Ok, so I’m going to post. Let me read up on where I left off. Ah, right, Christmas eve. That one didn’t include the story about work or the pipes. It didn’t cover New Years either. Oof, that’s a lot of typing. To be nice, Cliff Notes will follow at the end for you lazy sacks of worthlessness. Ok, so it’s Christas Day and everything is going swimmingly. Did the presents, everybody is happy, and we decide as a family to go see Meet The Fokkers. Right before we’re getting ready to head to the movie (~5pm), I get a call from a customer saying they are hard down. Like HARD MOFO DOWN AH SHIZNIT! So I tell the parents I’ll meet them at the theatre. So I bust it to work to find … the power out! Yay for power outages! So I trip the power back, make sure everything is kosher for 5 mins, then head out the door to the movie theatre. I get to the movie theatre, and everything is great. Except that as soon as I walk in the door my phone rings because all the shit is down again! OMFGWTFLOLLERSKATESBUTNOTATALL. So I tell my family Merry Christmas and go back to work until 11pm. On Christmas Day. I was relatively unhappy. So on Sunday, the day after Christmas Day, our water is broken. I am irritated. I attempt to fixify it, but fail because the pipes are at a funny angle so my solder won’t stick. I say fuck it and call Olson Plumbing and Heating, the best goddamn plumbers in town. They schedule me for 6pm. The tech calls me at 5pm and says that he is totally swamped until 10pm and wants to know if I can either a (grumblegrumblemumble) wait until 10pm or (cheery happy voice) reschedule to tomorrow. I can tell he’s not very pleased with working until 10pm on Christas Weekend so I say come back on Monday morning. Super. Oh, and the power went out again at work at 1:30pm, necessitating another 2 hours there. On Sunday. Christmas Weekend. So the plumber comes on Monday morning, assesses my bang-up-but-not-working plumbing attempt and whips out this sick plasma torch shit. It takes him a whopping five minutes to cut out the broken, splice in the new&working, write the invoice and leave. Well, maybe not 5 minutes. The invoice took at least another 3-4 minutes to write up. And he charged me for a full hour ($73)! Luckily, I am a savvy renter and took that amount out of my rent after consulting with the landlord. Should I put New Years in a new post? Hell no! No, it’s going to go right here and you’re going to like it because you read rand0m.org compulsively and will take whatever shitty slopfest I spew out, simply because it comes from me, oh mighty rrk from on high. And you’ll like it. A lot. OK so New Years was nuts. I was at the Store until like 10pm because of ton of peeps who I know from WoW were there, including Mike, who came all the way down for New Years from Toronto. Well, he was actually visiting his g/f who lives in Denver, but he was here in CoS from Canuckistan! Ok, right. So I go home and meet up with Laura and head on downtown. (Insert from later: Oddly, I left Steven and Ben at the house to … umm … wait while Laura and I got really fucked up? WTF was I thinkign?) We go to the Red Martini for some boozahol, only for the doorman to check our IDs, chat with us, and then tell us we can’t come in because they are at capacity. WTF!? I am certain that it was because I was wearing Cargos. What a fucker. So we head on down the “strip” … or the “strip-tease” because it’s not really a full fledged strip (HAHAHA OMFG I am hilarious at midnight), and end up outside the Ritz. Now, I have a hookup with one of the bouncers/doormen at the Ritz, but I didn’t see him, but I did see a huge line, ambulances, fire trucks and what looked like blood on the ground. So we went past the Ritz and headed on over to Jack Quinn’s, only to run into Lilly Rklasdoicv98pazch and her friend Robin! So we chatted and decided to go to 32 Blue. We go there, enjoy the countdown, drink a lot and catch up. Turns out Lilly has spending a vast amount of time in Paris and is/was headed back there on Jan6. She’ll be doing her Masters somewhere around the USA, I think. That is foggy. Robin, who I constantly referred to as Rose all night in a drunken state of unknown total self-humiliation, is also after her Masters; she went to PHS but was a year ahead of all of us, but spent some time abroad, so now she’s even. Yes? So after a delightful time with Lilly and Robin at 32 Blue, we all decide to finish off the night with a Martini at 15C. We arrive there, after a perilously cold walk, only to find that they have done last call at 1:15am. Lies & heresy I tell you! So we go to Old Chicago … and it’s past last call there! OMFGALLTHOSEWHORESCANBURN!!1` We decide that it’s best to leave the night as-is, so Laura and I say ‘night to Lilly and Rose^H^Hbin with promises to meet up two nights hence for a party at Lilly’s. We go back to the house to find all of the woefully underage WoW people there! They had gone bowling and then came to our house to get kashnickered. It was a helluva time. Most everybody got lit up and there was much merriment. Everybody greatly enjoyed speaking to Mike, our Canadian friend, about Canada and how super-great his country is (but don’t you dare come and foul it up with you rights-flying, gun-toting conservative naziism you hosers) and how the US is backwards. Normally I would take off about how superduper america is and how canada sucks my nuts, what with their total lack of army, airforce, navy, guns, violent crimes, tired, weary, social problems and injustice of any sort, but I was pretty trashed so instead I went to bed. Saturday was relatively uneventful. Particularly because I don’t remember more than 5 minutes of it. Sunday, however, was decent. Work workw ork at the store, then I headed over to Lilly’s (@ 8pm, as planned). I was stunned, nay, apalled that nobody else was there, which was A-OK with me because I had started to feel rather ill Sunday morning. So I went home and went to bed. Monday sucked. I woke up extremely sick, called in to work and laid at home all day. I think working like a mad man the week before having a wild new years did a number on my immune system. Same thing happened on Tuesday. Oh, and on Wednesday as well. It’s not very often that I get sick – this is my first sick leave in almost 3 years – but when I do come down with something it is definitely a doozy. So I was sick through Thursday-ish. I worked a lot of Thursday, despite feeling a little under the weather, simply because I was going stircrazy. So that was illness. Which I fear is coming back to plague me tonight! So I will be going to bed soon. OK so that was New Years. Prior to New Years, at work, after the Power Craziness, things settled down during my days. Until Tuesday morning at 3am! I got to come in at 3:15am, and stay at work until after 8pm. ‘Twas a bad day. A bad day that followed a bad Christmas Weekend, that preceeded a wild New Years. But it got worse! Tuesday was horrible, but so were Wednesday & Thursday! We had electricians at work all day and all night for several days, all attempting to resolve our horribly bad power issues. That involves them working all day, then me coming in after 1am to cut everybody over to the new stuff — we can’t incur downtime on our customers during the day (which happens when you yank out their power cables), so it has to all happen at night. So the week sucked and really wore me down, then New Years happened, then I was sick as fuck. Are you with me? Great. Almost done. So that was what, last week? I don’t remember this past weekend, so I’ll skip it. I do remember, however, going out with Sammi on Tuesday night. We met up at Village Inn and caught up — we didn’t get the chance at Phantom Canyon, if you’ll recall. I had a hella good time. Usually when I go out with Sammi, it always ends up with her asking me a question here or there and interjecting some conversation while I ramble on and on and on for hours. Somehow she enjoys this (OR DOESN’T? OMFGWTF!?). BUT, this time I turned the tables on her by not talking about myself! I know, hard to believe, huh? We talked about all sorts of things, and a lot of the references I threw in about the plumbing, electrical, sickness, anything … got blank stares. I think that made me mysterious and hence attractive. But not really. It did. So she talked and talked and I listened and listened and it was a good time. I do feel, however, that I was overly negative at a particular point in the evening … I think it’s because I’m really comfortable around Sammi and so I kinda used her as a dumping ground for pent up “I Fucking Hate My Life Because I’m a Worthless SOB”-ness that I usually hold inside until someone like Steve comes around, in which case I normally dump on him and he assures me that I am better than that and then everything is right as rain. Sammi, though, doesn’t come with the `assurance that I am better than that and that everything is right as rain` feature, which although an unfortunate error on her maker’s part, doesn’t make the whole any less super. The not-meat-eating and unbelievable dedication to all things natural and moral, however, was a little worrisome. Hopefully some time in Colorado, what with all the meat eating, gun toting, fsck nature-ing (???), and generally ignorant yet belittling people, will make her less totally nutso. I tried to catch her on AIM tonight so I could apologize for unloading my quiet desperation onto her cute little not-so-brawny-as-a-man’s shoulders, but I missed her. So I’m sorry for that, if you read this Sammi. But I still got you to talk the most, which for me is a feat undone. My boss, Hill, has been in town since Tuesday morning and work has been gogogogogoNOWMOREWOOgogoogogo since then. He really wears me down with the deadlines, meetings, deliverables and more. Work is nice and all, but I can’t wait until it calms back down a little. [b]Cliffs Notes[/b] 1. Power went down at work on xmas. that sucked. 2. The week after xmas sucked ass, a LOT. 3. New years with Lilly, Ros^Hbin, & Laura, oh my. 4. Crazy Canadians? WTF? 5. Sick as fuck for almost a week. 6. Late-Coffee with Sammi went well. 7. I’m tired now. Goodnight.