Quote of the Day: Charles M. Schulz

"Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love."


Stacey and I are celebrating our second anniversary tomorrow and that quote illustrates how she feels about my name choices for our future son.

We went to a European themed cafe on Capitol Hill yesterday for dinner to commemerate our honeymoon to Europe. The place provided a pretty authentic experience - right down to the room-temperature drinking water and my horrible faux-pas of asking for a diet coke. The guy serenading the room with slowed down Jeff Buckley songs on his guitar was the only false note.

Overall, it was a good evening if we did have to go to an American chain to get some real dessert with real American portions. Pears are not dessert.

Quote of the Day: Theodore Roosevelt

"Don't hit at all if it is honorably possible to avoid hitting; but never hit soft."


The other day I managed to kick a car, endure the owner getting in my face, and still maintain my flawless record of never having been in a fight. (See here for more details on my accidental pacifism.)

There's an intersection I have to cross every day on my way to work that acts as an off-ramp for I-5. It also connects First Hill with Downtown and I swear I'm going to die there. I got lightly nudged there a few months ago by a Terminix truck. So anyway, I almost got hit there again while I was crossing when the white man on the flashing "walk sign" said I was supposed to.

I had to jump back on the sidewalk to avoid being hit by a guy in a fairly nice car making a right turn so I lightly tapped the door panel with my foot. You know, the door panel that almost took my kneecaps off? It probably wasn't my smartest move but I was strategic about the kick - just hard enough to make him pay attention but not hard enough to cause damage.

Well, he didn't like that one bit so he turned around and stopped in the middle of the road when he was parallel to me. (It's strange that there was no one else around during this whole incident. Seattle has a very post-apocalyptic vibe to it at 5:30 in the morning.) He yells,"Hey, what do you think you're doing?"

"Going to work."

"Did you kick my car?"

"Did you almost run me over? Sorry, I get a little emotional when I almost die."

"Stop walking or I'll call the cops."

"Good. I'm sure they'd love to hear that you don't know what a red light means."

"You little punk, you just better there's no damage." He got out to check and discovered there wasn't. All I really noticed about him was that he was not too big and he was wearing his nametag around his neck and that he needed a shave.

"You better hope you don't run anybody over."

He ran over to the sidewalk and got in my face. "It's a free right on red."

"Not when the sign tells me to walk."

"It wasn't on."

"Yes, it was. You need to pay attention."

"Don't kick my car."

"Fine. I won't kick your car and you won't try to run me over." At this point it was clear that neither one of us wanted to fight. We were just a couple of desk jockeys with big mouths." "Sounds like we have a deal then," I said as he walked back to his car.

True, I shouldn't have given his car a love pat but I bet he pays attention next time. It's tough out here for a pedestrian. We're the forgotten collateral damage of Car-Bike war.

Quote of the Day: George Bernard Shaw

"The rational man adapts himself to the world. The irrational man tries to adapt the world to suit himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the irrational man."


I did something weird to my ankle so now I can't use it without an intense stabbing pain shooting through it. It got so bad that I had to give up my daily walk. I have gone from walking 4-7 miles away to walking Zero and it's driving me crazy. I swear I can feel my fat cells making room as we speak. Like Charles Dickens, I need long, violent-paced walks to keep me sane.

Maybe I'm a bad person but I take an irrational and disproportional joy when I see restaurants with bad customer service go out of business. If you're located in the business district and your only response at noon when a customer walks in is to look at them like they're idiots and say, "What do you want? We can't make anything today, too many people called off," I don't think you're very serious about being a profitable enterprise. Likewise, if it's noon on a Saturday and you tell customers you're not open that day even though you're all just sitting there and the sign says Open, you're probably not going to be the Bill Gates of African restaurants in the Greater Seattle Area. It looks like we'll be trying our luck again this week at an Ethiopian place that thinks posting "Hours 4PM-11PM" on both your website and door means that people should know you don't open until 6PM if you even decide to open at all.

I have been wrestling with a philosophical question: Is it wrong to steal a private citizen's traffic cone? Let's just say, hypothetically, that this guy drives a huge company truck and parks it in front of your house everyday instead of his own so that you can't see when you're trying to back out of the driveway. Let's also say he puts a cone out behind his truck so people will think he is on official business. I don't think it'd be wrong to take because my understanding is that you have to be a public official of some kind to endow the cone with any validity. I know because my friends and I used to block off roads as pranks and people did not like it one bit. I'll let you know what my "friend" decides to do.

Remember the new car we bought about six months ago? Well, we got into an accident and now we can't open the passenger door. The only silver lining is that it wasn't my fault. Believe it or not, despite being called a "bad driver who daydreams too much," I have never been cited for any of the accidents I've been in. It's always been the other guy's fault. You can't argue with numbers like that.

That's it today. As you can see, I am a little agitated because of the no exercise thing.

Quote of the Day; Napolean Bonaparte

“The battlefield is a scene of constant chaos. The winner will be the one who controls that chaos, both his own and the enemies.”

Control the chaos and win the contest to help us name our firstborn that is scheduled to take this planet by storm on March 12th (ish).

Enter your name choice below. Right now, the rules are it has to come from Shakespeare, the Bible, or be found in the lineage of Medieval European Royalty. Stacey has other ideas like that it won't get our kid swirlied every day.

Quote of the Day: W. Earl Hall

“Science has never drummed up quite as effective a tranquilizing agent as a sunny spring day.”

I have not abandoned this blog. I am just lazy.

Quote of the Day: Anton Chekhov

"A good upbringing means not that you won't spill sauce on the tablecloth, but that you won't notice it when someone else does."

(I am writing this very quickly so please feel free to point out any errors.)


I want to to thank my mother today for giving me a good upbringing.


Sorry, I haven't blogged a whole lot lately. Things have been kind of hectic. Life got stressful on all fronts. Work is all-consuming in a good way, homeownership is more expensive than I thought it would be, buying cars is a hassle, and I had the worst birthday of my life and that's counting the one where my roommate told me and another roommate that we were "undateable." (I won't go into why here.)


There is a situation at work that bears watching. We are moving offices because we are growing so fast. The problem is our new office might be for away from where I buy my Diet Mountain Dew every morning. I volunteered to be on the committee so I can be the master ot my own fate. We are at Defcon Five on this thing.


Am I the only ones who obessesese about getting defriended on Facebook? I know it probably bothers everybody but I focus on it so much that I eventually figure out who defriended me. I have a list of offenders. I am not sure why it bothers me so much because most of the people I would have defriended first if I did that sort of thing. I guess I like to think I am entertaining enough to keep everyone tuned in. I mean, is something I say so offensive that it's worthy of skipping the hiding option and moving straight onto defriending? I would just like to know why because I hate not knowing stuff. I understand why two single girls defriended me the week I got married, because I was no longer useful in their quest to meet guys. Other's motives are not so clear. I just hope if I run into them in real life, I don't ask them why but there is a good chance I might. (I am real tempted to name them in this post but I know there friends are among my readers so I will refrain.) Yeah, I am a little neurotic. I am also the same guy who couldn't sleep until he heard the real reason for every romantic rejection.


I have been thinking about human relationships and tribes a lot lately thanks to one of my favorite TV shows - Justified. It's about a modern day US Marshal who acts and dresses like a nineteenth century lawman who has to go back his hometown of Harlan, Kentucky because he got in trouble over an itchy trigger finger. (Harlan is famous for fueding redneck families, poverty, and a high homicide rate. It still has those all things too, only now it's meth instead of moonshine.) Anyway, throughout the show we learn that he acts like that because he used to watch old westerns while he as hiding out at his aunt's house to get away from his abusive criminal father. We also learn that no matter what he does he can't escape the ties of family, kin, and clan. In some ways that is a comforting thought. There are many tribes I consider myself a member of. There are relationships I forged in the heat of the battle of life that will never be destroyed. Even though I no longer see those people everyday, I am enough of romantic - in the old knightly sense of the word not the modern sexual sense - to think that if I saw them again we would take up right where we left off and that if I ever needed to gather together people for an epic battle they would be among the first to answer my call. I may be wrong but as Hemingway once wrote, "It's pretty to think so isn't it?"


I do hope and think it's possible for relationships to evolve without disintegrating.


Have a good week.

Quote of the Day: Oscar Wilde

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."

Forgive me for not blogging more.