Breakthrough

It is raining pretty hard outside here at work. It is a dark and dreary day which normally would get me down a little. But not today, for there finally is some joy in Mudville. After 13 straight losses, Team Bad Guy has won a game!

During the summer, we are playing in a five week, ten game doubleheader league. The season began last week with Team Bad Guy playing itself right out of the first game through errors and poor hitting and getting murdered in the second game by a team that should not be playing in the lowest possible league. Both were so depressing that I could not even bare to post about it. As I am sure you can imagine, we had actually gotten a lot better over the first season, but the second game was so bad that I wanted to cry. 18-1 is pretty bad.

That brings us to last night. We lost the first game by the score of 8-6. It is not like we played poorly either. We were beating them the entire game, but then, for two outs in one of the later innings, we became plagued by errors and good hitting by our opponents. They scored four runs and put the game almost out of reach. In the last inning, we battled back to within one run and had a runner on second base. A single was hit by the batter and our runner was thrown out trying to score. Things like that will happen in baseball/softball, but what made it worse was the fact that we forgot to put in a new third base coach who could have told the runner to stop at third instead of getting thrown out at home by a mile. We keep finding ways to lose. 0-3 this season and 0-13 overall.

Then, the breakthrough.

Let me start off by saying that these guys we played were the worst team I have ever seen. They were worse than we were at the beginning of our first season. Although we made the same mistakes in the past as they made last night, we at least had some athletic ability. These guys looked like a Magic the Gathering club in uniforms with bats and gloves. I know that is not very nice. Some of their guys were pretty good and athletic looking, but as we have found out in the past, that is not going to win you any games. We pounded these guys 18-7. We "mercy ruled" them! What a great feeling it is to win a game. What a great feeling it is to win a game like we did. We put together the most complete game we ever have. We hit well, we fielded well, and we played smart ball. Everything it takes to win a game. After our victory, I had this huge smile that I could not get off my face. It was so much fun. Hopefully it will not take another fourteen games to win another. But for now, who cares! 1-3 on the season and 1-13 over baby!

Another Funny Cooking Story

I have another funny cooking story.

So I am making dinner the other night, a spiced potato and green bean mix, and there are extra potatoes that I had already cut up. Sarah says to me, "Why don't we make mashed potatoes?" I tell her that that is an excellent idea, even though I had no idea how to make them. To make a long story short, after boiling the potatoes, putting too much butter and milk in them, and mixing them in the food processor, we end up with potato puree! Now that was some disgusting stuff! I never pretended to know how to make mashed potatoes and stated that as I was adding the milk. We are such bad cooks.

This is exactly how the story went. Do not let Sarah tell you otherwise.

Harry Potter: Order of the Phoenix

Wow...I finally have five minutes to post...

I finished reading the new Harry Potter book: Harry Potter: Order of the Phoenix. I hate reading, but I have heard all sorts of great stuff about the series, so I picked up the book when I saw it. Not only was this the first book I have read in years, it may be the first recreational book I have read over a decade. You may ask yourself why I did not start with the first book, and I do not have a very good answer for you. But now that I am done, I am going to go back a start at the beginning.

I must say that I really enjoyed this book. Although the book is almost 900 pages long, it flies by due to all the neat magic shiznit and suspenseful plot. To be totally honest, I could not and did not want to put the book down ever. If I could have managed to somehow finish the book in one session, I would have. I do find it a little weird that I was so drawn to this book due to the audience for which it was written, but I guess that is what makes these books so special.

This book is a must read with enough action, humor, and suspense to intrigue even the most difficult of audiences such as myself.

Lessons and More

To be quite honest, I have been extremely busy with all sorts of shopping and projects at work, which have caused me to not be able to post as much as I like.

About a week and half ago, on my final night of freedom, I went to Lava in midtown with a bunch of friends. There was a photographer for a local website there and I was asked to pose for a picture. Take a look at the picture of me and a few lady friends over at AtlMix.com (fourth picture down).

Living with my girlfriend has been a learning lesson thus far, but not all of the lessons have been about women and relationships. Sarah and I have said that we want to take cooking classes because neither of us really know how to cook, nor do we cook interesting meals even when we do make an attempt. In a very kind gesture, Sarah went on the internet and found a recipe for pesto-like spread to put on meat. She bought the ingredients and when I got home from work we gave it a try. The recipe called for two cloves of chopped garlic. We chopped up the two pieces, which we thought to be cloves, and continued cooking. I was about to combine all the ingredients, when Sarah says to me, "doesn't that look like a lot of garlic?" I agreed, but we decided to just proceed anyway. Once the entire mix was made, I took a taste of it an began to gag. Holy vampire repellent Batman! This stuff that we made was so strong that it would have killed plant life. But there was not anything we could do at this point, so we still used the spread on our meat....just sparingly. It was pretty good despite the overpowering garlic taste. I came into work the next day and told my manager, David, the story and he agreed that we put the correct amount of garlic in the mix. Still doubting that we were right, David and I looked up garlic on the Internet. Here's what we found: 1 bulb of garlic has about 10-12 cloves of garlic. We had used two bulbs of garlic and put in at least ten times as much garlic as the recipe called for! Ahhh....our first cooking lesson.

I am sure I will learn a lot more over the next few months and years, but that is all for now.

...oh yeah...one more thing...chicks use a whole heck of a lot of toilet paper.

Sleepy Move-In Review

I am so tired that I think I may fall asleep here at my desk because I have not been able to catch up on my sleep from this past weekend.

Moving was so tiring and stressful, but the majority of things we need to do are now done. Our couches, sleeper sofa, coffee tables, and big screen TV have all been delivered and the apartment organized just the way we like it. This is all so exciting! We've been to "Bed, Bath, and Beyond" at least four times and to the grocery store equally as many. No so exciting! Thus far, Sarah and I have not killed each other, nor had any big arguments, which is amazing considering my temperament. Not to say that we did not have a few tiffs like "I asked you to hold that!", "You just told me to put that there!", and "How many times do we have to go over this?!" From what I have been told these types of things are normal. Other than that, so far, so good.

To contain my excitement, I think I'll pretend to work and just close my eyes for a few seconds here at my desk....

My Final Night

Tonight is the final night that I will be alone before Sarah arrives and we begin our cohabitation. That still sounds weird (and not the fact that I used the word cohabitation). Although I like to joke around that I will lose all my freedom and this is the end for me, that is really the furthest thing from the truth. Sarah and I first started dating almost eight years ago and I have been waiting for the events of tomorrow for about as long.

Honestly, over the past few months, I was a little scared about the prospect of living with my girlfriend. Was she always going to be around? Was I going to have any privacy? What if this do not work out? While all are valid fears to some extent, none of them matter. I want to do this, and I finally came to that realization about two weeks ago when I woke up and said to myself, "Hey, this is gonna happen soon. Cool!". Now for the past two weeks, I have had that nervous/excited feeling....ya know the one that you get before a big game or performance? That has been interesting to say the least. So interesting that it made me giddy (yes I just used the word giddy) at times. Then today, I had one final change of emotion. Today, I was just in awe. The magnitude of what we are doing has finally hit me. All my belongings are packed, and tomorrow I will be moving in with my girlfriend...my high school girlfriend...wow!

All these feelings aside, I do know a few things: I am ready for this! We are ready for this! I am very excited!

Pheeeeew! Now with that off my chest, time to go out and have a drink.

My 4th

Let me tell you, I needed this long weekend. Having the day off, being able to sleep late, and getting to do some fun stuff was all great for my personal morale. Much of the weekend was quiet though, which is a good thing. I was able to stay in and relax and get ready for my girlfriend, Sarah, to move down later this week.

Friday was the 4th of July and I went over to Mollie's (Alicia's friend, and becoming my friend) place for a cookout and pool party. It is always nice getting to party with a few different faces, not that there is anything wrong with the people I hang out with most of the time! I had a good time with the exception of losing a contact and cutting my side on the latch to a chain-link fence.

After the novelty of the pool and sun wore off, we got dressed and went to Jennifer's (friend of the girls, which makes her a friend of a friend to me) place for some more congregating and to watch fireworks from her roof. Her place was incredible though. She has a really nice, large, and modern-looking loft in downtown Atlanta. It easily cost as much as some houses that you find down here. As I said before, we went up to the roof to watch fireworks, but it was even cooler than it sounds because the roof overlooked a portion of the city and we were able to see four or five different firework shows, including the one after the Braves game at Turner field.

All in all it was a fun day and night, but I did leave out one minor detail...

During the day, I received a phone call from Sarah. She told me that she had exciting news for me on the River Edge home front. The possibilities ran through my mind. Did some couple break up? Did someone get fired? Get a new job? Pregnant? So she proceeds to tell me the news that my high school friend Mike got engaged. Honestly, I was a little shocked and I'm not exactly sure why. I think it had something to do with the fact that I am at the age where some of my high school friends are getting engaged and that since I am in a serious relationship, I may not be too far away from the same thing. But that's neither here nor there. I am really excited for Mike and Regina. Due to the fact that I have been down in the ATL while her and Mike have been up in the New Jersey/New York/Connecticut area, I have not had a great deal of time to get to know her. From the few times that I have had a chance to spend time with her, I do know that she is really sweet, nice, attractive, and from what I can tell, a good honest person, which makes her perfect for a friend of mine. I also know that her and Mike get along great so I couldn't be happier for the both of them.

Best of luck to the both of them.

Movie Review

I have something to admit. Not only did I just go to the movies by myself on a Saturday night, I went to see Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde and enjoyed it! No seriously, I did not feel like sitting at home tonight and the majority of my friends are away for the weekend. I was getting a little stir crazy, so I decided to go to the movies. Was I embarrassed to go by myself? No! Why should I be? I have friends. I have a girlfriend. I have a social life. That legitimizes it in my mind.

The movie was pretty good...considering the genre of movie we are talking about. I do not want to give away the best parts, especially for those of you who plan on making the trip to see it, but can you really go wrong when a movie has a scene with homosexual dogs wearing tight leather?! Hmmmmm? Please do not shoot the messenger. Just trust me...it was funny. The bottom line is that if you are a Reese Witherspoon fan (she is a hottie by the way), can stand sitting through some cheesy humor, do not cringe at the color pink, and enjoy looking at life in an overly idealistic manner, this movie is for you.

Even More Wedding Pics

Holy cow! Even more wedding pics.

This Past Weekend

I went to a Baptist wedding this past weekend. It was way too religious for my Jew-ish self.