Thought Sausage

Once again your hero is sitting in Chicago's very own monument to stupidity (O'Hare). This is my first post-gel-bomb flight and I have to be honest, it was quite painless. The security line wasn't really all that much longer. The typical dipshit brigade was staffing terminal 3's checkpoint. This time around, the security of our carry on luggage was entrusted to a crusty old man with coke-bottle glasses that didn't look like he could detect the broad side of a barn, let alone a tiny bottle of hair gel. Where do they find these people? Nevertheless, this specimen-of-the-New-Deal studied every piece of luggage for a solid 2 minutes before letting it pass. I could certainly see how this could create security delays. Fortunately for me, the line was only about 30 people deep so it wasn't entirely lame. Of course, a trip through airport security wouldn't be complete without Johnny Suede Shoes who is appalled at the notion of having to take his shoes off. This time Johnny was directly in front of me and thought since he wasn't wearing socks he'd get some sort of foot fungus if he walked 10 steps barefoot across the O'Hare floor. The half-man/half-turtle creature watching the walk-through detector politely told him Homeland Security doesn't give a shit about his foot hygiene. After the two went back and forth on the issue, the man finally took his shoes off and walked his ass through the detector unscathed.

This week? Well a huge presentation is on the docket for Thurs. This one involves me conducting a seminar for a client which will take 3 hours. I'm bustin out the big guns for this one. This is straight up info-tainment folks! We got exercises, we got some super fly slides, about the only thing I'm missing is a soundtrack (and believe me, I've mulled the idea over). The goal here is to knock this one out of the park and replicate the process to other clients. We teach cos we can't do folks. Actually, we do, and we do very fucking good...hence the business.

Other than that, we gots us a ton of pages to crank out for a site audit. The minions are gonna bring the thunder on this one. We got a talented bunch over there in fogtown yes maam. we're like the A-Team of site optimization. I am putting in a purchase request for a godzilla costume, 82 GMC Cargo Van and a Corvette this week.

I arrive back in Chicago Saturday morning @ 9am. Plenty of time before I destroy all internal organs via a Cubs Game and me being on a Rooftop within viewing distance in the company of peeps I haven't seen in years. I pity the fool who has to pick me up off the floor.

Also, if you haven't already, please check out our AIDS Fund page here: http://www.aidsmarathon.com/participant.asp?runner=CH-9715&EventCode=HN06

Seriously if everybody who is subscribed to this blog throws down 10 bucks, we'll have met our goal. How cool is that? The AIDS Foundation of Chicago is a mighty fine cause as well. Unlike a lot of charities who have a ton of overhead and don't really help anybody, this one actually has a direct line with AIDS patients so if you throw in 10 bucks, literally 9 dollars of that will go straight to AIDS patients. Not a lot of overhead here. Plus its 100% tax deductible! So do it up! Even if ya don't, I'll still love you, but will god?

It's 4:45am....do you know where your children are?

I've been up all night. Rather than attempt to get to O'hell in the morning, I went ahead and trained it here last night around 12:30am. Camped out on a bench out front, which I'm sorry to say isn't the first time (and probably not the last). Getting here when O'hare opens for business is a spectacle in of itself. It's like some grand opening parade, but instead of a grand marshall, a 4'0" tall man with a TSA coat wanders up and down the cattle line reciting the same Homeland Security Bullshit that was blaring over the loudspeaker @ 3am this morning (and threatening to prevent me from sleeping). That speech is amusing. As you are no doubt aware, you are no longer permitted to bring liquids of any kind on a plane. Now there are some caveats to that. Baby formula is okay, but no more than 8oz's. Prescription medicine is a go too, so long as your name is on the prescription. Deodorants, chapstick and personal hygiene effects of that substance are also permissable. The amusing part to me is that the announcement then takes the time to suggest some other "substances" that may fall into the "deodorant-consistency" realm. Crew Cream was thrown out as an example (who the fuck still uses that?), as was some other shit I've never heard of. The entire message takes about a minute and a half to play through, and the tiny little man in the coat knew every single second of it. Word for word, enunciation by enunciation. From what I can tell, this is how that little man will spend the next 9 hours of his day. And you thought YOUR job was dull. Har har har!

So I was privy to being 2nd in line today. For those of you who've never been at O'hell when it first opens, keep it that way. Even at 4:30am the stupidity amazed me. First they parade everyone through an egregiously long maze (you know, the roped off things you see at banks and every other airport). Once it is about one hundred people deep, a largish woman with pants that look like they fit her three previous lives ago begins sectioning and resectioning off this little maze. She tripped up twice and had to "start over". By the end of it, she had taken a long-yet-routed line and turned it into a convoluted gigantic clusterfuck that, were I in at a carnival, I would expect to win a prize for getting all the way through. The fatal flaw in her poorly engineered labrynth was that she put in 5 (FIVE) areas where the line would feed into security. If there were 5 corresponding security checkpoints, this might make sense. However, we only had two available. At this time of morning, I, and probably most people in the line are not equipped to deal with these problems. This resulted in a clusterfuck of tired people aimlessly wandering to one of the two lines. Being the savvy people the dipshit brigade @ O'hare is, they solved this problem by designating one of the troops to stand in the middle of the floor and say "Go to the closest station to you". This statement neglected the obvious physics that 5 lines and 2 checkpoints poses. Nevertheless, I cut somebody and got through.

So where I am I going? Why NYC of course! I'll be here today for a meeting at 11 (pray tell I can get from LaGuardia to mid-Manhattan by then). Actually, this puts me pretty close to Times Square. I think if you haven't been to New York you should see Times Square. Kind of like if you've never been to Chicago, you should at least go to the Signature Lounge and have a drink. But after seeing it, Times Square has to be the single most plastic contrived wad of gawdy bullshit north of Disneyworld. I don't even know if I can properly describe it other than to say, if you took Justin Timberlake, Simon Cowell, Sharon Osbourne, a Japanese game show and somehow melded them all into a single building, what you would end up with would be the McDonalds in Times Square (you know, that one that looks like it should be in Tokyo). Sadly, I'll probably be eating a McRib there before the day is through

Of course, Carnegie's Deli is just a few blocks north of that seizure inducing section of town. If time permits, I may cruise up there and have a cow with two crackers on the end.

The client I'm meeting with today is a largish techie firm that sells solutions to problems you didn't know you had. From what I understand, if they decide to throw the gauntlet down on this project...I'll be spending ever MORE time in the most expensive city in the union. At some point or another, I may have to set aside my disdain for New York and make friends with that town.

Boy howdy this was a fucking day for the record. Upon boarding the plane, a monsoon decided to lumber its way into the far northwest end of Chicago...and O'hare ain't too hip to fueling and stocking a plane with lightning around. So we had to wait for 45 FUCKING MINUTES until they deemed it safe. Then, once we got out of the gate, the pilot announced that "we're going to wait until the showers die down before take off". Joy. Now I'm starting to think I may miss this meeting, but I'm going to New York no matter what. I decide to email the boys in NYC and inform them of this state of affairs and assure them I will call as soon as I land.

when we did land, the pilot then announced that "we hadn't been cleared to go to the gate" yet, so we had to sit out on the tarmac AGAIN! Of all the days to be delayed at every juncture, this was not the one I'd pick. Basically I was fucked. I called the rest of the crew and basically said I'd join the meeting late if I had to (an entrance I'm oh so fond of making).

I joined the meeting about a half hour late, did a 20 minute song and dance about myself and then hopped on a bus and headed back to Laguardia. Yes, I was in new york for a grand total of about a half hour. LAMENESS

New things are gonna be happenin around these parts. We're taking it to the next level! More details soon

Bought tickets today for Jay and I to see what is being called the farewell Ministry Tour (really?). It'll be cool to see Grandpa Al's big sendoff (in Chicago no less-that in of itself oughta make this a star studded affair) at the House of Blues, which is one of the better venues to see a show this size in our town. Meshugah and some opener I know nothing about are opening. Meh. Of course this whole affair takes place in May (seriously?) and the first show already sold out (!) so they announced the May 8th gig. Man I remember back when I could go see Ministry when they'd sell out the Aragon Ballroom and even scalpers weren't selling tickets for 52 bucks. Now I remember why I don't go to shows as much as I used to. Funny how ticketmaster charges 9 bucks for the "convenience charge" for a show like this and only like 3 bucks for the opera. Like all that industrial is way too much for Ticketmaster to put one guy on it so they had to staff it with three. Or they just subscribe to NIN's Australian label's theory that since Ministry has more of a devout following than the Phantom of the Opera did, they can charge more. Asstards...

Nevertheless, I'm quite stoked. Last time I saw Ministry was the Animositisomina tour and since then, they've put out 2 pretty good albums and 1 spectacular album (Houses of the Mole'). Tommy Victor is playing guitar (yawn) and obviously Paul Raven isn't going to be on bass so who knows will play bass. I'm pretty sure his first name isn't Paul and his last name isnt' Barker so its kind of a moot point.

I'm finding myself in the midst of trying to figure out what the fuck to do for New Years. On one hand...I'm not the sort of person who puts a lot of thought into New Years aside from going with the flow. Only the flow isn't going in one consistent direction. You see on the other hand...I have friends (and a brother) going to Vegas, and a flock of Chicagoans that want to "do something" but nobody has quite turned that into a plan. Rumor has it there's some deal at Witts that people are leaning towards, which is not unlike spending New Years in a liquor store, but whateva. I'm to the point in my life where I've played shows on new years, not played shows, gone to high rent exclusive parties downtown, and parties where people like Tara Reid are too drunk to actually make it to midnight, then of course, my Iowa days that are probably the most, I dunno? Comfortable? ...at this point in my life I really don't give a fuck as long as I'm around people. The rub of course is now the Vegas faction is telling me I gotta make a decision and yet I'm not exactly sure what the fuck is going on here in town. If this sounds like trivial bullshit to you, you and myself are in agreement. Why the fuck is this something that is even occupying my brain?

I have nothing intelligent to add here, other than SES is in town right now, but PubCon is going on in Vegas (jesus for a city I detest it's making its way into my site pretty frequently today). Of course, all the cool people I normally use SES as an excuse to meet up with are going to PubCon which basically means SES is nothing but a bunch of n00bs and hanger ons that didnt' get to go to PubCon. All the talking heads went to PubCon. I've had too many meetings and stuff during the day to pay much mind to SES, especially since there's like no fucking parties whatsoever this week. The party scene for this convention has steadily gone downhill since 2004. Perhaps its just Chicago because out in San Jose (San Fran basically) this thing is the shiznit (same with Ad Tech)

The girl from Monday departs for Hawaii in the morning for the marathon (aka Japan's now-annual re-invasion of Honolulu...it's what ya get for letting JAL sponsor the fucking thing I guess). Won't see her until the end of the month (as reported yesterday)

I got some function for Illinois Tech Association tomorrow night so I'm bailing on swimming. Then hopefully I'll make it to the CIMA holiday party. I'm told it'll be "off the hook" (thanks Brad). Off the hook is no longer something I do particularly well mid-week. Damn old age...

UPDATE: Oh shit CIMA party is so off the hook it sold out. Not that I'm particularly thwarted by that notion (seeing as how my boss is the president of that organization)...but I guess if I needed an excuse to not plunk down 100 bucks to hob nob with a bunch of people that I inadvertently make 'feel stupid' (their words not mine), that right there falls conveniently in line.

This would have posed a much larger problem when I was living in Iowa, but since I live smack dab in the middle of down fucking town Chicago, its more of a nagging nuisance...but I went out to drive to swim practice after work, only to fine my battery was not capable of turning over. I hadn't driven it since Thursday and it seemed the cold weather zapped it. Ugh...so that nixed practice for tonight. Instead I did some lifting and then Horowitz came over with his big 'ol blue Impala and its big 'ol battery and once again we couldn't get the fucker jumped (this same thing happened a couple years ago). So now I'm stuck in the position of not having a car to get to practice. This shouldn't be that big of a deal since I ride there in the summer (and somewhat last winter) anyway. But I really got in the habit of taking the car, and even though its only a mile, it's kind of nice getting out and driving.

So...yeah...shit on that. This basically means I have to coordinate/engineer a truck over to the garage to do whatever the fuck it is they do. Ironically, my cell phone of all things comes with some sort of coverage for this sort of thing so I just call 'em up and they send somebody over. I'm RLY hoping this shapes up so they can look at it before 7-ish so I can still make practice. I certainly didn't take in calories today with the idea I wouldn't be swimming.

In other news, I'm digging the new Atomica Project single that just dropped this week....

I'm only one listen into it so far, but it's sexy-female-vocals-done-right make no mistake. None of that Evanescane wannabe bullshit so many bands cop. It's easily up there with Collide. Wade's a cool ambient/noisy-yet-melodic dude (save for Scanalyzer which is just plain fucking noisy). The remixes on here are pretty tasty as well...from my initial impression. Sort of sound like they were done in Fruityloops though...not that that's a bad thing persay...cos I do a lot of shit in Fruityloops (GASP). I like Bounte more and more though...kid has skillz and not in a Paul Oakenshit flavor either.

....heh, I only realized now that Fruityloops is apparently now called "FL Studio"...guess I'm not hip to the kids nowadays

Anyway...you can go grab this single for a measly 2 bucks so you're really only demonstrating your lack of perception for good music if you don't go grab these songs.

(patiently awaiting the full album release)

Actually listening to this makes me wanna program and go electronic more. It seems I've stumbled into a Hansel Und Gretyl kind of heavy (sans vocals, cos I don't have any yet). Kinda cool cos I always wanted to get 'that sound' but haven't quite gotten it yet. But despite not using a single amp, and playing fucking Parker Niteflys of all guitars, I got a pretty mean slammin tone. And I finally stopped being afraid of putting a 909 foot behind my "real people's kick drum" samples and the net result is....i dunno "modern"? Perhaps I've discovered what everyone else already knew, which is most heavy bands nowadays don't actually have a drummer "play" the parts in the studio, but rather sample the kit and arrange accordingly in pro tools. Oh wait...I knew everyone else was doing that...I was just too lazy to program percussion that heavily cos I always had a real live drummer with real live drums till now...

Am sitting in La Guardia...once again O'Hare has fucked me over. Whoopdie freaky fucky do. I was slated to take off at 7:25, and now we're looking at 8:15 (it's bumped up twice) and everything coming in from O'hare is delayed by at least an hour. Jesus christ I should just fucking drive to New York when the man makes me come here. It'd certainly be more scenic.

Everything went fine on the trip. All necessary RFP's are in the fate of the selection comittee gods now. People who needed training/enlightenment seemed to have recieved it. The hotel was fairly nice. I perused the weight room last night and then went for a run in Central Park (yeah I'm in fucking mid/uptown once again it seems). And btw, Cafe Metro on Lexington and 46th is the fucking business for lunch. They've got the same salad scheme as Ponte Fresco (hellz yes!). Before today, I was a fan of this little Vietnamese grocery a few blocks south and west of that (the actual coordinates escape me). I think I have a new midtown fav. We ordered in sushi on Monday and that wasn't really anything to write home about (although the snow crab rolls were better than what I've had in Chicago...still doesn't hold a candle to what you can get on the west coast). I really need to come visit New York for non-work related reasons. The last time I was here for fun was to see David Bowie. That was in 2000. And I was engaged at the time. Travis is threatening to come here for baseball, so maybe that'll happen this year yet. I keep spending all my time in midtown, which is like, tourist/dipshit central. I know this because in other business trips, I've had time to move around the island and burrows enough to know that there are in fact some really cool areas in the city.

All that said, I'm looking out the window in Terminal D at some of the nicest weather I've seen since, well a week ago. I have no bike around me. This is bad. What's even worse? It's supposed to rain all weekend. Naturally that won't stop me from mountain biking, but well, go fuck yourself weather.

All this to remind me that well, I really don't mind not traveling for work anymore. It was an exciting prospect when I came to Fathom. BUt when I racked up 135,000 domestic miles in a shade under 9 months, it became not so fun. I know LaGuardia and the San Francisco Airports just as well as I do both Chicago ones. It got to the point to where even the bartenders at the San Fran one knew me by first name (my how times have changed...I had to sit here for an hour before I decided maybe a beer would be alright, I'd be 60 bucks in back in the day). Anyhow...been there done that. Being in beautiful weather and having to spend it sitting in an airport because my bikes are in another time zone, my running shoes are in the bag I checked and there's nowhere to swim is just plain fucking annoying now.

Plan for the rest of the week is basically to get to the weekend. Unfortunately, if I could do this over again, I would have scheduled this trip to go through Friday (although somewhat un-realistic). As it turns out, Sean in the NYC office has an extra ticket to see Ministry on Thursday here in town (the venue escapes me). Granted I'm going a week from then in Chicago at House of Blues. However his tickets are VIP which include a meet 'n greet (that sound you heard was Gabe slapping his forehead). So I guess I'll just have a good swim in grandpa Al's honor. Word is Ministry is playing for a solid 2.5 hours too so the setlist oughta be pretty badass. I still have Drive By Truckers this weekend...hoowah!

Well the past week flew by.

Went out for a brick session (run/cycle) up in Antioch on Saturday. That went alright...right up until I blew 2 (two!) tires. Jesus fuck this year is not being kind to my tires. The good to come of this I suppose is the fact I'm getting pretty good at changing tubes. It did cut short my cycle though. I also lost the pads for my aero bars (I'm guessing I left them on my trunk after attaching my bike). If the weather holds I plan on attempting this on lake path tomorrow. We'll see how that goes.

Was GOING to head to Palos and mountain bike today, however the Earth didn't agree with me and decided to blast Chicago with a hefty massive downfall of rain mid-afternoon. Normally I wouldn't let that slow me down but Cambr has been bitching up a storm lately about people riding the single track when it is muddy and they show up and bother people on the trails whenever possible. So instead of that, I watched There Will Be Blood and ate too much food. Wheeee....

All in all, for a guy who didn't really go out Friday, I managed to spend a ridiculous amount of money. Couple that with the fact I am going to be getting a hefty bill from james to replace the motherboard in my main computer (which has to happen sooner than later, I've had it with this thing). That is really thrilling...

I'm two weeks away from my first Triathlon of the season. Hy Vee in Des Moines. I'm quite confident on my biking and my ability to clock that in at right around an hour. Running has been a bitch in these bricks lately. To be fair, my diet the day before isn't exactly ideal, but I was hoping to be around 7:30 miles and around 7:50 is about what seems realistic. Some of that is dependant on how hilly the course is. Since I had the tube problems on Saturday I'm goiing to try to get more multi-sport workouts in between now and the 22nd.

Found out this week that work is very likely going to have me spending a lot of time in Seattle in the month of July and August. I'm a little nervous about that as it will fuck with the bike time I have (I'll run anywhere I don't give a fuck about that). Shit...speaking of work, I owed a blog post on Friday and didn't git 'r done. The search industry just isn't engendering anything interesting, and I doubt people are interested in listening to me wax poetic about my workout regimes.

Am sitting 30,000 feet or so over Canada (I guess? How the fuck else do you fly to Alaska from Salt Lake City?). We must be fairly far north at this point because it's around 11pm and the sun is still sort of up. We are at a point in the year where the sun is always out this far north. It's not like mid-afternoon or anything, but it only gets as dark as dusk back in Chicago. Flights so far have been relatively painless. I had a woman sit next to me en route to Salt Lake City that was in Chicago to go to her father's funeral. She explained this at length and also explained how life sucks because you spend it accumulating a bunch of shit, and then when you die, they just pack it up and give it away. After she ordered herself a couple vodkas, she proceeded to go into extreme detail and bust out the camera adn show me pics of her children, her house, and her birthday party with her friends (which was some sort of sex toy party...which seems to be all the rage with women in their 40's now).

Ever wonder what types of people are flying to Alaska this time of year are like? Well from the passengers on this 757, I would surmise they are either A.people who work on the pipeline "gettin to it", B. the reddest of rednecks who never set foot outside without some piece of clothing with the word "Skoal" on it or C. Spouses of military people stationed in Fairbanks or Anchorage. The row in front of me represents B and A and are basically getting on as you would assume this demographic would. They just met and haven't shut the fuck up since the plane took off. I think Roly and I are the only people on this plane that don't fish. As near as I can tell, that's all anyone on this plane seems to think one can occupy their time doing while in our nationa's 49th state (was it 49 or 50?).

So we're going to land somewhere around midnight, and then head off to get the truck, check into the hotel and call it a night. Tomorrow, we'll put the bikes together, go for a morning cycle through Anchorage, visit this sports store, get some salmon for lunch and then head off to the race site to pick up our packets. From there, we have zero plans till Saturday. We met a dude in a bar at the Salt Lake City airport who is from Anchorage and has driven the route we'll be riding many times. He says the elevation ain't shit and that we should be good, but that the roads kind of suck. No shoulders basically. That bodes kind of poorly, but not really since I can't imagine there's a lot of congestion in this particular neck of the woods. He DID go on to say that it is very possible we'll encounter/see a bear or two. As long as they are 500 yards away or so I'm fine with this, and hopefully we'll get some cool pics out of the deal.

Oh, and let me go ahead and say Delta is on my shitlist. Remember me saying they said you can fly a bike for free if the dimensions don't exceed 62"? Well their asstarded way of measuring this in no way resembles anything that makes sense. Our crates were over by 27 inches. Those 27 inches just cost Roly and I 150 bucks. Each way. So by "free", Delta really meant $300 (and that's on top of the $25 they charged me for my bag since I checked that first). MOTHERFUCKER! The cost of this trip is spiraling so far out of control it's almost comical. We're already way above our hotel and car rental budget and this extra $300 is just icing on the cake. We're actually considering going to a Fed Ex or UPS in Anchorage and seeing what they'd charge just to ship the bikes back to Chicago since it's very likely less than $150 fucking dollars. Goddammit I should just make a rule of only flying to rides that are in towns Jet Blue flies to. I'm not even going to worry about it at this juncture. I have money, I'd rather not burn through it at this rate, but if that's what it's going to take, then burn baby burn.

Other than that, I've been watching Californication on my ipod thus far. This show is the shiznit. Every episode is David Duchovny fucking one chick after another. I'm only 3 episodes into season 1, but as soon as I get done writing this, I'll be going through as many as I can the rest of this flight. Highly recommend.

We are now safely ensconsed in the Econo Lodge in Anchorage watching Family Guy (the one where Peter gets lipo suction). Everything went exceedingly well getting into the airport and after a quick gear-check (nothing is broken and all is in tact). It's about 57 degrees...and I'm 100% spent at the moment. Will update tomorrow

Boy howdy of all the customer support I've had to deal with over the years, American Airlines has to be on the ass end of the bell curve. Let me ask you this; if you are a huge company with lots of employees, why must the ones who can't speak a lick of english be the ones you put on your help desk? Surely there are employees of American who's command of our nation's majority tongue is sufficient to communicate concepts such as credit transfers and refunds.

Check it out. So I cancelled my San Fran trip from last week and was told I'd now have a credit voucher, but American would rape me to the tune of 150 bucks for re-booking. Sucks, but whatever right? So I hop my merry ass onto Expedia (as I was told when I cancel the credits would "show up in my account" - they didn't) to book a flight to Boston in October for my cousin's wedding. Seeing that these credits were in fact, unavailable, I called the support and the automated menu even had a choice for those of us that needed to use a credit voucher. This is where the fun began. Oh dear jesus. This fucker (I can't remember his name, but it rhymed with spaghetti) couldn't even understand numbers. NUMBERS! I had to read my itinerary to him no less than 4 times. Then when we finally made it clear I was calling to use credit, he ran through the whole rigamarole on the 150 bucks over and over because I kept saying "Sure okay, so can you use the remaining part of the voucher for that or do I need to give you a credit card (the flight to Boston is like 300 and the San Fran flight was 4 something or other)." At one point he put me on hold for 7 minutes (I spent the time staring at my computer clock) listening to crackly-ass elevator music (note to people who create hold music -how about something soft? the only necessary function of hold music is to let us know we didn't get cut off). When he came back, he informed me that I in fact, had to do this whole transaction through American as Expedia would not be able to book the flight directly so Spaghetti would have to transfer me.

The American Airlines person was nice. All the way up until I told her I wanted to rebook. She asked me why on earth I'd want to do that since I would be charged 150 bucks (I'm given to assume that staying put in Chicago for the rest of my life seemed like a perfectly viable option to her). As if pissing away the entire cost of the SF flight was somehow advantageous to using whatever credit I could get towards Boston. What the fuck?? Once we got the motives of my flight out of the way, she then informed me that not only would I be charged the 150 bucks, but the remaining difference of the flights would also be lost. So that difference between the 300 bucks (or something like that) for the Boston flight and the 450 or so the SF flight cost...yeah that 150 bucks...that part was going to just go away or something. According to her, I couldn't use that towards a flight in the future. I was also told that it was "not American Airlines policy to apply a credit voucher towards the 150 dollar mandatory re-booking fee". Somehow this equates to good customer service (I know this because the message told me while I was being transferred that American Airlines was going to 'record this call for quality assurance'). I finally just piped up and said "So how is it that you guys are just going to charge me an extra 150 bucks for a flight I didnt' even fly, when I'm perfectly willing to apply it towards another flight at a later date?" (I have the Disney World Marathon in January so I was figuring I'd use it then). I was told "If it's that big of an issue, I can talk to a 'credit voucher specialist' and was transferred to this person who I had to explain the situation to THRICE until I was told that there was no problem whatsoever applying the 150 mandatory re-booking fee on my voucher. Somehow it worked out that with fees/taxes I owed them another 15 dollars for the Boston flight. I literally had to ask "Okay can I just give you a credit card for that?" half a dozen times until she finally said 'yes" (prior to 'yes', she engineered new and different ways to explain to me that the differences between the flights and the mandatory fee came to 15 dollars).

So after damn near two hours I FINALLY have a flight on American Airlines to Boston in October and American Airlines got their 150 bucks to switch my flight (150 bucks?!! really??? Why don't they just go ahead and call it a gas tax or something?). The situation was such a clusterfuck I decided to compose a Haiku in its honor:

AA Can Fuck Off
Shitty Phone Support Bitches
Will fly Delta Now

Wow it's been awhile since I've posted what's been going on. Been a lot and a little.

Just got done doing an interval run out on the lake path tonight. I'm really trying to work at getting faster. the problem with working at getting faster is that it kicks your ass. I'm just beginning to ramp up for the marathon in January, but i want to do it in a way that I can actually finish under 4 hours. This summer was an eye opener to how shitty my run is. I'm looking at various training/coaching facilities in Chicago that cater to running. The Tri Club had a meeting last week where they introduced a bunch of them. Hopefully I'll have that hashed out by next week.

On another (sort of) downer...I've decided to back out of buying that Hummer. As it turns out, we got this here recession/crisis/hiccup thang going on gee gaw! You see, originally, the arrangement was that I would simply hand over my mustang, and they would hand me over the truck and the payments I was making on the Mustang would now go to GMAC and that would be that. In essence, it wouldn't really change anything money-wise for me. However, since said arrangement came to pass, GMAC seems to have drastically altered how they go about loaning money. That is to say, "we may require just a little bit up front in cash in addition to the car". How much is 'a little'? Oh you know, 5 fucking grand or so! Why is my definition of "a little" and the Hummer Dealer/GMAC so radically different? After mulling it over, I decided yanking that money out of savings (aka condo downpayment kittie, for whenever people besides Warren Buffet can get a mortgage) would not be wise given these times of woe and want. As a result I figured it would be better to chalk that $500 I gave them to order the truck up as idiot tax and keep on keepin on. The fact of the matter is that the Mustang is a perfectly good/stable/reliable/cool car. Doesn't exactly suit my needs, but whatever. Chicks dig it!

This weekend I'm going to Boston for my cousin's wedding. Good times...I havent' seen some of these folks in a few years and they are all good people. Good drinkers too...and Boston is a fun fucking down to party in. It'll be nice to go there and not have work going on.

Other than that...I'm back into lifting again. I want to see how much lean muscle I can build up in the off season (with respect to running of course). Getting up early is a bitch, but what the fuck ever.

Oh, and also...so Shelly and I are going to be going up to Milwaukee (and/or Madison?) for a couple days in a couple weeks. Unfortunately, this is occuring on a Saturday and Sunday. I have no idea what to do in those towns. Basically I'm up for anything (I haven't taken time away from work that hasnt' involved a race or cycling event in, like, forever, so just getting wasted and chilling seems great to me). Does anybody have any suggestions/ideas for things to do? And no fucking Paintball.