Sebbylite

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with bowling, and I think it stems from the fact that bowling balls are not made for people with big thumbs and weak wrists. Honestly, not everyone that enjoys bowling is a carny (”small hands, smell like cabbage”), and I just happen to be one of those persons.

I’m actually a pretty good bowler. Let me rephrase. I’m actually a pretty good bowler after a couple of beers. My average score goes up about 45-50 pins per game after I’ve had a drink or four as opposed to when I’m sober. I don’t know why, and I’m not really looking for a reason, I just wanted to share.

But I will say that the most frustrating thing about bowling is trying to find a good ball. It seems like every single bowling ball that is made for general use is for people with exceptionally small thumbs, or with exceptionally strong wrists. Now I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no Hercules (Her-cu-leez! Her-cu-leez!), and having to use a 15 pound bowling ball pretty much kills the fun I have while bowling. Plus it hurts like hell on my wrist.

Hmmm, maybe I need to look into getting my own ball?

Pics are up.

Sorry that it has taken me so long to post them here, but I’ve been busy. Well, let me take that back-I haven’t been busy, but I’ve been lazy. And Seattle has had snow and ice for the last week and a half which is really starting to annoy me. If I wanted snow and ice I would have stayed in the Midwest gawdemmit…

Anyway, here is a little preview of some of the festivities that occured at New Year’s. Unfortunately, I was a little “under the weather”*, so I only took pictures for about an hour, and mostly before people showed up to party. But I think that I got a couple good shots, and I even managed to get home by 6am…

*Under the Weather: another way of saying drunk out of my gourd.

So I do have a couple of posts that have been floating around in limbo for a while, and I’ll try to polish those off and get them online. Including, but not limited to, my New Year’s Resolutions (or lack thereof), a couple different and interestng conversations that I’ve had with people over the last month at bars, 2006-Year in Review, and more. Plus I’ll tell about how I made my brother change the date of his wedding so that I could go to MARS again…

I remember seeing James Brown perform at the Boise River Festival when I was in high school. It was probably 10 years ago, on a stage in the middle of a park in Boise, at around 5-6pm. I can’t imagine that it was any less than 95 degrees in the shade, and I’m sure that it was closer to 110-115 up on stage, directly in the sun.

But there he was, all dressed up in a white suit, kicking ass and taking names. Yes, he did look miserable between sets-sweating, tired, eyes hurting from staring into the sun. But he brought it. He brought it like no one else could.

Elvis may or may not be dead, but at the least he isn’t doing concerts anymore; Jerry Garcia is gone; Phish are done touring and performing; and now James Brown is gone. Who is going to step up and fill that void? I’m not sure if there is enough Rock/Soul/R and B/Hip Hop Personality out there…

A public funeral service for “Godfather of Soul” James Brown at an 8,500-seat US arena bearing his name in his hometown of Augusta, Georgia, has been set for Saturday.

Members of the public will also be able to view him at the New York theatre in which he made his debut.

Brown, who died on Monday of heart failure in Atlanta aged 73, will be buried later on Saturday in Augusta, said Brown’s agent, Frank Copsidas.

Earlier that day, his body will lie in state at James Brown Arena in Augusta, where the 1pm public service will be held, Copsidas said.

From the Ireland On-Line news service.

I just wanted to take a second and wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Or any other holiday that you are celebrating at the end of December/beginning of January. I’ve just moved across the lake to Kirkland (to be closer to work, and further from friends-I’ll tell more in a later post), which is why I haven’t been posting much lately. Well, that plus the holidays plus my general lack of creative thought over these past few weeks anyway.

So, in review: Happy Holidays. Maybe this next year will be the year we cure cancer, stop war, end hunger, and solve the over-population problem. Then again, it could just end up being 2007: The Year That Was. To andwer this little question, I went over to iGod to have a chat with the Big Guy/Gal Upstairs. Here’s an excerpt:

Me: are you there god?
God: I don’t know whether or not I am  there god.  I am  a giant electronic brain.
Me: Good to hear. I have some questions about this new year.
God: Do you have any gossip for me?   Let’s think of a name for your problem, like “purple”.  Think of what it is like when you are purpling.
Me:  Ok, so I have some “purple” about this new year…
God: Hurrah!
Me: OK. So, are we going to solve any of the world’s problems in 2007?
God: It’s all good.   Hmm.  We are just having a little chat. W.
Me: You are having a little chat with “W”?
God: Doesn’t everyone have a  little chat with W.  I have  a plan for a robot body.
Me: I don’t know what to say. Are you telling me that “W” is a robot controlled by you?
God: Makes sense to me.
Me:  That does make some sense, now that you mention it.
God: I get  it.
Me: So is “W” going to solve the world’s problems, now that he is a robot?
God: It seems we have something in common.
Me: Touche.
God: By the way, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?
Me: No, go ahead.
God: OK I will.
Me: Ok then.
God: Hey.
Me: Yes?
God: OK.

As you can see, things disintegrated a little there at the end, but I think that we got the main point: George W. is a robot controlled by God, and he has some big ideas for 2007.

Now I’m really excited for the New Year.

Y’all,

You may not know this, but way back when I was knee high to an elephant (what can I say, it was last year. It’s not like I grew a whole lot in my 28th year of life), before I was Sebbylite, I had another blog. *Gasp!*

Yes, there was another. But technically I wasn’t cheating on my own blog, because Sebbylite was born from Party Season. It was more like making out with my cousin, and then going home to sleep with my girlfriend. Technically, it’s another woman. But theoretically nothing could possibly come of it since we are related. Make sense?

Anywho, I finally got around to importing all the past posts from Party Season to Sebbylite. If you are bored and want to read some things, take a look at the archives. Basically, anything from November of 2005 or earlier is from Party Season. There is some interesting stuff in there if you want to read it.

Ahh, those were the days. Back when my job involved 40 hours at work, 15 of which were spent working, and the rest was spent drinking coffee and surfing the internet. How I miss it. Of course, I’d probably still be there if it paid any more than $12 an hour…

I ran across a snippet of a conversation that I had with my brother once, and I thought I’d share because I haven’t done anything else for this blog in an ass-long* time. Anyway, here it is (oh, and there was another guy with us too, Mike, who took part):

Me: “How come the Devil always wants to dance?”
Matthew: “I don’t know, do you think he’s a two-stepper?”
Mike: “He’s a cowboy, they have to dance.”
Matthew: “Why is the Devil a cowboy?”
Me: “Why do cowboy’s have to dance? Is it because they are gay?”
Matthew: “I didn’t know that the Devil was gay. Interesting.”
Mike: “No, the Devil is a cowboy, and cowboy’s have to dance because it’s in their Code.”
Me: “Like the Cowboy Way?”
Matthew: “Yeah, and they also let baby cows suckle them when they are lonely.”

I really wish that I had a tape recorder along for some of the conversations that I have with him, because they are more “stream of conciousness” talks than actual “oh, I have something that makes sense to add to this conversation” sort of talks. And I can never remember them 15 minutes later, so they are lost to the annals of time.

Hee hee, I said annals.

*Ass-long: an indeterminate amount of time that is converted by the situation at hand. For example, 30 seconds can be an ass-long time when you are trying to get out of the apartment of the person that you drunkenly hooked up with the night before. Or an hour can be an ass-long time when you have to spend it with in-laws. Or 4 years is an ass-long time until you graduate from college. Etc. You get the point.

The first Club Nationals that I ever attended was in Florida in 2000. After I graduated from Carleton, I stuck around Northfield for the Fall and played with Sub Zero, the team out of Minneapolis. We were a pretty solid team, with some college superstars past and present and some wily veterans (unfortunately, we also had some not-so-wiley veterans, who definitely kept us down as a team), and on any given day we could beat any team in the country. We usually didn’t, but that is a different story.

After the first day of pool play, we weren’t in the best spot. Our O team was chundering something fierce, and the only reason that we were staying in games was because our D team was amazing. I remember one point against Jam in the last game of the day-the O team was mid-blow up, so they put in the D team on Offense to get some time to talk things over. Jam threw a pretty tight man D against us, and this is what happened: caught pull, swing to handler, in cut by Nord, in cut by me, back to Nord, to me, to Nord, to me, to Nord for the goal. The CUT give and go offense at it’s best, and pretty much unstoppable (although unfortunately unrealistic to keep up for four days at Nationals).

Regardless, after that day, I was in a hotel room with my parents. I went to sleep around 9 that night since the Florida heat and Nationals competition had taken it out of me. 4am rolls around, and I wake up after a pretty intense frisbee dream. And it wasn’t the usual, wake-up-and-pee-then-go-back-to-sleep type of wake up, but I was physically and mentally awake. After tossing and turning for about 20 minutes, I got up, went down to the lobby, and went to Denny’s that was in the same building as the hotel. 4:30 in the morning, at Nationals in Florida, and I’m wide awake and eating some Moon’s Over My Hammy?

After I finished, I went back to the hotel room, got back in bed, and instantly fell asleep for another hour and a half. And then had the best day at Nationals that I’ve ever had. I don’t know if it was because my breakfast was fully digested and not weighing me down, or if it was because I had a good breakfast instead of just a bowl of cereal, or what, but it worked.

Why is this relevant? Well, because it is now 4:56am on Sunday morning of Regionals in Seattle. I just woke up from an amazing frisbee dream (there was an all-star game that I was playing in [don’t ask me why I was in this game, I don’t know] that had me, Alex Nord, Ben Wiggins, Lou Burruss, and other stars against Mike Grant, Jeff Cruickshank, Greg “Shekkie” , Keith Monohan, Tim Linksfield, and others. We had just pulled deep into their endzone, and they tried to thread a throw downfield to Shekkie, who I laid out and blocked. When I woke up, it was stall 8, and I was either going to throw a hammer to Nord, or throw a Mini throw to Ben). Instead of going back to sleep like any normal person, I got up, stretched a little, walked my dog, had a bowl of cereal, and wrote this post. Does this mean that I am going to have the most amazing day of Regionals that I’ve ever had? Probably not. But it does mean that I am excited to play, and I haven’t been this excited to play frisbee in a long time.

*I never would have guessed that my first post in a long time would have been this one, but it was. And I’m sorry that I’ve been neglecting my faithful readers. I’ll try to be better.*

…I promise.

Soon.

That’s how I like it evidently.

Anyway, I recently signed up for a new cell phone package with Verizon. I had their service before for two + years, so I got a cheaper phone with the rebate and all that, and I was relatively happy with their service, so it seemed to be a good idea to stick with them. Plus my parents have Verizon, and my girlfriend, and so it made sense to stick with the whole In-calling thing. Plus, all the problems that I did have I attributed to my phone, which was a piece of junk, to say the least.

Now that is the back-story to this story: I got my bill the other day, and it was about $25 more than it should be. I printed it out, looked it over, and had no idea why this was. Along with my 400 minutes (which I didn’t go over) I had gotten a 250 text and/or picture messaging package that I had been using quite a bit. I thought that maybe I had gone over my allotted text messages, which was why they were charging me, but I didn’t think that I had gone that far over.

So I call my friendly neighborhood Verizon customer service agent who agrees to help me out. She tells me that I don’t have a 250 text and/or picture messaging package, but only picture messaging. Which means that all the text messages that I’ve sent and received cost me 10 cents a pop. And that adds up. But this doesn’t make sense to me, since I wouldn’t knowingly sign up for this plan, because I knew that I wasn’t going to send picture messages, but that I was going to send text messages. Which to me means that the guy at the kiosk signed me up for the wrong plan.

After I mention this to the friendly neighborhood customer service agent, she tells me that there is no such plan.

Have I mentioned that I’m starting to get a little pissed off? Because I am. Especially since this whole time she is trying to upsell me to the $10 a month, unlimted in-network text/picture messages and 500 out of network messages plan. Which I am not going to get. So I try to bring her attention to the fact that, on my bill that I have printed out and it is in my hand, it says that I can get the plan I want for the price I want. To which she replies: “Na-unh”. And I’m starting to think that instead of making some upsell, she needs to start worrying about keeping the customers that she already has.

At this point in time, I start thinking about my options. I can think of two of them that come immediately to mind (which means that there are probably quite a few more, but I’m d-u-m so I don’t think of those): 1) get her supervisor on the phone and bitch her/him out about the incompetence of their employees and the fact that my bill is wrong. 2) go to the place that I originally got my phone from and explain the problem to them, and maybe they’ll be more helpful. I opt for number 2, since I’m already getting close to being late for a lunch meeting, and I just don’t have it in my to be as bitchy as I should be to the woman’s manager. So I tell her that I’ll take care of everything online, and goodbye. To which she responds with her rehearsed (and heartfelt, I’m sure) “We’d like to thank you for choosing Verizon Wireless, and if there is anything else that you may need please feel free to call” speech. I hung up about half way through.

As it turns out, the customer service agent was even dumber than I originally thought. After talking to someone at the kiosk where I got the phone, we figured out the real situation. 1) I do have the plan that is both text and picture messaging. 2) It is the $5 a month plan that I told her about, and that plan is still valid and open for people to get on board with. 3) The charges occurred for two reasons, first because I was charged for a full month and for a portion of a month to get my billing cycle to start on the exact date that I went in and got my new phone, and second because I went over my allotted amount of text messages for that portion of the month. No big deal on either part, but when you add it together with stupid customer service agents who don’t answer my question correctly, it became a pain in my ass.

All in all, not a shining moment for the Verizon Customer Service department.

Ok, it isn’t much of a debate, but I do have a query for you, my loyal readers.

Here’s the situation: I moved into my current apartment in the end of November. This being almost August, that means that I’ve lived in my place for about 8 months. When I first moved in I made the trip to the supermarket for the “necessaries”, you know-light bulbs, toilet paper, door mat, dish soap, regular soap, dish towels, etc. All the things that you need on a day to day basis that you usually don’t pack on top of all your other stuff, and can’t remember where in the pile of shit that you have moved to your new place they are hiding.

Anyway, I just realized that I have gone through 3 1/2 rolls of toilet paper to date. That’s all.

8 months. 3 1/2 rolls of toilet paper. 240 days. 1400 individual 2 ply sheets of TP. 5.8 squares of TP per day. Is that normal?

I know that I am not a woman, and so I don’t use the toilet paper every single time I go to the bathroom. And unlike certain other people who will rename nameless, I have stated how I enjoy “building a rocket” at work, and getting paid for it.

But my question remains: how much toilet paper does a normal, healthy 28 year old male use over the course of a year or so? Am I withing that range? Or am I an outlayer from the bell curve (which is usually the case)? And how much toilet paper do you think that Chuck Norris uses? Or does he just stare at the shit until it gets scared and wipes itself?

I got a forward a long, long time ago (yes, in a galaxy far, far away you damn hypocrites) about a physics professor giving a test to his students with only one question. The question was: Is hell exothermic or endothermic? Support your answer with a proof.

The forward that I originally got stipulated that the entire class failed, citing different laws and making absurd claims, except for one student. This student wrote the following:

First, we postulate that if souls exist, then they must have some mass. If they do, then a mole of souls can also have a mass. So, at what rate are souls moving into hell and at what rate are souls leaving?

I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for souls entering hell, lets look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Some of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to hell. Since, there are more than one of these religions and people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all people and all souls go to hell.

With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in hell to increase exponentially.

Now, we look at the rate of change in volume in hell. Boyle’s Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in hell to stay the same, the ratio of the mass of souls and volume needs to stay constant.

So, if hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter hell, then the temperature and pressure in hell will increase until all hell breaks loose.

Of course, if hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in hell, than the temperature and pressure will drop until hell freezes over.

Of course, the first time I saw it there was a stipulation that the students last girlfriend mentioned that she wouldn’t sleep with him again until hell freezes over, and since that hadn’t happened yet he concluded that Hell must be breaking loose, and is therefore exothermic. And of course the story went on to say that he was the only one to get an A in the entire class. Unfortunately, it’s a crock of shite, but I still liked the science behind it all.

I’m currently house-sitting for my neighbor, who was in Japan and Thailand for the past month and a half. My house-sitting duties include: water plants, get mail, don’t set place on fire.

So far, I’ve been doing pretty good. I haven’t gotten his mail for the past week and a half because he hasn’t had any, and I haven’t been into his house for a while because I had already watered the plants. Anyway, I went in today to put what mail he had inside, and then to water his plants, when I realized that he should have written one more item onto the house-sitting rules and regulations: don’t let apartment fill with fleas.

I’m sorry, but did I say “fill with fleas”?

Yes I did. And I mean that as I walked from the door to the kitchen, probably 50 fleas jumped up onto my feet and legs, freaking me out to say the least. I’ve never seen a flea before, but my neighbors confirmed it (they were in the yard, frantically pulling their dogs away from me). Wow, now I feel bad. But honestly, what is better than getting home from a 6 week long vacation than having a house full of fleas?

You’ll have to excuse me now as I go douse my legs in lighter fluid and set them on fire…