Back by less than popular demand

Long time no see everyone. I have no idea where to begin, so I guess I will just pick a point and run with it.
June starts the celebration known as my birthday month, if for no other reason than why should I confine myself to just one day. It should be a month long extravaganza, with festivals and parades and presents and cake and lots of other goodies. But it usually doesn't work out that way, no sense planning for things that will not happen.
Still for it only being a few days into June, it has definitely been a good birthday month, even if there have been no parties yet to speak of. After all, life has seemingly corrected itself after having gone a little off course for far too long. Things between Jen and myself haven't been this good in quite a while. Not that they were ever awful, I don't want to create the wrong impression, but I think the proper adjective might be hard. Sometimes the whole long distance thing can just be difficult for a number of reasons. But, I do have her to thank for making things better, when she actually suggested that we video chat for the first time the other day. Not that we hadn't talked before, we talk practically every night on headphones, or exchanged pictures, because we both have sent numerous pictures to each other, but that first face to face meeting, while it still brought with it a little nervousness on both our parts, ended up being wonderful. After a very short while it was just like we like the video didn't matter. Sure it was nice to be able to see the person that you are talking to, but the conversation quickly fell right into our comfort zone of just us being us. It was a way of adding a little tangibility to that which we share, it wasn't a matter of guesswork as to what the other was thinking, we were seeing it on each others faces. All I can say is that it was the best birthday present ever, bar none.
Part of what made the whole video chat possible though, was I have been on an incredible run of luck recently, probably about 10 days or more right now. As some of you know, I had been contemplating getting a new laptop, the keyboard was dying a slow and agonizing death on the other one. Keys were starting to not function, or function intermittently. So in my mind I could either take mine in to be repaired, and given I bought it refurbished to begin with, I didn't want to spend a lot of money on a $250 laptop, or I could start socking away money for a new one. Because I have a few ways to make money on Amazon, I started putting money in an account there, thinking if I got to somewhere around $400 I would start looking at replacing mine and getting a new one.
As luck would have it, I was at work the other day, not really working so much as killing time waiting to use the boss's baseball tickets for a Saturday night game when I decided to drop $10 in the instant ticket lottery machine. Well I basically won my $10 back, which means I am of the mind, if I was going to spend $10 anyway, I need to make more than $10 before I am going to cash out for anything, so I take the tickets up front and Amanda cashes them in for me and I decide to by two $5 tickets from behind the counter. The first one was a loser, plain and simple but the second one hit for $500.
So I go to the baseball game, thinking nothing more of the ticket than I will cash it in on Sunday before I go to breakfast. Well I wake up Sunday morning and I am talking to Jen again and as I am typing to her my space bar is cutting out, so I go to backspace to fix some of my typos and the backspace is moving the cursor forward and I just finally went all Odin the All Father and screamed "Enough!!!!". I decided right then and there that the laptop had seen it's last day before I would get so frustrated that I would impale it into a wall at a high velocity. I remembered that you could buy Amazon gift cards from Coinstar machines. For those unfamiliar, a Coinstar machine is a machine that will count change for you, in exchange for a fee of 9 cents for every dollar it counts. When done it will print up a voucher that you can take to a register in the store where the machine is located and they will give you cash for it. The thing is, you can also use those machines to buy gift cards, and it will wave the counting fee if you are using change, or you can insert bills and also buy gift cards. So after adding a couple of gift cards to my Amazon account, bringing it up over $300 saved, I went and bought a $240 gift card with my lottery winnings, thereby giving me roughly $550 to play with when it came to buying a new laptop.
Lo and behold, I found this little beauty (
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006LX2K3A/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00) which I am typing on right now and so far has worked wonderfully, even though this is my first real experience with Windows 7 (yes I was still using XP on my old laptop) so I am still getting a handle on all of the bells and whistles. One of the features of this laptop was the built in webcam, and while I did have an old webcam here (there is no truth to the rumor that it was on the mount when Moses got the tablets) it was not very good by any stretch. And because of that feature, Jen wanted us to try our hands and video chatting and so far so good, neither one of us has run screaming for the hills.

Had that been the only bit of luck I had with the lottery then I would have said that I just got lucky and left it at that. But as I sometimes like to say around here, the mojo is indeed back. Including the winning lottery ticket that I have already mentioned, I have hit for the following amounts in the last 10 days or so, $5 ticket - $500, $20 ticket - $200, $5 ticket - $40, $5 ticket - $250, $5 ticket - $50 plus I also put $10 in the poker machine in my neighborhood bar and cashed out for $150. Again I am thinking of just retiring my job and spending the rest of my life being playing the lottery and gambling.

Truth be told though, the hits on the lottery tickets recently help to make up for the fact I couldn't to crap with the change meter the last few months. I haven't updated it since late Feb. and since then I have only added $13.60 despite finding a $10 bill at one point. Yes, that is pathetic. Still, with the new money the total still stands at $333.27. It id definitely looking less likely that I will make it to the $400 mark this year. At this rate I might not even make it there by next year.

It hasn't all been wine and roses around these parts. My favorite local dive restaurant, Burger and Rice Bowl, recently closed. It sucks because that was the place that introduced me to the Cuban sandwich and I loved going in there and getting one every now and again, or stopping buy for chicken teriyaki with an egg roll and steamed broccoli. Heck, everything I had on their menu was delicious, from the BBQ ribs to the tomato egg drop soup. It was just such a tasty eclectic mix of foods that I fell in love with the place. And the husband and wife who ran the place were great to watch together, even as they had their two young children there to care for (neither looked old enough even for kindergarten) and it just added a nice homey feel to the place. Now it is a place that just does Asian food (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai) and is run by different people and I just have no desire to go there. Nothing against any of those food options, but I can get those at a half dozen other places here in Oakland, so it adds nothing to the culinary landscape.

For those either paying attention to the Shelfari thing to the right or the Neverending Thread entries, you will see that there are two new books on the shelf, an autobiography that Jen bought me a few months ago and a Robert Parker Spenser series book, which people around here know is always a good thing to bury my nose in. I am starting to get back into a reading vibe, though the book I am currently on could take a while, as it is a book covering the defense in the OJ Simpson murder trial. Now before people go off the deep end telling me if they thought he did or didn't do it, let me just say I don't care. For the record I think he did do it, I am not reading it because I want to be convinced one way or the other. OJ was acquitted, rightly or not, it is now settled history for me, but that doesn't meant there can't be something gleaned from understanding the motives and actions of those that were paid to defend OJ during the trial. That is why I am reading it, more of a peek into a historical narrative than to re-argue the case. It is why I read many of the books I do.

Wow, I just got preachy. Damn I may just be getting my blogging muse back after all. Don't know if I like that or not. Because I don't want to press a panic button here or anything, but this site may or may not be around here long term. Not that I plan on closing my page,. but depending on what the future of Multiply is, I may not have a say in that one way or another. In case no one was paying attention, Multiply moved their corporate headquarters from here in the states (Florida) to Indonesia and have stated that they want to focus more on the marketplace aspect of Multiply. What that means for the social aspect of thios site is anyone's guess, perhaps nothing, perhaps it will mean that the social aspect will go the way of Yahoo 360, it's really anybody's guess at this point. If it does go the way of 360, I haven't decided if I want to pick up the mantle of blogging again somewhere else. If I do I think it will take on a different feel entirely, because we were afforded the luxury of importing our 360 content here, and if that option is not available somewhere else, then I may start from scratch, or I may just say "fuck it" and not blog at all. God knows I have enough on my plate as it is, blogging is a luxury, not a necessity.

Anyway, I think I have went on for more than long enough, my fingers are tired as I imagine so are your eyes, so let's just agree to call it a night, shall we?