Brain (s)Craps

So it's been five months since I posted last. I've finished my associate's degree, completed some projects at work, read a few books, got my wife a job with me, and sneezed a lot. You know, for five months having passed, not much has happened. That's just my life. I get up, go to work, come home and sleep. It's the american dream, right?

Well since the details of my life are quite inconsequential, I've decided to use this site to dump off bits of stories that are lurking around in my mind. I've had these little snippets floating around for a number of years, and I think I need to get them in print somewhere at least before the brownian motion in my mind comes to a complete stop.

Most of these will probably be little bits of fiction I've cooked up, while others may be based on true events, where the names have been changed to protect the innocent. I won't say which is which, though I'm sure it will be quite obvious.

Since I'm going in a new direction with this blog, I'm re-christening it. Keep an eye out for the first post of the all new an improved Brain (s)Craps next week.

Yoda, in the backpack,
Jes

I'm told I don't post enough.

I'm not sure people feel this way, but it seems to be an overarching theme in conversations lately. "Can we come in and have a gloat?" they say, and I say "Oh, you heartless gloater!" We're up to our ears in gloaters around here...

Anyhow...

What's been up? Well, I had my surgery on my hydrocele. Now my scrotum smiles at me. Apparently I had let it go too long and instead of being able to just drain off the excess fluid, they had to scrape the congealed gunk from around my poor testicle. For those of you reading this while eating lunch...you're welcome. Recovery time took about a week and a half longer than expected. The pain was magnificent, and barely held in check with the Vicodin the doctor prescribed. February was a fun month.

How about March though? It's been okay so far. I hit my year anniversary at my current job which is nice. I don't really get anything special for it but, since it has been a while since I had a job that didn't lay me off just before my year anniversary, the year is its own reward. There are also two opportunities for advancement that have opened up which would mean a very nice raise. I haven't heard anything back on them yet, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed. The Missus is also trying to get a job here at the medical center which would be nice. Being able to take the HOV lane and sharing driving duties would make things a bit more tolerable on the commute. She like her job with UPS but she has no opportunities for full time work unless she gets a job as a driver. they do that by seniority and the list in front of her is fairly long.

I got a new laptop about two weeks ago. It's the Dell XPS v2 with all the bells and whistles. One of my regular clients purchased it for me in thanks for the many years of great service. I call it...The Machine. It is easily one of the finest pieces of hardware I've ever owned. Some people may badmouth Dell, but the people I've spoken with, with some careful prodding, can usually trace their problems back to user error. These same people have the same problems with HP, Alienware, etc. I have very few problems with any vendors, and the problems I do have are usually self created. So nyaa.

In other news, I picked up Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves recently and have been enjoying it immensely. It's definately a change of pace. I'm only about halfway through so far, but I've already started looking at the walls and doors of my house a bit differently. I highly recommend it.

Can I just take this opportunity to say what an incredible game that was? I thought the Orange bowl Tuesday night between Penn State and FSU was a bloody fight to the finish, but the Rose Bowl last night took the cake, injected it with nitroglycerin, and force fed it to me with a Plumber's Helper. It was like a late Christmas / early birthday present wrapped up in millions of glowing protons on my TV. Best of all? being able to put the game film on my other Christmas preset this year, my 60 gig iPod video. As Glen Quagmire would say: "Ooohhhh riiiiight!"

I hadn't really payed much attention to the whole iPod craze up until the newest iPod came out. Even then I was just like "Cool." Then my wife spring the surprise on me. She fooled me, too. She had me thinking she had bought me a new desk for Christmas. Now that I've got an iPod, I can't believe I didn't get one sooner. Well actually, I can because we don't have a lot of spare cheddar most of the time, but you know what I mean.

Hook 'Em!

Ooo look! Christmas! **WHOOSH** There it goes!

Well, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to those of you I didn't get to talk to over the holidays. Nothing rushes by quite so fast as Christmas and New Years when you're dashing from house to house trying to get 'quality' time in with as many family branches as possible. It was rather interesting to see the extremes of family involvement in Christmas. One side of the family just mailed in cards to everyone else. This side of the family has no kids under sixteen, so I can see the point, sortof. Another side of the family had a huge Christmas eve party with one of those goofy White Elephant gift exchanges that's so popular around the workplace these days. Yet another branch of the family had a big Christmas morning do where all the adults stayed up all night getting everything set up for the little ones. It was quite a roller coaster.

Normally I'm all about peace, quiet, and solitude. For some reason, my tolerance level goes way up when the jolly red fat guy gets ready to make his appearance. I guess it's me getting into the Christmas spirit. It was great fun being in a big noisy house filled with family members I hadn't seen in ages, even if I did feel out of place for being the only one not wearing cowboy boots.

Family Ties

Last time I was on here, I talked about seeing my biological father again after a number of years. It went OK. Talk was rather banal catching up kind of chatter. It was his first time meeting my wife, so there was that. I saw cousins I hadn't seen in years all grown up and married with "little'uns" running around all over the place. I saw my older sister again and her youngest. Cute kid. Big sis looked like life was not being kind to her. I narrowly missed meeting my youngest sister for the first time. She's nineteen now. Every now and again I get a little wistful thinking about my sisters and how we could have made things work out despite our jacked up family arrangements. Then I wake up and realize they would probably feel the same way about me swooping in and trying to be a brother after all these years that I feel about our father trying to swoop in and be a dad after being persona non adesse.

While the atmosphere was great, it wasn't really conducive to a heart to heart talk. This is probably for the better, for now. I do have issues that need to be sorted with him, but I don't know that I'm ready to pick those deep psychological scabs and examine the pus just yet. It was suggested that a relationship with my father might be a good thing because he would more readily accept me as I am, whereas my Dad is a hard man who may never accept or approve of me. What would be better, the approval of a man who has guilt for not being there for thirty years or the disapproval of a man who has known me my whole life?

Another Holiday Rant

I've vacillated back and forth about whether to have a public rant about this, but I'm just gonna do it and damn the consequences!

People just don't appreciate what is done for them. Allow me to explain...

My wife is probably the warmest, sweetest, most selfless person I know. I'm not saying that she's a saint or anything, but whenever an opportunity to help someone arises she is always there, giving time or money or her own blood sweat and tears. Even more so when the person in need is one of her own family.

This year for Christmas, her family got her a grand total of ten bucks worth of junk. A couple of DVDs out of the Wal Mart bargain bin. Some of them got her nothing at all. It wasn't even an issue of people not having any money to buy something, it was just an 'Oops, I forgot' from most of them. After all the things she has done for them over the past year, they could at least give a thoughtful card or something if they were really hard up for cash. I know Christmas isn't supposed to be about the gifts. "It's the thought that counts" right? It would have been nice if anything she had gotten had been thoughtful. Or if the one who 'forgot' to get her anything had been a little more appreciative when she asked him to help her out with some of the proceedings that day. I know I'm being vague, but I really just wanted to get this out in the open since it's been festering in me since Christmas day.

Ho ho ho.

So Christmas is just around the corner, and this year that means seeing relatives that I haven't seen in a number of years. A week or two ago I got a call from my biological father. I haven't heard from him in about three years or so. Before that I don't think I had heard from him in about five years. It's hard to know what to think since I can count the number of times I've seen or talked to him in the past ten years on two hands and still have phalanges remaining to stick in my ears and wiggle my fingers at you while making a silly face. Partly it's my fault, sure. The phone does work both ways, and I could pick the phone up any time I wanted and give him a call. It's difficult to track him down sometimes, but not impossible. For some reason I just never get that urge.

The other side of it is that this guy didn't raise me. For most of my life he was in and out of prison for different petty stuff, or just MIA in general. My step-dad has raised me since I was about three. It leaves me a bit conflicted. I almost feel like I'm betraying the man I've thought of as my Dad for as long as I can remember. I've discussed it with my Mom a few times (she's got one o them psychofrackulator degrees), but I've never been able to acheive any sort of resolution in my own mind. I still feel uncomfortable, yet long for the kinds of familial connections that my wife has. Not that my own family isn't tight knit, but they are considerably more reserved than my wife's family. My wife is Hispanic and has a large extended family with more cousins and aunts and uncles than I could even imagine.

I also have three half-sisters, one older and two younger, all of which are from different mothers, none of which I've ever kept up with. I have nephes and neices that I've never seen. I don't dislike that side of the family, I just didn't know them well growing up, so therefore I never bonded with them. I saw them once a year for Christmas, if we lived close enough to make the trip feasible. Can relationships be built (or rebuilt) so late in life?

Can a person's character change enough over the course of a lifetime that they can again be trusted with a familial relationship? I guess I'll find out this weekend.

"Where is fancy bred, in the heart or in the head?"

Every year about this time, Ernie over at Ernie's House of Whoopass (Not always safe for work.) does a little something for our service men and women stationed far away from their families. Ernie's little project is called Let's Bring 'Em Home. Ernie asks for donations of money or even frequent flyer miles which are used to get plane tickets home for soldiers and sailors who can't afford it themselves. Like Ernie says, it's not about who you voted for or whether you belive in what we're doing or not, it's just about getting some of these folks home for the holidays. Go without a half-caf-soy-double-latte for a week and send a few bucks over to LBEH for a good cause.

I guess it's been a while since I read LotR, but I con't remember who the heck these guys are. Apparently I'm one of them though.


Numenorean


To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?
brought to you by Quizilla

Gee, has it really been since July? How time flies when your life is a headlong rush of days whose sameness causes them to melt together indistinguishably. I see that I've been attracting a large number of hits from surfboard vendors for some odd reason. Gotta love automated Spam.

So what have I been up to? Not a whole lot. I get up, eat breakfast, sit in traffic for an hour and a half, listen to people who make three times more than I do and have four times my education cry because they can't figure out how to run a Peoplesoft query or save a Word document, Spend two more hours in traffic on the way home, get to spend a precious hour or two with the one person I'm happy to see all day before she has to go to bed because of her crazy work schedule, then I get up and start all over again. Yes, life is full.

Okay, so it's not all that bad. My wife and I both enjoy our jobs and it's really kind of nice to be on a regular schedule. After working nights, graveyard shifts, weekends and holidays for so long, it's a relief for both of us to have weekends and holidays off together. Our schedules are only a little out of synch since she has to be at work at 3am.

Current Events
Wow...Where to start? I guess the most recent news would be that I'm preparing to have surgery. I have what is known as a Hydroseal on one of my...gentlemen. Okay, so I have a swollen ball. Hooray. Basically one of my testicles has swollen to about four times its normal size. Big Teke Nuts in ya Mouth indeed. According to the doctor this is a "normal" issue. Normally, most guys would be like "Hell yeah! I've got a huge package!" Belive me, though, when I say that it's not comfortable, it's painful in some circumstances and I'll be glad when its fixed. The procedure seems simple enough. They slice open the scrotum, pop out the offending testicle, drain the excess fluid, cut open the sac that surrounds the testicle, flip it inside-out, then sew everything back up. Why are you guys out there crossing your legs?

Additionally, I apparently have gout, or at least a pre-gout condition. "WTF!?" you might say. I know I said it. I don't eat rich foods or drink heavily, but nevertheless my uric acid count in my bloodwork is abnormally high. I'm also not in any joint pain and I have no swollen or painful toes. So I did a bit of research. High uric acid levels can be caused by a number of things, the end result of which after a number of years, would be gout. One of the things that can cause high uric acid levels? Obesity. Guess it's time to dust off the diet and exercise equipment. Oh well, I've been needing to lose some weight anyway.

Insert Anecdote Here
So my wife and I were discussing my upcoming surgery when she recalled an event that happened a few years back on my birthday (which is coming up January 12th for those of you who want to lavish me with gifts like big screen TVs, Chrysler 300Cs, or a lifetime supply of half-eaten Fig Newtons). Marianne went to buy me a birthday cake from Baskin-Robbins (mmmm...ice cream cake...) and decided to put something funny on the cake. When she got the cake home and took a picture of it, she noticed the wacky foreign guy at the shop had made a minor spelling error. The cake read as follows:

"Happy Birthday to the Man with the Biggest Ball in the World!"

Considering what I'm going to be having surgery for...

"That, my friends, is irony writ large."
-George Carlin