Doctor's Visit

So, I finally went to the doctor yesterday to have my wrist examined...yes, more than 2 weeks later. The whole experience left me in a state of total "THAT'S WHY I HATE GOING TO THE DOCTOR". My appointment was at 11:20 am...I was taken into the back room to see the nurse practitioner at 12 pm. During my stay in the waiting room, I had the pleasure of conversing with an older gentlemen who clearly suffered from Alzheimers. He looked to be in his early-to-mid seventies, and was waiting for his wife, who was in the back having bloodwork done. He repeatedly made the same observations and asked the same questions over and over again, making the duration of my stay in the waiting room very uncomfortable:

(5 times)
Old G: Going to see Doctor F?
The Hag: Yup.
Old G: He's a great doctor. He's tough. He eats rails and shits spikes.

(3 times)
Old G: You gotta get up on the table and dance, move those feet.
The Hag: (to myself): WTF? I have no idea what he's saying.
Old G: You gotta shake the hips for the ladies.
(The receptionist looked my way on the 3rd and final time that he said this, and gave me a funny little smirk that said "You're nice for humoring him" to which I responded with a grimace that said "Like I have a frigging choice")

(3 times...twice to me...once to another guy in the room)
Old G: You see this (pointing to the Bruins logo on his jacket)?
The Hag: Yessir...go Bruins.
Old G: Yup...everyone loves them when they're winning. When the guy comes over to service my boiler, and he sees all the Bruins stuff I got in my basement, I tellim' "Don't touch...Don't want to break your fingers".
The Hag: (fake laughing) Yeah. I bet.

After spending a very awkward 5 minutes with this gentleman, I decided that I needed to extricate myself from the conversation. I executed the very effective "Stare at my cellphone with a very serious face, and pretend to read emails and make fake phonecalls". He got the point, and moved on. I really did feel bad for the guy, but it was one of those situation where I didn't want people to think I was associated with him because he was saying some really screwy stuff.

Outcome: The nurse performed a few preliminary health checks (seeing as how I haven't been in awhile), looked at my wrist, and then referred me to a radiologist for X-rays. I Haven't heard back yet. Oh well.

Ay Caramba! The Bomber strikes again!!

OK, so here's the deal: I went to the Black Rose tonight with the Bomber for a few drinks. It was "a Guinness Night" (i.e. a Guinness sponsored evening), so we had to register at the "front desk", and sign over our souls. By the time that I had signed in and ordered a beer, all the seats were taken. We ended up sitting next to 2 woman (Jen and Meg), who appeared to be of similiar age to ourselves. I was very cordial with our recent acquaintances, who seemed very cordial in return (we discussed jobs, hobbies, all the related bullcrap, etc). I wish I could say the same for Bombs: 20 minutes into the conversation with Jen, he said something along the lines of "You are useless". Apparently, she had told him that she had a boyfriend, and he responded with the aformentioned statement. For you see, Bombs is very "up front" with females when it comes to their potential "hook-upmanship", and will state his intentions within the first 30 minutes of engagement. I, however, am happily married, and will pretty much talk to anyone about anything.......SO, I ended up listening to these 2 chicks cluck about how my best friend, the Bombs, is a dick. I, of course, stuck up for him by saying "Look...he was honest....he's not wasting your time, right? Get over it!". Needless to say, he owed me mass quantities of beer for having thrust me into said conversation (all I wanted was a few free Guinness...Guinnesses....Guinni). Afterwards, we headed over to "The Tap", where Ultimate Fighting was on "The Big Screen", and all was forgotten. Evan Tanner, you ageless wonder!

Point of Comedic Reference Catalogue

I headed over to my friend's place yesterday evening to pick up a few borrowed items, and on my way over, I left a voice message for him: "This is Red Dog One. I'm coming to get the Jade Monkey". When he got my message, he asked me, "Do you remember that show?"....to which I replied "Tales of the Golden Monkey...Brass Monkey? No, Gold Monkey...yeah Gold Monkey. Of course I do!". What red-blooded, American male who grew up in the 80's hasn't heard of that show?!? Which brings me to my reason for this post: my friend and I discussed how most of our close friends have a similiar sense of humor, and that the reason for this is because we've seen and enjoyed a lot of the same TV shows, movies, comedians, books, etc. This cumulative library of comedic mishmash, which I'll refer to from this point on as the "Point of Comedic Reference Catalogue"("PCRC"), defines your personal taste in humor. Your PCRC does not necessarily have to be defined by a specific comedic happenstance, either...it's defined by whatever YOU think is hystercially funny. For instance, a midget in a neckbrace, whilst totally unfunny to the midget, is a bellybuster to me. This list will attempt to tackle a small portion of my PCRC (I'll start with some very obvious ones):

The Simpsons (BoBo episode, specifically)
Cheers
Seinfeld
The Far Side
Back to School ("Is she right?" or "Well, Mr. Helper")
Saturday Night Live (with Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo)
Road House (Best Swayze flick....yes, better than "To Wong Fu...")
Tombstone (not supposed to be funny....but it kills me)
Police Academy 1 (alright, I probably watched up to 3, but don't tell anyone)
George Carlin (More stuff)
Robin Williams (His standup when he was on coke was the best)
Bill Cosby, Himself (You got the thing with the thing, and the dooohw, you see?....Rudy!)
Phil Hartman (He was hilarious in everything, except for that movie with Sinbad).
Chris Farley
Gilbert Gottfried (Can I please get an egg salad sandwich? Does anyone, aside from HTE, remember that?)
Red Dawn
Easy Money
Revenge of the Nerds I ("Nerds in Paradise" to a MUCH lesser degree)
Monty Python's "Meaning of Life" & "Holy Grail"
Half Baked
PeeWee's Big Adventure
Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke (The beginning scene where the guy throws the Big Wheel always slayed me).
BeetleJuice ("Nice F'in model!")
Land of the Lost (a well place "Sleestak" comment can go a long way)
You can't do that on Television (Oh, Alistair...will you ever learn?)
Ace Ventura
Thundercats
Minivans with greater than 5 occupants (don't ask, I don't know why, but it's funny to me)
Neckbraces (C'mon...instant laugh getter, right?)
Kneebraces (I have a theory on these, which I may expound upon later)
Midgets (No explanation nesessary)
Midget in a neckbrace (or kneebrace, which I've never actually seen, thankfully...I might possibly die from laughter)

So there's a small glimpse of the foundation of my sense of humor...pretty standard, really. Strangley, one thing that doesn't make me laugh are clowns. Demon bastards.

My recent "Web Awakening"

For someone who's worked with the internet in a professional capacity for quite awhile now, I've been relatively slow to adopt a lot of the new/cool applications out there:

• I've just started blogging this past year.
• I've just started utilizing an online photo manager (Flikr, or Yahoo!, if you will).
• I've just started customizing my Google and Yahoo homepages this past year (I've also looked into tools like netvibes.com so I'm not locked into one proprietary search tool).
• I've just started utilizing del.icio.us this month(social bookmarking).

I guess you could say that I'm way behind the curve, at least in respect to the average 14 year old internet user. It may seem strange as to why I've fallen behind, but there's a perfectly reasonable explanation why I'm a late bloomer: I work with the internet every single waking minute, and can explain to you how each of these sites operate from an architectural perspective (I'm a "big picture" person...I can code here and there, but I'm an architect at heart). I've visited and sold to a large percentage of the online Fortune 500, and I can tell you that I've seen and heard and learned from so many different tech pros about so many "new and improved web apps" that it would make your head spin. Previous to my recent "web awakening", it would come down to the fact that after being immersed in it for every waking minute during the work week, I've wasn't that interested in playing on the web during my free time. I'm still not (except for blogging every now and then). And this is what I've realized...it's not about "playing", it about being more efficient and productive in my own personal life. These tools are great because they make it so I can spend less time on the web (or less time doing the boring, menial tasks that we all hate...how many times have you had to recreate your bookmarks because Windows crashed? How many time have I worried about losing all the photos on my home computer because of a hard drive malfunction?). So, yeah...I WAS slow to adapt to the new web, but now I'm all "c'mere, you beautiful bastard". It's all going to be mobile in a few years anyway, so I might as well get used to it, right?

Am I the only one who was slow on the uptake?

BTW: http://openomy.com/ is a great little app for online file storage (1 gigbyte of free data). Check it out!

Smoked Meats = Lots of work.

Has anyone else gotten caught up in the "Smokin' my own meat" craze?? My parents recently gave me a smoker as a Christmas gift, and I took the plunge yesterday afternoon by inviting over the family for a smoked-meat-fest. Actually, to be more exact, I took the plunge Friday afternoon (purchasing the meats), a large portion of Friday evening (carefully concocting the correct dry rub and applying it to a 10 lb pork loin and 2 racks of spareribs), and pretty much all day Saturday (preparing the smoker, smoking the meat, glazing it, broiling it, serving, eating it, etc, etc). I never knew how much work is required to smoke your own...it's a process and a half! Not to mention the fact that the first time you do it, it's REALLY hard to trust the process...I found myself lifting the cover every half hour to make sure that there was still smoke, and that the meat was cooking. Anyway, long story short, I cooked it on too high a temperature for too long , and the resulting meat were favorful because of the rubs, but a little tough (i.e overdone). Next time, I'm setting the smoker on LOW LOW and cooking for HOURS AND HOURS. Slow and low, that's what they say.

Aside from that business, I had a great time with C&K&the kids and M&D. M&D stayed for the whole Pats game after dinner, and we had a fun time. I drank a few beers during the game (6-7), and woke up feeling a little "off". Oh well...Viva La Smoker!