There have been two odd business, or bad business, practices that I have seen in the past few days. The first deals with Dunkin Donuts and how they process orders and management. The 2nd is the Mood Cafe in our apartment building which has a single digit customer total after 2 weeks in operation.

Dunkin Donuts, or at least this one, has this idiotic business practice where the person who is making your food calls out your number when the order is ready. The problem occurs when I happen to throw out my receipt or am not given one. I don’t know my order by number, I know it by identification with what you just made. If the person was like “sesame seed bagel with cream cheese”, I’d know it was mine. If she’s like 742, I have no idea. The management there is also horrendous because they just hired a new manager (who probably is in charge of this number fiasco), and everyone of the old employees wants to quit. The especially sad part is that this place always has a line out the door even with shoddy work.

The Mood Cafe is an Indian/American food establishment that opened up on the bottom floor of our apartment complex. They aren’t getting any business and I no exactly why. First of all, the parking lot to the building has a gate that is open from (6am-4pm) and is down the rest of the time. This isn’t a welcoming parking lot. There isn’t mass traffic around the area and it just isn’t a good location for a restaurant. I can also see that their thinking is that the residents of the building will probably eat here. This is flawed when I walk by the restaurant and never see anyone inside. It’s intimidating / scary, that no one eve eats there. I predict the Mood Cafe will be out of business in 6 months.

Sam, your pointless update was about 1:52 minutes too long. Unless the material is good, everything on youtube should be under 1 minute. While I was looking at Philly Bar Stool today, they had a EatDaPussy45 give a monologue for 9:24. I can’t sit there for that long. My attention span is about one minute and I’m sure that’s more than the average person. We need to be more succinct in how we do things.

Today at work JC was talking for what seemed like minutes straight and I was just staring right at him. Not making a reaction or anything, just looking at him and listening. He started yelling at me, telling me I’m making faces at him. Not actually making faces but not communicating in the conversation. I’m thinking, “how am I supposed to communicate when you talk for 3 minutes straight, I sit there and listen, and I’m still not doing what you expect out of me.” Then when he brought that he thought I was mocking him and I still continued telling him I have no idea what he was talking about (and I started to get a little pissed at this point) he said “why are you getting so angry”? Anyone knows the one way to fuel a fire is to tell a not angry person that they are getting angry and they immediately get angry defending they aren’t angry. It’s really a neat trick. Point is that things need to happen quickly. Mindless talk and blah blah blah just isn’t the way things get done. Hit em quick and hard.

I want to compliment the Shee on his golf behavior, which in my opinion, has vastly improved. I had no idea how to use the commas in the last sentence so I just made it up. Anyway, old Shee used to slam clubs and be ultra competitive at times. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe in being competitive but it just doesn’t rank high in my value system unless I’m going out of my way to compete. I believe the goal of any round of golf is to shoot as low a score as possible and I can’t tell if being competitive improves performance. I think it boils down to choosing when to be competitive. So today wasn’t one of those days and we just kind of knocked the ball around and it was a good time. It was my first time playing in about a month and I was pretty sporadic so the round didn’t even get a chance to be competitive. I was 9,7,5,9 to start and shot a 102 which was actually a decent comeback once I got striking the ball with more consistency. Golf is supposed to be fun because it will never really amount to any achievement other than a personal one. I even hit a deer with my ball today. The guy was about 50 yards away right in my shot that was through the trees and I hit a low liner (and trying to hook it around) that skipped right into his shin bone. He seemed unfazed. All in all a fun round.

*I’m actually editing this published copy because I left out the best part. We were playing with two girls who were on the high school golf team. They told us their TEAM is 8-4. These girls however could not have been imperative towards contributing to that record. They were some of the worst golfers I’ve ever witnessed. The one girl was pretty dopey and would look backwards during her back swing. Her putting stroke was the atrocious. She’d blast 5 footers, 15 feet. I started feeling bad for them and was going to give a few pointers but the Shee said it wasn’t my place to do so. The one girl picked up on the first 3 holes which blew my mind. These girls should find a new hobby.

I just went back to my archives to relive my Octobers in 2009 and 2010. Nothing has changed. I’m still the same person as I was back then. What is the Joe Walsh quote from Life’s Been Good To Me? “Everybody’s so different but I haven’t changed.” Or what about Eddie Vedder? “I changed by not changing at all.” I think that this particular quality is both good and bad.

Good because you stay true to your value system. This isn’t exactly well put when your value system is drinking, gambling, and working but it’s at least what I like to do. This isn’t an all encompassing sentence either because I’ve been doing other things too but there is still a general theme throughout those posts. I believe it’s bad because you really aren’t doing anything but surviving, which for me should at least count for something. Time just keeps passing and then it eventually runs out. I just don’t know what I should be doing. People love getting married and raising a family but I’m not going to do that if I don’t want to do it. Once you get married and have a child your freedom is limited. This is a personal choice that every human being has to make and I’m not prepared to make it. So after reading this you should know that I have no answer other than figure it out for yourself. My goal is to make enough money to do anything I want to in life and not be hindered by financial decisions. Then I can feel more comfortable moving on. No one has a guide to this tiny existence.

Most people, I’d hope, know what this title is from but for those who are missing one of the best shows (and book series for that matter), it’s Game of Thrones. I believe we can all feel the weather dropping some degrees and it also is getting darker earlier. This leads to different activities like the end of baseball, the start of basketball, and the continuing glory that is football. New TV like Dexter and Boardwalk keep Sunday nights entertaining. Going out on weekends becomes a tad more cumbersome. Nevertheless, time continues and you must do the best with what life offers.

Tomorrow I’ll be heading to Chicago with Jeff for 3 full days. We are attending a sheet metal show which is where a fair amount of new business has been coming from. I’ve only been to Chicago once and didn’t get to really experience which will be a good life experience. It’s better to go with someone else, rather than yourself, because you don’t really need to worry about doing things all by your lonesome. It gives you someone to sit at the bar with instead of looking like a creep and makes conversation easier with two minds instead of one. It should be amusing and rewarding.

Last night was fairly entertaining. Evan and Gourlay came over and we had some beers and were playing Ping Pong while watching football. Evan left at halftime and the 3 amigos decided to go to the bar. We started off at McFadden’s which was more crowded than I would have guessed. They had dollar Bud Lights on “College Night” which was a nice surprise for the city. I thought that crowd was pretty good but we thought it was a good idea to change the scenery which probably wasn’t the best idea. An interesting thing about where we live is that it’s surrounded by the devil.

On our walk we decided that stopping by Delilah’s was a good idea. It was but it wasn’t. I’m not even sure exactly how much money I started the night with but I know I finished it with 0. Delilah’s is actually a really good strip club from my point of view. The girls are all smoking which is nice. They are however very aggressive and it’s easy blow your wad in a hurry. Nevertheless it was a fun time.

Gourlay has deemed the title “the 5th Stortz” which I have no problem with. I’m not necessarily sure he’s as unusual as he thinks he is but I find him amusing and a good person to hang out with. You’d think me being 28 and him being 21 would make a difference but it really doesn’t. The only thing I worry about is him spending his hard earned money on a Thursday night hanging out with me. I’m probably not the best influence. Hanging out with people though is how you build friendships which I believe the cheesy poem says are the best kind of ships. Just another night in the books.

For probably the very first time in my entire life I had an entire fitness facility to myself. If it took me 28 years to finally experience this I have to imagine that most of you probably haven’t had the pleasure. Our condo building supposedly has 125 or so condos/lofts filled with people. However at 10pm tonight there was absolutely nobody.

I started off doing some lifting on there various machines. I even did the ones I never do because I have no idea how to do them. With no one else around to make fun of you when you look like an idiot trying to learn it, I took the time to do so. After some lifting I ran 3 miles at 17:03 on the treadmill. Then I took the jump rope and actually jumped around the entire track which is 1/3 of a mile long. I would never attempt this with other people there but I had the urge by myself. I got about 3/4 of the way around before I started tiring and then messing up.

The experience was actually pretty enjoyable. I got a good work out in. No one slowed me down and I got to try basically every machine. This post came out way better in my head.

I rely on technology to keep me up to date on just about everything. There is nothing worse than when your phone or web browser freezes. You just sit there like a dipshit waiting for something to happen. Combine this with the problem that all mobile technology runs off of a battery which constantly requires your attention to not let it die. Plus hardware breaks after a certain amount of time which is super annoying. My right click button on my mouse only works when I press it down with herculean strength. We are slaves to these devices. Our parents never had to worry about this nonsense. They lived a much simpler, less stressful, happier life. Today is full of up to minute communication which is more of a headache when you have to rely on these piece of shit computer hard and software. No point of this post other than to express my frustration when NFL.com and its multitude of ads crash Mozilla.