Yesterday afternoon I had to make an emergency trip up to Chelan which, for the uninitiated, is pronounced "sha-lann" (but is spoken by locals more like "shell-ann")... and means Deep Water in the Salish Native American dialect (from the words "tsi-laan").

The city is named after Central Washington's premiere summertime attraction, Lake Chelan, which is indeed some deep, deep water. Like 1400 feet deep, making it the third-deepest lake in the USA, 24th deepest lake in the world. It's also very long... as in 55 miles long.

When I was a kid, I spent many summer days up at "The Lake," and have some great memories from my time there. In high school I spent many summer weekends up at "The Lake," but for entirely different reasons. All my memories from those times are fragmented and hazy.

Anyway... I haven't been here in a while and, despite making the trip for a very sad occasion, there is no denying that waking up to this view is anything but unpleasant...

From Chelan this morning, I drove back to work. Then drove three hours to Spokane this evening...

Where my first stop was Famous Ed's so I could enjoy some David's Pizza (now that David's Pizza has been destroyed)...

Still not authentic David's Da Vinci pizza, but it's a step above what I had last time. I just wish they could get the crust the way David's used to. This crust is kind of tough and chewy... not the wonderfully crusty crispy crust I loved on the original. Oh well. I remain hopeful that they'll eventually open a new David's and make the best pizza I've ever tasted once again.

=sigh=

And now I'm comfy in my hotel bed watching the latest episode of Happy Endings

I want cake.

ZOMFG! I have a cold y'all!

I'm fairly lucky in that I rarely get hit with colds or the flu. After going back through my blog, I see that the last time I had a cold was in February of 2009... or three years ago. Not surprisingly, everything I'm feeling now was pretty much summed up when I wrote about it then. LOL! LMFAO! ROTFL!

   
I say "not surprisingly" because my "cold routine" is always the same...

DAY ONE!
SYMPTOMS: Sinus tickle... beginnings of a sore throat.
DIAGNOSIS: Dude! You're coming down with a cold!
PRESCRIPTION: Overdose on Vitamin C, Spirulina, and Excederin PM for sleep.

DAY TWO!
SYMPTOMS: Runny nose, congestion, sore throat.
DIAGNOSIS: Dude! You totally have a cold now!
PRESCRIPTION: Overdose on Vitamin C and Spirulina. Take DayQuil to survive the work day. Take NyQuil to go comatose at night. Go on a Pine-Orange-Banana juice fast. Zinc lozenges throughout the day.

DAY THREE!
SYMPTOMS: Congestion so bad your head will explode, very runny nose, sore throat.
DIAGNOSIS: Dude! You are dying!
PRESCRIPTION: Same as day two... PLUS chocolate pudding.

DAY FOUR!
SYMPTOMS: Minor residual symptoms... little bit of a runny nose left.
DIAGNOSIS: Dude! You're gonna live!
PRESCRIPTION: Regular doses of Vitamin C and Spirulina. NO cold medications.

Now... if I'm lucky, Day Four is the end of it. I wake up on Day Five and am pretty much cured. But every once in a while, I get "The Cold Cure Fake-Out" which means your cold comes back stronger and harder than ever on Day Five. In which case I'm screwed. Colds like that can hang on for weeks.

Right now I am at the end of Day Three. I can already feel my cold breaking, and have stopped taking all cold medication (I find it's good to stop as soon as possible, because cold meds seem to prolong a cold if taken too long). Which means tomorrow I'll start recovering. That's awesome, because two days of misery is more than enough.

But then there's Day Five. Where I'm either cured or screwed.

Now there's a Saturday to look forward to.

I don't really believe in old wive's tales and superstitions and stuff. Sure I feel that most superstitions are probably rooted in a grain of truth since they keep getting reinforced through the ages. But time has a way of warping the truth, so it's not like I think that "stepping on a crack will break my mother's back"... or "wishing on a shooting star makes your wish come true"... or that "Friday the 13th is is an unlucky day."

But boy was my belief (or lack thereof) tested today.

Because if I believed in luck, this would have been a horribly unlucky day. So many things kept going wrong that it felt as if my world had been turned up-side-down...

   
But now that the day is over, I've decided it was just a coincidence. Bad days happen from time to time, mine happened to be on Friday the 13th, and now I - - -

Uhhh... ow.

Just as I was typing that last sentence, I got a wicked leg cramp.

Guess it's probably best to stop writing... post this entry... and then go to bed before my living room explodes or something...

   
Stupid Friday the 13th.

For the past couple weeks I have been feeling badly dehydrated all day long. I'd say it was the dry winter air wrecking havoc on me, but I've never had this problem before. The upshot is that I am constantly drinking fluids, which means I can't stop peeing. I have to pee right now and I just went pee a half-hour ago. I'd run to the bathroom to pee, but I'd just end up having to pee again once I got back to my computer. So now I'm dancing in my chair with the hope that I can put off peeing for just a little while longer.

Except all this talk about going pee has just made things worse.

DAMMIT!

And now I'm back.

This would all be a lot easier if I just stood in the bathroom all day long while somebody kept me permanently saturated with Gatorade...

   
Or somebody just has to start manufacturing my Dream Bed with a Toilet...

Alas, I'm not going to hold my breath.

What I am going to do is reach for my water bottle since I'm parched again.

Drinking all this water is supposed to be healthy, but it sure doesn't feel like it when I have to go pee every 20 minutes.

Maybe it's time to start looking into those adult diapers after all?

It used to be that when I heard somebody say "I'm my own worst enemy" I would reply "THEN STOP FIGHTING WITH YOURSELF, YA MORON!"

Not out loud, of course. I'd say it in my head. But I always thought this was the stupidest saying ever because anybody who has themselves as an enemy and is still alive must be really bad in a fight. If I were MY own worst enemy, there'd be no survivors.

But lately I've had a change of heart.

Sometimes enemies are so lethal that they are at a perpetual stalemate. Which means there doesn't necessarily have to be death and destruction when facing off with an arch-rival...

That's pretty much me right now.

Except all the fight has been beaten out of me over the past month, so it's not that I'm too lethal to battle myself, it's that I'm too tired to put up much of a fight.

Which means my own worst enemy is badly in need of an ass-kicking.

If only I cared enough to give one to myself.

A couple months ago I was in an auto parts store.*

While waiting in line to pay for whatever it was I was buying**, the guy behind me announced "I gotta take a dump like nobody's business, so can we hurry the line up?"

Naturally, I found this fascinating.

Not that the guy had to take a raging poop, but that he felt comfortable sharing such information. It had me curious to know why this was, and what other personal business he'd be sharing with us that day. Fortunately, I left before finding out.

And then I remembered that the internet is so much worse. People are forever talking about their bodily functions, their health problems, their relationships, and other personal crap online. I always thought that it was the abstraction... having a computer (or phone or whatever) in-between the person and their audience... that made this possible, but I guess that's not the case. People just like to share. Misery loves company, and all that.

People also love money, which explains shows like Jerry Springer, The Bachelor, Judge Judy, and the rest. For me, the bigger mystery would have to be Why do other people care enough to tune in, but whatever.

ANYWAY...

The reason I bring this up is that I am still getting email because of my "diaper problem."

Never mind that I don't actually have a "diaper problem" and it was a joke comment left on another person's site, people follow a link back to my blog, find my email address, and are compelled to write. Usually with suggestions of diaper brands... but also to share tips & tricks or to let me know about diaper support communities or (worst-case scenario) diaper fetish sites.

That's all well and good, I guess. Most of the people are simply trying to be helpful.

But today's email had photos attached.

And now that my retinas have stopped burning, I can see that there are times when the sharing goes too far. Waaayyyyy too far.

Though, now that I think about it, I really should have printed those photos before deleting the email. That way, the next time somebody announces they need to take a dump while I'm waiting in line at the auto parts store,*** I can show them a way to avoid such an uncomfortable situation in the future.

Or get punched in the face. One or the other.

*Don't ask me why. I wouldn't know what to do with an auto part. Any auto part.

**Seriously, I have no idea what I was buying. I'd say it was replacement wiper blades (that's the only thing I'd know how to fix) but the blades on my car are shit, so that wasn't it.

***Though I still have no clue why I would go back to an auto parts store. WHAT IN THE HECK WAS I DOING THERE?!?

I used to take absolute joy in crushing my enemies and destroying people who have wronged me. I was also very, very good at it. If somebody was deserving of my wrath, I would do almost anything to make it happen. I would call in favors long forgotten. I would orchestrate any needed scenario. I would facilitate any action. I would pay any price. And while I'm not saying I would ever be the cause of any physical harm, my vengeance could be terrible and have horrifying consequences for anybody who dared to screw me over.

But then one day after a particularly nasty revenge scenario, I realized the only person I was hurting was myself.

Ha ha... just kidding. That's lame.

Actually what happened was that I took a moment to do a victory dance after a particularly nasty revenge scenario and suddenly realized I was genuinely afraid of myself.

The person who was capable of what I had done was not somebody I wanted to be.

Which means that I actually was hurting myself after all. Which is still lame, but at least it's lame for a cool reason.

That was twenty years ago, give or take.

Since that time, I've had exactly one relapse.

I'd like to say that I'm not proud of what I had done, but that would be a total lie. The only thing I'm proud of is that I didn't go any further than I did. Because, heaven only knows, they certainly would have deserved it.

But I didn't deserve to have to live with it.

Except now I've been working my guts out while catching up on the past couple episodes of ABC's Revenge starring the brutally hot Emily VanCamp, and I'm starting to have second thoughts...

On television, everybody is having a great time dishing out wrath and vengeance.

That could totally be me!

All I have to do is sit back and wait for somebody truly deserving to come along. Given my luck, they'll be here soon enough.

Darnit anyway.

Hyperbole is so rampant now-a-days that figuring out the actual seriousness of a situation is almost impossible. Even with people you know. Especially with people you know. Just this morning I heard somebody say "After 15 minutes of being ignored, my head LITERALLY exploded!" And yet her head was intact, so I'm not sure what's going on there. I'm guessing she just doesn't know what the word "literally" means. I run across this a lot.

So when I say "This has literally been the worst day of my life," I can understand your scepticism.

"It can't be that bad," you say, "he's blogging after all. If this was the worst day of Dave's life, he wouldn't be blogging. Maybe he just doesn't understand what the word -literally- means?"

And yet, sadly, I do. I literally know what "literally" means, and it's still literally the worst day of my life today.

When having the worst day of your life, I think it's only natural to compare it to other times where you were having the worst day of your life.

My previous worst day is burned into my memory and still makes me upset to think about it. The worst day before that is also very clear to me. But as I go backwards from there, the worst days of my life are fading. I'm having a hard time picking them out from the crowd. If they were truly so catastrophic, shouldn't I remember them? Maybe those earliest "worst days" weren't so terrible after all? I mean, come on... when I was five years old, the worst day of my life was undoubtedly something pretty silly... like being told I couldn't have a toy I wanted.

Needless to say, things have escalated since then.

As I sit here on literally the worst day of my life, all I can think of is what's next? What will come along that's so gut-wrenchingly awful that it replaces this day as my new "worst day ever?"

It would have to be something pretty big.

That would be a terrifying thought if not for the fact that having new "worst days" means that eventually this worst day will start to fade from my memories.

Life. It's pretty fucked up.

Verily!

Virtuous Victims Vying Vivaciously for Vindication...

Well poop. I am unable to get my video uploaded, so I guess that Bullet Sunday and the Movember contest winner will have to wait until tomorrow. I have no idea what I'm doing wrong, but I have troubles with YouTube EVERY TIME I try to send something.

But there was good news today: I made the final payment on the expenses I ran up while I was in Australia! Accumulating high interest charges on credit card debt drives me a little nuts, so this is a huge weight off my mind. I'm still mad at myself for having spent more than I could afford on vacation... but I ran out of money, so it was either break my budget or sleep on the streets and starve to death.

Fortunately it didn't take an act of Congress for me to raise my debt ceiling during a time of emergency.

Except now I'm behind on saving up money for my next vacation.

Perhaps I should make it a staycation to my bathtub, since that's about the only thing in my price range right now.

Being financially responsible sucks ass.