Mother of the Year
Yesterday I was having this really good day
Category: Uncategorized
Playing the Lottery
Thursday, 3-4-2004: I’ve decided to start playing the lottery. I’ve always made fun of people that play it, saying that it’s a game for people who suck at math. I’ve played it about once a month for the past 6 months and I’ve won exactly nothing. $6.00 down the drain. Up until 6 months ago, I’d never bought a lottery ticket in my life. (This doesn’t include lottery tickets that I stole while working at various convenience stores nearly a decade ago.) I think I’m going to buy 1 ticket per day, every single day for the rest of the year. There’s about 300 days left of 2004, so that’ll be $300 I’m wasting. If I don’t win at least $300 by December 31st, I’ll quit playing forever.
If I beat the odds and end up winning $100 million or something, I’ll give almost all of the money away. Nobody needs to have $100 million sitting in a bank. I think I’d spend a lot of money to help restore old, historic buildings and houses around Alton. I’d make that my full-time job, just blowing money on that. Then I could just go around knocking on doors of crappy-looking houses and offer to give them free paint jobs, landscaping, roofs, etc. I’d probably open up a place in town for kids to hang out, such as a skating rink. Alton used to have 2 of those but 1 closed down and then the other burned down. The nearest rink was about 20 miles away in Glen Carbon up until about a year ago. Lowes took care of that – they bought that skating rink and tore it down so they could build a new Lowes in Glen Carbon. So I’d put a million or so into a skating rink/arcade/cyber cafe. Maybe a movie theater too.
I think I’d also contact Weird Al Yankovic and his band and I’d offer to finance a few dozen videos for them. Because each album that Al puts out, he only can afford to make videos for the 2 best songs. So I would work with them and get them to make videos for most of the songs from all his past albums. We’d start with videos for The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota, Hardware Store, Jerry Springer, Mellow When I’m Dead. Then I’d allow Al and his band to pick some videos they want to do. We could just blow $500,000 per video. I bet that’d be enough money to do something cool with. That’d be a great way to blow money! I’d sure beat spending it all on the homeless or starving children or whales.
As far as myself goes…I’d pay off my mortgage. I definitely wouldn’t move into a mansion because I like where I live now. I’d pay off my credit cards and buy a nice van. I’d probably give certain family members a bunch of money. I’m sure I’d do crazy stuff with phonelosers.org. Like have a contest for “What can RBCP do for PLA now that he’s got $1,000,000?” I could open up a retail store that sells PLA shirts and stickers. And that’s it. It’d be a sorry looking store! I’d definitely spend all of my winnings, though. Maybe I’d set $1,000,000 aside in a savings account. But that’s it, nobody needs more money than that. Bill Gates pisses me off, hoarding that $50 billion dollars for himself instead of giving it all away for something meaningful. Like financing Weird Al videos. So anyway, everyone wish me luck on the lottery this year! I’ll be buying my first daily ticket in about an hour.
Speaking of money – my daughter brought home this paper from school a few days ago, detailing what she would do with $100. Apparently she knows how to stretch $100 a lot further than I do.
New cell phone
Monday, 2-23-2004: Time for another weekly update since I’m too lazy to do them every day. My week was boring. On Friday after work, I went to a Sprint PCS store and got a new phone. My 2 best friends have Sprint PCS camera phones so I figure it’s time to get one for myself. I do some shopping and decide on a Toshiba VM4050 because it’s got the prettiest display. It also takes 640×480 pictures and is 1/3 smaller than my old Sanyo 4900. I usually carry my old Kodak digital camera with me just about everywhere I go so this phone will help me eliminate that. The quality isn’t quite as good as my Kodak, but it’s good enough for outdoor pictures. Here’s a few of the pictures I took with my phone throughout the weekend. They don’t really come out this small, I shrunk them. Roll your mouse over each picture for a description.
On Saturday is0tek came over and we ended up going to IHOP for some supper. On Sunday my kids left around 2ish and I spent much of the evening working on notla.com, fixing and updating things. Hmmm, what else. I cleaned my basement, went to Lowe’s and bought a door for my closet and sold an old stove in my basement. That was my weekend. I’m boring.
Weekend of Painting
Saturday, 2-7-2004: No kids all day today or tomorrow. I started my day by completely emptying out the living room and dining room. It took less than an hour but the rooms are completely empty now, including curtains, pictures and furniture. I plan to paint all the walls this weekend. I spent all day sanding and patching the unfinished walls. I’ve lived here for over 6 years now and have never painted the walls in the living/dining rooms. They’re kind of a yellowish white color mixed in with scratches, dirt, streaks, scribbles (Emily liked to color on the walls when she was a baby). Tricia came over and we went to Lowes so she could help me pick out colors. We decided on #C5BD8C for the living room and #83ABD7 for the front door/closet area. Click here to see Tricia’s secret message to Lowes. After Lowes, we went to the Funny Bone to see Bobcat Goldthwait. I’ve seen him before but he was still pretty funny. A couple of guys got thrown out of the club near the end for heckling him so much.
Sunday, 2-8-2004: Spent all day painting. Looks really good. It’s weird to have clean walls. Moved most of the furniture back. Here’s a picture.
MJ Kelli knows me!
Monday, 1-12-2004: There’s this Tampa DJ that has a morning show broadcast in St. Louis which I listen to every morning. Today I woke up to hear him talking shit about ME! They got on the subject of the drive-thru incidents in Michigan where some guy was taking over drive-thru frequencies and screwing with customers and he suddenly starts going off about this guy in Alton that used to harass him. I grabbed my digital voice recorder and held it up to my stereo speaker since that’s the only means I had to quickly record. I posted the clip on Cal’s Forums here.
About 2 or 3 years ago, I started listening to this MJ guy. His favorite thing was to call and harass famous people. I thought it’d be funny to try and track down MJ and harass HIM to see how he’d take it. It wasn’t too easy since he didn’t use his real name on the air. But I finally figured it out, tracked him down and started pranking him at home and on his cell phone. He didn’t take it well. But I never realized that he figured out who I was. I thought if he knew me, he would immediately file a lawsuit against me. I did some really terrible things to MJ during that year beside just prank calling. So this was surprising news for me. And it’s pretty flattering for me that he remembers me after 3 years and he’s got copies of my phone bills.
Happy 2004!
Sunday, 1-11-2004: I’ve been neglecting this journal lately. Happy 2004! Guess I need to stick all my 2003 entries into an archive page. So let’s see…for Christmas I got a Lowe’s giftcard, some clothes and a MIDI keyboard. I wasn’t expecting the keyboard so that was very cool. I’ve been wanting to buy one for years but I just never got around to it. My kids got pretty much everything they wanted. Nothing that interesting has been happening with me. A couple weekends ago I used all of the money from my Lowe’s giftcard to remodel the living room closet. Put big floor-to-ceiling shelves on one side, painted, etc. On Friday me and Tricia went to the Funny Bone and saw a show by Joe Marlotti. He was funny, but not VERY funny. We’re gonna go back next month when Bobcat Goldthwait is there. I’ve seen his show and it’s hilarious. Before seeing Joe, we went to eat at Ponderosa.
I spent all of today and yesterday working on my room – I removed my hidden bookshelf doors and put in a normal door. I did a lot of patching on the walls, installed a 220 volt heater in the wall (I usually turn off the house’s furnace and just heat my own room when the kids aren’t staying with me to save money), fixed parts of the floor that I never got around to finishing from when I moved walls around and put some new (but used) carpet down in bare spots. I’m annoyed at the beautiful weather today because I don’t get to test out my new heater. So yeah, that’s what I’ve been up to for the past few weeks. It’s exciting to be me.
Taxi Guy and Pizza Man
Thursday, January 1st, 2004: Tonight around 9pm I’m sitting in my office, at my desk, and the doorbell rings downstairs. I glance up at my front porch monitor and I’m horrified to see a brutal killer standing at the door.
He’s got a cigarette tucked behind his ear, ratty old clothes and he looks fairly pissed off. Have you ever seen the 1990’s movie called Problem Child? Where Michael Richards plays the Bow Tie Killer? This guy is the spitting image of him! Here’s some proof – screen captures from that movie:
I debate on whether I should completely ignore him, talk to him on the intercom or run downstairs and talk to him in person. I finally decide to just let him murder me so I can get it over with. I run down and open the door, ready to quickly slam it shut when he lunges at me. He says to me, “Did you call a cab?”
He says that somebody called a cab and he makes sure that he’s got the right address. I’m relieved to find out that it’s just some kind of mixup. In the picture above you can see my reflection in the door. Look at that fear in my eyes! I notice that the cigarette behind his ear that I saw from upstairs is actually an ink pen. So anyway, we say goodbye and I go back upstairs. About 15 minutes later the doorbell rings again…
The pizza man shows up and rings the bell! It immediately hits me – somebody is fucking with me. I decide not to even go downstairs this time or talk to him on the intercom. He waits on the porch for a few minutes in the rain.
Look at this, the pizza man was picking his nose while he waited for me to answer. I sure wouldn’t want to buy a pizza from a guy who’s picking his nose with one hand while holding my pizzas with the other.
He tries the doorbell again. I fight back the urge to fuck with him on the intercom. I decide against it because I don’t want the poor pizza guy to think that I ordered a pizza for myself just so I could screw with him and not pay for the pizza.
Feeling defeated, the pizza man finally gives up and walks off into the sunset. I wait for more people to show up at my door so that I might talk to them this time on the intercom. But that appears to be the end of it. So I capture the pictures into the computer and post them on Cal’s Forums. In less than 3 minutes, a forum user by the name of zmaster admits that he’s the culprit. He says, “That’s awesome its not often i get porch cam screen shots of my hijinks….and i thought you’d like that triple anchovie pizza….i bet the delivery guy did.” I decided not to release the actual video of this event since it was extremely boring to watch a pizza man stand on my porch picking his nose for 5 minutes.
December 2003 Entries
Saturday, 12-6-2003: My brother and I took the kids to the City Museum in Saint Louis for the day. This is a place I visit with the kids probably 3 or 4 times a year. The City Museum is an old shoe factory in downtown Saint Louis which has been converted into a gigantic funhouse for all ages. Even if I didn’t have kids, I would still visit this place. It’s hard to describe but it’s an incredibly cool place. You can spend an entire day there and you still won’t be able to experience the entire place. I probably have a hundred photos of my kids and their friends in various parts of the City Museum. Here’s a few from today.
Wednesday, 12-10-2003: Life is like a mop. Sometimes life gets full of dirt and crud and hairballs and things and you gotta clean it out. You gotta stick it in here and rinse it off and start all over again. And sometimes life sticks to the floor so much that a mop, a mop, it’s not good enough. You gotta get down there with like a toothbrush, you know, and you gotta really scrub ’cause you gotta get it off! But if that doesn’t work, you can’t give up! You gotta stand right up! You gotta run to a window and say, “These floors are dirty as hell, and I’m not gonna take it any more!” -Stanley Spadowski in UHF
Saturday, 12-13-2003: No kids today. I spent pretty much the entire day sitting in front of my computer. I also went through a bunch of my old papers, threw stuff away and scanned some stuff into the computer. I worked on updating and creating websites all day. Tried to make some more pages W3 compatible.
Sunday, 12-14-2003: Picked up the kids from Colleen’s at 8am. When I got back they played in the snow for awhile while I took all of our bikes and toys to the basement. Tricia decided to let me watch Jordyn while she worked for a couple hours today. When she got back, we all went to her family Christmas party in Gillespe. Got home from that around 5pm or so.
Monday, 12-15-2003: I let Emily take my digital camera to school today for show-and-tell. Apparently all kinds of wacky picture-taking ensued throughout the day. Here’s one of my favorites…
Monday, 12-15-2003: Took back the video games I rented last week. Stopped by the lawyers office to pick up some papers that I accidentally let him keep. Just kind of hung around the house and played with the kids all evening.
Friday, 12-19-2003: Emily was sick today so Colleen didn’t take either of them to school. She brought them over for me to watch at 10:30am. Since Emily missed her Christmas party, I let them open one present to play with while I worked – the Simpson’s game for Playstation. They played that for most of the day while I worked. At 7:30 we went to Richard and Shirley’s party. I was bored so me and Payton left within about 20 minutes. Emily and Casey came over later.
Saturday, 12-20-2003: Woke up at 9:00 when Payton came up. Emily slept in until 10:00 when I finally woke her up. At 1pm I took the kids (Emily, Payton, Casey and Ryan) to a Christmas party at the Keasler Complex. It was from 1 to 3 so I just killed time while they were there – I went to Ace Hardware to get some electrical stuff and then to Kmart to buy Jordyn a Christmas present. Came back home after that. I finished installing a ceiling light in Tricia’s apartment so it actually works now. Tricia watched the kids for a few minutes while I returned our videos from Wednesday. I picked up Dumb & Dumberer while I was there and we all watched that.
Tuesday, 12-23-2003: Today I was on the phone with Sprint PCS customer service, SEing some info on an account. I identified myself as Charles from the collections department. While she was waiting for her computer to pull up an account for me, she says, “Hey Charles, do you have a direct number to the collections department. We used to transfer to 800-xxx-xxxx (she gave me a number) but it hasn’t been working since last summer so we have to use the regular line to get through.”
Just so I didn’t screw up my SEing attempt, I said, “Yeah, they changed that and I have the number here.” and I prepared to rattle off some random digits. But then I quickly looked on my own Sprint PCS phone in the text messaging. It said “PLEASE CALL 800-427-3632.” This is 1-800-HARD-MEAT (a gay chatline) and I’m assuming Murd0c paged me with that the other night. I decide to give the Sprint lady that and I do.
But this is where it gets good. She’s very grateful for this and says, “You don’t know how much this is going to help us out here! I’m going to send an email to everyone in the department here with this new number right now!” So apparently when customers are talking to Sprint PCS at that call center and they need to be transferred to collections, they’re going to be sent to 800-HARD-MEAT! I rock!
Wednesday, 12-24-2003: It’s 10:15pm and my kids are asleep. I’ve just put out all their Christmas stuff for in the morning. This year they’re getting Crash Nitrokart for Xbox, Simpsons Road Rage for PS2, a big cheap cardboard clubhouse that can be colored, a plastic sled for each of them, lots of Play Dough, a Power Rangers lego set for Payton, a Hillary Duff poster for Emily’s room and a Simpson’s poster for Payton’s room. They also got some junk in their stockings, such as silly putty, Pokeman videos, an Arron Carter CD for Emily, some kids songs CD for Payton and a few packs of Pokemon cards for each of them. Now I just have to hope that they sleep in until at least 7am so I don’t have to get up too early in the morning. Here’s some pictures…
The Rest of November 2003
Thursday, 11-27-2003: Got up and worked for a few hours, then went to my parents house for Thanksgiving lunch. Colleen has the kids today so they weren’t there. After that I went to Tricia’s parents house and had lunch there. Then me and Tricia went to see the movie Timeline at Eastgate. Went back to her parents to pick up Keirstan and Jordyn, then went home.
Sunday, 11-30-2003: My 4-day weekend was fun. On Thursday I spent a few hours eating lunch with my parents, then a few more hours eating another lunch at Tricia’s parents. Then me and Tricia went to see the movie Timeline which was incredible, just as I expected. Me and the kids mostly did a whole lot of nothing on Friday and Saturday. During the 7 or so hours that I didn’t have the kids, I cleaned out my basement. Yesterday I put the Christmas tree and lights up. Then this morning the kids put all the ornaments on the tree. We all went to my friend Amy’s house and I put lights up on her house and we hung out there all afternoon. Then we went to the mall to visit Santa and have a picture taken and Target to buy a few more Christmas ornaments for the year.
Payton’s Amazing New Video Game
Wednesday, 11-26-2003: This morning I woke up at 3:30am to the sound of Payton at the bottom of the stairs yelling, “Are you up HERE??” I reply that I am. He comes up and gets into my bed and starts going on and on about this amazing new video game on Xbox that him and Emily have just been playing. ‘Emily is awake too?’ I ask. He says yep and goes into great detail about this new game they’re playing, how it’s like Fusion Frenzy kind of but you get to be in these cars. He tells me all the characters names and stuff. Then he excuses himself and runs down to the fridge to get a glass of milk. He comes back upstairs and tells me more and more about this game and wants to know if he can go play it some more. I tell him that it’s night time and he should go to sleep and that he can play it when it’s light outside.
He finally goes to sleep. I assume so anyway. He wakes me up again and 6:30am and tells me that it’s starting to get light outside and wants to know if he can go play now. I tell him sure and I sleep for another half hour. When I go down, he’s not happy because he realizes that this amazing new game that him and Emily had been playing doesn’t really exist. He was just having a dream. Poor guy…