Sleepy time…

…seems to be all the time some days.  The hazards of everyone attempting to cram way more things than they probably should into a given day, that energy-destroying sin nearly everyone is guilty of.   But it does lead to amusing mornings.

M really needed to get up at 5:00 today, the byproduct of an over-busy week.  I’ve become sort of the backup alarm clock lately, although I’m no where near as reliable as a $3 piece of plastic.  Normally I just roll away while subtly stealing all the blankets and occasionally using cold feet as the brutally effective weapon they are.  This morning I was feeling more creative, so on her second whacking of the snooze alarm, I started “singing” a well known motivational ditty:

Softly, but with increasing enthusiasm: “duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh”

Louder, and quite off key: ““da da DAAAAA da da DAAAAA da da DAAAA da da DAAA da da da da da da da da DAAAAA!”

Nothing like the Rocky theme to get someone up and moving in the morning. Makes you want to run up a flight of stairs, if only to get away from my singing.  Recordings are available, $5.99 plus S&H.

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M gets her revenge when I go to bed, since I typically do so a good while after she does.  I have to unwind after my late classes, or I just lie there thinking about….trigger strategies under oligopolistic competition with multimarket contacts.  Its about as confusing as it sounds.  This means I have to find myself a) space to sleep and b) blankets to sleep under.

M likes to sleep in a particular fashion, known geometrically as “diagonally”.  This is usually fairly easy to solve, by way of nudging, lifting, shoving, etc.  The blanket situation is more complicated.  The American Medical Association classifies M’s sleeping style as “the blanket burrito”.   Those familiar with attempting to unwind the burrito sleeper will recognize the inherent problem here: the tradeoff between blanket and space.  Because if you pull on the end of the blanket in hopes for some coverage, Newton tells us that the equal and opposite reaction will be the dreaded body roll.  So now you have some nice pre-heated blanket and eight inches of bedspace on one side, and 5 open feet with no blanket on the other.  I tend to go with the blankets.

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All of this is, of course, in jest and with substantial exaggeration.  Except the Rocky music.   And I really can’t complain, because anyone that watches someone wash down two bowls of chili with a couple of beers at 10 p.m. and doesn’t force them to sleep in the garage is clearly making a few sacrifices.

Hornk.

Around 2:30 this morning, M and I both woke up at the same time.  The culprit?  On the floor next to me, a little furball was making the dreaded “hornk” sound.  M cut through my semi-intelligent babbling to tell me it was fine, just that cat throwing up again.  Thinking slowly, I grabbed a magazine off the nightstand and got it in front of the cat, right before detonation.  If I’d thought a little faster, I might have realized that its easier to clean up kitty presents from a hardwood floor that we don’t own than a magazine I was planning on reading the next day.

Five minutes later, I’m still a bit out of it and standing in the kitchen in my underwear, cutting the nasty spots out of the latest issue of the Economist over the trash can.  M is in the other room comforting the cat, having already taken care of the small amount of vomit that wasn’t soaking into my late night reading material.  Several thoughts went through my head:

- why am I getting cat vomit all over my hands to salvage a magazine I can either read online or get for free at the school library?

- the cat loves attention at night.  M is now paying much attention to the cat.  Let’s hope this doesn’t start any kind of association between throwing up on the floor and getting attention.

- why is M comforting the cat, who is fine, and not me, who is gagging in a futile attempt to save a magazine?  My guess is that at 2:30 in the morning, covered in magazine clippings and puke, I am not the most cuddly of individuals.

- is this what having a kid is like?  Randomly jerked from sleep to deal with vomit everywhere?  Actually, it kind of reminds me more of the frat house days….

Countdowns…

24 hours until M gets back from Istanbul. 22 hours until I finish a finance midterm. I’m sure these won’t conflict in terms of my concentration levels.

3 days until Halloween. I’ve already eaten more candy that I did last year.

Three weeks until my birthday. Buy me stuff. What I really need is someone to pay my rent or tuition, but I’d settle for various consumer goods. I am especially in need of some new pants. And size 13 socks.

7 weeks until the end of this semester. I am very tired of having class every night, but need to get used to the idea that I have several more years of this.

8 months until our lease is up. I’m not moving without significant persuasion. Unless we hire movers.

10 years until I can legally run for president. Donations would be appreciated, but are not tax-deductible.

26 years until I pay off my student loans. This had better be worth it…

Also, new post on the other blog….

backpacks and stuff

I started school again this week, this time on kind of a down note.  One of my two planned classes was a statistics class for economists.  Which covered material I’ve already had three separate times in college.  Going over it a fourth time did not seem like a worthy use of tuition.

This led me to spent the better part of the week changing up my schedule, petitioning various people more important than me and generally pondering, completing with looming deadline, how I want to spend the next few years of my life.  Verdict was that I would get transfer credit for the stats class and completely revamp my schedule, with the aim of finishing up my econ masters this coming summer, a year and a half earlier than planned.  This will enable me to either be much better at my current job (being technically self employed, this is important) or to get a job I really want.  I hope.  Then after next summer, I ‘ll only have two more years of night classes  until I get my environmental degree.  Whee!

The last part, the two years of a few night classes a week, isn’t really a problem.  What concerns me is the next 9 months, taking 7 graduate level econ course while working 30 hours a week and dong an increasingly time consuming volunteer job, and attempting to spend some level of time with the girlfriend, and the family, and showering once and a while.  I’m being whiny because its 7 am on a saturday and I’m writing this to wake up before getting some work done.

Oh yeah – $420 for books this semester.  The best thing about econ students is that they always resell their books, making textbook shopping a bit easier on the wallet.

Alright then

Been awhile, much craziness has been keeping me from doing…much of anything lately.  So….

Car is finally fixed, after 35 days of sitting at a garage in New York.  The joy of getting into my car was somewhat overshadowed by the realization that after driving a new car for a month, my 7 year old Saturn does indeed suck.

Em and I are moving into our apartment in four days.  The degree to which I am not yet ready to move is a bit staggering.  I never realized I had so many books, but the really amazing thing is the sheer volume of random crap I’ve managed to accumulate over the years.

Speaking of books, I have seven of them sitting on my nightstand, in my car and on my bookshelf that I have started recently but not finished.  I haven’t had the attention span to read anything require thought lately.  Its probably a combination of the usual summer brain rebellion, a lack of time, and the seductive calling of my super nintendo.

Tomorrow is the 4th of July, which means lots of fireworks.  I appreciate the well-done show, but not so much when the pryotechnicians attempt to stretch it out beyond the limits of their fireworks.  A well orchestrated combination of colors is enjoyable.  40 minutes of individual fireworks being lobbed up repeatedly, less so.

The Deer Hunter

I had big Memorial Day Weekend plans.  M and I were going to drive overnight on Friday to Vermont, where we would spend three days camping with my relatives and doing all sorts of camping related things, such as hiking, flea market-ing, cooking things over a fire and drinking various forms of alcohol, all while surrounded by the woods of southeastern Vermont and completely cut off from the outside world.

So its around 11 Friday night, and we’re motoring along through New York at about 70 mph when a deer decides to act out some suicidal tendencies on my car.   I caught a glimpse of the deer jumping into the left lane about a half second before impact, which gave me just enough time realize that I had nowhere to swerve.

When a deer hits your windshield, it makes eye contact.  And a surprising loud bang.  My poor car had its windshield smashed and most of its left side ripped up, all the way back to the bumper and including the roof.  M and I got off lucky, just a little flying glass and a slight expansion in my vocabulary.  A mildly deranged tow truck driver took us to a Best Western, which has surprisingly good waffles for their complimentary continental breakfast.  The next morning Enterprise did indeed pick us up, we cleaned out my car in case it had to be totaled, and we soldiered on to Vermont.  The rest of the drive was a beautiful trek through mountains, and we eventually made it to the campsite, 22 hours after we left Ohio.  My first greeter was an uncle passing me an open beer through the car window.

Footnotes:

It took a week for Nationwide to get someone to take a look at my car.  Despite my having arranged all of this before leaving it with them last Saturday.  Despite me paying half the cost of a rental car.  Despite my car body being crammed with sizeable amounts of now rotting pieces of New York’s finest road hazard.  Life may be coming at me fast, but I’m not sure they’re on my side.

On the plus side, my rental car is a 2007 Jetta.  Nice car, but the visibility in it is terrible, especially if you aren’t 5 foot 6.   I am completely taking advantage of the “unlimited mileage” segment of the Enterprise rental contract.  I’m not sure they expect someone who just wrecked their car to use the rental to drive 500 miles to Vermont and go tooling around on dirt roads.

In a slight change of plans…

After reflection, I realized that M and I having apartments across the street from one another was a little silly, given the likelihood of us spending all of our free time together anyway.  So after we had placed deposits on two apartments on the same street, I mentioned to her that it might make more sense if we got a place together.  Which, apparently she had thought about a good amount but didn’t mention in the interest of being a nice girlfriend acting with the understanding that guys are required, by law, to fear any situation which will potentially diminish their future chances of hosting a party with a guest list limited to the cheerleaders from a major sports franchise.

With the assistance of our very patient realtor, we made an appointment to look at a three bedroom apartment this afternoon.  This was a little nerve-wracking, because they had been very helpful, had access to our bank accounts and this was their ONLY vacancy for a place this big within ten miles of where we wanted to live.   While we had the option with going with another company, they kind of had a monopoly on the neighborhood we wanted, so I was pretty nervous when I was walking through the door on the top (3rd) floor of an old apartment building.

Not sure what caught my eye first, the 12 foot ceiling and fireplace in the living room, or the brand new everything in the kitchen, from granite counters to new cabinets*.   Or the big dining room, the seven closets, the arched doorways, the back entrance, the new windows, the included utilities (well, no internet or electricity) or the 1600+ feet of shiny hardwood floors.  This place kicked our original apartments collective asses, and in terms of cost per square foot, it is probably one of the cheapest places I’ve found in 3 months of looking.  All this, walking distance from the train downtown, a grocery store, a movie theater, four bars, restaurants of brazilian, italian, hungarian, japanese and mexican persuasions, a diner, a homestyle cooking place and an art gallery.  Not to mention the farmers market set up every saturday, year round, 50 yards from our front door.    The location is actually a bit of a geographic oddity.  It is technically in Cleveland, and we pay Cleveland taxes.  But through a zoning blip, we get city services and the community center of the suburb next door, which is one of the richest in the area.  Ice skating for free in August?  We can do that, at half the tax cost of everyone else on the ice.

So yes, an amazing, insanely cheap apartment in a great location dropped into our laps.  While the whole living together thing is quite a step**, so is living across the street from each other, the only major difference between the two will be a lack of complete separate retreats.  However, the reasoning behind a three bedroom apartment was the flexibility it gives us room-wise.  I have an alcove with what will become the man room and the adjacent man bathroom.  Think black leather couch, black leather chair, a pile of cheesy action movies and my nintendo games.  I will rescue the princess this year.

*pictures will not be forthcoming, because we forgot a camera and don’t move in until July 1.  Just imagine awesomeness.

**this will probably lead to some interesting blog postings.  Hijinks await, mostly of the I-screwed-something-up variety.

Through the looking glass…

And I’m back, after a reader request.  The last few weeks have been crazy, and in a few more weeks, my life will be very little like it was this spring.  There is no time to explain, let me sum up.

I finished school, and got healthy again.  I managed to pull off straight A’s, keeping the grad school streak alive.  I had to pull out of presenting a project for an urban conference as asked though, due to time issues.  I was also asked to be in an environmental documentary as part of Earth Aid, but that fell through, in part because of a lack of enthusiasm on my part to play someone’s monkey.

Three weeks ago, a fraternity at a local college I’ve been helping advise with for three years officially became a fraternity, built from scratch into a group of 40 great guys.  Big ceremony, I looked dashing in my tuxedo, they gave me a nice watch and I got to stay in a very nice hotel.   It took unending meetings, trips to St. Louis, Columbus, and Indianapolis, countless phone calls and some very late nights, but it was all pulled off successfully.  And chicks flip for guys in tuxes.

I started working again a week ago, as an outside consultant/contract worker for my old company.  I’m in the office a lot now, literally, as I’ve been upgraded from my previous cubicle dwelling.  Also, I no longer have to show up at any particular time or work any set number of hours.  Its weird though, going from being the youngest/newest person in the company a year ago to being almost a veteran.  Some things are still the same – my work hasn’t changed much, they still give us lots of free food and I am still completely clueless as to how to work the phone system.

This past Saturday I put down a security deposit on an apartment, which will be mine if the background check shows that I didn’t kill Jimmy Hoffa.  The new bachelor pad is in a great area, 200 yards from a train to downtown Cleveland, a grocery store, a movie theater, a half dozen restaurants, art galleries, a weekly market and a beer store.  Its also somewhat between work and school.  Added bonuses to the location include the girlfriend moving a block away later this summer, and me being too lazy to cook.  The actual apartment is the top floor of the highest building on the roundabout plaza with all of the aforementioned establishments.  Its got six closets, windows along all three sides, high ceilings, a view of downtown and, I’m hoping on a clear day, Lake Erie.

Living Room  

Not sure if the picture uploads are working…if they aren’t I doubt I’ll care enough to go back and fix it.

Also this week, I have the two nieces keeping me company.  Frequent choruses of “Again!” follow every exhausting game we play, but at least I’m getting in some workouts.  I’m having a great deal of fun spoiling them for their mother.  My favorite was letting the older niece eat ranch dressing with a fork.  Who needs the vegetables when you can just eat the dip?

Things men should not say…

Girlfriend checking out the weather forecast online:

“Look, they have a link that lets you predict the weather on your wedding day!”

Me, from the  couch:

“I think its probably gonna be a pretty cold day…in hell.”

I’m still counting up the bruises.

“I’ll jumpstart YOUR engine….”

Yesterday, at the tail end of a road trip to Philadelphia and New Jersey (“Death Before Road Construction”), my older sister was getting ready to take the nieces to various places when she found out that her car, just back from a few weeks in the shop after an accident, was somewhat disinclined to start.  I immediately speculated aloud that the problem was with the battery, since along with “the tires”, “the engine” and “the smokey thing”, it is one of the few car parts I can recognize.  My brother-in-law comes charging home from work, freshly purchased jumper cables in hand, and we set about the manly task of automobile repair.

I’ve seen jumper cables used many times.   My brother-in-law has a mechanical engineering degree from an Ivy league school.  The jumper cables have instructions on them.  We have, between us, something on the order of 12 years of college.

All of which makes it somewhat embarrassing that our first attempt to start my sisters car resulted in a lot of smoke, and the second would have probably ended in our blowing up both cars had Em not pointed out that we were doing it wrong.  She managed to straighten us out, we got the car started and my sister and brother-in-law head out, leaving Em and I to pack up and head back to Ohio.  We load up the car and as I turned the key in the ignition…silence.  I hate cars.

Its comforting to know I have a girl that knows much more about cars than me.  Also, cooking, credit scores, ironing, travel, technology and a whole host of other grown-up how-to’s, including actually having one of those job things.  But for all that I can still kick her ass in Tetris.