All I want are some Pants!

So a couple weeks ago, I got the itch to go out and buy some new clothes for work. That itch to get new clothes happens about once every year or two, so I figured I'd better go out and buy some clothes while I was in the mood, rather than waiting until my darling wife ridicules me that my pants are full of holes in rather inappropriate areas and forces me to go. Off to Pennys we went.

I just started grabbing anything that looked remotely close to being good and loaded up said lovely wife. After trying on over a half a dozen pairs of pants and as many shirts, I had myself a nice little haul, including 4 new pairs of pants. Unfortunately, of the 4, I was going to have to order 3 pairs because, apparently, "scrawny" isn't a size they normally stock. You can probably sense the impending doom coming.

A girl comes over to help up and I tell her that I need to get three pairs of pants ordered. Of the three, she can order one pair, but isn't sure what color the pants are. They're olive pants with a pinstripe and the closest she can find is "khaki." Fine. Go with it. The black pants aren't available. She can't decide if the brown pants are petrol or sienna and the girls all have a huge discussion over it (even calling another department) until one girl comes over and simply scans the pants and says, "They're bark." Oh my - didn't that cause all sorts of hand-waving freak-outery. Bark simply wasn't an option. Okay, fine. Don't order those. So, by the time we left, instead of having 4 new pairs of work pants, I have 1 pair and 1 pair on order that may or may not be the correct color.

I get home and look up the brown (that's bark, for those of you keeping score at home) pants that I wanted and find them on the Penny's website after a couple minutes of searching. You see, Petrol and Sienna are listed, but, if you think like a rocket scientist for a moment and scroll down, you find bark at the bottom portion of the list. So I order my own bark pants and have the shipped to my house. I have to pay for shipping, now, because it's not going to the store, but I care not.

A couple days later, I go to the store to pick up my pants and, thank God, they're the right color. I was almost dreading going to pick them up because I suspected that I'd have to go through the whole order process again to get the right bloody color.

As for the bark pants? Supposedly, the post office got them a couple weeks ago, but they still haven't made it to my house.

They're PANTS, people! This should not be that difficult!




Okay. That aside, what else has been going on, lately?

Work has been okay, although I've found out recently that the project I'm supposed to be working on was also sent to another team to work on. So now I have to wait around for someone to decide which team is actually going to do the project so that the other folks can go on doing other things.

Had a rather humorous moment the other day, though. I was in one of our unit meetings, in which I sit around with a bunch of people that I only see at these meetings and we talk about things that, supposedly, impact all of us, but usually don't. In the meeting, I'm sitting next to a guy from another division. I vaguely know him, in the fact that we attend these meetings together but, aside from that, I never see him. I kinda doubt he even knows my name, but it's no big deal. Imagine my surprise when, at the conclusion of the meeting, he turns to me and says, "Hey Corey - I saw your name in a book I'm reading." Apparently, he's reading one of the Java books I worked as an editor on. Just kinda funny, really.

Outside of work, life is far more fun.

Our softball team finally won a game, in our final outing of the season, no less. I moved from outfield to shortstop for the game and, aside from feeling horribly uncomfortable because my perspective of the field was all skewed, I didn't really screw up. And for probably the first time all season, we had our bats going and scored some runs. Man, it sure felt good to win at least one game, this season. I'm not really sure what'll happen next year. I think a lot of folks were pretty turned off by just how bad our team was, this year. We'll see, I guess.

Liz and I made a trip back to Wisconsin a couple weeks ago to visit Nate at their cabin. I'd never been there, before, but he planned a weekend for a bunch of us high school buddies to go up there, eat poorly, and get suburned on the lake. Unfortunately, half the crew failed to make it, so it ended up being Nate, myself, and Lagatta, as well as our spousal units (Nate excluded from the spousal unit list). Regardless, we had a fabulous time. That's how all weekends should be, really. We sat around a fire chatting all night and eating brats. The next day, we cruised around the lake drinking far too much beer and lying about Nate's pontoon boat. Fabulous. Those that weren't there severely missed out.

My birthday is coming up and, with it, the usual questions of what to get me for my birthday. And, as usual, I have no idea. I'm one of those immediate gratification bastards that just buys whatever he wants when he wants it. As such, there's little that I wait to have for birthdays and such. Fortunately for us, though, my list of wants usually includes just food, drink, and the occasional video game (and, rarely, a pair of pants, as illustrated above). However, if you're pining over something to get me for my birthday, office toys would be an excellent option. Something that you can do crazy stuff with, like these or these (first spotted on the Colbert Report - hooray Colbert!). Or perhaps something simple and remarkably geeky, like a Newton's Cradle. If, however, you have no ambition to get me anything for my birthday, no worries. I ask only that you have a beer in my honor.

I suppose that's enough babbling out of me for one day. Later, folks.

It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Hurricane Ditka!

So it's been quite a while since my last update. Let me try to recap all that's happened over the last couple weeks.

A couple weeks ago, we decided to take a spur of the moment weekend trip up north of the cities with a couple friends of ours. The plan was to camp out and spend some time on the lake on their boat. Perhaps we'd go to the casino that's nearby. We were camping on his uncle's land (right where his grandpa lives) and his uncle has two campers set up there - he goes up there quite a bit. We were welcomed to use the campers, but Liz and I decided it would fun to get the tent out, anyway, as we hadn't used it all Summer. It went up easily enough, although Liz had removed a couple of the tent stakes to stake things down in the garden and neglected to replace them. No big deal, though.

Well, it was no big deal until about 3 in the morning and a massive thunderstorm hit. I was laying there, awakened by a noise that sounded something like a rushing train. But, at three o'clock, I wasn't exactly awake. Well, I was certainly awake when Hurricane Ditka came crashing down on us and instantaneously pushing the top of the tent down under its wrath and lifting the bottom of the tent up into it's jaws where we were missing tent stakes.

Fortunately, Hurricane Ditka was just warming up. Liz and I stepped outside into what was really just a lot of wind and plenty of lightning. The tent came down in record time (I suspect 5 minutes or less) and we high-tailed it over to my friend's grandpa's house. So, at three in the morning, we came barging into some old guy's house and spent the night in relative comfort.

The rest of the weekend went far more to plan. Some boating, some gambling at the casino. Lots of sitting by the fire drinking and eating hot dogs. We also introduced our friends to the wonder that is pudgie pies.

Aside from that bit of excitment, most things have been pretty normal around here. I go to work everyday and then Liz and I usually either hit the gym or have a soccer/softball game in the evening. Our softball team continues to be miserable. We haven't won a game, yet, and, in all honesty, I'm one of the best players on the team, which is really depressing because....well...if any of you have seen me play softball, you'd know. We have our final game this Thursday - our last hope to not go winless on the season. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure I know what the result is going to be, already.

This weekend, Liz and I will be taking off for the green land known as Wisconsin for Nate's "Super Happy Fun" weekend at the cabin. I have no idea what we'll be doing, but I suspect cards, food, and drink will all be involved. Perhaps some shenanigans, as well. We'll see. Hurricane Ditka is officially not invited.

Also, Liz and I planned out a vacation to Seattle next month. Well, I use "planned" in the weakest sense possible. We really just bought airplane tickets, booked a hotel, and reserved a rental car. Aside from that, we have absolutely nothing planned. Should be fun, though. They have this place where people chuck fish at one another. Rock on.

Football season is coming up. The wife and I caught a glimpse of NFL action the other night when we flipped on the tube to see the Raiders of Oakland taking on the Eagles of Philadelphia. Of course, it was the 4th quarter of the season's first preseason game...the announcers had actually stopped doing any sort of play-by-play as I'm guessing they didn't know who any of the players were, nor cared to learn. It was much more like an episode of The Tonight Show, only with John Madden in the place of Johnny Carson and Al Michaels in the place of Ed McMahon...only they used a football game as the background and it wasn't particularly funny. The uniforms on the players looked legit, though, so I think they really were NFL players. Don't know what was up with the ref's jerseys, though - they're whack.

So I suppose, with football season upon us, I need to start thinking about getting fantasy football started. I'm sure I'll think about it a bit more before I actually do anything about it. For now, though...food. I'm hungry.

Later.