Last week hailed a big news story here in Trickville. That is, the world became aware for the first time, that in my life I had never seen The Goonies. Ever.

I imagine most of you are rocked by this realization as my friends and family were. Thankfully we’ve been able to move past it and in an effort to make things right again I joined K and a group of our friends who went to the movie theatre and watched it on the big screen.

It is my hope that we can, as a community, move past this horrible event and continue on with our daily lives. I would just like to say that, yes I did enjoy the movie, and yes a lot more pop culture references make sense.

If it makes this act any more acceptable let me first say that I did enjoy the movie. Very much. And secondly I think I especially enjoyed it because of seeing it on the big screen and being with the group of friends who were all truly excited for me to see it.

I’d like to wrap this short blog post up with a few closing remarks: truffle shuffle, “thanks for saving me,” and Goonies never say DIE!

“Be nice to Bernice!”

That was written on a sticky note next to the phone when I worked at the college radio station, WREK. Her story changed depending on who was telling it to you, but the consensus was that she was an older woman who lived alone and spent her time in front of the tv. One day she misdialed a number and got the WREK call-in line, discovering a phone number which almost always had someone there to answer she saved the number and began calling it frequently.

I remember clearly the first time I had a call from Bernice. I was playing some beautiful classical music and the phone rang, the latter being quite unusual during my show because I did the morning shift, 6am to 9am. It was quiet and let me play classical music, low stress, nothing big. So when the phone rang, I answered it.

“WREK.”

“Can rats climb up your drain pipes?”

That’s how the conversation opened.  She had an odd question and called WREK for some reason. I realized it was Bernice and so I let the conversation go on, I had another 10 minutes before the music ended.

“I think so… why?”

And off we went through her babbling story telling about finding a rat in her house and how it must of come through the drain pipes, the evils of rats and such. It was an unusual question and I genuinely tried to be helpful in answering it, I did think rats could climb up drain pipes. That story came back to me this morning after sleeping very deeply.

Yesterday K and I were in transit for approximately 13 hours, from Atlanta down I-75 to US-82, which crossed Georgia to drop grand mom off before getting on I-95 and taking it down to Titusville to pick up Mattie from K’s mom, then heading into town to try and pick up a CD for next week’s episode before finally heading home.

K and I had been getting ready for bed, both in the bathroom (which I had used previously when we first arrived home.) I lift the toilet lid to throw away a tissue, and both K and I jump back in surprise as a frog stares up at us from the bowl. I drop the toilet lid again and K and I just stare at each other in surprise.

I don’t know how he got into the toilet. There are a few possibilities:

1. He hopped into the apartment when we were unloading the car and the door was open for periods of time, made his way to the bathroom and leapt into the toilet.
2. He has been in the apartment and found his way to the toilet over the past few days.
3. Teleportation.
4. He came up the pipes somehow.

In any case, the frog was quickly removed from the toilet via a plastic bag and a hand. To be released outside, leaving K and I to laugh about it as we finally called it a night and fell into a deep sleep.

I stand by my answer to Bernice: animals can come up drains.

YouTube - The Great Trafalgar Square Freeze

photo credit: Peter Blapps

Having played Dungeons and Dragons for a while now, a new character is refreshing especially when he’s not like anything you’ve played before. I find myself all too often falling into a mercenary fighter role, sometimes a valiant hero but that’s much less common. So when I knew I needed a character, Oaen (pronounced Owen) was about as different as I could get.

See, Oaen is 3′4″ tall and about as smart as a rutabaga. As a player, I go into every gaming session looking for stunts to pull which should, in all honesty, end up in the death of poor Oaen. The problem is that Oaen is built, in terms of the game, to be damn hard to kill. Let’s give you a rundown of the latest gaming session.

You know what? Screw that, here’s the story from Oaen himself.

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» Read the rest of the entry..

As any good and humorous quote should be, let’s take this statement completely out of context:

But at least they have short periods.

Then layer in some context: we’re referring to midgets.

Further let’s settle back and lay a bit more onto it: The conversation had begun as one of our female co-workers made a comment about one of the developers’ “midol” which was in truth aspirin.

Ahhh programmer humor towards the end of the day when we’re all feeling a bit silly!