Saw the President, got a Guinness sign, watched my cats… strange day!

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What’s up today? Well, it started with some mega-thunderstorms that rolled through and dropped a beat-down on Portsmouth. Now it’s just hot and muggy.

I got a completely kick-ass neon Guinness sign for my house yesterday. Two of my office mates went over to help clean out the old building and claimed it for me. So, huge props to Mel and Bryan – I’m extremely pumped. It needs a new bulb, but who cares. To a big Guinness fan like myself, this thing is completely kick ass!

I saw the President today! He traveled to Portsmouth to do some sort of meeting at a local high school and landed at the Pease International Trade Port. I work on the trade port, and went down the road to see if I could catch a look at the motorcade as it went by. Well, not two minutes after parking and walking over to the side of the road it came by. How cool is that!? I saw the big Presidential limo and the big motorcade of SUVs and police cruisers drive by. It was sort of surreal. Not ten feet from me was the President of the United States. I felt, and still feel all patriotic.

pres-limo
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Make your own Ice Cream sandwhich day…

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I’m not bubbling with excitement to be back in the office today. I feel like the past five weekends have been so busy that I never really had much time to chill. So, being monday (again), I’m feeling a little bit like I’m done with this week already.

Well, what can one do to improve one’s attitude at work? That’s simple… make ice cream sandwiches! I just ran out and grabbed a gallon of Cookie Dough ice cream and bag of chocolate Chip Cookies and announced it was “make your own ice cream sandwich day”. There was a veritable stampede. Good stuff.

make-your-own-cookie-day

Now, two sandwiches and a bowl of ice cream later, I feel like it may actually turn out to be “get sick in the bathroom after a major sugar rush” day. Yikes. I can feel my heart pounding and I feel like cornholio from Beavis and Butthead. I could push the limit and get a NOS energy drink from the vending machine, but I’m not certain I’d survive.

Speaking of NOS, we (Jamie G and I) made what could arguably be the worlds first Office NOS can wind chime. The design is a little cheesy, and is basically an empty NOS can taped to a desk, but it’s a wind chime to us. Now all we need is a little breeze in here to make it chime (bang against the desk).

What the hell is wrong with us?

50 people, tons of food, more beer than any baby shower ‘really’ needed

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Phew… I can’t tell you how relieved I am that the baby shower is over, and the day went off without a hitch. I’ve been all worked up about the number of guests, the size of our place, the white trash in the area, and the various home projects we needed to get done beforehand. But, as is the case is most instances, I made a bigger deal of it than really needed to be.

Aside from the near-fire in the grill, and threat of rain, it was great day. Thanks to everyone that helped get everything together. It took two weeks to get things ready, three hours to have the party, and 30 mins to break everything down… then, it’s all in the past!

There was some benefit of hosting the party at our place. As I’ve mentioned, we did a lot of house updates to try and “spiff the place up”. We re-did the back deck and one of the bathrooms, built a fence and landscaped in the backyard. Now that it’s all over, I’m just happy to have the updates done. The place is looking nice.

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police, eggs, cleaning, computer format, and 50 people at my house tomorrow… yikes!

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Today really covered the bases. I’m not sure if I can do it justice in a quick post, but let’s try.

First off, we woke up at 7:30am to pounding bass from the neighbor coming through the bedroom wall. Make no mistake, this was not “kinda loud”. I’m talking “jump up in bed, it’s 7-eff’n-30 in the morning, what the hell are you thinking?” sort of loud. I got all pissed off and started cursing, while my wife walked outside and and knocked on the neighbors door, half asleep, to ask if they can maybe turn it down. She had to bang a few times just to get them to hear her.

When they did finally come to the door, the neighbor said they would “take care of it” in a crass, rude tone and slammed the door in my 8-month pregnant wife’s face. Not shut it, but shook the entire front of the house. I tell you, these people are a piece of work.

Well a few minutes later, considering the music continued to bang against our wall, we called the police. A further two minutes later, a cruiser arrived to find the neighbors sitting in plastic chairs with a little plastic table on the front porch smoking. Music was echoing out the door behind them. The porch is common area, they are not even supposed to be out there settled in and smoking – but don’t even get me started on that.

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House party, white trash, tenders and beers… TGIF!

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Ok couple things today…

First off – {insert name here}, stay out of my way. You are nothing but drunk white trash. We know, the police know, my lawyer knows, and you need to tread extremely lightly around me. You can’t win this, so don’t try or you will just look more stupid than you do already.

Second, I’m crazy nervous about this weekend’s baby shower at the house. I’m at least 80% sure I will be calling the police on the neighbor. In fact, I’m almost looking forward to it. Assuming things don’t go that way (and I’m sure they will), we have two days left to get everything together so the day goes well. The house is cleaning up, the back yard is all cleaned up, the fence is up and we are both doing everything we can to ensure everything is in place. 50 people in my house is going to be ludicrous.

But, the party is at most three hours baby! I need only last three hours. Then it will all be behind me. Ok, to be honest I’m sure it will go fine. I’m just overwhelmed with things that need to still be done. I’m usually pretty busy anyway with work, band, freelance and whatnot. Add this sort of thing into the mix and life tends to get a little crazy.

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Network games at the office… hell yes!

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Dump this in the “it can’t hurt to ask” category…

I work in a fairly modern, laid back, technology-based based company. We are about 60 employees, most of which are technical staff (web dev, apps, creative, IT, etc..). Therefore, it’s not unnatural to assume that some of us (if not most) are gamers to some degree.

Well we just moved offices, as I’ve mentioned before, and seem to be launching new efforts to promote internal collaboration and inter-office communication. Well, I sent this long-winded email to our CEO asking if we can set up a network game to play after hours. I reasoned it would create some more energy in the office and help build relationships between teams.

I didn’t expect approval, we are pretty anal about what we do with the machines/software in the office. Well, turns out it can’t hurt to ask – he said go for it, just keep it on the low-down.

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Milly’s show last night was great.

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The show in Manchester last night was a great time, thanks to all that came out! I felt the energy on the stage was the best yet. Normally I just hide in the shadows and focus on my guitar lines, but for some reason I really got into it and ended up taking over a lot of the stage. Maybe it was because we had a decent sound guy and I didn’t get frustrated with the crappy stage sound that usually plagues our Milly’s sets. What ever the reason, I loved it.

This was also the second show I played with my recently modified Ibanez JS100. The original bridge (TRS Trem II) was crap and all worn out so I invested in an “Original Floyd Rose” to replace it.

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