I snapped this pic of the butt-can outside the front door of our building a few weeks ago. This has since been cleaned up, but by the maintenance guys and not the jerks who left the mess.

The trash only gets dumped twice a week. The week before Memorial day, they dumped it on Thursday.. this is how it looked by mid-weekend.

Last weekend, we came home and discovered this lovely park job. The green car is my Bonneville. The photo is a bit of an optical illusion, I could not have physically walked between the vehicles, nor opened the driver’s door of my car.

Yesterday, Barton caught one of the residents of our building using our patio area as his own for a smoke break.

Smoking... on our patio.

And here I am again, exact. same. sickness. Day one, my throat and roof of my mouth feels itchy. By Day 3 or 4, my head is fully congested and I am breathing exclusively through my mouth. Because my nasal passages are the thickness of those thin plastic straws used as coffee stirrers, I congest easily.

And then the cough starts. Its a dry, unproductive, bone-rattling, bark of a cough. It feels like I have feathers, or itching powder, or dust, in my bronchial tubes. Nothing helps: not Nyquil, or coughdrops. Drinking water helps a little, because it usually allows some moisture to get coughed back up and that settles the itchyness for a little while. Then it slowly builds again until I can’t suppress the urge anymore.

Last Sunday is when my throat started feeling itchy. I took Monday off work hoping to not spread the disease around and wishing that it would just go away. Tuesday, I felt mostly “normal” so I went to work. Wednesday and Thursday I had off, and that’s when I really started feeling it. Friday, I’m sure I annoyed the piss out of everyone in DC3 by coughing and coughing, and coughing.

Friday evening my teammate Andrew treated our team to some awesome traditional Chinese food. The food was spicy. To me, super spicy. It cleared up my sinuses and the whole drive home, I felt great. But I still coughed. And the spicy eventually wore off and my congestion came back.

Here it is Sunday night again, and here I am, coughing, congested. I’ve coughed so much over the past few days I lost my voice (again – it happened last time too). I can’t sleep because I just lay there and cough. I’ve got to get up at 3:30am and put the finishing touches on the crockpot stew I made tonight and then get ready for work so I can walk out of the apartment by no later than 6am.

I can hear people asking, “Why don’t you go to a doctor?” – Because, I’ve had this so many times before, and gone to a doctor, only to be told “You probably just have a cold virus. There’s nothing we can give you that will make this go away faster. Just drink plenty of fluids, and get some rest.” Or, a couple of times, they’ve given me a week’s worth of antibiotics, which I take, and which are just as useless as Nyquil and cough drops against whatever-the-fuck-this-is.

This time, it jars the floor so hard that the light fixture, that is above and slightly to the right of me, breaks loose. One of the rods that holds the glass bowl of the fixture broke free and it was left swinging by the remaining 2 rods.

Needless to say, this pissed me off. The glass bowl, while not completely broken, is in no shape to go back up there, even if the rods that hold it in place are able to be screwed back into the fixture. The holes where the rods go through the bowl are chipping away. While taking it down before it fell down on me, I got showered with little shards of glass.

Pictures to follow (once my camera battery charges).

• Despite setting the option to save new photos to the media card, the camera still saves them to “Device Memory”
• If a picture fails to upload (no matter the application) I cannot get it to upload using any other application, even after rebooting (forcing me to download the picture via the USB connection if I want to post it somewhere)
• Can’t find any decent (and free) personal time management apps
• Can’t find any decent (and free) budgeting apps
• I get shit for cell phone signal at my apartment, which drains the battery abnormally fast, not to mention I can’t even make phone calls, and 3G? HA! forget it
• I pay $100/month just for my phone. Which I can’t use half the time (see above)
• WordPress app is now apparently only available via “Blackberry App World” so I just had to download and install a completely new app to update one I already had

When my contract is up, I think I’m just going to go back to a basic, non-smart, cheap-as-I-can-get phone.

• US131 in Grand Rapids (Wyoming, technically)
• M6 along the south side of GR metro area
• I-96 from the east side to Lansing

[Google Map of route]

I usually need to leave my apartment by 2:30pm to get to work just before 4. Sometimes I’ve left later, and still gotten to work on time. Today was one of those days.

It seems there is no discernible traffic pattern. It doesn’t seem to matter which time of day I pick to leave, new day, new assholes. People are either pushy, or they’re a pussy. And sometimes the pushy ones turn into pussies, and vice-versa.

On my way home, there’s usually a lot less traffic, but about the same amount of dumb. One night I had someone come up behind me real fast, then pace me for about 2 miles at 1 car length off my bumper. Then they decided to shift into the passing lane, and hover in my blind spot for about half a mile before they finally passed me. Once they passed, they immediately got back over in front of me, making me hit my brakes and break out of cruise control just to get some space between us. Then they continued to drive almost directly in front of me for no reason, even though I’d slowed down by about 5mph.

Another thing that irks me is that it seems like people refuse to even use their cruise control. Or, when they do, its set ridiculously fast, or ridiculously slow. Why not just pick the speed limit and set it to that?

Also, police presence on the freeway seems to be inconsistent at best. One night I counted no less than 5 traffic stops, and most nights its none at all. There is also a truck weigh-station on I-96 between Portland and Ionia that I have only seen open and in-use one time since I started commuting 5 weeks ago.

A couple days ago, I was taking a nap and Bart was up working at his desk, and my remote started going off, like someone was trying to break into the car. He rushed out, but didn’t find anything suspicious at the time. We figured someone just lifted one of the door handles to see if it was locked, and ran away when the alarm went off.

Tonight when I got home, I got out of my car, locked it, and went inside. By the time I kicked my shoes off at the front door, my remote started beeping, and the shock sensor icon was on. I put my shoes back on and went back out. The alarm didn’t seem to be going off, but as I was standing there, the shock sensor gave warning chirps like someone bumped the car. Nothing was touching it. It wasn’t windy, and there were no trucks rumbling by.

I’m starting to grow very suspect of this alarm unit. My remote has also randomly rebooted itself on several occasions, despite the battery icon showing ‘full’.

I don’t drink pop (soda, coke, carbonated-non-alcoholic-beverage-with-artificial-and/or-natural-flavors) anymore because it makes my body go whack. Sugar (well, in pop its most likely to be high-fructose corn syrup) makes me jittery. Extra caffeine in coffee or pop magnifies that effect, and also makes me cranky and unable to function once it wears off.

So, I drink iced tea. I get a little bit of caffeine so I can function, and it has a subtle tea-taste. I can’t stand sweet tea. It tastes like sugar-water. However, at this point maybe I ought to switch to just plain water to keep myself sane.

I hadn’t checked our mail on Monday and we apparently got a big pile of stuff since its the holidays and everyone is sending holiday cards and such. I also got a Netflix, and Bart got quite a lot of mail, some bills, mostly credit card junk mail. On Tuesday I retrieved the mail, and found it all crunched up in the bottom of our mailbox because the postal carrier decided to stuff the “ShopWise” mailer in on top of it and smash it all down so it would fit. Because of this, when I opened the mailbox about half of everything in it spilled out on the floor everywhere. I took the “ShopWise” and put it on top of the mailboxes and left it there because I didn’t want it.

Today when I went to check our mail the only thing I found in the mailbox was the  “ShopWise” mailer, with a note written on the back of it – “This is mail! Please treat it that way! Thanks” — this is where I vehemently disagree. This is NOT mail. This is a prime example of “Unsolicited Bulk Advertising.” Or, the real-world version of spam.