29-Jan-2007 Uncategorized

second life

On Friday night I got a call from Cranky McCrankster Girl — also known as Breanna. Breanna and ”The Boyfriend” Chris live upstairs on the 4th floor in the official party loft apartment. I’ve already frequented their casa twice in so many weeks. How did I end up there? I was driving home after a mild shopping binge at IKEA when I got the call from someone claiming to be in my HR Department. After I figured out who was really calling me, I was off to meet the gang down the street at Drink. I’d offered to drive, but that makes no sense when you live steps away from the nightlife (and I love to boogie). My fellow yoga bud Rachel was quick to assured me that the service at Drink ”sucks major bigtime.” This was quickly proven when I found myself unable to order a drink from Drink. Irony! I eventually followed her advice and walked to the bar where I purchased a dirty martini. Mmmm. While I slowly imbibing, someone noticed this guy outside the window who was giving out free drink cards to people as they came in from the parking lot. Breanna and I plotted how we could best simulate people who had just arrived. I insisted that we should walk all the way around the block in order to appear like Hey We Just Parked people. To add to the look, I loudly dangled my car keys and made my best I Just Turned Off The Ignition face. We scored three tickets each. Nice! We returned to our table and showed off our booty, so another couple of folks decided to raise the bar by walking only halfway out and swinging around the parking lot. Success again! Now that it seemed so easy, two more people simply walked out the back door — a mere 50 feet away from free ticket guy. Free tickets were had. D’oh. I wish I’d known about that before suggesting we walk half a mile. At least I was still wearing my jacket –which oddly enough I’ve lost somehow. Hmmm. There was more drinking and lots of dancing and I had a great time. I had such a great time that when I finally left the party loft and got to my apartment, my dog rushed right past me into the hallway. I didn’t figure this out for at least 10 minutes. I was snacking on flatbread crackers when I realized the pooch wasn’t begging. In fact, he wasn’t there at all. I did a quick search of the entire house until I figured the only place left that I hadn’t looked was outside. Chew was out there, quite confused, apparently waiting for me to figure out what I’d just done. Good thing we live in condo with a nice heated hallway. Geesh. So yeah. I need to stick with little beers from now on. Good times.

In other events over the weekend, I got a iRobot Scooba to mop my floor. I had to make my purchase from Target as Best Buy no longer carried the Scooba. Funny thing — I was at the Best Buy and ended up talking to the same girl I spoke to last year about my buying a washer-dryer combo. This was the week that I tried out speaking in a British accent. That was especially hard to do as I kept wanting to break out laughing while I tried to surpress my Texas-Philly combo accent. The Scooba, to get back on topic, kicks ass. It kept getting lost under my computer rollaway table. I’ll need to work on blocking that, but otherwise it was good times.

I’ve got to get back to work. I have this estimate that I’ve been trying to focus on but I’ve had about 16 other things going on at the same time. One last thing I did on Sunday was to log into the game Second Life. I created an avatar which I think looks somewhat like me. I dunno. I may have to do a side by side. Most people make their avatars totally hot, but I figure I’d rather go for realism as much as possible. Now all I need to do is buy some pitch black pants and a shirt to match up. Check it out:

Mark Shields in Second Life