tuesday, october 26, 1999 10:14:23 pm




i notice i have a certain procedure i go through when i get to work. i sit outside for a few minutes to have a smoke just to ease my mind before i defend myself against the onslaught of work i know that sits on my desk. after that's done, i calmly walk inside and say hello to my employers and co-workers - go through the motions of telling them what i did the night before, and all that usual small talk. after wasting a few minutes there i sit down at my desk, turn off the lights in my office, and press the keyboard which takes my computer out if its sleep mode (yes i leave my computer on all night. hey, that's what they told me to do!). i then proceed to check my email, then open up AOL IM, and then netscape. if i'm lucky there's someone that i can chat on aol for awhile, but that usually isn't the case. after reading my assortment of email for work and pleasure (sometime i'll reply right away, but usually i like to sit on a message to think how i should reply), i go surfing around the net. first i hit the stats page for palesky (which i noticed hasn't been doing to well, but then again, why does it have to?), then i proceed to all my guestbooks, then my quickdot page, then justine's forum, and then i check out the weather on yahoo (it seems unreliable as shit, but yet i continue to check it on a regular basis), and then my work calendar, which happens to be web based. in betwixt all my regular morning surf hits, i tend to find an interesting link every once in awhile, so i'll spend a few minutes to peruse the new site that i've just found.

all this usually takes somewhere from 30 to 60 minutes. it's a wonder i get my work done at all.

* * *

i rode into work with my room mate mike today, which is the first time i've done that since we moved in together, which was in july. it seems really dumb that we didn't start carpooling earlier, since we work at the same office and live in the same house as well. i can't even begin to fathom how much gas i would have saved if i had started doing that from the beginning. anyhow, we were riding down i-95 and getting off at the marsh road exit in wilmington. we were following a car that had vermont plates, and for some reason he stopped on the off ramp, even though there were no stop signs. mike waited for a few seconds and then started beeping his horn and shouting, "there's no stop sign you jackass!". now, i really wouldn't have cared if it were myself that were behind the wheel, but in no way was mike wrong. we eventually pulled up beside the vermont car only to be greeted by calls of "you asshole!", to which mike replied with, "there's no stop sign there man. how long have you been driving?" .

"well, you could have just told me you asshole!" (he seemed to like the word asshole, in the actual confrontation he said it at least 10 times)

this kind of situation is always difficult for me, since i was sitting in the passenger seat and really had nothing to do with this all, but i felt i had to put my two cents in. i looked at the man and replied softly, "he just told you, you idiot." mike laughed at him, smiled an intentionally obnoxious grin, and drove away.

* * *

i was standing outside my office last night, listening to the bings and bangs of mike playing the star wars pinball machine our company just acquired (yes, we have a pinball machine in the office) when i saw a daddy-longleg spider just sitting on the ground. i started nudging him around with my feet, pushing him this way and that, when an overwhelming feeling of guilt overtook me. what the hell was i doing to this thing, that was just sitting there, minding its own business and just chilling out? the sensation of guilt hit me so suddenly that i picked up the spider and calmly placed it back in the place and position it was in before i started messing with its head. i wonder if it's still alive.

i remember hearing somewhere that daddy-longleg spiders have the highest toxin to body weight ratio of all spiders. in other words, they are pretty poisonous, but apparently their mouth , or fangs, or teeth,(whatever) are too weak to pierce through human skin. i wonder if there have been any scenarios where they have tried to bite an open wound on someone - maybe that's how it was discovered that they were so poisonous.





yesterday | history | names | subscribe | palesky | tomorrow