Oh my blog, he’s back! I haven’t been in much of an “update my life” mood as of late, so everything’s fallen by the wayside. If you think this blog is bad, you should see my yard. And if you do see my yard, could you do something about it for me? It scares me.

Anyway, the reason for me to dust off my blog and do an update was yet another purchase of M&Ms (peanut, as always). This time, I sprung for a big bag from the local deli to finally do a cost/cancer comparison. I bought a 10 ounce bag and got down to counting:

10 Orange
15 Green
15 Blue
17 Red
18 Brown
33 Yellow

108 Total

My, my, my – look at all of them thar yeller ones. The big bag had a relatively small cancer index – this one was a mere 16.67% cancerous. As for the cost, it was pretty much close to the same as our unfaithful little machine here at work. If it belches out 73 M&Ms, the cost is 2.74 cents each, while the 72 M&M payout runs at 2.77 cents each. The bag weighs in at 2.77 cents each as well, so the only real difference is exercise.

In other news, the word for the day is “smurf”. Now, isn’t that just smurfy?

Well, today was rollover day for the deodorant. I screwed up last time and bought the stick kind rather than the spiffy gel kind. For those of you who read the labels and don’t get stuck with the stick, there comes a day in the stick’s life that I call rollover day. This is the day when you have just a tiny bit of the stick left. You turn the little dial to make it peek its head out, which makes the majority of the stick be above the holder. Thus, when you try to apply the deodorant, the stick part rolls over the holder part and you scream and cuss as you try to make sure it doesn’t get on your clothes during the journey to the floor.

So, today was rollover day and I feel like one of those testers in the old deodorant ads. One of my arms has had the stuff put on it, the other hasn’t. Of course, once it rolled over, I did the natural thing and tried to catch it. Have you ever tried washing that stuff off? You can’t. Well, at least I can’t. So now, not only is my hand strangely sticky, everything I eat has a refreshing minty flavor. Yum!

This is a truly sad week for the science world. A nation mourns its loss.

Why don’t I just buy a big bag of these things? Beats the hell out of me. Here’s the $2.00 rundown:

6 Blue
8 Green
8 Orange
14 Yellow
16 Red
21 Brown

73 Total

Oh man, I don’t want to start up my calculator for this one… today’s batch is a whopping 21.91% cancerous. I think I’m going to go home now. Then again, I suppose it evens out yesterday’s total.

We’re back to being Coke-less today. Ugh.

Another day, another $2.00 of M&Ms…

5 Red
6 Orange
11 Green
13 Blue
17.25 Yellow (frickin’ machine)
20 Brown

72.25 Total

Today’s batch is only 6.92% cancerous! The only bad thing is, it kicked my calculator into that exponential mode, so I had to figure out what something times ten to the negative two was. Ugh. I’d rather have more cancer than be forced to think about math in the morning.

In other news, there are like, fifty Cokes in the refrigerator this morning! Well, probably just five or six, but considering the usual early morning paucity of Coke, five seems a whole lot like fifty. All of those beautiful red cans…. If you happened to be around when when I opened the refrigerator this morning, you would have heard me making much the same noises as the Cookie Monster when he’s chowing down.

$2.00 M&M Rundown for the day:

4 Orange
8 Green
11 Red
11 Blue
17 Brown
21 Yellow

72 Total

Today’s batch was only 15.27% cancerous. I’m on a health kick!

What can I say about today? At least it’s not Monday, right? I’ve been debating on a site overhaul and scribbling on anything I can get my hands on, so there hasn’t been much time or energy to post away here. Once this place looks different, you’ll probably see me back up to my verbose levels. Or not. We Geminis are quite mercurial that way.

Well, today is a post-food poisoning day of relaxation. Thanks to a friend-who-will-remain-nameless (don’t want my rabid blog fans going after her), I got it in my mind that Burger King would be a pretty good meal last night. How wrong I was.

It was just a mild case, fortunately – I spent the usual five minutes afraid that I was going to die, but only had ten minutes of hoping I would die. Last year I had a bout that was more lopsided – 5 minutes of thinking and an hour of hoping. Add to that the fact that I was at a bowling alley at the time and you can imagine the misery.

Luckily I was safe at home this time, recognized the symptoms and had time to prepare properly. Is it strange to be proud that you’re prepared for food poisoning?

It went away about as quick as it hit me, so I was able to crawl back into the living room and finish watching Hudson Hawk. Wait a minute. I forgot I was watching that movie. Maybe it wasn’t Burger King’s fault after all….

“Hey Helmut. Who’s that guy dragging himself into the bar?”

“Oh, that’s just Crazy Ernst.”

I know I do everything in my power to not use the word, but… I NEVER want to take BART again. Originally I was going to make that something about never sleeping through my alarm, but we all know that’s not going to happen.

So I wake up on my own about three hours after I normally do. D’OH! Near as I can figure, I woke up at my regular time just long enough to get out of bed, walk over to the alarm (placed far from the bed so I don’t do this), turn it off and go back to bed. Naturally, I recall none of this – only the certainty that I turned my alarm on last night.

So, since I can’t drive in and have to take BART, I took my time getting everything ready, knowing that I’ll just work really late today to make up for it. I get to BART slightly early, hop on the train and get that oh-so-desirable little standing nook in the front of the car. Everything’s going good ’til somewhere in the Oakland tunnels area. The train stops. The air stops. The lights go out. By the time I get my music turned off, the operator has already given her report and decided she’s not going to talk to us for the next 5 minutes we’re in the dark or the next ten that we’re paused in the light.

I go back to reading, tuning out my co-passengers as usual. Especially hard to do since there’s a guy who’s been in SF for 2 weeks (probably from Nebraska or something) and today is his third day on the job. He’s taking polls of the surrounding passengers. “How long do you think this will be? How long does it usually take? Will my boss believe this is BART’s fault (ever hear twenty people snort in derision at the same time?)?”

So I’m finally tuning him out until I hear someone say “…like rats in a cage.” Knowing full well what rats in a cage act like, I decide this isn’t a good thing and start tuning the world again.

“Here you sit down.” “I’m not going to sit down – you sit back down.” “Look, just take the seat.” “I don’t WANT the seat! Just sit down and shut up.” “FINE! No one will sit in the seat!”

This is the mature exchange between two men, one probably in his thirties (I’m horrible with ages) and the other, say, in his sixties or so. In fact, this is the exchange that occurs before the shoving match starts, the young guy throws a punch and the mass of bodies seethes and writhes in front of me as everyone decides to be a hero at the same time. One lady pushes past everyone to hit the “Call Operator for Assistance” button repeatedly, telling everyone around that “something must be done” because “people can’t just go around hitting one another.”

Hasn’t she ever seen Fight Club?

The operator ignores the button pushing, the guys are broken up and we eventually got underway. Surprisingly enough, the rest of the trip was rather uneventful.

The first rule of the BART system? You cannot talk about the BART system.