What would happen if....(2/29 edition)

...you were late getting home from work but you lived at the South Pole? Could you argue to your wife that you had to "run around ALL DAY"? Geez, it's worth a shot.

I saw a headline on Yahoo! that said "Bobby Brown agrees to community service for cocaine". I'm sure he figured that's a pretty good deal, no? I'm sure lots of people would do a day of Habitat for Humanity in exchange for a dimebag of weed, too....

One phrase that seemed popular in college that I never hear any more is the "hot beef injection". Google only had 23,900 hits for it. I wrote the "HBI Song" with a buddy in college...typical E5 chords no-skill riff rock.

When a company changes its fiscal year, it will often have a "short plan year" -- say, from July 1 to December 1 if they want to change their tax filing from June 30 to December 31. This comes up with a company's 401(k) plan, too -- same idea. The IRS prohibits what I'd like to see -- a "long plan year". You can't go 18 months with only 1 return to the IRS, apparently.

Now that my new job comes with its own office for me, I've begun debating how this affects me should I have some smelly farts. For instance, by being alone in my office, I have the privacy and confidentiality that nobody will know what I've done. However, if someone were to walk IN my office soon after, well then I'm busted. Nobody to blame it on, unlike a scenario where there's a room full of cubicles.

As someone with Type 1 diabetes (the "real" diabetes, as I like to put it -- the kind you can't help getting), I sometimes wonder when I'll end up retiring, or how long I can escape death. So I wonder how much I should be saving for retirement. Will I get the typical 25-30 year long retirement? Or would I have to retire at 40 to pull that one off? If I work until I'm 65, I could have lots put away, only to die within 2 years if I'm lucky, on the other hand.

Kinda weird, I don't picture myself ever being retired....and I remember getting yelled at by my dad because it took me two weeks after I turned 16 before I got my first job....back when you had to be 16 to work. Then they changed the work age to 15 and my little brother got a job like a month later.

This being 2/29, it's obviously another 4 years before this day rolls around. I remember when my long time dentist's son died in his 40s....the obituary happened to show that he was 44, and listed his birthday as Feb. 29th of whatever year it was. And immediately, I thought...wow, only 11. Well, 11 birthdays, although the 44 years would be accurate.

I have an episode guide to the Simpsons....from 1997. Kinda incomplete at this point. Anyways, the Futurama movie Bender's Big Score that just came out was pretty good -- a little too "let's make sure we include every minor character in this somehow" to be great, but still a good deal. I believe there are 3 more movies in the pipeline, so that's encouraging.

The Red Sox start in an hour....I'll be off playing basketball, so I can come back and watch around the 8th inning -- when absolutely nobody in the game will be familiar. If they're losing, I blame the post-White House visit hangover. And who hasn't had that before, right?

mild pet peeve

Hey, the numbers on an adding machine....or numeric keypad part of a computer keyboard:

They are not in the same order as one would find them on a phone. The 1-3 and 7-9 switch places.

In the words of TV's Cliff, "what's up with that?"

so much for that idea...

Ugh, what a crappy football game. Close, but not exactly well played.

And then the spice of the ribs combined with the...um....cheapness of the Red Dog to do a number on my intestines, too.

I enjoy a good Sunday crossword. I do the Boston Globe one, as I get the Sunday paper only delivered to the house. It's amusing that most of the sports scores from the night before are too late for the obviously early edition that gets sent out to Connecticut. So I get relatively good info from the notes sections, but nothing too up-to-date on last night's games.

Anyways, with the Globe one I always get fewer than 10 letters wrong, but almost NEVER a perfect score. This week's was amusing, and also seemed to follow to this odd theory. The harder it *seems* at the start, the better I do. (For instance, one letter wrong this week....the Q in "Chatauqua" in New York, which combined with Qui, the Italian word for here. I put a G, not knowing either word.) I didn't seem to be working at too briskly a pace, and yet...only the one wrong. Other weeks I fly along, and end up with 6-8 spots (usually in the same area of the puzzle) empty (or actually, mis-guessed at).

Spring training starts next week! Yee-hah! And March Madness is just around the corner.