Catch Up Post

It’s been a while since I’ve done a proper post, so I suppose a little catching up is in order.
At work we’re making the upgrade from Microsoft Office 2003 to Office 2007, and as part of the process various training sessions were held in which reps from MS came and discussed some of the changes and new features and to answer any questions.
I’ve been using Office 2007 at home pretty much since it came out, so I’m pretty familiar with it. However, at home I don’t use Outlook, but at work I practically live in it, so on Wednesday I went to one of the training sessions to find out what’s changed in the new version.
At the end of the session they asked some review questions and gave out prizes to the first person to answer the questions. In exchange for saying “The Office Button,” I was rewarded with a Microsoft hat.
I’m not much of a hat person – or terribly inclined to be a corporate shill via the clothes I wear – but who doesn’t like winning stuff?
They also gave away a grand prize to the person on the sign-in sheet who matched the random number that the MS guy picked (which wasn’t me).
The prize was a couple of X-Box 360 games. However, the person who won didn’t have an X-Box 360, so instead he was offered a full copy of Office 2007 Professional, which was actually pretty cool, especially considering that it can cost more than an X-Box 360 system.
Wednesday night Scott came over for Riff Trax night. We watched the Riff of Aeon Flux, and, out of a sense of nostalgia, watched an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Specifically, we watched Manos: The Hands of Fate, which is a perfectly dreadful movie, masterfully mocked by Joel and the Bots.
I had actually intended for us to watch the Ed Wood “classic” Bride of the Monster, but circumstances were such that it wasn’t an option.
On Thursday evening I was invited out to dinner at Outback with Scott, Stacy, and their friend Dawn.
As it would have been silly to drive all the way home to Leesburg and then turn around and drive to Centreville, I decided to head that way straight from work.
The Google driving directions suggested that the trip would take 22 minutes, but as I would be driving at around rush hour I assumed a considerable amount of time would be added to my drive.
This proved to be the case, but, of course, it wasn’t quite enough time. We were supposed to meet at 6. I arrived at around 5:15.
I killed some time by wandering around the Giant grocery store located in the plaza.
As an aside, I do my banking with Chevy Chase – the bank, not the comedian/actor – and every Giant I’ve ever been to either has a Chevy Chase branch inside, or at least a Chevy Chase ATM. Given that the sign said that there was a Chevy Chase bank inside, I assumed this Giant was no exception, so I intended to hit up the ATM, as I was rather low on cash. Turns out that the sign was a lie; there was a PNC branch and ATM inside.
At around 5:50 I decided that I could head over to the Outback and wait for the others to arrive. I assumed I would be waiting for the others to arrive because that’s generally how it works, especially when I arrive almost 45 minutes early.
So initially I sat in the waiting area, but as it started to get busier I decided I should get us a seat. Once I was seated I sent Scott a text telling him where I was seated.
This resulted in Stacy appearing and telling me that they were already there, and had been since 5:30.
D’oh.
This made me a little more surly than usual, but I took note of this and attempted to set my annoyance aside and enjoy my baby back ribs (and the company, of course).
On Friday when I got home from work I decided, as is typical, to take a bit of a nap.
I only dozed for about an hour or so, but throughout that time I had mini-dreams in which I imagined myself looking at my hands and finding that they were riddled with odd sores and covered with some sort of crud, which was weird.
I finally got up when my mind created a rather startling image of some random, masked person leaning down and putting his face right in front of mine and shouting something that was mostly unintelligible, but may have been, “I’m going to the drug store!”
As another aside, when I was 12-13, I shared a bedroom with my older brother Stuart. He had a habit of coming home late at night/early in the morning, walking over to my bed, and hovering his face just centimeters from mine until I would wake up and yell “Gah!”
It’s worth noting that he was, of course, drunk when he would do this. On other occasions he would just come over and pound on my chest until I woke up.
Other times I would wake up before he got in the room – he generally wasn’t terribly quiet when he would stumble his way into the house – and he would engage me in bizarre conversations before falling asleep.
The most memorable one was when he came in, said, hi, got into bed, paused, and then said, “Are you my brother?”
When I answered in the affirmative, he said, “Brad?”
I said no, and he responded, “Jon, right?”
I congratulated him on getting it right on his second try and told him to go to sleep.
In any case, after I got up and ate the leftover Chinese food from Riff Trax night, I set about the task of watching some of the TV shows that had piled up on my DVR - I still have an hour and a half worth of shows to watch – and then came back upstairs to download and watch the Thursday night episode of Smallville that I’d forgotten to set to record (and was too late to catch after I got home from dinner). I gave up on watching Smallville two seasons ago, but this was a special episode that I wanted to check out, and about which I’ll write more in a subsequent post.
At 10 I watched Numb3rs, then I watched the premiere of Battlestar Galactica, which I’d recorded while I was watching Numb3rs.
I slept for about 9 hours last night, waking up sometime close to 11.
I was preparing to take a shower and venture out into the world when my mother called.
After that I sat around for a while, then finally made my way out to get gas and go grocery shopping. I’d stopped at the comic shop on Wednesday, as it had occurred to me last week – after I’d gotten home – that I should have picked up a copy of You’ll All Be Sorry! for Scott. Since I was going to be seeing him that evening, I figured I should rectify that on Wednesday.
Somehow the grocery shopping experience seemed to be even more maddening than usual, so I tried to wrap things up as quickly as possible.
Once I got home I had a very late lunch/breakfast, then decided to take a nap, one from which I had to violently struggle to wake.
Apart from some random sitting around not doing much of anything and some more TV watching, that’s pretty much been it.