Opposite of "loner."



A 1% common birthday is almost four times more common than any other day of the year, you idiot.

1 / 365 = about .25%. Nothing happened.
Well, it turns out I didn't do anything this long Memorial Day weekend.

I got up later than I would have like on Saturday to do any sort of far away geocaching run, and it didn't matter much to me at the time because the forecast predicted lots of stormy weather. Lo and behold, it didn't rain for shit around here, so I could have played in the woods locally if I was so inclined.

I was going to make an epic geocaching run all day Sunday, but Mr. Mitchell called me late Saturday asking me if I wanted to do some frisbee golfing. Sure, what the hell. The tupperware ain't going anywhere.

I started falling apart physically Sunday afternoon. I could tell I was coming down with something by midday Friday, and I wouldn't stop blowing my nose 48 hours later. SARS. I ended up having to NyQuil myself to sleep. Also, I noticed I somehow got a small amount of poison ivy across my left ankle, which makes absolutely no sense because when I play in the woods, I always have socks and shoes on.

To add to my physical afflictions, I got a lump forming on one of my eyelids. It's probably another chalazion. Super. Hot compresses ftw.

When I woke up today, I was pretty run down. I was in no condition to do any sort of epic tupperware runs -- or do anything, really -- so I stayed in the condo and played video games all day. Whee.

That's alright. There are plenty more weekends coming up for me to do the things I want to do.

I'm going to bed now. The last three months
This entry exists solely to bridge the time between my Virginia Trip and Memorial Day. I like to write about what I do on the barbecuing holidays, but it would just seem a little too weird to jump straight into it without first discussing what's been going on for the last two or three months. Besides, I still have posts from February on the front page.

Needless to say, quite a few things have happened:

* One of my better friends here in Keene has completely disowned me over the dumbest of things: a misunderstanding. I don't really want to get into it, but suffice to say, the problem isn't really a problem and could very easily be solved be talking with one another. However, being ignorant is the strategy of the opposing party (coward). It's not cool when I have to get all of my information second-hand or even third-hand. Once I caught a drift as to what the issue was, I wrote a letter explaining the situation as I see it and apologize for any confusion, but I'm still being ignored weeks later. What gives?

* I recently got the worst raise ever, both percent-wise and amount-wise, in my working career. Coupled with the bullet point above and the recent crackdown on overtime, I'm really not looking to continue my life in Keene. I need to do go elsewhere and prosper.

* I had an infected epidermal cyst on my left hip. I didn't even know that what I had was even a cyst; I've had it on my body for as far back as I can remember. It never did anything. I just figured it was some sort of anomaly. But it started to turn red on one half of it. I went to the doctor's and was prescribed my first pill ever: cephalexin! It didn't seen to do much, though, because as the days passed, it got redder and redder and more sensitive to the touch. Blood was pooling near the surface, and eventually it would burst one morning in a bloody and cheesy mess and I had to take a trip to the emergency room. They didn't do much there, but a few gauze-intensive weeks, I had the fucker surgically removed. My first ever surgery. Funny that I haven't been to a doctor's office in the last 12 years, but I ended up going a total of four times over a month. I took some hot pictures of the incident but I don't know what to do with them.

* I haven't been geocaching as much as I have in years past, but it's still my primary way of killing time. I usually go out once a week and bag a bunch of them. I'm not really looking for numbers this year. Instead, I'm more focused on finding every cache in New Hampshire that existed prior to me becoming a geocaching member. There are about 130 of them, and most of them are far away and/or on desolate mountain tops. I figure if I can a couple of them a week, I should be ok, especially with gas being cheaper this summer compared to the last few years. It's not a goal I can see myself completing this year, if at all (I need a kayak for some of them), but it's nice to have a purpose.

* If I'm not in the woods hunting down tupperware, I'm typically at my mom's. I visit more often now than when I didn't have my own washer and drier. Not sure how that happened. I think subconsciously I want to be more involved with my immediate family. Catch some of my nephew's baseball games and whatnot. I kinda got the urge to settle down once I turned 30, but lacking a girl and a family of my own, I'm trying to give myself worth by checking out what's happening in Hillsboro once a week.

* I sued someone and won the case. Now I gotta collect my money. Hope that doesn't turn out to be too much of a hassle.

* Me living with Brown is still going well. We drink, play 8-Ball, and play Cribbage a lot. :) The pool they have on site officially opened yesterday. We went swimming. I don't remember the last time I went swimming prior to last night.

* Brown and I started off with three pets: two rose hair tarantulas and one snapping turtle. One of the tarantulas has died (old age?) and we set the turtle free in nearby Goose Pond.

* Mr. Mitchell and I have gone disc golfing a number of times. We bought a few new discs to replace the ones we keep losing. :) I'm impressed we continue to do this; he has a wife and a newborn and works like 60 hours a week, yet still he manages to fit me in somehow. Good stuff.

There's no guarantee I'm even going to write about what I end up doing this Memorial Day weekend, but I figure I'd write this up anyway. If you want more up-to-the-minute news, you can always look me up on Facebook. Epilogue
Caches found: only 11 (one of the ride down, ten on Friday)
Golfing done: none. I've lost interest in ball golf.
Disc golfing done: 9 baskets

Money spent on tolls: $49.50 (23.25 south, 26.25 north)
Money spent on lodging: $126.04
Money spent on food: just between Otani and Greenies, I don't want to know. :)
Money spent on gas: $64.61

Total mileage: Probably 1,400 miles (600 highway x 2 + probably 200 running around everywhere)

Favorite part: 75-degree sunny weather every day. Actually doing something with someone for once.
Worst part: I don't feel I made the best use of my time.

Things I didn't expect: Planes flying over the hotel. Spending all of the money I saved on lodging dining out instead.
Things I would have done differently: I kinda need to have a predetermined schedule when I'm doing things with Elise or else we waste a lot of time doing nothing.
Things I want to do next time: I gotta get more caching and frolfing in next time. I didn't do much of either.

Place to find some of my pictures: click here
Place to find some of my videos: click here

Last year's statistics. Glad to be back.
lol.

I was out of Elise's place early this morning. She said I could rummage through her stuff looking for breakfast. She didn't have crap. Well, she had stuff, but there's no way I'm eating cereal with lactose-free soy milk. What the fuck is that shit? I also noticed during my foraging that she doesn't own any private label / generic food. That's pretty much all I buy when I go grocery shopping. She's not exactly living the high life, either. Hmm. Whatever. Anyway, I stole a couple Kellogg's breakfast bar things and booked it.

There isn't much to say about the ride back up. I only stopped to gas and to use the bathroom. It took my about 10 hours. Like last year, I only heard each song on my cd of mp3's once each. Well, almost. I was in Keene by the time the last track started playing, and the first track started playing again once I was turning into the ungated community I live in. Son of a bitch.

I started the morning with the AC on in my car. By the time I got to upper New Jersey and New York City, it was drizzling pretty good. Halfway up Connecticut, I could see the occasional snowflake falling. I didn't really see any snow until I got to Vermont -- which was still buried in the shit -- at which point I went off on a five-minute tirade about how much I fucking hate snow and how I'm dumb living in this part of the country and I hope a forest fire wipes out all of upper New England. It was great. Battleship



Sunday didn't make for a terribly exciting day. It was more of a "hanging out" day. Which is fine.

I woke up late (per usual) to the sounds of Elise watching The Holiday, which was an ok but very predictable chick flick. We had lunch afterwards, and then she took me around Norfolk Naval Base to see all sorts of destroyers, aircraft carriers (USS George H W Bush and USS Harry S Truman), and even some sort of stealth ship (M80 Stiletto). We weren't allowed on the ships -- go figure-- but it was still pretty neat. I took a bunch of pics, and you'll find most of them up on Facebook.

On base, they had a giant store that I can only describe as a mall without walls between departments. It was like your typical WalMart, but at least two or three times the size. The TV section was set up similarly to Best Buy, both in layout and having employees around to answer any of your questions. Walk another 100 feet and you'll think you're in JCPenney's makeup section. wtf?

Strangely, I couldn't find any sunscreen in this mastodon of a store. I was burning up pretty good yesterday, and today was another day in the sun. I ended up picking some up at a store near her place after we were done playing on the base.

After a stroll along the beach with one of her neighbors, we made homemade fried chicken with homemade french fries. Yum.

We didn't do much at night, seeing how she has to leave for work at 6 in the morning and I had a 10-hour drive coming my way. We watched Breach, which was an alright movie I guess, and called it a night. Loud.



Once again, I failed to get up at a respectable time. The hotel does check outs until 11 AM; I was out by 10 or 10:30. Talk about pushing it. Whatever. I wasn't really into caching, believe it or not.

I did attempt to find a few caches higher up on the oceanfront, but I ended up with the ol' goose egg. Muggles were problematic in most of the caching spots. I couldn't get anything going anywhere I tried, so I just kinda dicked around, looked for shells, and made my fingers dance in the nearby salt water like some sort of fruit.

My cousin called me around noon, and I took off to her place right next door in Norfolk. We talked for a while and spent a lot of trying to figure out how we were going to spend the rest of the day.

We eventually decided that checking out the Jamestown Settlement was the way to go. That turned out to be a lot of fun. I snapped a billion pictures and put most of them up on my Facebook page. They had all sorts of Powhatan Indian stuff, including "housing," skins, and hunting camps.

We then took a look at some of the (replica) ships the English settlers came in on: the Susan Constant and the Godspeed. The Discovery was out of order or something. They aren't particularly big ships. I don't know how the hell they carried 70 and 50 people respectively along with all of the food and animals and whatnot they needed to make the trip. The beds were ridiculously small and poorly padded, even for the captains. Hmm.

They had some sort of English fort/village as well, and we spent a lot of time messing around in the plethora of houses. A couple noteworthy moments would be some kid wanted to pet the chickens around the fort and one of the folks that work at Jamestown put on a demonstration on the musket.

When we thought we were done, it turned out they had this huge indoor museum for us to explore, chock full of trivia and videos and even a special area where you aren't allowed to take photos. I did anyway, because I'm such a fucking rebel. Actually, I didn't. I'm a pussy. Whatever.

After stopping at the two gift shops, it was back to Elise's place. The commute back sucked balls. Traffic was back up at the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel for miles. I noticed this when we were driving to Jamestown, but apparently it didn't clear up several hours later when it was time to go back home. It took forever to get through. You're not allowed to stop in the tunnel, yet I had to apply my breaks ever ten seconds. I've come to the conclusion that when I finally do move to Virginia, I'm going to make sure that my commute does not involve taking a tunnel. I'm not a big fan of hanging out in my car when it's not moving. By the looks of it, though, there are tunnels all over the Norfolk area, so I'm very likely to be fucked one way or another. Son of a bitch.

It turns out my cousin has the same drinking book that Brown and I have, and we decided to take it with us to Greenies, a local bar. We just pointed at recipes and made the bartenders make it for us, since we lacked all of the bottles necessary to make the concoctions ourselves. :) Fun times. The bar itself was alright. They had live music. And I was surprised to see smoking in the bar; it's not illegal to do so in the state of Virginia. My clothes smelled wonderful after that. But it didn't really matter, I was five or six hard drinks in anyway. Woo woo! All sorts of action



During last year's vacation, I made it a point to get up by a set time each day, gather up my shit, and then go find a specific route if caches. Today, I woke up late and still didn't have a clue as to which direction I was going to travel in. And I didn't really care that I lost a few hours of quality GPS hunting time. Hmm.

I spent the morning working my way up the oceanfront, trying to find caches along the way. It was abysmal. Because I didn't start until later, muggle activity really impeded my progress: they were doing construction up and down the entire road. I found one cache on the porch of a museum that didn't open yet and that was about it.

By lunch time, I headed down to Northwest River Park. That's quite the silly name for a park, as it's not in the northern or western part of the state. I'm thinking it used to be controlled by North Carolina, but then Virginian forces came up with a plan and decided to move the entire border another ten miles south. That still doesn't explain the "west" part, though. Hmm. But anyway, there is a decent concentration of caches there, and I found a bunch of them.

I could have stuck around and found a bunch more in the other half of the park I never visited, but I really want to get some disc golf in. Munden Point is pretty much right next door, and since I found most of the caches in that park already, I could just leave the GPS in the car and hurl some discs at baskets. There were a surprising number of disc golfers here on a Friday afternoon, and I ended up having to start on the back nine to guarantee I wouldn't be impeded by anyone.

The course is very different than what I'm used to (Tully Dam). There are actually two tee off points and two baskets per "hole." The shorter baskets appeared ridiculously easy, so I (clearly) played from the further tee to the further basket. I did alright, I guess. At Tully, you don't really have a choice but to hit a tree every other basket and royally fuck up your game, but at Munden (like Barre Falls), there is a lot of open areas and fields with the occasional and easily avoidable tree. The terrain wasn't a challenge at all, but the wind was insane. Munden Point is next to the ocean.

I only played the back nine. By the time I was ready to do the front nine, I noticed a few groups of people teeing off at basket #2 or #3 or whatnot, and instead of being slowed down by them, I decided to head back to the hotel and get myself ready for a night out on the town.

Elise wanted to check out this hibachi place called Otani for dinner. Figuring I had another $100 I could spend courtesy of not having to spend two nights at the hotel, I figured what the hell. I've never been to such a place before. The chef makes all of the food right in front of you and puts on a fancy show at the same time. There were lots of fire, fancy tricks with spatulas, and the flipping of food into people's mouths. It was nifty. I took a video of the chef making a flaming onion. Woohoo.

When that was all said and done with, I pretty much called it a night. I wanted to do a better job at waking up early tomorrow. That wasn't going to be an easy task, because tonight (and last night), planes keep flying over the hotel. There's a nearby air base and I guess a bunch of pilots have been getting some training runs in or something. They are loud as hell, and didn't stop either night until about 10 PM or so. The ride down to VA



I made it in one piece to VA Beach, though the seagulls tried to impede my progress.

I stopped on along the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel (there was a cache at a vista there) and when I opened my trunk, I think all of the seagulls thought they saw the biggest reddest clam ever. About 30 of them flew over and were getting way too close to me. One of them tried to shake me down, but I kicked him in the face.

Ok, maybe I just ran into my car, told them to go away and almost drove over a few of them. Same difference.

But yeah, I'm here. In my hotel. Got there at 6:15ish. That makes it a 10 3/4 hour drive. I'm here for two nights and staying at my cousin Elise's the other two nights. She recently moved to a place in the next town over, which I guess means all of my future visits, I will be bunking up for free. :D

Gonna see Elise tomorrow. We're gonna check out some Japanese steakhouse for dinner. Yum?

She must be lonely as hell. Her and her husband are in the Navy... Her husband got deployed and she's kinda just twiddling her thumbs. When she talked to me last night, her mouth was running a mile a minute and she was already coming up with things we can do if/when I come down next year. wtf? I don't think she realizes that I already made all of my plans for this current trip, and I don't have to spend every minute with her. I just kinda called her out of the blue expecting she'd be busy but may want to get some drinks at some point, not rewrite my whole itinerary for me. Whatever. She's cool, though, so I don't mind scrapping some of my plans to spend time with her. There's a bunch of colonial crap around here from the Revolutionary War and Civil War that she wants to see worth looking at. OMG, I'm linking an outside source!
I can't remember the last time I posted something in response to something I've read from another site.

For some reason or another, I found myself on my boy Greg Lohman's site, and there I learned of some beer mistruths. Two of them in particular caught my attention:

Myth #6: Beer should be served ice-cold for best flavor

This is an unfortunate myth perpetuated by the major commercial breweries - especially for their lite beers. The fact is, flavor typically diminishes when beer is served ice-cold. It may make for a thirst-quenching, refreshing beverage, but often bears little resemblance to traditional beer. Several beers are, in fact, best served much closer to room temperature or slightly cool and are considered undrinkable when icy cold - such as Guinness and many of the traditional English ales.

Wow, you mean all of those Coors Light commercials I had to deal with during Patriots games are all for naught? The fancy label tells you when not to drink it? Not that I would, anyway.

Myth #8: "Beer before liquor, never sicker - liquor before beer, in the clear"

This is common drinking advice shared but not scientifically true. In reality, alcohol is alcohol, and the overall quantity you imbibe will determine your resulting (in)sobriety or hangover. Drinking beer before drinking hard liquor may prolong the onset of inebriation. However, it won’t ultimately matter whether you drink beer first or last; it’s the quantity of alcohol that does the damage.

I still go by this to this day, though I guess it makes sense that the order drinks are consumed would not have a bearing as to whether I'll puke or not.

Fun fact: I've never been hung over. I've purged a number of times. :)

Wanna read the ten other myths debunked?