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I haven’t talked about The 3 Day in probably a week or maybe even longer and that’s entirely unacceptable.

1. Erika put together an incredible design for our site. We figured we could spread the word more if teamboobylicious.com was more than just an online ordering form. And now, thanks to Erika, it is. Check it out, and even add it to your RSS reader! Jenni and I geeked out about this all day long. I’m not kidding.
2. Our team fundraising goal is currently $30,000 and we’re already at over 10% of that goal - $3762. This is, of course, after our two big fundraisers, but it’s an awesome way to get us motivated for raising more. Speaking of which, do you have any fundraising ideas? Let me know. We’re pretty much down with anything!
3. We also have a goal of recruiting 20 members and right now we’re at 14. We know of a few people that are going back and forth, maybe thinking about joining, so we could possibly hit 20, but we’d love to have YOU on the team, too. Seriously. Any and all of you. Commit yourself for three days and walk with us, or be a part of the crew and support every walker through each step of their 60 miles. You’ll understand why I write so much about it.
4. And it wouldn’t be a post without a fundraiser mentioned! Save the date for March 22. We’re having Bar Trivia at Hubert’s in Downtown Minneapolis. If you’re interested at all, just fill out this form and we’ll get back to you as soon as we have more details!

Carry on with your Saturday morning!

After I came home to find my dog had been pissing on my pile of dirty clothes all week long, I decided it’d be wise to go out for drinks. First we had trivia and leftover red velvet cake to attend to at Keegan’s.

We didn’t know that scotch whiskey has just as many antioxidants as orange juice, and we couldn’t remember that Forrest Whittaker had won the SAG award a few weeks ago, so needless to say, Jumi, Matt, Jenni, and I did not fare so well in the second round of trivia.

We finished some food and our drinks, paid our tab, and then walked a block to Nye’s Polonaise Room, which also happens to be The Best Bar in American, according to Esquire magazine. That’s where the above picture was taken. In our switch of drinking locations, we’d traded Jumi for Bill, which gives Matt a smoking partner.

When the boys went out to smoke, Jenni and I headed straight for the photo booth, because what else would we do? That picture? It’s so not us. Never have I seen a picture of the both of us looking so emo and sad and full of hate towards the world. We don’t even know what we were doing!
It’s seriously the funniest picture ever of us and totally worth the $3.

Also, staff of Nye’s? Sorry about the bathroom. It’s just tradition.

It was 1990ish when “Ice, Ice Baby” hit the airwaves. I don’t recall when I first heard it. I only knew I loved it. You know what I loved almost as much as I loved the song? The video. You know why I loved the video so much? The car that Vanilla Ice drove.

You remember it. It was a white Mustang 5.0. It was convertible. And the girlies were on standby just so they could wave hi. It didn’t matter that there were rockman lovers driving Lamborghinis. They were just jealous ’cause he was out gettin’ his.

But here’s the deal, I really loved that car. And it didn’t hurt the situation that there was a white guy with bad hair and a shaved eyebrow that was driving it in a horribly made video.
My very first roommate drove what I think was maybe a 1997 Mustang. It was purple, and yeah, it was pretty hot and definitely step up from her white Ford Tempo. The Tempo maybe fit her personality a little better (plain, boring, and, um, four-doored?), but the Mustang was a much slicker car. Needless to say, I was more than happy to let her drive when we went some place together.

The whole time I lived with that particular roommate, I would always discuss Mustangs with my brother. See, the only two things he cares about in life are himself and cars, so I pick conversation topics as appropriate. Anytime Mustangs would come up in conversation, I would fall back to the 1991 model that Vanilla I-C-E drove when he kept on pursuing to the next stop.

Out of all 43 years of Mustangs, the 1991 has always been the one I’d like to have, just as long as it had a ragtop I could put down for the whole hair blowing thing. Otherwise, it just wouldn’t be the same.

“I don’t like gay people and I don’t like to be around gay people. I am homophobic. I don’t like it. It shouldn’t be in the world or in the United States.”

Tim Hardaway, a former NBA point guard, has a reaction to a former NBA player John Amaechi coming out recently and it’s obviously not a very nice one.

”First of all I wouldn’t want him on my team. And second of all, if he was on my team, you know, I would really distance myself from him because, uh, I don’t think that is right. I don’t think that he should be in the locker room while we are in the locker room, and it’s just a whole lot of other things and I wouldn’t even be a part of that. But stuff like that is going on and there’s a lot of other people I hear that are like that and still in the closet and don’t want to come out of the closet, but you know I just leave that alone.”

He’s just so smart and wise, that Tim Hardaway fella. Clearly once someone announces that they’re gay they automatically turn into a horrible basketball player. I wouldn’t be surprised if John Amaechi could even dribble a basketball now that he’s out.

And obviously if a guy in the locker room is gay, he’s GOT to be checking out Tim Hardaway and everyone else, because that’s what those gays do!

The transcript that’s posted on the Miami Herald’s website makes me want to kick Hardaway in the nuts a few times. And for the record, I don’t like point guards that used to wear the #10 for the Golden State Warriors and couldn’t really do shit for his team after Mitch Richmond left the squad.

Oh, Timmy. I actually used to really like you back in the day, but it’s hard for me to even entertain the thought of liking someone that’s a narrow-minded asshole like yourself.

Hey, so today’s Valentine’s Day. Did you know that? Did you send roses? How about a heart-shaped balloon with an overpriced teddy bear attached? Yeah, me neither, suckers!

The picture to your right? Those are the last flowers I received and really, I think maybe they’re roses, but mostly I don’t care. I was just super excited because The Most Adorable Co-Worker Everâ„¢ gave them to me during a work conference and I was so giddy I almost exploded right there on the spot.

Even though the flowers died before the conference was over and now we just make awkward eye contact when we see each other around the office, it was still a moment I’ll never forgot. I seriously couldn’t even finish that last sentence without laughing.

I don’t really hate Valentine’s Day. I figure it’s an excuse for A) selling truffles to benefit The 3 Day, B) eating extra candy, and C) making sure people who go on and on about hating Valentine’s Day are forced to celebrate, like my co-worker who just received 2 dozen Krispy Kreme Valentine’s courtesy of my trip to get donuts this weekend for trivia.

I guess I just felt obligated to write about the wonders of this candy and/or love-filled holiday, because between it and Anna Nicole Smith, i don’t think there could possibly be anything else going on in my life today or for the past two weeks.

I’m taking a class right now called The Art of Photography. I laugh every time I think of the class’s name, because my photography usually consists of drunk people or my dog, but it’s art, dammit!

I missed last week, which was our 2nd class, because I had to work late. I know, right? You can imagine how furious I was. Since I’m in class with three of my homies, though, they were able to pass along the assignment for tomorrow night. But since I’m a slacker through and through, I forgot to write it down and here it is the night before class and I don’t have any of my homework done. Why does this sound familiar of most of my educational career?

The one class I went to was pretty exciting and it reminded me that I need to take more pictures like I used to! I guess it really stopped when I moved into my apartment and didn’t have the overwhelming urge to get the hell away from my living situation, but I miss it. I, and sometimes other people would join me, used to just spend a few hours walking around somewhere and taking pictures. That would be the whole reason behind going somewhere for the day.

In any case, I know part of tomorrow night’s assignment involves taking pictures involving depth-of-field. I have a broad idea of what that entails, but I thought I’d look it up anyway. And then Wikipedia gave me some information that had ALGEBRA in it. Really? Is it necessary to take my favorite thing and involve the one thing I absolutely abhor? Do not tell Mrs. Piatt, but I hated that class in high school, no matter how much I sucked up to her. I don’t even remember who I took Algebra from in college (both times), but I’m certain I hated that class, too.

This is comparable to giving me a brownie, but then after I’m thoroughly enjoying it, telling me it’s made out of tempeh. Not a happy surprise, my friends, not a happy surprise at all.

My computer may hate me, or at least it’s getting close.

I bought in in April of 2003 with my first bonus at my current job. That’s just about four years that I’ve had it and it’s never been reformatted. It’s starting to become painfully obvious by the fact that I have to reboot it at least six times a day that it’s time to wipe it clean and see if that fixes things. However, there’s some issues with that. Would I be posting if there weren’t?

I opted to not get a DVD burner when I bought it, probably in order to save some money. As you can imagine, with the amount of pictures I take and the amount of mp3 files on my computer, it’s going to take A LOT of CDs to back everything up, as well as a lot of time I don’t want to spend copying everything over.

I may have found a solution: a Free Online Backup. If I can have everything uploading to storage space online while I’m at work, I wouldn’t have any reason to complain at all. Or at least for not very long. The free option of idrive gives you 2GB of space, but for only $4.95/month, I can get an unlimited amount of storage.

I was entertaining the thought of buying an external hard drive. Jodi pointed out that they’re not all that expensive and, well, they’re not.  But this whole online storage thing? Even cheaper, and I like cheap.

Trivia Weekend was awesome. And it once again reminded me how awesome my friends are. Put anywhere from three to nine of us in one room, each of us armed with a computer and/or cell phone, ask us anywhere from 9 to 18 insanely hard questions every hour, and then do that for 50 hours straight. I think if nobody kills anyone, it’s a sure sign your friends are the right ones for you.

It works like this. You put together a team and gather in a location where you can all hear a radio station based out of St. Clouid, MN. We had it streamed over the Internet. The station asks nine questions an hour, unless it’s a speed round where they ask 18, and once you have the answer, you call into the station’s phone bank with your team number, the question number, and your answer. If you’re correct, you get the number of points assigned to that question. If not, you get to keep looking until they close the question some time before the hour is up.

I manned the phones most of the time when I was there and handed over my laptop willingly to either Matt or Jenni when they were there. I know it was either one of them that used it most of the time based solely on the number of Journey videos on YouTube that were added to my bookmarks. Nothing beats a little Steve Perry on a punchy Monday afternoon.

There were 80 teams. We finished 43rd. Sure, we would have liked to win, but we gave it our all and tried our best and yadda, yadda, yadda. The winning team had over 20 people on their side, so we didn’t do too shabby with half of that. Brains start to go to mush after too many hours without sleeping, even if you do swallow enough Red Bull to make your heart skip a beat or two. Not that I would know anything about that really. At all.

I didn’t take many pictures, but the ones I did take are right here, and as with my friends, there are always other camera’s: like Jenni’s or Kaye’s. And, yeah. I’m still trying to catch up on sleep.

I have a confession. i’ve been blogging with sponsored content. It’s true. I’ve sold out. To the tune of $76.52 even!

At first, I thought the whole PayPerPost thing was kind of sketchy. Maybe they won’t pay me or maybe they’ll only want me to write about things like penis enhancement drugs or other high quality meds with huge discounts. While I can usually write about anything, I’m not sure my parents would want to read several paragraphs about long-lasting erections.

Basically, people sign up, get approved, and then are free to pick from usually around 50 different sites that will pay you a few bucks to write a post and include their link. It’s obvious from some of the blogs participating in the blog advertising are only blogging for money. While I find that to be kind of annoying and boring, I guess it takes all kinds to make the blog-world go ’round.

Me? I’ve found that I like it because it’s more like a writing prompt for me. For a while, I felt like I didn’t have anything to write about and I can tell that when I don’t write, I get crabby-ish. And that makes for an unhappy me! So, instead, I find ideas (like this one, which is paying me $10) to write and make a few bucks at the same time.

And the cool thing? With the money that I’m making by linking to random crap all over the internet, I’m donating it to my efforts to The 3 Day walk this year. Our $30,000 team goal may not be that easy of a task! Knowing that, it should make it a lot less annoying to the rest of you then it would otherwise!

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been developing headaches while at work, sometime in the early afternoon. It’s the same time every day and it’s the same throbbing headache that stabs away at the back of my eyes.

Option #1 - Quit my job. Not exactly feasible. Although potentially very fun.

Option #2 - Get glasses to wear while at work, using a computer, or reading. I’m going this route. My prescription looks like this:

Right eye: +050 -125 x 090
Left eye: +075 -100 x 085

I know it’s eye doctor code, but it makes me laugh that my eyes are so different. You know what else is funny? My cock-eyed head. Anytime I wear glasses, they’re crooked on anyone else. If looking like a nerd (I picked extra nerdy glasses on purpose) while I’m at work will make headaches go away, then I’m down with that. Know what else I picked my frames based upon? The same type of frames I always make my Sims characters wear. Nerd alert.

So, a headache started brewing this morning at trivia and I haven’t been able to kick it yet, despite taking pills and avoiding the computer. I’m gonna hit it with one more dose of Excederin, take a shower, and go head back over to the Trivia HQ.

Also, for those interested, my new cell phone ring is Secret Lover. Yes, just like the T-Mobile commercial, but I can’t help it. It makes me laugh every time my phone rings.