writ. dodging classification

Check them out:

http://iammikesdomain.com/imagery/pumpkin

2 parties 2 days, then Eagles beat the Ravens. Great weekend!

There was some real good highpoints to the trip. There was some low points (mostly the fact that all the meetings went way over their scheduled time). But all in all an exciting trip for various reasons. (to clarify. Kinda funny, at least one reason was truly exciting, many of the other reasons I’m using exciting as more of a sarcastic stab at it. At least those kept me on my toes and alert though) The meetings made it a very long 3 days. I’m glad to be home in a way just so I can rest.

Wow this is a short entry. I guess thats cause most anything else I could say, I can’t really talk about for various reasons of their own ….. or my own ;).

Ok have fun.

Oh and I got soooo drunk last night at Heather’s Halloween party. It was at her and Sam’s new apartment, which seems like its in the middle of nowhere, from the directions we took there, but still good times were had by all.

Ok so after my friday night, saturday was pretty slow. In fact it was great. Cause all day on saturday I sat around by myself and worked on stuff I wanted to work on for me. Things like more website stuff (mostly behind the scenes stuff). Stuff for the game that Dan and myself have been working on since we were in high school. Also just in general vedging out and watching movies too. I did a lot of thinking about lots of stuff as well. All in all a non-exciting but fruitful day.

Come sunday. Sunday was originally going to be an OM mini-fest of hitting DC for some monuments with Joey and whoever else of the OM bbs crew could get out. It turned out all but myself, Joey, and Lisa could make it out. So as to further Lisa’s traveling, and shorten Joey’s travel we morphed the mini-fest into a semi-fest and moved it to my apartment
up in Cockeysville to watching the sunday afternoon Football games. The Eagles v. Browns and the Ravens v. Buffalo. To add to the excitement Lisa was cool enough to go pumpkin picking the day before and bring them up with her for a good ol’ pumpkin carve-off. The teams were Lisa/Joey vs. Mike/Mike.

Ok from the pictures below I’m sure you see clearly who came out on top in this competition ;).
So yeah carving pumpkins and watching football was a pretty good mix. Lisa of course rocks cause she got the pumpkins, and braved driving up north even though she does not like going anywhere near Baltimore. How brave!

Anyways. The rest of my day was a blur. I watched some TV and played online Battleship with Jess. She totally sunk my battleship.

Here’s pumpkin pics:

So I was at the Mt Washington Tavern. This girl comes up to me, and gives me this schpeel about how her friend is getting married on sunday and how the girl’s fiance said that he wouldn’t hit on her in whatever outfit she had picked to go out to the Tavern in, and that she would think it would be really cool if “I” would go up to her friend and hit on her to give her the kind of bachelorette party sendoff of getting hit on, on the last night as a free woman.

Why me? Honestly. I mean.. i really don’t hit on girls in bars. I don’t know if its my own issues with my own self-image, or if I just feel its a fruitless endeavor. But even then… if i’ve never done that before why should I start on an event that really seems completely fruitless. No less I coulda been cool and did something for a stranger that woulda given them a good sendoff or whatever crap for their wedding. But still!!! really.. why me? I mean if my situation with woman was any different I might not have thought twice about this situation. But where I am now its almost like some other tease in the long string of these sorta things thats happened as of late.

So no less I completely chickened out and never went over and hit on this girl, (even though her friend has asked me specifically). I’m not exaclty sure why i chickened out. Maybe i coulda gotten the number of one of her friends cause i was being a cool guy and hitting on their engaged girlfriend. But either way I just didn’t seem to feel up for it, or was just sorta intimidated by the situation. Does that make me a bad person?

Whatever. The girl was cute so good on whoever she was marrying that guy was lucky. Even more I kinda woulda gone for this friend of hers that came up to me… she was kinda interesting, she had a lip ring, and seemed kinda cool.

Pah. Oh well maybe some day I’ll break out of my anti-social shell that I seem to force my self into in such situations.

Well. I have to say my job lately has really kept me moving. Enter next week on tuesday evening I will be driving up to Camden, NJ with a co-worker for another business trip. I’ll be in Camden till Friday after lunch. I was thinking about it today. It seems i travel somewhere for work just about a day or two ever couple of weeks. Looking at my schedule through the new year that is pretty much the case. I’m going to be in Texas for two, one day trips, during November. Then i’ll be up in Camden again for a day or two in December. Then in January i’ll be in Camden again for a whole week. Its kinda neat to always be working towards some other work trip. It keeps me on my toes. It also breaks a lot of the duldrum of day to day work, because i know in a week or two I’m gonna be off somewhere at some meeting in a different state. Thankfully though this rash of lots of trips is going to let up after the week in Camden in early January. I can see if it kept at this pace of a lot of trips, I 1. could get very tired of traveling, then 2. my office would run outa money for travel lol.

Either way its fun to travel for work while it lasts.

This past weekend I was up in the good old Delaware County area, just south of Philly, my old stomping ground. I was staying at my parent’s house, of course. What made this weekend interesting enough to write about was the fact that I got to catch up with a large number of people I haven’t seen in a very long time. Some I’ve seen more recently, and others I haven’t seen in about 3 years.

So to preface things I’ll give a short synopsis of the weekends events. I got sort of a late start on Friday heading my way up to Philly, so I ended up pretty much driving in traffic and rain on and off for the first half of my drive. When I got about an hour out of Philly, on an whim (and i wanted to talk to somebody while driving) I gave Liz a call to see what she was up to this weekend. We talked for a while and it turns out she was really busy on Saturday as I was, and that maybe we should get some food on Sunday or something. Being that I was going to be headed to Howard’s on Sunday for football we initially had the idea to get dinner on my way back down through her area after the game. The idea eventually morphed, for reasons I was hungry and she hadn’t gotten dinner yet and was just leaving work, into us just meeting up for dinner when I got up in the area on Friday night. That turned out well, I hadn’t seen Liz in a month or two and it was good to hang out and talk about the things Liz and me talk about. She was tired, but she couldn’t pass up going to Bertucci’s and having an Apple Martini, as we figured out in our conversations I am an enabler of bad things like drinking, and staying up later (i.e. like 10:30 or so hehe) when she has to get up way early the next morning to head to E-town for Homecoming stuff. So we were off.

Ok so Saturday I wake up early (like 9am) and head out to Clayton to play 9 holes of golf with Howard and Brad. I haven’t seen Brad in like forever, and Howard I’ve talked to some but haven’t seen him in a while either. Who knows what we scored, it was just a good time to get out with those guys, then head back to Howard’s parents house and check up on how they’re doing.

Next on the plate I get home to find my dad and my brother had gone out to watch my cousin’s son, Brian, play some football. I got out the field and saw my cousin Jack (brain’s uncle) cheering on the game with my dad. Brian plays QB, defensive end, and he’s the team kickoff kicker. Hey all the kids play Offense and Defense, but their team has like 4 kids that are just really quick and way better than many others. One of them is my little cousin. Damn its funny to see when some little kid is just on another level compared to the people he’s playing against. Fun times my cousin’s team destroyed the team they played.

Next up for the weekend was Homecoming for Widener, my college. All of the people I knew (or a bunch) from when I did college radio were all out at homecoming to see the new WDNR studio and equipment. This is where I saw some people I hadn’t seen in years. Overall the idea was go see the new place, then get some dinner, and then the station was letting graduates do radio shows that whole weekend, so our band of misfits took the WDNR 89.5 airwaves around Chester, PA from 9pm to 12am that night. It was a blast of craziness, lots of inside jokes and such and good music. I got to meet some people I only knew about from the people I knew at the station, so it was cool. I also saw people like Dave and Stan, whom I haven’t seen since leaving college (like 3 and half years ago), its good to catch-up. Also along for the festivities were Jess, Joey and Stacy. Stacy I’ve hung out with before but never knew very well. Joey I’d just seen last month. Jess however I haven’t seen in quite a while, in fact I don’t exactly remember when I’d seen her last (some time this year maybe). We talk online or random phone calls about some computer problem she is having (yes if you’re reading don’t worry keep calling with computer problems I like the challenge).

I guess the whole Widener homecoming thing is what threw me for the most of a loop this weekend, even though the whole weekend contributed. I think it comes down to the fact that you have to realize you can never really go home. You can’t capture that thing you had before that sometimes you long for, for whatever reasons. It’s always a little earie. Its almost as if there is a ghost of those former feelings and experiences with you, but its not quite the same anymore. We’re all temporary visitors, with our own separate lives now. Its really great to recreate all of that in a little way, but in the back of your head you know we’ll all go our separate ways again at the end of the night. With some it’s that we just don’t live as close anymore. With other people it’s that you’re both different people now, then you once were.

With that it leads me into Sunday. Sunday was football day. I picked up Tony and headed up to Howard’s new place to watch the Eagles game. This was a good time, and great to see Howard for the second time in the weekend. Still with the theme of trying to get things back that were once so easy, this was another one of those. My main focus of this whole weekend was to try at some point to try and get together with groups of friends that I used to hang out with all together, almost all the time. It’s just not that easy to do anymore. Everybody’s got these plans that we need to work around, and I live out of the state so it ends up my visits up to Philly drive when these happenings might be. In the end we get people together, but sometimes only in fragmented groups. I guess it really can never be the same as it was. I guess that’s what memories are for. Still though it’s good to get everybody together every so often, just to catch up, even if it is only a fleeting moment in all of our current lives.

quick note. I’m off to philly this weekend. So hopefully i’ll get to see everybody up there ;). Give my cell a call we can set something up.

Well I got home from my boston trip this early afternoon. Low and behold what do I find patiently sitting on my couch? None other than my new turntable. Yes! Ok well the excitement didn’t stop there. I realized that I had ordered my needle cartridge seperately, and that it had not arrived just yet. More over that I checked my e-mail and saw that my order had been delayed because they ran out of the needle I had ordered so it would take another week or so. I couldnt’ have any of this so I changed my order with them and ended up getting a little better needle as far as sound quality goes and they gave me 2 day shipping all for the same charge that my other cartridge would have been. Now the big question “What do I do now?” I have a record player with no needle. I did what any person on a tear for vinyl would do. I went out and found myself a stand in needle for the time being. My finaly decision landed me at Guitar Center talking to the guy at the DJ equipment desk. Things worked out fine because I ended up getting a formidable inexpensive DJ needle for my turntable, which I am currently enjoying listening to Breakbeat Era through. This is a good contrast because the needle I ordered was not a DJ needle, its focus is on sound quality and would not hold up to the tracking forces required for scratching (ok who knows if i really will do that.. but its nice to have flexibility). So now i’ve got a needle for all applications. Everybody wins!

Ok so here’s some pics of it:

I’ve made a cash cow come out through the cold trials of a lime light. Break me down to the people who make up my personality. They break into fights and call my name wondering who they are and they don’t realize I am them and they are me. All those people who seem off the distance calling me in the voices in my head coming through the cold true love of a side show slideshow gone bad and making it right off the head of bottle that breaks off to the side and sprays its insides out onto the floor. Thats the feeling its the feeling of a cold clean crack, Thats the feeling its the feeling of me coming through time.

Some days i guess i just come up with weird shit to write down. Completely stream of thought.

Wow its funny. I wanted to write about this party I went to but on the other hand i can’t think of much to say. It was a good party. There were many crushable girls there (including one of the roommates of the people in the house is a Ravens Cheerleader). It was located downtown in our fine nations capital. It was this girl Amanda’s Birthday bash + a fundraiser for diabetes. How do i know these people you ask? I don’t. Well ok its not like that. My friend Chas., a guy I work with, asked me if I wanted to come to the party. So I figured it sounded like a blast so I went. I know Chas. because 1. he works in my office and I have lunch with him just about every day. 2. He was stationed out in Minot, ND at the same time as me, and he dated a girl who was friends with me and I worked with. Ok enough connections? Anyways Chas.’s girlfriend is friends with the girl who was throwing the party. Ok so that makes sense right? good.

I had a good time at the party. Jello shots were had, and Ice Luge’s were done, and much beer was drunk. Overall i spent most of the night talking to Chas, some buddies of his/roommates of his GF, that I had met up with earlier that night before hitting the party., and of course I talked to some random people a little. I was in general being my non-gregarious self. But on the other hand my goal for the night was to get drunk and hang out, which I was very successful at. So hey if I didn’t talk to a million unknown people I don’t care. Sometimes I wish I was more the type to become the life of the party, and really hit off with people right from the start, but I just can’t seem to bring myself to do that. If I know a lot of people at a party I can transform into that, because I guess my humor and wit need somewhat of a starting point to get moving, and with out that I’m just stuck in low gear going nowhere. Thats one thing I respect about Chas. though, he can just jump right into large groups of people he doesn’t really know and get things started. Oh well i’ll mark that up on the self-improvement list. I think I can do that, and I’ve done it before, but I think last night I really was just more in the chill and observe mode, and I had a good time doing that. I think my only regret about my chill mode last night, is probably would have liked to get more of a conversation going on with the birthday girl (ok its not her b-day till monday .. but who can party on a monday??) Amanda, she seemed pretty cool, and she was damn cute. Ok so yeah I think I’m gonna start hanging out with Chas and his friends more often if I can.

Where was this last year? HA when i actually lived a considerable distance closer to D.C. Oh well the drives not that bad anyways.

Oh other thing of note. I pulled off a small miracle in parking in D.C. as well. I parallel parked in this space that, literally, when I got in I had 2 inches on the back and 8 inches in the front of me. Holy crap. Ok it wasn’t as impressive because it was a two man effort between me and Chas, who was standing outside the car telling me to backup or move forward a little or whatever I needed to do. But still damn.. even for two people it was pretty stellar. (only thing that pissed me off is the car in front of me had about 3 feet in front of his car unuseed, that DICK!)

Ok thats all for now.