rockin around the murder tree

dear employee from neighboring company cube,

please buy headphones so i don't have to listen to christmas carols blaring from your crappy monotone internal speaker on december 29th.

i think anyone listening to xmas songs after xmas should be lit on fire.

a night of firsts

we have a plastic wreath hanging on our front door. it's plastic, but it looks fairly real. like an artificial xmas tree. but again...it's plastic. So the last few times i have opened the front door (which we rarely do) i have seen a bird fly from the wreath to the tree in the front yard. The little bird has decided to make a home in our wreath.

last night i opened the front door to take the garbage out. about the time i got 5 or so feet from the door, i heard the neighbor kids screaming and such from their house. i thought nothing of it because there are like 100 of them and they are always making noise. by the time i got back into my house, i realized that it was heather that screamed and it was because our little bird friend was racing all over our house.

and what do birds do when they're freaked the fuck out? poop and molt. poop and feathers everywhere. so after about 5 min of closing off rooms, i trapped him in the office and got him into a bag. he is now back outside, probably sleeping in our wreath again. we are still vaccuming little feathers up everywhere.

Shortly after that, our cat tumbleweed came wobbling into the living room. this is when we discovered that he was poo butt (translation: he had poop stuck to his butt).
this was no ordinary poo butt though. this poo butt wasn't just stuck to his fur, it was dragging behind him leaving little poo trails. there were also poo prints in the office from where he stepped on the dragging poo.

The fun part is, this was about 5 min after the bird. the other fun fact was that this was set into motion the day before when he ate a big piece of string he tore from a pillow. so not only did i get to clean up poo trails and paw prints, i also got to pull a length of poo covered string from my cats butt.

one can only hope that tonight will be just as exciting. that all depends on if Jon has eaten any string recently....

what's the problem?

overheard conversation from employees in the company next to us

female worker: what's the problem??? what's the problem??

male worker: yes i..

female worker (cutting off male worker): the problem is...god! you're dumb

calgon take me away

i have no desire to be at work and no motivation to do anything. the last few days have been so busy, i never had a chance to do anything but what was being thrust into my face. today i have more free time to work on existing projects, but i only get about 3-5 min at a time before something or someone needs my attention. just in the time i have written the little bit here, i have been dragged away 3 times.

i want to work on the ireland pictures, i want to clean the house, i want to build tables for the beer room.

i do not want to be at work....

don't feed her after midnight

i don't know who taylor swift is. all i know is that for some reason Myspace is profiling her on their site. i am here to say that she is terrifying.

maybe it's just me. maybe i find little squirrely blonde girls with gremlin eyes and a look on her face like she needs to consume your soul to survive to be unattractive and no one else does. if this is true, then i apologize.

actually, no i don't. she's terrifying.

please sell me popular rum drink

as you can see, heather and i are back from ireland. the trip was good. cold but good.

day one started off sunday when we left. we started our journey at around 11 am from chesterton and ended up in ireland around 8am the next morning where we immediately rented our car and headed out of dublin. i quickly mastered the art of driving on the left side of the road, though it did take me a few min just to figure out how to turn on the car.....

day 1:
left dublin in the rent-a-yaris and headed towards the gardens of powerscourt. after wandering around there for a while, we headed through the wicklow mountains on a road about as wide as our couch (and our couch isn't that wide). it was terrifying and fun at the same time. Here we are weaving back and forth on this little curvy road and just around the curve was another car coming the other way going twice as fast as us. Thank god those little roads have lots of little spots to pull off into the dirt a little to let other cars past.

After we made it through the mountains, we ended up in glendalough then onto kilkenny and our bed and breakfast. We made it to our bed and breakfast around 5pm. The b&b owners were pretty awesome and unbelievably helpful. They told us where to eat and where not to eat and all kinds of useful info on the town. We headed to dinner then to bed. By the time we hit the sac it was about 8pm and we had been up for about 33 hours….

Throughout the week we went to the Waterford crystal factory in waterford (and managed to not spend all of our money), toured kilkenny castle, went to the rock of cashel and the castle at cahir and then it was on to the dingle peninsula.

Our trip to dingle gave us a decision. We could take the low road which was a little curvy but not much more than all of the regular roads. Or we could take the Connor Pass which went through the mountains. Both roads would take about the same amount of time. I missed the turn to the regular road so we headed up the pass instead. We passed a sign that essentially told trucks that the road is impassible with such a large vehicle and to turn back now.

Now it was dark, rainy, we only had 1 headlight (the right one that aimed to the center of the road not the edge, and one of my contacts was freaking out in my eye. Up the pass we go.

All was well until we got to the top and the road became almost less than 1 lane wide….even though it’s a 2 lane road. And there weren’t many areas to pull off to let oncoming cars past. You had 3 choices, drive left into the mountain which still leaves your car in the road, drive right off the cliff which leaves you in flames 1000 ft down, or go in reverse until you hit a wide enough area for both cars to pass. We chose the left into the mountain approach. Good thing those little foreign cars have collapsible mirrors and insurance. Needless to say, we scraped the mountain a little, made it down the pass and to our b&B in dingle town.

Dingle …what’s to say about dingle….if it wasn’t for the blasting wind, dingle would have nothing to offer except breathless landscapes, cute little towns, history stacked on top of history stacked on top of history, and sheep. 500,000 to be exact. The wind was pretty much the only bad part of dingle but even the wind had its moments as you will see when I post the pictures.

Galway was crazy on Halloween and Dublin was cool but city-ish. Overall the trip was pretty awesome.

The pictures will be posted later this week. I have to sift through them and get a good system for posting them seeing as I took about 740 pictures (actual estimate, not an exaggeration.

There are obviously more details but I haven’t the time or patience to type them here. You’ll just have to ask us in person.

the drunk bartender says what?

friday night. coachlite. heather's laswt night on the town as a chestertonian...
the night went well. pretty big turn out. quite a few people i knew from stories but not by face.

stories exchanged amongst friends and new people i have met. heather, rightfully so, had a good amount to drink. all night, i went to the same (the only) bartender and got the exact same drinks. after the 2nd time i went there, he knew my order. he stopped asking the name or the drinks. he just went to the card directly next to the register and wrote down our most recent o'=rder.
;
this was the case all night until we went to cash out and found out....and i quote: "i don't have your card...i must have given it to someone else"

WHAT?!? we're leaving the fucking country in 1.5 days and you gave our fucking credit card to a stranger?????
so we then found that kourtney's card was still there and are hoping above hope that she has ours......otherwise, vacation not ruined, but nicely fuct by 1/2 drunk bartender that should not have gotten any tip at all and quite possibly, if i see him again, a swift kick to the nuts.

fingers crossed. foot ready. we'll find out tomorrow when kourtnet gets her voice mail if she has our card.

i switched to blogger to avoid tech problems

i sure did try to write this blog 8 hours ago, but blogger was down......

today = boring as shit. i had to re-write the webpage i wrote in ie6. what does that mean? it means ie7, firefox, safari...every browser ever looks fine on my website, but when i view it in ie6......vomit. horray duel css files?

Wii. also known as lock the fuck up. i would say that the last 5 times i have played madden on wii, 2 of the 5 times, it has locked up. not just locked up, but it locks up when i am saving my game just after beating the crap out of my opponent. it never seeems to do so when i lose. only when i win.

i'm not saying that i wouldn't be able to beat this team again, it's just......well....i already fucking beat them.......

make dinner......not discard it and make it again......i bet it's not as appealing the second time around.....fuck you wii. save my fucking game.....i...fuck. just save my game.

that's it. pretty much, fuck technology. it's almost 2009....2009!!!!!. fuck people. flying cars, robot people, self cleaning kitchens....we've let the past down. 120%. fuck you present and fuck you future. i doubt you will even meqasure up to my expectations.

ireleand in 3.5 days. suck it.

I was tied to a chair and he had a baseball bat. Pissing him off was the right thing to do

welcome to the new blog. i hope it's better than the god awful myspace blog interface.

so we decided to go see Max Payne last night. rotten tomatoes gave it a 21% which is really low. virtually every rating rotten tomatoes gives is pretty accurate. this disappointed me because i was really looking forward to max payne. i read a bunch of the reviews and the general consensus was that the movie didn't make any sense and was poorly done. after reading the reviews, i chalked up most of the negative ones to people that have no clue that max payne is based off of a video game or have never played it.

i am here to tell you they are wrong and possibly retarded. heather hasn't played the games, but seeing as she's not retarded, she followed along just fine in the movie. this movie was about as hard to follow as the yellow brick road. if you weren't paying attention you ended up wandering off into a corn field and making a new soul-less friend, but for the most part, the path was laid out directly in front of you.

the movie was a little slow. that one i agree on. for max payne, the first half of the movie had very little shooting. over all i think the movie was well done. the sets were very well done compared to the game. marky mark did a pretty good job as max payne. they could have casted mona a little better though.

overall i would say it's a definite go see. there were a few things missing that i would have liked to have seen:
1. drug induced endless hallway / blood trail scene
2. non stop popping of pain killers (though that would require more violence throughout the movie to make sense)
3. most importantly, there was no voice over of his inner monologue. that's one of the most important parts of the game, so it should have been in the movie.

the movie goers will miss out on clever voice over thoughts like:
- "Sooner or later it was going to catch up with you. You'd find that lady luck was a hooker and you were fresh out of cash"
- "It was all over. The final shots were an exclamation mark to all of it. I pulled my finger off the trigger."
- "Collecting evidence had gotten old a few hundred bullets back. I was already so far beyond the point of no return I couldn't remember what it had looked like when I had passed it."

i'm also putting money down on there being a sequel considering the main boss was not killed. but i guess that's why they had two games too.