Friday!!

It is Friday!

...and that's all I have to say about that.

:-)

US vs. World News

I had heard from my international friends that US news tends to have a different bend to it, either it has more of a fear mongering tone to it or the important stories get buried because they're either "not important to Americans" or don't fit the agenda of the news agency. Also, my US friends traveling abroad and trying to catch up with the news would see stories (really important stories) that never made it over to the states or stories presented in a much more rational sense.

But actually seeing this for myself really pissed me off:

Are you kidding me CNN??? "Wabbits" have the same newsworthiness as Burma??

Please Let It Rain!

Would someone tell Mother Nature to get off her ass and turn on the faucet for the rain clouds already!!??

It's beyond humid right now and the air has taken a consistency of a nice chicken broth, so if you so much as even think about walking around you'll get coated in a nice skin of sweat. *shudder*

Hopefully though, we'll have a nice thunderstorm which will help to cut the humidity and actually bring about that elusive season called Fall that seems to be making smaller and smaller appearances in recent years. When I was a kid (which is really not that long ago) I remember that there was a clear change from summer to fall and that we had a full season called fall that brought chilly temperatures and crisp clear air before the winter set in. What has happened to this season?!

Brane No Werk Goood

Dammit, I left my cellphone at home! I hate that! $%&^@#%$%

So if you ring-a, I no hear-a. :-(
(I love that corny phrase. There's this wings delivery place near my apartment that uses "if you ringa, we bringa" on their delivery menu and I never get a chance to use that phrase to my benefit, but I finally can now!)

Apartment Dragon

And J was most kind enough to buy me a dragon to stand watch over my apartment!

RAWR!!!!!

IKEA and Target Pillaging

The weekend was filled with gathering up goodies for J's new place and also gathering up new things for my apartment as well. Things to help with that whole "after-college apartment" to "home" transition. Not that I was sitting on box crates or anything like that before, but after this weekend my apartment is definitely much more like a "home."

So I got myself some real kitchen chairs (yes, I was using folding chairs before, BE QUIET!!):


And since I got my new bed recently, I brought my old twin bed (yes, I was actually still sleeping on a twin bed) into my living room and made a nice couch/daybed out of it with the addition of many pillows and fluffy backrest thingies. Then, I updated the kitchen cabinets with some nice polished chrome knobs and handles to replace the old, tarnished copper ones that kind of made you cringe when you touched them. *shudder*

And I was actually good when I went into Target to get the handles I had my eyes set on, I only got the things I needed and I stayed to my list. Normally when I so much as enter Target I run around with a carriage like a viking, pillaging and conquering each department leaving nothing behind besides bloody store associates who got into my path and empty shelves and clothing racks. But that didn't happen, thankfully. I've hung up my horned helmet for now only to be used again when my sister needs to start looking for a place and needs to stock up her apartment. Then I shall don the helmet again and retake Europe...er, I mean Target...

pwned!

From one of the message boards I frequent:

[A comment from a creationist]
One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn't possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it.

[to which someone posing as "the sun" retorted back with]

NOW WHAT M*THERF*CKER!!?!

Moral: Don't piss off the sun, he will invariably join your forum and pwn your ass!

It Must Be Fall...

...because I'm wearing these babies...

Man, I remember these things, has it been a year already?? I've definitely grown a sentimental attachment to these boots because they've been on me during one of my first trips back into Manhattan for a nice shopping binge (that I was good and didn't participate in, merely browsed). They even have some nice "subway damage" for extra authenticity; one of the heels has a huge gouge from when I was running and landed the heels smack dab in the center of a metal grate. You can call it a defect, I call it "added character."

And it's definitely been a while because my feet are hurting a bit, but it's nothing some nice gel insoles can't fix. :-)

Falling Off the Planet

This is a term I give to people that have disappeared from the face of my personal "earth" or social stratosphere, so to speak. It's an offshoot of the Irish proverb, "a man is never too drunk if he can at least grab a blade of grass and not fall off the earth," just minus the drinking part. It's kind of implying that you're never not my friend unless you can at least keep in minimal contact with me, an email every now and then, a text message or some other "blade of grass." (And YAY for double negatives! I like to test my friend's logic as well. :-P )

I'm not going to mention details about why I'm bringing this up, but I'm just putting this out there.

Random Cute Thing

HAPPY DANCE!

Nonstop Weekend, Saturday

Saturday was interesting in the mind-numbing sense of the word. I was expecting my mattress to be delivered between 9AM and 1PM (which really means somewhere between 9AM and my death) so I enlisted the help of my sister so that I wouldn't be alone driving myself crazy waiting for the mattress and also, you never know with delivery people (power in numbers!).

So after much pacing around and catching up with my sister, 1PM rolls around and I am beyond pissed. Look, I know it's not a huge deal that the mattress came at 1:30PM instead of within the time frame, however, you do realize how large of a window the hours between 9AM and 1PM are, right? You do also realize how much of a pain in the ass it is to wake up for 9AM, especially on a Saturday morning after I was hanging out with someone. Also, the fact that I inconvenienced my sister to also wake up and come over to my apartment for 9AM as well.

DON'T PROMISE ME 9AM-1PM IF YOU CAN'T DO IT. Tell me a more reasonable time then, "sometime after Noon." That I'd respect much more than an artifical time frame you're telling me just to "keep me happy."

And yes, it's only an extra half hour, but I was waiting 4 hours already for this thing and was beyond pissed dealing with customer service on the phone with these people where I waiting about half an hour on the phone waiting for someone to contact the driver about where the f*ck he was.

And I do realize how much of a pain in the ass traffic in the tri-state can be, but c'mon...Even if you were coming up from New York and had to make a delivery in Windsor, that means you had to pass by my neck of the woods, how come I could't get my mattress first?

They Really Make These Things...

You know what, that would actually totally f*cking rule if there would be all out duels in the office. That would definitely help that mid-afternoon slump if you had to defend your honor against your cubicle neighbor. He shall rue the day that he dare disturb your peace with loud NPR!!!

Nonstop Weekend, Friday

This weekend was one of those wonderful weekends that involved a lot of different people and took me to a bunch of different places, a smorgasbord so to speak.

First off, was a great night out with J where he took me around his neck of the woods. First off was a great dinner at Bravo in Fairfield. Great food and wine and they have a great patio to eat outside on which I have to admit is a favorite thing of mine. The novelty of eating outside still hasn't worn off in me.

Then it was off to hear some jazz, funk and some other good types of live music at Acoustic Cafe. I love this place because they have this really funky and ecclectic atmosphere, kind of reminded me of some places I visited in Providence. They had great murals and artwork featured inside and these awesome booths that you could sit and drink from while you listened to the bands play.

Afterwards, me and J decided to see Shoot 'em Up which I still think was a good idea to see. It was probably one of the worst movies I've seen, but it was absolutely hilarious to watch. Even Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 67%, so that has to mean something...right? And, oh yeah, Clive Owen is in it as well, where he really likes his carrots...

Random Cute Thing

Well, I have my semi-daily Mitchism, so I figure I'd add something else to this blog to give it some more regularity. (Beside having it eat a salad.)

RANDOM CUTE THING!


WINTER SOCK MONKEY!!!
*girlie squeal*

Snowy Plant Attack

Uh oh, maybe it's time to start feeding Snowy...

You can't eat those ya bastard!

Wakey, wakey!

Maybe this will stop me from slapping my alarm like it owes me money and then resetting it for another 15 minutes every morning.

IKEA 31337

If you go to my home page and check out the newest addition to my "Web Obsessions" on my sidebar you will see a nifty site that shows you different ways of modding your IKEA furniture. So if you are bored with things around your place and want to change it up a bit, take a look-see around this site.

IKEA is the crack of furniture and I am highly addicted. And thanks to J for letting me in on the madness.

toga...Toga...TOGA!!

Well, it's official, I've decided on a Halloween costume. Not as Mr. Belushi from Animal House, however, that's a great one for one of you fellas out there. Instead, I will be going as my namesake, Eris:





I prefer the later likeness myself. And this costume gives me the excuse of wearing an awesome toga. :-)

HAIL ERIS! ALL HAIL DISCORDIA!

Last One Standing

Here's a picture of the last column recovered from the World Trade Center courtesy of AM New York.

Photos from Hangar 17

Hangar 17 in JFK Airport is where the structural debris from Towers 1 & 2 are being held. Here's a link to the AM New York photo display so that you can have a look. **Edited 9/7/09: New link to MSNBC article, AM NY became a dead link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14789146**

6 years ago today, I had decided to skip Multi-Variable Calculus and slept in, I was then going to go have brunch with my roommate. We went into the dining hall and heard that the radio was turned up all the way and everyone looked worried and extremely nervous.

I am now a structural engineer, at the time that this happened I was studying to become one. I was fortunate enough to have studied under some of the best professors and engineers in the field, one in particular was Prof. DeWolf. About a year later from the attack, I had him for structural analysis and one day he came into class with the full, de-classified structural reports and he allowed us to use them and study what had happened for about a week or so.

I'd like to close with the advice that someone once gave me when they found out I was a structural engineer, "don't let it happen again."

BloggerChick!

I joined the club and started drinking the Kool-Aid!

http://izzymom.com/join-bloggerchicks

If you are a cool chick who likes to blog as well, I suggest you join up. All the cool kids are doing it!

So go to my homepage and check out the new sidebar blogroll of other BloggerChick mamas.

$$$ :-(

I am broke.

Why?

Scroll down and read the rest of the posts!

:-(

Oh well, at least it's money well spent.

New Bed

So this is roughly what it'll look like:

Except that the comforter is a "boxed quilt" meaning that it's stitched and is actually a comforter. The one pictured is a "coverlet" which means I'd have to buy that along with another comforter which is just silly to me, I want a comforter not a shell to a comforter!

And yeah, it's microsuede...

I'm so happy and thankful to be able to finally afford this bed, I've been drooling over it for a couple years now. And it wasn't actually that expensive compared to the exorbidant prices spent in the bedding world these days, so I'm very happy.

Cheap skate 'til the end!!

Highway Robbery!

So over the weekend I decided to finally take the plunge and buy myself a new bed. Something that is actually mine and is actually a decent size bed, not that my bed before was that bad, but it was neither of those two things that I mentioned before. We're talking a hand-me-down twin size bed from my grandmother. It was definitely great and served it's purpose, but I'm all grown up now and can afford a new mattress plus, I want the biggest bed possible so that I can brag about it like a proper adult!

So I decided to go about to some different mattress places and see what the wallet damage would be. I check out a discount furniture place and got a nice baseline of what the absolute minimum price would get me (oh yeah, I'm cheap like that). Then I went to another place that was much pricier, but had better quality mattresses and liked to give specials depending on their mood.

So first off, the sales guy was a d*ck. Just a complete, pushy, stereotype of a salesmen. "Try that one, now that one, turn to your side, try that one..." I was going to tell him what I really thought of him and leave in a huff, but I decided to play it cool. So as he came back he asked me what I thought, I told him that I had found something comparable and at a lower price at another store. With that he asked me (very nicely, oddly enough) "well, do you mind if I ask what the price is at this other place?" So I told him, because at this point that was my way of saying "f*ck off," but he then preceded to "go see what his manager would say" about meeting this price.

So we (I schlepped my sister with me) waited a bit and for all we knew, he could have been getting some coffee in the break room instead of "talking to the manager," but I figured I would go along with the song and dance. He comes back and tells me that he's willing to give me the higher quality mattress for the same price as the mattress at the discount competitor, but he'll include the frame and delivery in the price.

So after I picked up my jaw, I managed to walk away with a queen size mattress set with the frame and delivery charge all amounting to 50% less than the retail price for the whole set. Before I wrote out the check I kept checking the paperwork to make sure that there was no fine print that said "oh yeah, and we want your first born child as well," and there wasn't, so I got myself the mattress before the guy would come to his senses. Then me and my sister ran away with the papers just to be sure he didn't change his mind.

I should have brought a gun to the store because that would have explained why I got such a deal. "Oh, well you did hold a gun to his head, that explains it..."

So I haz a real bed now! One I bought with my own, two widdle hands and that'll last me until who knows when. :-)

Now I just hope the sheets that I ordered online will come before the bed does...or else I'll be bummin' it with some blankets until they do arrive.

15 min. turns into 45 min.

Normally it takes me about 15 minutes to drive into work, taking local roads and avoiding the chaos that is I-95 traffic around New Haven. However, today that chaos somehow leaked onto the local main roads of West Haven, for what reason I have no idea. Was there some accident? Did aliens land? Who knows.

All I know is that I'm cranky and another cup of coffee beckons to me from the break room. Yes, I hear you little one, I'll be there shortly.

Alien Memo

What the hell is this?



Apparently, we sent this memo up with the Voyager spacecraft back in 1977 as a way to show potential aliens how to play a record that came along with the spacecraft. My problem comes from that fact that we're trying to show some Being how to play a record who, if they are intelligent enough to find the record, has probably developed a completely different means of communicating than us. So, how can we presuppose that they know what any of this means?

Yeah, we can look at it and go "oh yeah, that's a record and that's the needle you'd use to scrap the record with in order to produce the sound" (unless you were born way after I was and have no idea what these record things are, in that case Wiki up "vinyl record" and you will be amazed at what you find, plus I'll allow you to be my friend again since not knowing what a record is makes me ashamed of knowing you), but how is some completely different life form with a completely different means of communicating going to look at that and think the same thing.

It does look pretty cool though and the thought of an alien memo is kind of cool as well, however until we bump paths I don't think communication will exist between life forms (even though I did like the concept in the movie Contact, but alas, that is just a movie).

Computers are Weird

For some reason, I have this way of affecting computers that I use regularly. These poor metallic beasts end up having weird and funky things happen to them. Perhaps I am a witch? Well, my chem. lab professor back in college accused me of being one since my water wouldn't boil in 4 hours worth of heating, so maybe he was onto something.

Case in point, my glorious (4 GB RAM) desktop at work is one badass piece of machinery. If I could I would marry it I would, just to make my life a whole lot easier, but alas, Congress has not approved human-machine marriages yet (weeps to self). However, ever since I've started using it which is around 3 months so far, weird things keep happening to the installed programs. Weird error messages pop up, commands in AutoCAD and other programs mysteriously change while I'm using the program and the computer will occasionally freeze for no apparent reason and then I'll have to restart it just to get it free again.

My office IT guy called up the big, bad New York boys in my company to fix the problem (while temporarily taking over my computer and fully violating it right in front of me) and they had to do a complete reinstall of AutoCAD just to get it to start printing PDFs properly. Then, while they were surfing around my computer, they recommended a full reinstall since "weird things are happening."

My poor computer is sick or maybe I'm just a witch...we shall never know. I did, however, completely short out the alarm system in our house when I was a kid by simply touching the control panel. BEAT THAT!! Yay for static electricity!