Guilt, the River, Chocolate, and Toasters

Alright, you lazy-bones bastards. This isn't supposed to be a one-way conversation. Think about me for a second. I moved out here alone with no friends and no one to talk to and nothing to do. On my own, I'm making a schedule, Doing The Thing With The Stuff, and suffering through a horrible living experience. On top of it, I'm writing this website, often posting pictures and thoughts twice a day. You can't leave some good, encouraging comments? You can't make the conversation go both ways? I just have to sit in my smelly house and send my thoughts out into the Internet never to even hear an echo?

Look, guys, fake it. Read it, give me a call. I love talking to you. I miss every one of you. All I've got for conversation out here is at work; it'd be rad if you made the smallest effort to remain part of my life.

Alright, guilt and shame aside, here's what happened most recently.

I've been using exercise as an antidepressant. I am a member of the local YMCA, which has an indoor track, two weight-rooms, a six-lane pool, and a ton of treadmills and elipticals and stuff like that. On alternating days, I lift weights and pseudo-run, or swim. It's been doing wonders for my attitude. I get home from work, and my house smells bad, and rather than being filled with visions of fire and flying fists, I'm able to shrug and remember that people love me. Though it's harder to remind myself of this when there's no conversation and nobody calls me.

Sorry, I did say the guilt was over. :)

Another thing I did was ride my bike about twenty-eight miles on the Greenway Trail along the South Platte River. The trail goes for some thirty miles, but I turned around after only fourteen. My butt nearly fell off by the time I was finished. Here's some photos I took along the way.

This is roughly where the trail began. Can't wait to take Jaylyn there next summer!

Me, further along the trail, further up the river. Notice how still and placid it seems. Beautiful.

Me and my trusty utility bike at the spot I turned around. Thanks to K-Man's Sean for helping. He hasn't found me on Facebook, the weenie.

In other, non-bike related news, work's been intense. Long hours, trying to catch up to the orders. We're doing it with a green crew and half our usual machines. We're making up for it with long hours, though.

I've also been eating a lot of Whole Foods stuff. There's no Trader Joe's out here, but Whole Foods sort of fills the niche. They're also bigger, with more food. So I've had lots of frozen stuff because I don't want to have fresh food in this house; it'd get contaminated with the floating filthy insanity in seconds. They sold me meatless meatloaf, though, and I loved it.

They also carry this item; I photographed the small version in front of the big version. The fact is, though, you can get this item in two sizes, and it'd displayed prominently.

Yes, that's bacon chocolate. What's wrong with the world?

I didn't buy any. I'm tempted to buy some and leave it in the break room at work, just to see what happens. Will it get eaten? What if I put a notepad next to it, demanding the bacon chocolate experience in writing? There's a lot of possibilities. Including sending some to Cassandra. Or Blaine. Blaine would eat it. He'd also be able to give a pretty good write-up on it.

So as long as it's on my mind, I wanted to point out that my house has no real knives. It's full of utterly crappy versions of this, though:

What do you even do with that kind of knife? Amputations is all I can think of. So in my last post, I talked about buying my own knife; I've been surprisingly happy with it. It's a $10 stamped knife, and it's rad. It'll probably go into the camping box when Cassandra arrives with my real utility knife, but till then, it's satisfying.

In addition to the no knives situation, there's also no cheese slicer. I'm gonna pick one up Friday. Along with a coffee maker (French press coffee is too hard on work days) and a toaster. Oh, and how about that for ubsurdity: we've got two microwaves, but zero toasters or toaster ovens. Awesome.

Ok, last idiotic complaint about my house: this is the laundry room. The washer and drier are in there backwards.

I wouldn't even bother mentioning it except everything else is so stupid, too. Oh, and the kitchen garbage is in the laundry room. Why? Because whoever's in charge of this house is a sideways, know-nothing, no-clue, jackass moron, that's why.

Ok. Enough writing by me for today. I'm gonna drink beer and watch cartoons. I love everybody, and would love to hear from you more than I do.