Our engagement party is today, so naturally there would be a huge catastrophe at work. I left work yesterday around 2:30 so that I could go pick up my car and then all hell broke loose. So naturally I was working on it late last night, and then got paged again early this morning. Hopefully it's fixed soon.

Perhaps you can vote on which style you like best.

Is this darker style preferred over the lighter style?

I'm messing with a bunch of different layouts. Please bear with me.

I'm accepting constructive comments.

In other words, that means not things like "Page too bright. Hurts eyes."

Once upon a time there was a natural gas bill. Every other month when the gas company would estimate the usage, it would skyrocket. Then the next month, the bill would be negative. Eventually the gas company got confused by this and decided to issue FOUR DIFFERENT BILLS in a single month. Which one needs to be paid? Who knows?

Could it be $509 for a month? It could be.

Could it be $333 for a month? It could also be that.

How about the $159 bill that is showing on the web site? Maybe.

Or lastly, it could be the $176 bill that I actually paid. They've re-computed me bill 5 times in the past two months, so now I have no idea what I actually owe. On top of that, when they read my meter last time, they read it way too high. I read my own meter and submitted it, then their idiotic worker came by and misread it and over rode my own. Then they came back a few days later and read it correctly, but never reported it to the company.

What I want to know is how the crap can I have a $500 gas bill for a single month? I'm never home and even when I am, it's only for a few hours at night. My programmable thermostat keeps it at 60 degrees when I'm not there. There are only two possible solutions. One is that my entire house is one giant gas explosion waiting to happen, and I'm fairly certain that that's not the reason. The more likely one is that Dominion East Ohio sucks and cannot reasonably estimate, or even apparently read, my natural gas usage.

I've also decided to switch my comments to a more stable method. Sadly, this means that I will lose all of the comments from the past, but it's a move that has been coming for some time.

Since Time Warner sucks so badly, I'm changing the address of this blog to be:

http://vanfossen.blogspot.com/

Tell your friends. Tell your neighbors. Shout it from the rooftops.

My address is changing.

vanfossen.blogspot.com, your source for information.

vanfossen.blogspot.com, your source for hilarity.

vanfossen.blogspot.com, your source for oatmeal.

My old address will still work until March 31st. Yes, it's not much time is it? You can thank Time Warner for that.

What is freaking wrong with humanity? Did you see this article?

It's about a guy who murdered his ex girlfriend, chopped her up into little pieces, and then barbecued those pieces on his grill.

I understand the need for due process. Believe me, I do. In this case however, if he is found guilty, he should immediately be chopped into little pieces himself.

Stupid upstairs bathroom sink drain isn't working. The drain itself is leaking now because the tailpiece nut has too big a gap between itself and the ball joint.

The joys of homeownership.

I wanted Butler to win tonight. They didn't. I was doing so well in my tourney picks too! I could've broken the top 1000 nationwide. Probably even the top 500. Oh well. I'm still doing okay.

Dance class is over. No more cha-cha for me. Nipples.

I think this anti-war protester speaks for all of us.

Here's the aftermath from our sucky marketing test.

1 90-100
0 80-89
2 70-79
14 60-69
10 50-59
4 40-49

I got a 68. There's no curve in the class. The average was 60.1%. He did say that we can protest questions, so I'm writing a paper that protests the completely subjective and bull crap questions (even though I already did that on the test itself.)

I got 100% on the definitions (which you may note are not subjective.) How did I do on the subjective ass-hat questions? Obviously not. too. good.

Wii Remote
2007 - 2007
R.I.P


My one and only Wii remote bit the big one today. Lindsay's sister was playing Wii Baseball and the strap broke and sent the remote hurling across the living room. Thankfully, Lindsay suggested that I call Nintendo. When I did that they told em they'd send me a replacement remote (MSRP $39.99) for free and all I had to do was send back the bad one.

Yay Nintendo!

I also ordered 4 of the replacement straps for the Wii that are thicker and less prone to being destroyed.

I can only blame myself as she asked me how to hit home runs and I told her to "swing harder."

Remember how it was 70 degrees this week and I was predicting snow on Saturday?

Well, it was 70 degrees yesterday AND SNOWED YESTERDAY!

I went over to Lindsay's before dance class and opened all of the windows since it was so nice outside. We closed the windows before dance class because there was thunder and lightning and rain outside at that time (1 hour after it was so nice). More rain after dance class and much colder. Then... snow.

Snow! 70 at lunch time. Snow at night.

Bleh.

On a good news note yesterday, I have been promoted to Change Control Analyst. I start my new position on Monday. It won't be that much different than what I'm already doing. I'll get more money, potentially more vacation time (the HR manager is figuring out if I can get another week of vacation), and more responsibility. I'll be directing software development and will have programmers reporting to me.

I'm upwardly mobile. Watch out!

I was offered floor seats to the Cavs - Kings game last night. Did I accept them? Nope. Do I have a good reason for not accepting them? Nope. I just wanted to go home and sit there with no plans. It seems as though those types of days have been few and far between lately.

So I ended up watching Dodgeball last night. It wasn't very good. Of course, I wasn't expecting it to be good, but I was expecting it to be funny. It wasn't.

It was a beautiful day today. It hit 72 degrees at my house. I was able to go for a bike ride, open the windows, etc. Of course, it's expected to snow on Saturday. No joke.

According to Wii Training, my fitness age is 57. Hello retirement!

You know you're out of shape when you're sore after playing Wii Boxing.

You also know you're out of shape when you begin to wonder if round is an appropriate shape for a human.

Purdue is a 9 seed? That's great. They should be able to beat Arizona and then the next thing you know, we're partying like it's 1993.

Wiiiiii!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I think I'm going to be losing weight the Wii way!

Breaking news. The Wii did not arrive today.

Poop.

The Wii should be arriving today. Yay! I might not even have time to set it up. Boo!

Waltz part 2 is tonight. After tonight, we have two Cha-Cha sessions after this, which I will try not to pay too much attention to. I would like to focus more on dances that we would use more often, like the Foxtrot and the Waltz. If we could have 4 weeks each on those two, I'd be happy.

As it is, we're going to need to sign up for private dance lessons. Yes, I said need. We need it.

I just finished an exciting night hanging out with the Roomba. It dutifully cleaned the downstairs in preparation for Thursday and Friday nights, when I'm having Lindsay's parents, and my family over for dinner.

It certainly makes it easier on me. Granted, it doesn't do quite as good a job as a person would do, but it's a freaking robot, and it's cleaning my floors. How cool is that?

There's nothing better than taking a test with multiple choice answers that are not based on fact, but rather are based on opinion. Hooray for marketing bull crap.

Answer the following questions for me.

Technological advancement has had a positive impact in all of the areas except:

A. Increasing productivity
B. Increasing human life spans
C. Enabling more output of goods and services with fewer workers
D. Sustaining human life on Earth

Which freaking answer is correct? In my opinion, and I wrote this on the worthless exam, ALL of the answers have been positively impacted by technology. Not to mention, that choices A and C are exactly the same and choices B and D are exactly the same.

Here's another wonderful question.

The media has definitively done all of the following except:

A. Reported ethical missteps in the media on a regular basis
B. Reported political ethical violations more than business ethical violations
C. Increasingly been focused on ethics in business
D. Reported business ethical violations more than political ethical violations

Notice how it says DEFINITIVELY? Doesn't that mean that one of the choices should definitely be correct while the others are not? What the hell are you supposed to answer? How are any of those based on FACT and not strictly a value judgment? Different people could choose each of those separate answers and still be correct.

This class is incredibly worthless and does nothing but piss me off.

Today we did work on guest list and stole an idea from Melissa and Justin - the engagement party. We're going to have it on March 31st. It'll probably be family and bridal party and their guests only, as that alone will already be 60 people or so. We obviously don't expect everyone to make it, but we'll do it anyway. It's going to be at my house, so we're going to do an open house style so that people can come and go as they please.

Another productive wedding planning weekend. We're ahead of schedule now, even though we only have 4 more months before the wedding.

Yesterday we checked out Macy's to see if we wanted to register there -- we don't.

Today we booked our honeymoon. We're going to Couples Swept Away in Negril, Jamaica.

I also finalized my tux arrangements. I'll be sending out info this week. I chose After Hours because they're available in every city that has a groomsmen.

We also finished our registries. We're registered at Bed, Bath, and Beyond and Target. For all of my multi-millionaire friends, you can buy out our whole registry if you like. We'd be happy! Feel free to check out all the exciting things at http://www.lindsay-and-tim.com/registry.asp

Play a little game to see if you can figure out what I've registered for and what Lindsay has registered for. I'll give you a hint... if it's Wii related, it was probably me.

I just bought a Nintendo Wii. I've been looking for one since Thanksgiving, and when I came across one today, I pounced. Never mind the fact that I have no money for such things. I bought it anyway. I should arrive within a week.

Yay for frivolous spending!