600’s A Charm??

So here I sit, knowing that I am writing my 600th blog post, which I will tell you upfront is not exactly accurate because of my fondness for being lazy reposts. But, I have pushed Blogger’s little ‘publish’ button 600 times, so I have no problem taking the credit. After all, assuming I have used my same index finger to push the mouse button to hit ‘publish’ all previous 599 times, I have expended a decent enough amount of energy. My first instinct is to look back fondly on many of my past post topics much the same way Mike Rowe does on Dirty Jobs after about every 25 episodes. I assume this is because of a lack of material on their part. Well, perhaps I am just pushing what I do onto Mr. Rowe. I think that is called ‘transference,’ but I’m really not sure. It could also be called passing the buck or making something up to complete a paragraph.

Whew, one paragraph down on my 600th post. If this pace keeps up, I will have completed the most boring and self-centered post ever written in no time! I wanted this one to be memorable, but since there are no really good faux holidays (Hi, Kat!!) until the end of the week I am on my own to come up with decent material, like denim. That’s a decent material. So is khaki, plus that one is fun to say and makes me think of tropical expeditions with pith hats and crocodiles. Oh wait, that’s the Jungle Cruise. Still, as far as material goes, khaki is where it’s at for me. Did I just type ‘where it’s at?’ Was I subject to reruns of ‘Laugh In’ while I slept this weekend? Sock it to me, that was bad. Uh-oh, did it again. At this point we can officially conclude that you should not blog while suffering a deficiency of oxygen. Translated – irregular heartbeats = irregular thought processes. Though that will be solved Tuesday morning, but more about that fun later!

I’ve read a few news stories lately that caught my attention. The first was the minor league baseball team in the Midwest that gave away a funeral during one of its games. That has to be one of the greatest giveaways ever. Though it didn’t happen, how great would it have been if little 7 year-old Timmy in section 5C Row 117 Seat 3 won the ‘prize package?’ As the cost of funerals and burials and other ‘now that you are dead’ costs rise over the next several decades, think what a cool customer Timmy would be knowing that his burials plans have been secured. Unless the mortuary company goes out of business, leaving him with completely useless burial plans as if you were the holder of frequent flier miles from some low-scale economy airline named something like U-Fly U-Sav or Econo-Air, or possibly Delta, that had to declare bankruptcy. I can just see Timmy right now in his 80s on his knees in a parking lot where his gravesite would have been doing his best ‘Stella’ or ‘Why?’ It’s very sad…

Then their was the story I mentioned in a recent podcast where a homeless woman in Japan was caught living in some guy’s closest…for a year. Seriously, if she got away with that for a year, I’m pretty sure that takes away her ‘homeless’ status. Though there are probably no official rules or handbook to refer to, you’d have to think that one year in the same closet is enough to qualify as having a home, don’t you. I mean it’s not as if I can say I’m unemployed while working in the same office for a year. Though I wonder if I could not come in for one year and say I AM employed. Hmmm, vacation time and my mom would think I’m a contributing member of society. I shall have to ponder this.

What finally got this squatter (why do I dislike the word squat so much, by the way) caught was that the owner noticed that food was missing. Yeah, it took him a year to figure this out. Do they have super big rats in Japan that a homeowner could assume was removing food from his domicile? ‘Honey, where’s the ham we bought last week?’ ‘Oh, I’m sure the rats got to it.’ I think that is officially the downward turn of mankind when an excuse like that is acceptable. Unless the downward turn is when we care about the goings on of people like Paris and Britney, or that we know people like Paris or Britney by their first names only, or the fact that people make good money photographing people like Paris or Britney coming out of a grocery store. Oh holy crap, our downward spiral has begun. Quick, to the Y2K bunker!!! Don’t laugh, now you are wishing you had built one…

Did the homeowner not catch on when he kept turning on his DVR only to see that 15 soap operas and Oprah had been recorded? I don’t know about you, but when mysterious programs start popping up on the TiVo, I begin to get suspicious. What about when those programs started disappearing from his TiVo. I don’t know about you, but when mysterious programs disappear from my TiVO, I begin to get suspicious. Yes, you are right, if only I would put as much attention towards my job as I do my TiVo. But, I ask you, does your job allow up to rewind, pause and playback in slow-mo things as they are happening in real time? Yeah, I thought not!!

There are other topics I could throw at you for this 600th post, like the fact that I can’t keep putting off removing all my Saturday Night Fever and Bee Gees songs from my Ipod. I say this because I do keep my Ipod playing loudly at work and do sometimes walk away from my desk only to hear ‘More Than A Woman’ blaring as I return to cubicle hell from doing something important like buying a Diet Dr. Pepper or a candy bar or going down the street to buy ice cream or running to the office’s shared printer after realizing I printed something that was not work related. Why I ask you does disco have such a stigma? There is nothing wrong with being a Disco Discerson! After all, you cannot do the hustle to Motley Crue. I tried, granted it was way back in the 7th grade, but I seriously doubt the laws of gravity, motion and musical pulsating have changed all that much since then. The fact that I was fully versed in disco by age 13 is a whole other problem to be tackled later while you are all drunk and cannot remember what you have read.

Well, I guess I have sufficiently written enough to qualify as a post because if I have learned only one thing over the last 599 posts (and believe me, the likelihood is quite strong that I indeed have only learned one thing), it’s that quantity always trumps quality. So, I will hit the publish button for the 600th time and start towards the next 100, although good ideas are getting hard to come by. Which reminds me, how do you feel about reading my opinion on the increase of gas prices as it has affected the purchases of minivans as it relates to the drop in demand for sippy cups that really are leak proof? Or how the coming of summer directly affects the global warming of the second story of my home? You know, I realized I am about to wrap up my 600th post and have yet to mention cheese or slip in a TWSS. That reminds me, I was telling someone at work about the quesadilla I made with 4 different kinds of cheese and topped with Chiptole Tabasco over the weekend. She responded that she’d like to get her hands on that. I responded with a firm and confident ‘that’s what she said.’ There, that takes care of that. And now, index finger, meet the publish button…


**This may be my last post for a few days, but it’s not because I’m resting on my 600 laurels. It’s because I get to show up at the hospital at 5am Tuesday morning (only about 4 ½ hours before I normally stumble into the office) to have a cardioversion (also known as the shocky shocky or ‘the paddles,’ if you ever watched ‘Emergency’ growing up). I’ll be released Tuesday afternoon if all goes well and then will be able to recharge 9-volt batteries just by licking them. Ok, I made that up, but THIS shocking will mark my 10th cardioversion, granting me access to the elusive Double Digit Club (which I made up, but it’s the only club I’ve ever belonged to, except for the BBQ Club we tried to start in high school, but it wasn’t officially recognized).

It might actually be my 11th cardioversion, but major league baseball has put an asterisk next to the first one I had because it didn’t work. Now I know how Roger Maris felt. See ya later in the week and thanks for reading my daily mental purges! I promise they’ll get better once I have a sufficient amount of blood being pumped throughout my body again. Heck, maybe my left foot will once again work properly, although I guess that has nothing to do with writing…