20 in Marlboro coupons, which of course I would take to work and it would just be $20 off of my charge sheet, but early this week I actually hit level 3 so instead of the $20 I will have to settle for a free mini camcorder instead.  I know, I suffer so much.

09/10/10
5:16:37 PM

Just passing through, though I really should finish this up if I hope to get it posted in any sort of timely fashion.  For now it is a a good way to occupy time between Scratchix resets over at Facebook.  I have 5 minute intervals between sending out tickets, and this would be one of those intervals.  I still haven't won anything with the app yet.  Technically I guess that isn't true, I have won some cash but in order to collect you have to get your total to $25 or more and then it is added to your paypal account.  I probably could have cashed out once by now, but usually I just turn around and dump the money back into more tickets rather than save it for a rainy day.  Even now I have $4.50 in my account but I doubt I will hold out for the other $20.50.  Instead I am mostly just playing to see if I can win one of the prizes and so far the closest I have come would be the $25 Amazon gift card, where I have 19 of the 25 tokens needed.  The prize I really want is the Kindle, but that is still light years away since I only have 13 of the 70 needed.  

And while I am looking to waste some time here, I have added another $4.92 to ye olde change meter.  the grand total as of this typing is now $176.80.  I doubt I will hit the $200 by Christmas, but still this has already been the second best year in the brief history of the change meter, I can't complain too much about that.  

I learned two things about Ed today at work.  1) He is like the Terminator, I am not sure anything can realistically stop him and 2) he would make a piss poor Italian.  Let's deal with the first and then venture on to the second.  Monday was Labor day, or as I like to call it, Anti Labor Day because nobody fucking works.  I could deal with a Labor Day that was sort of like Christmas, where you go to work and maybe your boss gives you a present for laboring, and people come to your place of work and greet you with a Happy Labor Day sort of thing, but this celebrating by not working just strikes me as off.  The see "how hard we work, we are sitting on our ass" aspect of it just strikes me as more of an excuse not to work than an actual holiday.  Then again, when you work at a place that is open 24/7/365, holidays are taken in a different context.  We have roughly 5 throughout the year that are recognized and if you work any of them you get an extra paid day off.  Anyway, Ed was at work Monday and it turns out he was the only one of the managers that actually showed up, which peeved him quite a bit as Labor Day is not one of the 5 recognized holidays for us.  Not only is it not one of the 5, but there was a chance, however slight, that we may be busy (thankfully we weren't) because the Labor Day Parade runs right in front of the store.  Of course even though the parade is one of the largest in the country for this pseudo-holiday the general public treats the parade as a non event, nobody really goes through the trouble of actually watching it, which I guess brings up a philosophical question, if a parade is organized and no one is there to watch it, did it really happen?  All of this is way off topic, so I will get back on point quickly I hope.  Ed is thus pretty agitated that nobody showed up but him and the few of us worker peons that are scheduled, and maybe his aggravation contributed to what was to come, or maybe it was something else entirely, but either Monday night or Tuesday morning (I am unsure which and rather than guess for stories sake I will just try to stick to the facts ma'am) he started having chest pains.  So he goes to the hospital and apparently it was pretty serious because they put a stent in his heart, or somewhere close to the general vicinity thereof.  The amazing part is today, a mere three days later he is back in the office like nothing happened.  I would like to think I am a pretty hard worker, not without numerous flaws I might add, but actual effort I would say is not one of them.  That being said, had that procedure been done to me, I might be inclined to take a week off, even if it isn't Anti Labor Day anymore.  

That being said, while I work today I received a phone call from our old Coke rep, Beth.  Now Beth also works part time for us, usually Sunday mornings, so it isn't like I don't know her or anything, but my primary dealings with her occurred when I would be working with her on our Coke orders.  Anyway I get  a call and she asks me if we have an extra case of Vitamin Water (Multi V flavor) that a client can buy off of us because they forgot to order it for a function they were having, apparently it was a wedding reception or something.  Given I had just gotten an order in this morning and one of the things I ordered was that very item I said I see no problem with it.  Beth said she would call Ed just to make sure it was cool with him, I figured it would be given Beth is one of our employees after all, so I went downstairs, grabbed the case and went to the office to tell Ed to expect a phone call.  Rather than wait, Ed goes ahead and calls Beth, they have a brief conversation and much like I expected, he approved it, said what he would sell the case for ($26, whereas if we would have sold it ourselves it would have went for $42.96 (1.79 x 24)), so he did cut them a pretty decent deal on the product.  Mind you I know there are some people who will say, but I can buy that for $1 a bottle at my local store and then I would have to get into the tiered pricing system that exists for different sized vendors and that we aren't getting products for the same rate as say a Wal Mart, who has vast more leverage than we do in such matters.  But that story too would take us down a path better left for another time, so let's get back to the issue at hand.  Ed finishes the phone call and says "Guess who the Vitamin Water is for?"  Of course I had no clue and admitted as such, when he told me it was for former First Lady Laura Bush, who apparently is in town for that shindig before heading off for the 9/11 Memorial tomorrow with First Lady Michelle Obama in Shanksville, PA.  This is when I told Ed that he would make a terrible Italian, because he could have drug the former First Lady into his office, leaned back in his chair and said "So you come to me seeking a favor?'  Yes I was having a Don Corleone moment in my mind, which is where it will have to say, because Ed passed on his opportunity.  Maybe next time.

Well we just crossed the 6pm barrier, which means Scratchix resets and the friends list is refreshed for more ticket sending.  The way the ticket sending is supposed to work is there is one reset time, I don't know what it is in your little corner of the globe, but for me it is at 6pm.  At that time everyone's friends list resets and you can send everyone on there one ticket, which if it wins, you also win the prize they did, so having a big friend's list helps your odds however slightly in winning a prize.  The thing is your can only send 50 tickets at a time, then you have to wait 5 minutes before sending the next 50 and so on until your friends list is complete.  I have 502, so it can be a time consuming process, one of the reasons I am doing this in the intervals.  I guess it is to cut down on the traffic that used to plague the server when you could send all of your tickets at once, because while I have 502 friends, there are people that have well over 1000 and if enough people hit the server right at reset time it would often crash the server of the app, so they opted for the timed ticket release as a way of easing traffic, if people have to invest more that 5 seconds in sending tickets they are less likely to just rush out and do it to get it done.  The thing is, while you are only supposed to be able to send one ticket a day to each friend, often times after about 6 hours or so you can send "bonus tickets", that is, some of the friends on the list can't be sent another ticket or two or three depending on how many times you visit back and try sending them.  Since I had something to do, this blog mainly, I went to the app ahead of the actual reset time and was able to send out another 62 tickets before the reset occurred.  

I think I have developed a pattern to my internet, almost to the point where I become very predictable in what I am going to check out on a daily basis.  That being said the list is quite long and time consuming, so it is entirely possible for me to spend literally hours in front of my computer and little else.  here is what a rundown on how a typical computer day may go in the Matt household.

12am (after all that is when the day starts) - This is the time when the new Facebook app Madden Superstars resets.  Not that you can't play it throughout the day and do things with it after 12am, but this is when the friend's list resets, which measn your team can scrimmage everone else on your list.  the scrimmages aren't worth much in game value, usually you just gte 30 XP and 30 coins, but occasionally after a win you will also get a game ticket, which you can use to play real games in either season mode or in the Super Bowl challenge mode.  The other plus to scrimmages is that they don't take away from your training points, which make up one third of your team's overall rating and I like to keep that as close to 100 as possible when playing real games versus scrimmages,  just to improve my chance of winning.  Right now I have about 75 friends that play the app, so 75 scrimmages can take upwarsd of a hour or so which brings us to 1am and

1am  Super Scratch Offs reset and Swagbucks reset - Super Scratch Offs is one of those apps I almost wish I had never started, just because it is so time consuming and there is little to nothing to be gained by it, other than saying that you advanced in levels.  At least in a Madden game you can trash talk afterward, no such luck with this app, just scratch a ticket and move to the next.  That being said, there are only 10 levels to the game and I am about a third of the way through level 8 and I don't want to give up this close to the end.  Also at 1am is the Swagbucks reset, where you can pick up a quick 4 swagbucks by doing the following; refreshing the toolbar, voting in the daily poll, checking out the trusted surveys and skipping through the no obligation offers.  All told that process takes maybe 5 minutes tops and they are guaranteed bucks, which I like.  Especially now when I am within 100 bucks of the next gift card.  I might be able to pull that off this weekend with the right amount of hits on searches and codes.  If not then than certainly by Monday night I will have it.  Woohoo, more free money.

Usually by this time I will stop for the night, provided nothing else shiny has caught my attention.  After all, I have to be at work in 6 hours.

09/11/10
5:49:00 PM

Sorry, I got got up in a few things and the next thing I know it is 10pm and I am all sitting down in my recliner, trying to watch TV and book, I am out like a light.  Presumably that would be a good thing, after all I had to go into work again today and place an order for Monday, but what should have been a simple task, taking maybe an hour to an hour and a half turned in a trip with the Skipper and Gilligan and a three + hour tour, spending a large portion of my time fixing the mistakes of others.  Just an absolute mess, and one that sufficiently pissed me off.   But enough with work, I can only talk about it so often before I get sick of hearing myself speak.  

Instead I will deal with the whole 9/11 nonsense, since it is 9/11 after all and all day it has just been a bombardment of "Never Forget" and other such nonsense, as though those people alive would have forgotten such a moment anyway.  But between the never forget nonsense, the idiot preacher in Florida who does, then doesn't want to burn Qurans, the yelping about the Islamic Center/mosque two blocks from Ground Zero, the fundamental question of what has taken place since then seems to get lost in the shuffle.  The Pentagon was quickly rebuilt, as to be expected, but it took 9 years to break ground in Shanksville on a memorial and in NYC only a pittance has been done in the better part of a decade, and that which has been done, no one seems to question and I can't help but wonder why.  For all of the pouring of outrage of what is taking place a couple of blocks away, nary a peep is being said about the fact that on the actual site they are leasing retail space, so apparently it is perfectly okay to buy a Starbucks on a gravesite, but don't you dare go praying anywhere near one, because that isn't allowed, especially if you aren't of the preferred religion.  Under this guise it should then be perfectly acceptable to open a McDonalds on the Arizona memorial in Pearl Harbor, or maybe slap a Pizza Hut in the middle of the battlefield at Gettysburg because we have determined that it is okay to continue commerce on a site where a few thousand died.  

Nonetheless the nonsense about the building in New York continues, with many muttering the words that they shouldn't do it out of respect for the victims of 9/11.  Really?  Is that the new found logic?  Under that premise then I would argue all Catholic schools should be closed out of respect for the children that the priests decided to play grab ass with.  

Okay enough of my ranting, I was in the midst of something prior to my nodding off last night, I should probably continue before the idea loses any and all coherence it once had in my brain.  

5am (if I am awake) - Depending on what time I wake up, if it is early enough I will make a run to my homepage (set to iGoogle) where I have a few different apps set up, so I can check my email, read the Washington Post headlines, check other news headlines and breaking news all in one spot.  I guess it is just a bad habit left over from my radio days that all of that info is set up on one page, but it is much easier than going to a number of different websites.  After a quick check I head back over to Facebook, do all of the requisite likings that need done, maybe sneak in a game of Madden or Bejeweled Blitz, then it is out the door to work.

4pm (if I am lucky)  Provided that I am not held over at work, I am usually in by this time, so I will sit down, do the iGoogle thing again, then hit the PG (Pittsburgh Post Gazette) website, just because it will have more updated info than the paper which comes out in the AM, go to Facebook and do more likings, more Madden, play off my Bingo Explosion credits and sneak in some more Bejeweled Blitz, then head over to ESPN, check the baseball team and the Streak for the Cash contest, head over to yahoo sports to check on my football team and read the Shutdown Corner and Puck Daddy blogs,  and see what is new on the That's Church blog.  If I have time I may send out some bonus Scratchix tickets, then over to Multiply to see if anything new has been posted or commented on.  Thankfully I have my update screen set to the last 100 updates, so I usually don't miss much, I may not comment on everything, but at least I usually get a chance to check most things out.  

6pm Scratchix resets, which usually take me about an hour and a half, just because I end up web surfing while I am doing it, usually to PWTorch.com, and Comic Book Resources, where I read any updates that I find interesting.  I will usually take the time to also venture over to the Washington Post website and read any articles that I find of interest.  I might make a run to Slate.com also just to see if Christopher Hitchens wrote anything new.  

10pm  More Madden, then a trip over to ESPN to reset the baseball team (if I remember to, which isn't all that often recently) and of course iGoogle again to check emails and what not

That is pretty much a web day for me, I might make some sidetrack excursions, such as doing a survey and Mysurvey.com, or doing some personal research on some things that I saw online that I want verification for, just because I am a stickler at getting things right whenever possible.  When the facts are readily available I have no sympathy for those that choose to live in a world of rumors and innuendo. I tend to view such people as well, stupid.  

09/13/10
4:17:34 PM

Okay, this is my fourth day on entries here and if I don't get this done today I am just going to erase it and throw it on the scrap heap of history as far as potential blog entries go, and that scrap heap is larger than you might think.  

I will admit that I had reason not to do any entries yesterday, there was a lot on my plate considering it was a day off and all.  First I had mentioned last week on my Facebook status that I had come back from breakfast at Pamela's.  That is all well and good, but then my aunt Amy saw it and said that she wanted to go to Pamela's this Sunday.  So we made it a plan to head out to breakfast together, first by determining which Pamela's to go to, as there are 6 in and around Pittsburgh and we settled on the Strip District and then determined a time, to which I said probably the earlier the better, having seen what happens at Pamela's in Oakland, where if you aren't there early you often get stuck waiting in line for a table.  Because this weekend was the opening weekend of the NFL season and the Steelers were playing at home, I knew the Strip would be busier than usual, with people looking to kill time until the stadium lots opened and the weekly ritual of tailgating began.  But for me to make the Strip District by 8am when Pamela's opens, I had to hop a 7am bus.  Not that a 7am bus in that much of an issue, I catch earlier ones during the week, but it meant I had to go to bed a tad bit earlier Saturday night than I normally would.  

So I make it over to the Strip by about 7:30 am and it was not really raining so much as it was misting, so I found a place across the street that had an overhang and waited.  Thankfully I had my book with me (which I have since finished and can be found in the Neverending Thread section), so I did some more reading up on the finishing of the construction of the Panama Canal, and around 8am I saw Amy, as well as her daughter Sarah and one of Amy's friends from work, whose name eludes me right now, but then I am terrible with names and numbers unless I use them on an almost daily basis.  My limited cranial capacity means some things get shoved right out the door almost as fast as they enter.  Anyway we all went in and everyone opted for the chocolate chip and banana pancakes, though I was tempted through the course of the week to get the chorizo and eggs, I guess I just caved in to peer pressure or chocolate or something, but the breakfast was good (or brekkie for those of you that don't speak American, lol) and I had made mention that I wanted to meander around the Strip a little bit, because despite being relatively close to my apartment, I don't go there nearly enough.  The Strip District is the area in town where most of the trucks dump their freight, so it is basically a warehouse area, and there are plenty of shops where you can buy stuff cheaper than if you go to the store.  You can find everything from seafood to apparel if you are willing to put in the effort.  And since it was a Steeler Sunday, I knew that many of the shops would open earlier to cater to the pregame crowd.  

So we have our breakfast and everyone decides to do a little shopping, we go down Penn Avenue, checking out the shops on either side of the street.  Plenty of places were open selling Steeler merchandise.  At one store we went in, it was all Steeler stuff in this rather cramped space, and to make matters worse they had a boom box set up playing the same Steeler fight song over and over and over.  After about 5 minutes in the store I was starting to understand how someone could go postal at work.  If I had heard "Here we go....." one more time, I might have killed someone myself.  And we all know the deal with killing people, it's like potato chips, you can't kill just one.  Down a couple of blocks we found a produce stand so Sarah grabbed some fresh strawberries and blueberries, then into another shop where Amy bought a t shirt for her husband,  After trudging down a few more blocks, we ran out of stores on that side of the street so opted to come back up the other side.  We stopped in a couple of novelty places, one did knit sweaters and scarves, another was a novelty shop when we came upon Pennsylvania Macaroni (www.pennmac.com for those that want to take a gander) and a bolt of genius struck me, it is a pasta place, they will have spices for the pasta, if they have spices then they may have the Holy Grail of spices I have been looking for, white pepper, so I forced us to go in.  I ended up finding my white pepper and also snagged a loaf of fresh Italian bread from Breadworks, Amy's friend also made use of the trip to grab some Breadworks goodies (which I highly recommend by the way) thus making it a very productive trip for me at least.  We came back past Pamela's and sure enough there was a line going out the door (at 9am no less) making me all the smarter for suggesting the early eating time.  

But alas we parted ways, but not before some things of import were discussed.  First we decided that the breakfast thing should be done on a monthly basis, just pick a greasy spoon on a Sunday morning and go, so next up is the October breakfast and the frontrunner for our business is Jo Jos, also located in the Strip District.  There are rumors of plates full of food that come from the kitchen at breakfast time, rumors that must be investigated to be proven true or false and who better than me for that task.  Also on a more serious note, I wanted to know what the holiday plans were.  See, when my grandmother passed way, we usually held the family Christmas Eve get together at her house, but obviously that can no longer be the case.  Plus as time has worn on, people have started to back out of it anyway.  Not that I blame them, of the siblings (my aunts and uncles) Bud has 6 kids and now a handful of grandkids all his own, Mouse has 4 kids and three grandkids, my mom is another matter, Amy has 3 kids and Will has 3.  Of the 5 siblings, three had pretty much quit going, Mouse and Bud because their respective families have grown so large that they tend to focus on their own kids and grandkids, my mom also backed out, though I think it was over some far more petty reasoning than Bud or Mouse, so it had really come down to just Will and Amy and their families would show up, and I was pretty much the only grandkid in attendance.  But to a certain extent, Amy and Will are almost like siblings moreso than an aunt and uncle, as they were the youngest, so Amy is only 5 years older than me, and Will just three and one of the hardships while growing up that I had was when my parents first divorced we really didn't have a place to stay, so we lived in my grandparents basement.  It isn't as bad as it sounds, since my grandfather built the house himself, they originally lived in the basement themselves while the rest of the house was being built, so it had al of the amenities that a house should have, but it was also still a basement.  But it did mean that as a kid I spent time playing with Amy and Will just because they were the kids that lived closest, namely upstairs.  Even after we moved out (though not necessarily to better digs, just out, I still spent a large amount of my time there.  Often I would catch the bus for school at their place because my mom would often have to leave for work early in the morning.  Later on I would do a bit better of a job fending for myself, where some of my bachelor cooking skills would develop, but as a kid those skills were not yet quite developed so off to grandma's house I would be shipped.  In any event, just because we grew up together, with my grandmother passing away I wasn't sure if there were going to be any Christmas Eve plans this year, juts as Bud and Mouse had done before, I was aware that Amy and Will have families of their own now, so if they wanted to just pass on the whole thing I would have understood.  But Amy assured me that it will continue, most likely at her house (which is good, I have her name in the gift exchange after all) this year, and probably thereafter but we will see what happens after this year.  I like having family all under one roof, but given the defections in the recent years I didn't want to be the guy trying to impose that it continue.

With all of that out of the way, I hopped my bus to get back to Oakland and settle in for the first week of the NFL, and my fantasy football season.  I could watch football pretty much all day, and for the most part that is exactly what I did.  The advantage of knowing where to look on the internet is that you can watch pretty much all of the games, I know of two websites I personally use, so it is easy to just jump between games if one gets too boring.  Not that the Steelers game was boring, a 15-9 win in OT but Istill managed to sneak in some peeks at other games, so I watched the Lions get jobbed on what should have been a game winning TD catch, and I saw some of the other action in the late games.  Even now as I type this I have a game up on the computer, since on the opening weekend there is a double header on on Monday night.  Plus let's not kid anyone, I have fantasy guys going, which is reason enough for me to watch a game.

Between that and me finishing my book, I pretty much had no time to do an entry yesterday, even though I was hoping to finish this then.  Instead I think I will finish it now, before I get all distracted and fail to get this posted.  Have fun kids, but I am calling it a night.