Posting will be light this week due to the following whiny excuses reasons:

1. I have to go to the dentist at 7am tomorrow and get a cavity filled.

2. I have to do about a week and a half’s worth of work in three days. Oh, and do so while pulling double-duty on Wednesday.

3. My mom is coming to town.

4. Because of #3, I spent half the weekend cleaning and will spend most of tomorrow doing so as well.

5. I agreed to bake a pie (and signed mom up to bake one, too) for the potluck Thanksgiving we’re going to. This is my first attempt at baking a pie. While I’m generally good at baking things, I sense that this is going to be hilarious.

6. Did I mention that my mom is coming to town?

7. I’m finally rejoining a health club Saturday, so I have to go exercise. No, seriously.

Wheeeeeeeeee! Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

I had my inaugural barbecue at my new place today. I bought a nice grill at Home Depot yesterday (yay Home Depot having a Seasonal Sale even though barbecuing never goes out of season here) and broke it in today.

The only problem was I didn’t account for the COLA Flake Factor (COLA = City Of Los Angeles), and bought enough meat for both the people who said they were definitely going to come, and those who said they might be coming.

In reality, I should have bought about half of what I did, if not a third. None of the people who said they might actually showed, and then a bunch of the “Oh, Definitely!” people bailed as well.

In the end it was still quite fun, but I now have enough ground beef and hot dogs in my freezer to feed a small army, and enough beer to keep me drunk for weeks.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

ROUND 1: ME vs APPLE

The pins on my ethernet port are all bent out of shape, so I head over to the Apple store to see if they could replace the port. They take one look at it and tell me I’ll have to mail it in.

So I go back to the office and call Apple to get a box, and they say, well, there’s basically no way other than physical damage that the pins could have gotten bent, so the repair isn’t covered.

All right, looking at the way things look, I can see where they’re coming from on that. So, I ask, how much will replacing the port cost me?

Turns out the port is soldered to the Logic board, so to replace the port, I’d have to replace the entire Logic board. How much does that cost? Only TWELVE HUNDRED DOLLARS.

I decided to say fuck that shit, I’m going to get an ethernet adapter. So I go over to MacMall, grab a CardBus ethernet adapter that the CSR assures me is Mac-compatible.

I get it home and start trying to test it, and no dice. I do some googling, and it turns out that there are only a very few adapters that work with Macs, the one I just purchased not being one of them.

Awesome. Proper Adapter is on its way from Amazon.

Round 1 Winner: Apple

ROUND 2: MY APARTMENT vs ROOMBA

I took the Roomba out for its first spin (and watching it spin in a growing spiral pattern over a stain is REALLY entertaining), and it was quite fun.

Chaplin seemed confused at first, scared shitless the first time it bore down on him and he realized it wasn’t going to stop, and then generally amused by it.

He was very entertained when it got stuck under my TV stand, and the motor whined pitifully as it tried to extricate itself. He stood over it, lord of all he surveyed.

And then, the ‘bot freed itself, and he ran for the hills.

The roomba did a decent job of vacuuming, though the fact that it got caught up on my shoelace, a belt, and a cat toy reminds me that I really need to clean my damn apartment.

Round 2 Winner: Draw

ROUND 3: MY STOMACH vs MY FREEZER

I went grocery shopping on my way home Monday night, and was reminded why I usually don’t.

Everyone knows that grocery shopping while hungry is a bad idea, but this was beyond ridiculous.

They were out of the little DiGiorno’s pizzas I usually get, but they had a “crispy crust” version that was bigger that I deemed sufficient.

What I didn’t realize until I got home was exactly how much bigger it is than the wee pizzas I usually get. You guessed it: The damn thing wouldn’t even fit in my freezer.

Luckily, I was REALLY hungry, so I just ate the damn thing for dinner.

Round 3 Winner: My Stomach, by Technical Knockout

OVERALL WINNER: Draw.