wwe smackdown

Well, you may remember from an earlier post that this weekend Belinda and I are having the WWE smackdown weekend this weekend.

I'm not really sure what to expect. What I do expect is that it will be interesting and stressful. There will be a decent amount of fighting, no doubt. And I will have to spend a lot of time listening to Belinda say, "Can you believe my fucking mother?"

The only upside to all of this, is that I will probably have a ton of new grumpier-than-ever material for Tuesday!

walk

Belinda and I have been walking to work as of late. At 2-1/2 miles, it's great exercise, takes us about 1 hour (with a stop at Starbucks) and takes the same time or less than our city's "efficient" subway.

As with everything in my life, there is a catch.

The catch isn't the fact that our walk takes us through one of out city's worst neighborhoods (think strip clubs, crack deals, homelessness, and condoms on the sidewalk), it's that Belinda doesn't have some sort of bag to carry her stuff.

I have a rather cavernous messenger bag. The contents of which are one small digital camera and one book Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling. I have plenty of room left over to carry her stuff. I don't mind, I volunteered to be her sherpa, besides it's my job as her man!

So Belinda gives me a nice pair of shoes, a nice top to wear at work, and the PURSE. The PURSE just fits in my messenger bag, with only a little room to spare, if that gives you any indication as to its size. In the last few weeks, I have taken to calling it the black hole, if that gives you any indication as to its heft. To give you some idea as to how dark and deep the black hole goes, Belinda once couldn't locate her keys for a full week. Eventually at the end of the week they mysteriously turned up in the darkest reaches at the bottom of the PURSE.

As we set out each morning, my bag weighs in at a good 25 to 30 pounds. On top of that, we try to keep up a good pace. This is exercise afterall.

Now, please remember, this isn't the whining blog, so I'm not complaining here about how much the bag weighs, or how far I have to carry it, or that I get a little sweaty carrying it. No, this is the grumpy blog. No whining!

What made me grumpy today was that I asked Belinda to carry it for a little bit about half-way through our walk. I didn't say so, but I was getting a bit tired, my back was aching, and I wanted to unload it for about 10 minutes. As soon as I asked her, she gave me a look and said, "But it's heavy!" Riiiiiight. So she takes the bag, and boy did it feel good to get the weight off my back. No sooner did she put the strap over her shoulder that the complaining started. "The heel of the shoes are poking me in the back!" "The bag is so uncofortable!" "It's poking me in the butt!"

This is just in the first two minutes...

human condition?

I got this email from Peter at Mildew Hall:

Heyup Mr. Grumpy!

I've noticed that there seems to be a disturbing trend in grumpy blogs - is this part of a new determination that people will no longer be afraid to speak their mind ? If so, I'm all for it!

Peter

First of all, I have to say, "Whoa". This is because someone besides Belinda and me are reading this. Who knew?

Secondly, I had no idea that there was a trend in grumpy blogging. So I decided to do some research. I did this google search and got a grumpy blog in Polish. Maybe grumpy means teenager in Polish, who knows. Blogwise returns these three blogs. A similar search on Blogarama yields exactly one hit, this very blog. Technorati gives me 132 posts in the last 7 days! Feedster returns 4979 posts!!! Whoa! Maybe there aren't many blogs dedicated to grumpiness and grumps, but everyone sure is talking about it! This is certainly not an exhaustive search, and I'm sure there are even more blogs out there discussing general grumpiness, crankiness, and grouchiness.

What I do know is this. People are pissed off. I'm certainly not the only one. Do we have a general level of unhappiness? Or is this just part of the human condition? Are we no longer shackled by Victorian-esque good manners and keeping our feelings to ourselves as Peter suggests? What really is going on here?

Personally, I write this blog to blow off steam. It's a great outlet and a great way for me to be tolerable to my loved ones. Since I've been writing it, I notice that people say things like, "Jeez, what crawled up his ass today??" a lot less. To avoid such things, I write and I vent. I imagine a lot of bloggers do so for similar reasons. Sort of a "dear diary" approach to dealing with being fucking pissed off.

But what about Peter's email, and the disturbing trend in grumpy blogging? Peter's been in the blogiverse a lot longer than I have, so if he says there is a trend, I'm apt to believe him. Are we all going through our lives pissed off more than not? Whats causing this? Chemtrails? George Bush? Terrorists? RFID? Anyone? Anyone?

doppelganger

So I googled myself today to find out what's going on with my doppelgangers.

There a few other men in the world with the same name as me. No, my real name is not Grumpy. I have a pretty unique name, so when I google myself I get 3 pages of google hits, about 25 hits altogether. It seems that there are about four of us in the USA. From time to time we all do different stuff, win some award, start a new web page, or whatever. I like to keep tabs on all of us and see how we're all doing.

One is me. Another is a dentist in Virginia. The third is a real estate agent in Racine. And the last guy is a high school band teacher in New Jersey.

This is where it gets weird. It seems that recently, the band teacher has been arrested as part of a global child porn ring. So there is some guy out there, no, not just fucking out there, in fucking New Jersey, that has the same name as me, who has been arrested in connection with a global child pornography ring. Not only that, but he is only 2 years younger than me. The closeness doesn't end there. He lives in New Jersey which is pretty close to the state I am originally from. In fact I have relatives in New Jersey (not the same last name though). Which also means his social security number is probably close to mine numerically. Also, having the same last name and being from the same region of the US as me, he most likely fits my description, average height, brown hair, brown eyes, that non-WASP look. Yikes!

I realize that he is innocent until proven guilty and all that. But seriously, in this society if someone even utters your name and child porn in the same sentence, your life is pretty much toast.

What I can't figure out is, what is the universe trying to tell me here? Should I expect to walk into my local bank one day and have them tell me that my assets have been frozen pending my acquittal? What happens when one of my coworkers is bored one day and decides it will be fun to google me? I bet they'll never look at me quite the same way again.

Well in any case, I have my fingers crossed for my troubled doppelganger and I hope our name gets cleared soon.

supposebly

My sister uses the word supposebly.

What the hell am I supposed to do? I mean she's my sister. She's not a dummy. Yet, she uses it all the fucking time.

Is there some gentle way I can say, "Sis, I love you dearly, but the word is supposedly. IT'S A FUCKING D, NOT A FUCKING B! IT'S FUCKING SUPPOSEDLY! NOT FUCKING SUPPOSEBLY! WHAT ARE YOU FUCKING STUPID?!?!"

Sheesh.

Nope, there's no nice way to say it...

prisoner

I really hate it when coworkers hold me prisoner.

You know, it's when they stand next to your desk and tell you all about their lame-ass weekend activities. You really couldn't care less how their weekend was, but there they are telling you all about it. You're sitting, they're standing, they're droning on, you're pretending to listen, faking a pleasant look on your face. What you're really thinking is, "How the fuck do I make them stop?" You can't just get up and walk away. You cant turn back to your computer suddenly and pretend to be composing an important email. The only thing that can save you is the boss, a fire alarm, or perhaps a sudden urge to pee. Of course, if the boss comes it spells doom because he's probably going to make you do some actual work. That sudden urge to pee is a bit girly and a little too much on the TMI front. So your only recourse, really, is the fire alarm.

I am praying for a 5 alarm fire. It's going to ring, any second now...

weekend

Belinda and I are going away for the weekend.

I can't quite remember, but I think it may be the first time we're having a little weekend getaway since we've been together, which is almost 3 years now. There's always been some reason or other to not go away. Money. School. Work. Time. Moving. Family. Dog. Migraines. So this weekend is it, no more excuses, just her and I in a little bed and breakfast on the coast.

Hopefully, I will be able to keep my grumpiness at bay this weekend and not ruin things. I just want to have a nice time and do some "relationship strengthening". We need this for two reasons. First, because it's been so long since we've done anything romantic. Second, is because the weekend after this is going to be the equivalent of a WWE smackdown.

That weekend, we are going away too, to the mountains. But unlike this weekend, we're not going to be alone. We're going with Belinda's mother, the mother's boyfriend, her sister, her brother-in-law, her nephew, and our dog.

I love Belinda's family dearly. Sure, they're a bit dysfunctional, but they are so nice and just generally warm and accepting of everyone. But over the years, for many complex reasons (and some other blog post), Belinda has grown to become, in a way, the black sheep of her family. They fight. A lot. Not the men, all us men are outsiders. Belinda's family is a family of women who are hypersensitive, emotional train wrecks.

I can hardly wait...

belinda

As you can probably surmise. I use aliases when talking about the people in my life.

Since Belinda is so special to me, and a supporter of my blog and my blogging (and probably its only reader), I gave her the opportunity to choose her own alias. She politely declined, saying something like, "Oh, it's your blog, you decide." Or something like that.

So I did, I chose Belinda. It's not my favorite name in the world, but it's worlds apart from Belinda's real name. Also, I don't personally know or have I ever met a single person with that name. The only celebrity I could think of with that name was, of course, Belinda Carlisle. I could've done a lot worse there.

Today I get this email:

"BELINDA? Ugh. What a yucky name!!!!!"

I gave you the opportunity to choose your own name... you declined, I chose for you. Belinda means beautiful (scientific wild ass guess, here), you should be happy...

And this:

"Belinda means fat. It just sounds fat!"

No, Bertha sounds fat... You can change it any time you want.

And finally this:

"Belinda is fine. Just funny."

Now we all know what that means, change it now if you ever want to have sex with me again, ever. I am not going to succumb to her mafia-esque pressures. What I need is some information to battle her with. I need to know the true meaning, hopefully it will be good, and I can say, "Look Belinda means ... isn't that sweet!?!?"

So I google "meaning of names" and got this from Behind the Name:

BELINDA f
Usage: English
Pronounced: be-LIN-da
The meaning of this name is not known for certain. The first element could be related Italian bella "beautiful". The second element could be related to Germanic lind "serpent, dragon" or linde "soft, tender". This name first arose in the 17th century, and was subsequently used by Alexander Pope in his poem 'The Rape of the Lock'.

So it either means beautiful dragon, or soft beauty.

It's even better than I thought!

ridin' high

I continue to astound myself.

I am still in a good mood. Work has been going very well. I have actually gotten to work on some new stuff for the last two days, which has been a great break from the monotony that I have been subjected to for the last three months. Things with Belinda have been going nicely too.

I was a bit grouchy this morning, but that's because I'm not a morning person, and I was running late for work. But that all seems like eons ago at this point.

Don't worry, I'm sure the grump will be back with a vengeance and soon...

holy sh*t!

I'm in a good mood today! I can't fucking believe it!

Of course, that sucks, because now I have nothing to write about.

pbase

I love pbase.com. It certainly doesn't make me grumpy. What does make me grumpy is the number of people who either don't know it exists, or who use it without paying their ludicrously low fees.

Pbase is by far the best online photo site ever. It is fast. There is no advertising, no banners, not even that "Ads by Google" thing on the side. They don't try to sell you prints, greeting cards, frames, calendars or any of that soon-to-be-landfill shit the other sites try to hawk on you.

What you do get, for a measly $23/year, is a whopping 200MB of storage space for your pictures. They let you direct link to your photos. They let you upload and download the full size, unadulterated, straight-from-your-digital-camera version of your photos, if you want. You can set up as many galleries as you like. And you can alter the look and feel of the galleries any way you want if you know a little about CSS (they have pre-made CSSs if you're HTML illiterate like me).

And get this, anyone you want can see your galleries. Your Aunt Sophie in Kalamazoo, your great-grandmother in Peoria, whomever. All you have to do is send them the link to your gallery in pbase, and they can see the dog, cat, grandkids, artful nudes, whatever. The link is even easy to remember it looks like this: http://www.pbase.com/yournamehere. Amazing.

Go on, throw money at these guys now.

job

Like most employed people in this country, I have a job that I can't stand.

The thing is, I'm supposed to love it.

In many respects it's a dream job. It can be challenging. I can pretty much come and go as I please. I work in a small office of 8-10 people, and that means I am certainly not a cog in the huge corporate machine, a number, a worker bee. I do not work in cubicle hell, in fact, there are no cubicles at all, which rocks. I am paid fairly (then again, we're all dissatisfied with our salaries, no matter how high they climb, aren't we?). All this, yet, I can't stand my job.

Maybe it's because there's too few people here and I haven't really connected with any of them as friends. Maybe it's because it's so fucking dark in here (the lights are always off in here so a small minority of people can better see their computer monitors). Maybe it's because my boss is perfect and I can never be as smart, articulate, and properly educated as he is. Maybe it's because it's so fucking quiet in here that I can hear a mouse scurrying across the indoor/outdoor carpet.

Whatever the reason, here I am, stuck. For now...

baby talk

I love Belinda through and through. She loves me even more than that, which is totally incomprehensible to me, mostly because I'm a man.

Occasionally though, she does a few things that really put me over the edge.

Belinda loves to baby talk to me. Baby talk is a perfectly normal and lovely way to express your emotions and feelings of intimacy to the person you love. I actually like it. It's cute, it allows us to banter in a cutesy way, and it usually is a good precursor to snuggling. Who doesn't like snuggling?

The thing that gets me is when Belinda bursts out with the baby speak. At the seemingly most unromantic moments in life. On line at Starbucks. On the subway at crush time. Standing next to a homeless dude while waiting to cross the street. Walking through the worst neighborhood in the city, with prostitution and crack deals and homelessness going on all around us as we try to get through it all as quickly as possible.

I totally don't get it.

I love the baby talk when we're home. When we're getting close on the couch, spooning in bed. Even when we're cooking and doing the domestic togetherness thing. That's actually romantic. But at Starbucks? What the hell is romantic about Starbucks? I can assure you there will be no spooning happening while the milk for our lattes and macchiatos gets steamed.

I'm a very private person. I do not like other people, especially total strangers, to know about my personal life at all. I like to be cutesy and romantic as the next guy, I just like it at home. So when Belinda starts with the baby talk, at the supermarket, next to the plastic wrap, I tend to get a little grouchy. I see it as letting total strangers in on our little secret love life.

Belinda says it's because she feels that way about me all the time. In which case, I refer to you back to the first paragraph...

headache

A long time source of my grumpiness is my brain. It hurts. Quite often. Like right now. Been that way all day today. Since lunch. Maybe I shouldn't have eaten that burrito. Who knows.

Something that makes both me and Belinda grumpy are people who think they have migraines. Since the 90s, it seems that it's "cool" to have migraines, and people out there in the world seem to think that every time their head hurts, they must have a migraine. According to WebMD migraine headaches are

"...painful, sometimes debilitating headaches often accompanied by nausea, vomiting, and sensitivity to light, noise, and smell."

They also say this,

"Migraines run in families, and a genetic link has been identified."

Now I'm not suggesting that you people that I speak of are faking it. I truly believe that you have a headache. I'm sure it really hurts, too. I will grant you that you suffer from frequent headaches, even. But you don't have a migraine... Come on, get fucking real.

I do not have a migraine. I have a headache. My mother used to say, "Oh Grumpy, you are a headache."

grumpy

It's like a dark cloud has been hovering over my head today. I am in an insanely foul mood. Lots of reasons for it today. None of which I will get into...

I'm trying very hard not to be outwardly mean to anyone who doesn't really deserve my wrath. I mostly try to stay to myself, and avoid human contact. It's much easier that way, and no one gets hurt.

whew

Just a quick update on Belinda's laptop. It turns out that the laptop is OK afterall. She drove it down to the other office (where the IT guys actually works) and he fixed it in 30 seconds. It turns out all you have to do is take the battery out for a minute, then put it back in, and it fires up. Now that's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard of. Nice job HP!

fuckup

well, not a true moment of grumpiness, but I certainly do feel bad.

Over the weekend, Belinda asked me to take a look at her work laptop. She has apparently been having lots of problems with it. It turns out she had a virus or fifty, and being a bit of a tech neophyte, she asked me to help. Apparently the IT dude at her job is in another office, and totally overworked.

So on Sunday, I ran a virus scan and cleaned that up. While I was at it I also ran Ad-aware, defragmented the hard drive, and did a general cleanup. I did the virus scan last, and as I was running it, her laptop ran out of juice and went into hibernation mode. No problem, except that she left her power supply at work. So we took a quick jaunt to work (and Starbucks, my hard earned IT salary) and picked up the power supply. When we got back home, I plugged it in, and fired that puppy up. Except it didn't fire up. Nothing. Hmmm... I let it sit a while to juice up the battery and tried it again. Nothing. WHAT THE FUCK? NOTHING. I tried the power switch again. Nothing. Again. Nothing... HOLY FUCKING SHIT I BROKE HER WORK LAPTOP!

I, of course, maintain my usual stoic composure...

Belinda freaks out. She has lots of work to do over the weekend, as well as, something insanely important on Monday morning.

There is nothing I can do. I've exhausted my limited skills as a fake IT guy. It doesn't turn on, no green LEDs, nothing. No response. I don't know what to do. Belinda continues to freak out.

I don't blame her. I wish I could help...