CARS

Man, talk about a fisting! I just spent a grand total of $344 getting my alternator fixed on my car, plus the tow to the shop. The good news is that it was the alternator and not my frying my motor! I checked the oil on my car when it broke down the other night and it was registering that it was completely empty. I checked it again the next day when having it towed, still empty. Steve, my mechanic for the past twelve years, said the oil was fine. I guess my car must have been on a steeper incline that I had noticed and kept the oil away from the measuring stick. So relief knowing I still have a car, dread knowing that work has been next to nothing and I'm broke as hell and this is the worst time this could have happened. Thanks again Jesus! Good thing I have a 401(k) because I need to borrow money from myself now. Damn...

FOOTBALL

Yes, I won the first week of the football pool two years in a row! That basically means I play for free for the second year in a row. I'd like to thank Philadelphia for playing like crap last night, it really meant a lot to me. Funniest thing about the football pool is that I am one of those guys who knows next to nothing about sports. I'm lost when it comes to most sports. I do know a little about football though. It also gives me some kind of sadistic pleasure knowing I've won the football pool three times on one year and don't read sports, live sports, or hardly watch sports. There are guys at work who do nothing but talk sports and statistics and I'm consistently picking teams better than they are. I correctly picked 11 games out of 15, it's luck and intuition nothing more. So thanks for the $43 this week guys, and gals, I'm in first place off the bat again second year in a row! I'll stop gloating now.

911

Two more days and it's 9/11 again already. I'm glad I'm off from work this year and will be home by myself most of the day because I didn't expect to be as depressed as I was last year. I'm not an emotional person that often but there is just something about two years ago that really got a hold of me. We had a group in house of about 500 or more people for this computer technology convention and they had two giant screens set up at the front of the ballroom, one in each corner. It was hard enough getting Brandon to the baby sitter and Miranda to school then driving all the way to work knowing what had just happened, but standing in that room for the next four hours watching the footage and the news on those huge screens was just as surreal as it gets. Many of the people at that convention were from New York and quite a few of them either worked at the twin towers or knew someone who did. Everyone was devastated, and many were crying. So last year I didn't expect to be emotional or anything but it was all over the news again and it was all I could to to keep from crying. I had the same sick empty feeling in my stomach that I had the previous year. The same sick empty feeling I got when that guy got decapitated in front of us in traffic last year on the way to see that wonderful new Disney movie Snow Dogs. The same sick feeling I get every time something incredibly tragic happens. I'm really not looking forward to Thursday at all.