Monday, July 31, 2006

Another week on the grind

Well remember that hellacious sunburn I was telling you about? I'm now peeling. But this isn't normal peeling. This is like when a snake sheds its skin. It's crazy. There's damn near a whole Andy-skin coming off of me. Itches like hell and makes it hard to sleep. But enough about that.


It was nice having a weekend with nothing to do. We just kind of hung out. Went to Red Robin with Cory and Amy, watched a couple movies, watched some baseball on tv, finished our thank you's.....pretty relaxing. We even got in a few games of Sequence. Rachel whupped me good. I'll have to get her back here tonight or something.

There's this place in town that has a sign above it that says "Our customers voted us best oil-change!" Ummmmm, of course they did! They're your customers. If they thought another place was better, they'd go there idiots. That sign cracks me up everytime I see it.



Alright off to work...hopefully they've got stuff for me to do this morning. Peace!

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Misguided idealism

What the hell were these two guys thinking? How does their action represent in any way what they are trying to accomplish?


LIVERPOOL, England -- A man who threw purple dye on the 18th green at the British Open was sentenced Tuesday to eight weeks in jail.
Police officers clear up paint bombs that were thrown onto the 18th green by protestors at the British Open on Sunday.

Paul Addison, 40, pleaded guilty to five counts of criminal damage at the Wirral Magistrates Court near Liverpool. Stephen Fletcher, 35, was sentenced to five weeks of unpaid community services after pleading guilty to the same charges.

The two said they represented a group called "Real Fathers 4 Justice." The group is a campaign for father's rights in child custody cases.

Though they left purple stains on the grass as Tiger Woods and Sergio Garcia approached the final hole Sunday at Hoylake, the players didn't seem affected. Woods made a par putt to win the tournament by two shots.

Monday, July 24, 2006

Weekend to remember (and forget)

Well the weekend is over. And I don't know how I feel about that. Thursday, Rachel and I bought a HD DVD player to go with our new TV. Only then did we find out you need a special cable to connect it to your TV. Of course, this cable is not included with the DVD Player. So off I go to Radio Shack. There, the guy tells me "I know exactly what you need." He hands me this cable, and says "that'll be $90." For a cable! So I say something along the lines of "are you fucking serious?" And he says "dude, it's worth it." And I say 'for that amount of money I have no doubt, but I don't think my wife will see it that way." And he says "all you gotta do is plug in your old DVD player, watch a little bit, and then switch to this new puppy and she'll understand. That's what I did with my wife." Obviously, this man is not married to Rachel. So I buy it anyways, then figure I'll either convince Rachel or she'll make me return it. Before I even have a chance to say anything she goes "please tell me that cord did not cost $90." She'd already checked the balance on our account! I stammered through something like "I know, I promise I'll stop spending money on electronics, but we need this cord to make our DVD purchase worth it." She immediately gets online and finds damn near the same cord at WalMart for $31. That's why I love Rachel. She keeps money in my wallet.

Friday the heat started. I had to get the oil changed in Brown Sugar, who acted more like the Brown Habanero Pepper all weekend. It was a damn sauna in there. I'm sitting there at Oil Can Henry's and the guy basically tells me I need a new engine (tell me something I didn't know) and i'm sweating my ass off. By the time I got back to work, I had a sweat line across my shirt from the seat belt. Very professional.

Saturday, I drove Grant out to the hay field and then Rachel and I made a trip to home depot and Radio Shack to return my ill advised purchase. Following that, we went out to the Linn County Fair, because Rachel's company was letting all employees and their families in for free, plus hosting a free lunch. These were some of the best hot dogs ever. So after three hot dogs and a cremesicle, it was starting to get pretty toasty at the fair. So we headed up to Salem to see You, Me and Dupree. Great movie, though the whole time I'm watching I'm thinking "Dude, if you hadn't met Rachel, you'd totally be a Dupree." I was well on my way to living on a friend's couch, being totally adrift in the sea of life.

Sunday, Rachel and I were supposed to drive my mom and stepdad over to Corvallis so they could kayak from Corvallis to Albany. Somehow, they convinced us to go with them. So we drove all over Corvallis looking for innertubes. We finally bought a couple of inflatable dinghys for $14.99 each (paddles included!) Only thing is that we didn't read the fine print that said 190 lbs max! Now being a good 60 lbs more than the limit, I was a little worried. But the thing kept me afloat, though I had to bail myself out a few times. It was probably 20 degrees cooler on the river, so that was great. What wasn't great is the hellacious sunburn I now have. It hurts to move, because my entire front half is red. I look like a lobster on one side and a snowbank on the other. Ridiculous, and very very painful. I'm bathed in banana boat right now, and it's all I can smell and it's making me nauseous. Ah well, I'd rather get burnt now than when I'm on vacation in Hawaii in two and a half weeks!

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

The rundown

Things that make me happy:


- being married

- having a job

- our new 50" DLP TV

- playing basketball

- Amazing amount of gifts received for our wedding

Things that make me grumpy:

- leaving my wedding ring on the counter this morning (10 days in and I'm already leaving the most important symbol of our marriage next to the soap dish....nice)

- Not having anything to do at work so I just sit here and try to look busy

- Finding out that DLP TV's are the worst Hi-Def TV's for video game play.....not that I'm going to give it back because I bought it for watching TV not playing video games, but still.

- Having to wait until 9 tonight to play basketball, and knowing that there's a 99% chance that Marcus will be our referee.

- Having so much money on gift cards that you don't know what to spend it on. Sure you could get a lot of little things that you want, like DVD's, shower caddy's, etc....but is that really in the spirit of what people gave you the gift card for? So then the money just sits there, and you feel like you should spend it, but there's nothing to spend it on, so here you sit with almost $1000 in gift card money burning a hole in your pocket.

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Silver lining

Well I didn't get the job that I applied for. However, I did get a call yesterday telling me that while I won't be interviewed for this position, they are going to keep me in mind for other positions that might help me get to where i want to be eventually. I really appreciated that. It's much better to know where you stand than to just not get a call and be wondering what happened or why you weren't interviewed.


In other news, everyone at work got a $500 bonus yesterday for achieving our goal for the fiscal year. While I love getting a bonus, I hate the fact that I have absolutely no bearing on if we get that bonus or not. Our bonus is based on how much money is brought in. I can only process what other people bring in, so really I'm relying on everyone else to do their job for me to get my bonus. Doesn't really seem fair, and I could see how the development officers might resent some of us that work behind the scenes. I gotta say that they have a pretty tough job. Thier job is to convince rich people that their money should be given to OSU. Not the easiest job in the world.

Rachel's patients threw a reception for us last night. As if we needed more gifts! I had like 4 or 5 patients come up to me and tell me that their lives were infinitely better because of Rachel and that she makes them look forward to exercising, something they'd never done before. That made me proud. It's nice to hear that you married a fantastic person every now and then.

Well off to another fun day of work...enjoy yours!

Monday, July 10, 2006

Going to the chapel and we're gonna get maaaaaaried

Well we did it. Rachel and I are officially Mr. and Mrs. Lasselle now. Everyone tells you that you can't worry about everything being perfect at your wedding because something inevitably goes wrong. Well, looking back, I don't think I'd change a thing. It was fantastic. Everyone did a great job, everything looked great, and everybody had a good time. People kept playing practical jokes on me the day before the wedding to stress me out, but they were pretty good jokes so I was ok with it. Rachel's cousin called and said he was "Tony from Comcast" and wouldn't be able to hook my cable up until August 10th. I got pretty mad at him and had no clue it was a joke until he called back. Pretty funny. Garth told me he forgot to pick up JR so I was going to be down one groomsman for the wedding. I kind of caught onto that one right away, but in the back of my mind I was like "great.....I'm going to have to make an emergency trip to Portland the day of my wedding. And we discovered that we have a $1000 a day spending limit on our account when we went to pay for the reception. That caused a few tense moments when we thought someone had emptied our account, but everything was fine, and everyone got paid.


The reception was awesome. I got roped into singing "Ice, Ice Baby" in public for the second time in my life. I saw the video of it, and I'm not that great, but it was pretty fun. My career as a rapper is going nowhere. Grant gave a great best man toast, including calling me a "great mom." Back at the hotel afterwards, Erin had lit candles all over our room for us and we tried to use the jacuzzi, but the damn thing sounded like a jet taking off, so we decided to scrap that. We then proceeded to dump hot red candle wax all over the tub when we were putting away the candles, so it looked like someone got murdered in our bathtub. Our first night as a married couple we spend scrubbing our hotel room jacuzzi.

Thank you to everyone who made that night truly one of the best nights of my life, and a big thank you to my wife Rachel for making me the happiest groom ever