The next stop will be…

I could NOT get out of bed this morning. It was probably because I woke up around 4:30am and it took me a while to get back to sleep. Anyway, I finally managed to drag myself out of bed at 7:40am thinking that I’ll just be late to work. No biggie, right? But then I had a brain wave, what if I changed my morning routine to compensate for my oversleeping? Change my habit? Horror of horrors!

That is exactly what I did though and I’m amazed at what I accomplished. I literally made it from my bed to the Museum’s door in about an hour and that includes taking a shower and getting dressed! That has to be a record for me. I have to say that the trains were pretty good to me which helped. Still, one hour from bed to work!

There was a small price to pay, I had to get coffee in the staff cafe’. It’s… How shall I put this? Let me just say that I buy/make fancy coffee at home so, in my opinion, the staff cafe’ coffee tends to be wanting in the flavor dept. Nevertheless, it fueled this post and most of my productivity this morning so I’m good. At the end of the day, caffeine is still caffeine.

Ps. I was originally gonna write a post about how I started chewing gum before I finished my coffee and had to spit the gum out when I realized my error. That little circumstance reminded me of these things.

This won’t come as a surprise to those who know me but I’m very much an instant gratification kind of guy. I see something I want and I buy it. It’s not complicated. Occasionally, I’ll put off buying an item but that’s the exception not the rule. My affliction mostly revolves around whatever shiny new gadget came out this week but not always.

Thankfully, my shopping handicap is not much of a problem because my expense to income ratio has a fair amount of wiggle room which brings me to my point. I’ve set a goal for myself to save a predetermined amount of money by the end of the year. I sorta arbitrarily picked a number and when I figured out how much I’d have to set aside each month, well it turned out to be rather aggressive. Ooops.

What does this mean? I’m committed to my goal, arbitrary or not, so that means I have to suck it up. Yeah, goodbye Mr. Instant Gratification, hello Mr. Budget. Can I just say, Mr. Budget is a LOT less fun. He won’t let me buy any shiny new toys! So no new Kindle, no new iPod Touch (rumored to be announced),  and no iPad for me. And that’s just the stuff on the short list, I’m sure I could come up with others. Insert frowny face.

I guess it’s not all bad. I’ll have a nice chunk of change at the end of the year to show for my shopping abstinence and perhaps I’ll learn a thing or two about self-control. More likely, I’ll welcome back Mr. Instant Gratification with an open wallet.

Continuing the theme from my prior post, I was flipping through an investment book this weekend and caught a glimpse of a chapter heading that I thought said “Introduction to the Millennium Falcon.” For those of you with lives, the Millennium Falcon is Han Solo’s spaceship from Star Wars.

That subject seemed out of place in an investment book and so it was. Upon a closer look, my nerd brain had merely misread the correct heading which was “Introduction to the Millennium Edition“. I guess I’ll have to look elsewhere for an introduction to the Millennium Falcon.

The original movie blew me away when it came out. This trailer for the new film gave me a nerdgasm.

Total frowny face. I was doing really good last week, I had thoughtful thoughts lined up a couple of day in advance so blogging was a breeze then I hit the weekend and ran out of juice. Hmmm…

I guess I could post a brief summary of my weekend. E and I ran some errands on Saturday then went to a lawn party in the evening. Sunday I mowed the yard and attempted to tune up the push mower (it’s idling rough) but it was exhibiting resistentialism so I failed. I think I”m gonna have to rebuild the carburetor on it which I was hoping to avoid. I still might be able to get away with properly gapping the spark plug but I doubt it’ll work.

Sunday was not a good day for working on things because it wasn’t just the lawn mower that was being obstinate. I also attempted to teach myself how to sweat copper pipe and that didn’t go very well either. I had a general idea of how to do it but it’s trickier than it looks. I practiced with a couple of straight couplings and some scrap pipe but  I only managed 3 out of 4 watertight connections. A 75% success rate is not very good in my book not to mention that the welds which were successful were ugly as hell. I need to review some YouTube videos on how to do it and practice some more. I guess.

That’s it for now, hopefully I’ll come up with some more blog ideas or it’s gonna be a slow week around thenextstopwillbe.com.

This video isn’t as good as The Muppets version of Bohemian Rhapsody but it’s still pretty funny.  I think I used to own the 7″ 45  for the song.

A friend and I went out for lunch the other day and while out, spotted an NYC police officer on a scooter. It occurred to us that there is an inherent degree of respectability for an officer based on the size of their vehicle. Here they are from most to least respectable. I’m pretty sure scooter cops must have made someone mad further up the food chain.

The standard cruiser sits at the top of the respectability ladder.

Photo by timetrax23

This small single passenger vehicle is a little lower down.

Photo by Hinnosaar

And the lowly scooter is at the bottom.

Photo by Seth W

This post is in no way meant to show that I have disrespect for the individual officers themselves but just as their uniforms command respect, their vehicles also confer a certain status to them. At least in the eyes of us proletariat.