Category — Family & Friends

A friend of mine rarely, if ever gets angry. He admits getting annoyed at people once in a while, but never angry with them. I greatly admire my friend’s attitude and I wish I could practice it myself. He has a relaxed style and demeanor that makes him a great person.

With me, I get angry all the time. The idiot who cuts me off on the road, the moron neighbor who lets their dog crap on our lawn or the buffoon in front of me at the salad bar, carefully deciding (and deciding) which items to put on her plate easily set me off.

My friend is right though. There is nothing I can do about these people so why bother getting angry. Why should I work myself up and get upset about something so trivial? Stay relaxed and focus my energy on more positive thoughts and forget about the losers who I encounter, my friend tells me. It’s a great philosophy and the determination and self-disipline he exhibits should be a model for all of us.

But I’m not that way. I take great pleasure of reminding my moron neighbor that his dog is crapping on our lawn. The other day he says “Good Morning, Mike. It’s a beautiful day outside today, isn’t it? To which I replied, “Hey moron, your f-cking dog is crappy on my lawn again.” The astonished look on his face gave me a great sense of joy.

How about that lady at the salad bar? I remind her that this isn’t rocket science and that taking so much time to make a decision is ridiculous. Just plop it on the plate and get moving I tell her. I view this as a courtesy and by pointing out her shortcomings she can improve behavior the next time. Without me screaming at the poor woman, she wouldn’t never realize what a pain she was being.

So the next time another driver cuts me off on the road, and I scream and yell at them you’ll know it’s my way of making myself feel better. Bottling up these primal emotions is not good for me. My therapist and I have discussed this many times. Because of his help, I’m the well-rounded and emotionally balanced person I am today.

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to be more sociable. I often talk about not having too many friends and interacting with people is the way to make friends. I get invited to events every now and then but I usually make some excuse for not going. This year its going to be different. I’ll make a better effort to take people up on their offers to get together and socialize.

The problem I have with this is the actual interacting with people, making small talk and trying to be friendly. That doesn’t sound like much fun to me. I’m joking of course. It’s the general pubic, The Great Unwashed who I hold in contempt. Years of working with the public in the retail industry scarred me for life.

Every so often I’ll get a call from someone I haven’t heard from in a very long time. Each time the conversation usually goes something like this:

Caller: “Hi Mike, how are you doing?”
Me: “Fine, how are you?
(note: we both know we could care less how the other is doing but go through the ritual anyway)
Caller: “I haven’t talked to you in a long time and thought I would say ‘Hello.’”
Me: “Great, nice to hear from you. How’s your family?”
Caller: “They’re fine. Say, do you have any autoshow tickets/a car for the weekend/time to fix my home computer?”
Me: “Um..I thought you were calling to say “Hello.”
Caller: “Yes but while I have you on the phone..”
Me: CLICK.

Now I don’t mind helping out people that are nice to me. I’ll go out of my way to take care of them any way I can. I don’t expect anything in return. It’s the people who are only around when THEY need something that I reject. Snubbing their requests for favors doesn’t bother me since not having them around wouldn’t be a problem.

These are things my therapist and I will be discussing this week.

The holiday week is passing quickly. We coasted around the house for a few days before Christmas then headed off to Chicago for a while. While there, the weather was perfect so we walked around everywhere and had a great time. Between the eating, movie watching, shopping and eating, we were ready to come home after four days. I posted some pictures of our trip on my Flickr page.

When we returned, Pam became ill so we’ve stationed ourselves around the house for the past couple of days. It’s fine with me because now I’m getting a chance to catch up on old movies, some computer projects and other around-the-house activities. If she’s feeling better later, maybe we’ll go out and watch ANOTHER MOVIE. Let’s see, that will make about fifteen I’ve watched over the past 10 days.

The Christmas Gift from the people at work continues to astound me. It is a great feeling to know my co-workers care enough to show their appreciation. And man did they show it - a Best Buy gift card, loaded up so I could get a video iPod. Initially I wanted a Creative Zen Vision unit but they weren’t available there. After fidgeting with Michael C’s Zen and doing some online research I thought it was a good choice. But Best Buy doesn’t carry them yet even though I saw a demo a few weeks ago. Actually they were showing several Creative products and the Vision was on the guys belt. It must have been his personal unit. So I opted for the iPod video instead and I’m very happy with my choice. The Zen has a bigger screen and great features but it only has 30 GB of storage. My new iPod has 60 GB and some cool features of its own, especially the smaller size.

My time off has been consumed with loading it up with music, podcasts and yes, videos. I ‘ve found several nifty programs that convert any type of video into an iPod-ready format. My new friend has been keeping me busy for hours during our travels for the holidays.

There were others who gave me gifts for the computer assistance I’ve rendered. It’s a nice show of their gratitude and I respectfully appreciate their gifts as well. I help out because I enjoy sharing and collaborating with my friends and never expect anything in return. But thank you all for the unexpected surpises and I promise not to do any re-gifting.

We didn’t do much yesterday, didn’t even leave the house all day. Sometime its nice to putz around and not go anywhere. When it got dark, I setup a blanket in the backyard. We had a nighttime picnic to watch the fireworks in the neighborhood. There was quite a show this year, bigger and better than before.

Go here for 304 Photoshop 6 tips. Even if you don’t have version 6, I think you’ll find it very useful.

Yahoo! Internet Life magazine listed their “50 most useful sites” this month. Among their choices are: speedtrap.com (avoid speed traps), mapblast.com (better maps than mapquest), askmehelpdesk.com (get expert advice) and Daypop.com (track news stories).

Go to Yahoo Internet Life to see all the winners. Be sure to look up their featured Useless sites while you are there.

Big News! My site was awarded the prestigious Golden Web award. I would like to thank the academy, my family and all those who made this site possible. Thank you.

Kartoo is a cool graphical search engine.

If you like to collect fonts, then go to Blambot! This site has loads of comic book fonts free for you to download. I plan on using one of them to create a new FSB logo for the top of my page.

I have a terrible cold that I can’t shake. It started when I was down in Texas and got worse when I got back home. I haven’t been sick in many years. I can’t remember the last time I had a cold. I don’t think that I’ve ever had the flu. I’ll be better soon. Thanks for caring.

I am not looking forward to work tomorrow. Besides any work that has piled up, I will have to tell the “funeral story” over and over during the day. I guess I don’t mind that much. People are only asking because they care.

Sorry about the lack of updates lately. I just returned from a trip to Dallas to visit my 2 brothers. It was nice seeing both of them and their family.

But now I have to take off more time from work to attend a funeral. Sigh.

I’m having fun visiting my brothers in Dallas. I particularly like the fact they don’t have a lot of traffic, even during rush hour. The one thing is that it extremely hot and humid here. I guess I’ll survive.

After an uneventful weekend, I’m back to work today. We didn’t go to the movies but we did rent Vanilla Sky with Tom Cruise (don’t bother), had a nice picnic dinner on Monday and did some shopping and yard work. I enjoy staying around the house and not going anywhere. Fighting the crowds at the store on the roads and everywhere isn’t very much fun. Staying home on holidays is like a break from all of that for us.

2 more days and I’m out of here. I’ll be at the Dallas Headquarters of FSB for a long weekend. If you need me, just page. I’m not going to answer you but you can page anyway.

Thank you very much for coming through for me in my time of need this afternoon.

I could get spoiled having all this time off from work. Chrysler is closed today for the Easter holiday. Pam decided to take it off too. We have a full day of activities planned.