Tony’s Journal

Just did my taxes. I owe the State of North Carolina $2.

Four rolls of pennies coming up.

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So. It ices. Not as bad as last year, but annoying nonetheless. Yesterday I went to work for 5 hours and actually got a little work done. I walked to work and rode home about 3 with Billy. We met Ben and Mandy and tried to go to – gasp – Applebee’s. Luckily it was clsoed, and we tried Tripps instead. That was nice and open and delicious. Meanwhile, Chris worked until 5:30 to try to squeeze as much money as possible ut of the day. Apparently he busted ass 3 times on the way home. “Ha ha!” we all said. “You should be careful on ice!”

Came home and didn’t so much for a while, then played Castle Risk. I had never played it before, just like I hadn’t played Risk before last week. I did okay but Ben won in the end.

About 1:30 am Ben and Billy went out the front door to shovel a path through the snow/ice that had been piled up by the plows. Now, why they wanted to do this at 1:30 am is still beyond me. There was a chance of more ice icing it over, but as one could clearly see, nothing was falling. I was upstairs and looked out my window. Here are my thoughts as they occurred.

Hey, it’s Ben at the bottom of the stairs.

Surely he didn’t fall down the stairs.

Well, surely he had, and his arm was the worse for it. He didn’t have extra elbows, but Mandy took him to the hospital anyway. I went to sleep. I woke up to the news of Diagnosis: Broken. He needs to stay away from known perilous activity in the winter. Actually he might have broken his arm on the same day he broke his leg 4 years ago. If not it’s real close. At least Mandy won’t have to babysit his as much this time. Don’t think the lack of necessity will prevent that though.

So I am staying home from work today. I have a year to make up the time. I actually have a tiny amount of work I could do here, but. . . no thanks.

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So there were a couple boxes of free tea down in the little kitchen area here at work. Bigelow™ Vanilla Hazelnut was the type. Decided I’d give it a whirl.

There was a good reason it was free.

It tastes like old people stew.

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Yeah so great job Fishel. “A slight dusting of snow,” huh. I mean I know that when you say “no snow” it means “lots of snow” and vice versa, but maybe you could switch it up one time to make it easier to follow. Besides, if you’re going to be as nerdy as you are, you’d better at least be correct in your predictions. Oh well. Right now you have erred in my favor, as I love the snow, so I will hold off on asking Melissa’s dad to give you a swift kick to the crotch.

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OH MY GOD IT’S SNOWING

PRAISE JESUS

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So Joe Gibbs is the coach of the Skins again.

And I am so happy I could cry.

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It is 2004, which is alarming.

December 31, 2003 - Went to work, came home, sat for seven hours, talked to Cynthia on the phone at midnight, and watched some sort of giant nut descend on Raleigh on TV. Went to sleep. No fanfare.

Boring as hell, and lonely as hell too. The sad thing is that there weren’t even people around to hang out with even if I wanted to. My closest friends were in Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Florida, Maryland, and far away parts of NC. I guess most of them weren’t having tons of fun anyway, but I bet they had other people around.

Basically it was like any other night for me, except the roommates weren’t home. I had planned to drink Grey Goose until I fell asleep, but I forgot to. For a guy who gets depressed constantly, though, I didn’t feel too bad. I didn’t think too much about how probably 90% of the civilized world was having fun. Bad moods kind of get dull after a while I suppose.

I was more upset at my lack of planning, and at the fact that it was not a good time to travel. I could have taken a flight to some random city, looked around a bit, and come home. It would have been something to do. Not that I would have done it, but I had just resigned myself to the fact that I’d be spending New Year’s alone without giving it much thought.

God, I didn’t mean for this entry to be so pathetic, but a narrative of what I did on Wednesday is a pretty pathetic thing.

January 1, 2004 - It is 2004 now. La dee frickin da. Where’s my flying car? Anyway, I woke up to find no flying car. Sat around for a bit and then went in search of food. Zaxby’s was not open. Cameron Village was the next stop, and I went to Carolina Cafe for a Jimmy V sub. It was nice. I don’t understand that place really, it’s like some kind of optical illusion food fun house. I always receive my plate and think “damn, this isn’t enough to make a meal,” and then I eat half of it and find out that I’m full. Next up was Fresh Market.

Always a good idea to go to the grocery store on a full tummy, especially the Fresh Market, where essentially they buy Velveeta from Harris Teeter, relabel it “Velours Fromage” or somesuch, and triple the price. I wandered around for a bit among the bluebloods with their pince-nez and gold-tipped canes. I blended in well. (Translation: I was wearing a shirt with buttons!) I bought accordingly. I bought salad, marinated salmon fillet, bleu cheese for said salad, and a bottle of wine. And popcorn.

I bought the wine based on its price. Seven to eight bucks is a reasonable price for a bottle of wine for me, as I am no wine snob. After all, I buy wine solely due to the fact that I have a cool corkscrew which makes opening the bottle fun. That and I know two grades of wine: “from a box” or “not from a box.” The wine I bought was a shiraz. This apparently means red. It might mean something else, but who knows. It was from an Australian winery called Crocodile Rock, which sealed the deal for me, as I do like Elton John.

Guess how it tasted? Like freakin’ wine.

Guess where I spilled it? On my shirt.

I have failed to note that I did not drink it with a meal. I drank it while watching football. Made me feel quite the pansy. Then again, when it’s 3 PM on New Year’s Day and you haven’t seen a human in the last 24 hours, there is a limit to how much one can feel like a loser.

What ho! Along comes Ben on the telephone. He wanted to go out to a bar and watch the Rose Bowl. Sounded good to me, and l put a shirt and away we went to the Village Draft House. The place was near empty. We got sat very far away from the TVs, though, and Ben asked our waitress if we could move. Unfortunately for Ben, we unwittingly moved out of that waitress’s section. I say “unfortunately for Ben” because he had had a good look at the first waitress — I had not — and apparently she was, to quote him, “hot.” The new waitress, while not the Elephant Man, was a step down. So I watched football for two hours while Ben stared longingly over my shoulder at Ms. What Might Have Been. I ended up paying for Ben because he forgot to get his credit card out, so I think that even if he had had the balls to talk to her, she would have been confused about half of the gay couple hitting on her.

Then we went home and watched more football, and Chris arrived, and FSU predictably lost to Miami. Poor FSU. They can never close the deal.

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