It has been almost a week and the top on the Emperor has been up the whole time because of a com­bi­na­tion, cold, rain and cold rain, so still I don’t have to blog, but I saw some­thing yes­ter­day that I just have to mention.

While in Bed, Bath & Beyond pick­ing out a new front door mat to use our 20% off coupon on, I spot­ted among the Snug­gies and other gifts that you might give to a dis­tant rel­a­tive (one you don’t see too often, so you won’t have to worry about reper­cus­sions) an item that is just another small step of human­ity towards its date with des­tiny and life aboard the Star­liner Axiom — a motor­ized Lazy Susan for your din­ing room table.

I went to the den­tist yes­ter­day to get a tem­po­rary fill­ing that should last until the new year. I need a crown on the tooth, but that costs just at the 4 fig­ure mark, so I con­vinced the den­tist to tide me over until after Jan­u­ary 1, so I can use my Med­ical Flex Spending.

I didn’t even get a sin­gle shot of novo­caine, because I’m a tough guy, yeah, right. I’m actu­ally a big wimp, but I didn’t need any pain killer because he was work­ing on the tooth that had the root canal done on it last month.

The other day while perus­ing inter­net as usual I found a post­ing on some­one who is paint­ing scenes from clas­sic video games for use as desk­top wall­pa­pers. I love col­lect­ing good wall­pa­pers as much as I love cool fonts (that is to say, a lot) so I decided to check them out. The very first one caught my eye, Another World, not because it would make a good back­ground, but because I remem­bered the game fondly. I remem­ber it from the early 90’s as Out Of This World and it remains to this day the only video game I have ever bought (as long as you don’t count Pac Man that came with my Atari 800.)

I fol­lowed the link to the large ver­sion and the artist men­tioned that the game had been reported to Win­dows with updated graph­ics — WOOT! I went to the game author’s site and down­loaded the demo. Very cool.

I remem­ber that I never could defeat the thing until I found the cheats on the inter­net. When I started the game and watched the intro I tried to remem­ber to how the game went. When dumped into the first scene I remem­bered what to do, but after get­ting out of the water you have to get by these big inch worm look­ing things. While I remem­bered what I was sup­posed to do I fum­bled the con­trols and was killed in short order. When the code was dis­played that you needed to renter the game at that point the com­puter froze.…dang.

I’ll give it another go here after awhile (maybe when I’m done post­ing this) maybe I should reduce the dis­play res­o­lu­tion from 1920 x 1080 a little?

Because I need another lit­tle project that I want to do, I found some­thing at work that a ven­dor gifted the recep­tion­ist with. It is just too neat for words and now I want to make one for my very own self. A desk cal­en­dar that sits inside a old school full-size CD case.

You must have one of these cases sit­ting in a draw some­where, go get it, I’ll wait.….

.….never mind, I just pulled out a few CD cases I have and real­ized that the thing they used for the cal­en­dar is not stan­dard issue. It must have been spe­cially designed so that it didin’t have the insert for the disc and it could fold back fur­ther to get the proper slant to hold the tiny pages.

We went shop­ping in Sta­ples this after­noon, we needed a new shred­der and some other stuff, chief among them, paper. It was time to buy our bi-annual ream of it. We walked into the store and I imme­di­ately headed off to the right side where the paper-like office sup­plies were. I looked along the wall and up and down every aisle (even though paper was not on the sign telling me what was down them.)

My wife sug­gested that I ask a kid in the red shirt where it was, but just like a man, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. On my sec­ond pass down the last aisle a woman who was arrang­ing items on a shelf looked at me and asked, “Can I help you find some­thing?” I can’t ask for direc­tions, but I can’t lie and say no to some­one offer­ing help, so I said, “Where is the paper?” She looked at me with a twin­kle in her eye and replied, “I hate to sound con­de­scend­ing, but (point­ing to the wall on the other side of the store) do you see that big sign over there that says paper?” (the let­ter­ing was only about 4 foot high…) “Man,” I said, “It always used to be over on this side of the store, why did it get moved?” “Don’t tell me, I know. The paper is over there for the same rea­son all stores move stuff around, to keep the cus­tomer in the store longer while he searches for some­thing, hop­ing for an impulse buy.”

About this time Donna walked up, so I said to the lady, “Or maybe it is like my wife who moves stuff around in the kitchen every six months just to make me feel inad­e­quate. She’ll ask me to get her some­thing, I’ll look in the spot I think it used to be, it won’t be there, and I have to ask her, so she gets to sigh that sigh that means, ‘Men are so helpless’.”

With­out miss­ing a beat, Donna says, “I never move any­thing, You don’t know where any­thing is at because you only come there to help me once every six months.”

Ouch.

For all you MMC mem­bers who read this, be care­ful what you open next year. Remem­ber the infa­mous leop­ard print steer­ing wheel cover? This will top it.

We were in Bed, Bath & Beyond this evening to use a cou­ple of the 20% coupons we get in the mail and/or in the news­pa­per. We bought a 2 big ol’ bags of pis­ta­chio nuts and were headed for the check­out when we hap­pened to walk by the Christ­mas close out area. Within sec­onds Donna found just the per­fect gift for under the com­mu­nal tree next year. It’s orig­i­nal price was $12.99 (although in our eyes worth so much more) and it was 50% off bring­ing the price down to $6.50. The 20% off coupon brought the price down another $1.30. Even with the tax it came to less than five and a half bucks. See­ing the look on your face when you open it; priceless.