I think I might need to stop driving for a living and open a laundry service. I'm a clothes washing fool. And not a day too soon. We were getting to the end of the wardrobe there for a little while. I hate it when I have to dress this way when I go for a walk past the local sidewalk fire.
All of my work stuff is ready to rock now, all the way down to clean sheets and pillowcases, so the next few days will be nice and easy. A funeral on Friday won't exactly be the ideal way to kick off the weekend, but that's just the way it goes sometimes.
Having spent most of the evening watching movies, I can reach only one conclusion about the cinematic arts. Movies suck. Even the ones that I think are good are only kinda sorta good. Halfassed resolutions to weakly developed stories and cheesy overacting seem to be the norm. Boo. On tap for tonight - Flags of Our Fathers. I'm not optimistic. As soon as the Tigers finish losing yet another game in the next half hour here, we'll fire it up and see what's what.
When I got out of bed this afternoon, I was still dealing with some lingering effects from last night. $4 pitchers at Drinks Saloon - need I say more? So the standard routine commenced. First, water. Lots of water. Second, Advil. Lots of Advil. Third, food. Lots of food. Once I got myself sorted out and started to shake off the cobwebs a little bit, I seemed to remember a song that I heard at the bar last night. It was basically a compilation of every redneck stereotype about the people who live in the redneck town that I now call home. I couldn't say for sure that the song actually existed. Maybe it was just the subject of a drunken dream or something. But, I might as well check. Yep. It exists.
The funny thing is that, in quite a few neighborhoods around here, nothing in that song would be considered an insult.
Satisfied that I was no longer too intoxicated to drive, having slept for a solid ten hours, I headed out to run some errands. That was all well enough I suppose. Then some dinner and bowling with a friend of mine. (181, 177, and 158 in three games with a house ball and rented shoes. Not too shabby.) Then back home to watch some hockey and baseball.
Tomorrow actually looks to be one where I'll have to be an adult for a while, so we're holding off on finishing the beers in the fridge. I'm going back to work on Monday, so I need to have my affairs in order before heading to Indiana this weekend. I have things planned for most of the day Thursday, leaving tomorrow as the last good chance to be productive. As long as I can get my laundry done in the morning and some shopping done in the afternoon, I should be in decent shape.
Then there's one of those situations where I'm quite inexperienced and not terribly comfortable, but I know that there are certain expectations. A close friend of mine lost his mother this weekend. All I know so far is that the family has requested no flowers. Beyond that, I'm pretty much clueless as to the usual protocol. When it comes to funerals and related matters, I've always taken direction from whichever lady had the misfortune of being attached to me at the time. Flying solo these days though. We'll see how it goes. According to the eye doctors, Mrs. Pedro was legally blind for the last several years. She always told me that I was handsome though, every time I visited her home, so I'm pretty sure her eyesight was just fine. After a sequence of medical misfortunes in recent months, it sounds like she and God just decided that the time was right to move on. Nearly 101 years on this earth is a pretty impressive run in any case.
I was waiting to see how everything panned out before posting about this service, but I got my money today and everything seems legit, so here goes. Before my last trip home, I ordered a new cell phone. As has always been the case, I also received a little envelope asking me to donate my old cell phone for whatever purpose. Also as has always been the case, I didn't donate my old cell phone to charity. Usually I would just put the old phone on a shelf and forget about it. This time around, I employed the services of a company called cexchange.com. They had a little self-evaluation form that I filled out to assess the value of my phone. For the one that I was replacing, the value was established at $20.68. For my previous phone (non-working), the value was $2.76. For the other phone that I found lying around on a shelf (also non-working), the value was $0.84. Certainly not enough to make anyone rich, but there you had it. A little over twenty bucks for old cell phones that served no useful purpose for me.
I submitted the form through the cexchange website, which then produced for me a pre-paid FedEx label. I printed the label and attached it to a little cardboard box that I had sitting around. Then, off to Kinkos. The shipment was received in Texas a few days later and the waiting began. The whole process took around a month, perhaps a little longer, but I finally got my money today. A deposit was made to my PayPal account for the appraised value of the old cell phones. I don't know if this information is useful to anyone or not, but you know, I'm all about saving the environment and recycling and so forth. That place apparently will buy other old electronics from you, in addition to cell phones, but old cell phones are the only things that I have sent to them.
Plus another post about how drunk I got tonight while watching the Tigers lose wouldn't have been very informative. You know me. I'm all about the dissemination of important information and stuff.
Sleeping until noon is always a decent way to start a day. Of course, a handwritten note reminding yourself to call PNC isn't the best thing to find sitting next to your bed. To tell you the truth though, the phone call wasn't all that bad. I wasn't placed on hold, the girl spoke English as a first language, and my concerns were addressed promptly. I can assure you that I don't have an identity worth stealing, but we'll have to see if someone tries anyway.
No luck on the motivation to head up to the yard and clean out my truck today. Maybe tomorrow. I did manage to drag my ass out to Walled Lake for some dinner with my buddy Jonathan and his parents. So that was good. Can't have the ole Godfather starving to death or anything, can we?
I stopped at a Chase ATM on my way back home, to deposit some checks that were in my stack of mail when I got home last night. Since I'm putting PNC on probation for a while, I figured I might as well get used to that Chase account. I had three checks - two for $5 each, from online focus groups and one for $6, from my state tax refund. I guess I'm just behind the times or something, but I was impressed with how the ATM handled the transaction. No envelope or anything like that. I just inserted the stack of checks all at once. It didn't matter that they were different sizes. The machine sucked them in, made a few noises, and then told me that it had counted $16 in deposits. 'Press here to complete the transaction' and so on. Pretty nifty.
That's a pretty productive Day 1 on the homefront... or something.
