Breakfast Milestones

It has become apparent to me that phases in a relationship can often be defined by the type, yes type, of breakfasts in which the relationally involved partake. My girlfriend and I have been discussing this lately, and I thought I would share the results of my latest theory with you.

It is a basic class-scale, based on 5 factors, that can be applied to a simple breakfast scenario. We begin with a class A breakfast in which all of the factors are met. Remove one and we have a class B breakfast. Remove two and we have a class C breakfast, and so on.

1. Everyone is looking their best.
2. This event is out of the ordinary.
3. The individuals involved are "just friends."
4. More than two people are present.
5. This was a planned event.

So my girlfriend and I are meeting this morning for the first breakfast scenario of our dating relationship. It was a planned event, it's out of the ordinary, and we'll be looking our best. Since we are missing parts 3 and 4, this is officially a class C breakfast.

Wedded couples often indulge in class E breakfasts; couples with children are bumped back to D. Youth group outings are generally Class A's....You see how it works.

Developing...
After further discussion (*ahem*!), we have deemed it best to update the breakfast scale so that there are two versions. A guy's version (above) and a girl's version(listed below). The idea of us sharing a "Class C" breakfast wasn't all that appealing, apparently, to my girlfriend. :) The new scale does not have groupings called "Classes" or "Grades", as they appear somewhat reminisent of meat or beef grades to the fairer sex, but will instead have "Categories" and be based on somewhere between 6 and 137 factors that may include the relational status of the other involved parties, timing of the event, and a bunch of stuff guaging the intent, intimacy, phase of life, relative stage of beautification, time of year, perception of event's meaning by the other involved individual(s), perception of event's meaning by 3rd party individuals, etc. More on this to come...

Harassment

Ok, people. If you're going to harass me about not posting, at LEAST make it a little more vicious, ok? No more requests or kind reminders. I need to know you mean business - like you're going to kick in the side of my car door, or stomp on my goldfish's tail or something like that. Come to think of it you may have already kicked in my car door, but I couldn't tell. You gotta threaten me or something. Take a handful of paint from my car hood and arrange the flakes into an eerie reminder on my windshield. Slash one of my flat tires. Poke another hole in my leaking gas tank. Get original already!

:)

Please note that I will more than likely contact the police regarding any of your threatening statements and actions, but that's just part of the fun!

The Miracle of Transportation

I haven't written anything remotely cynical in a good while, and I apologize... kind of. I've been doing a lot of fun things lately. My job has taken the standard "end of the year slowdown" for travelling, which means they slated me for 5 full weeks in town to recoup and try to remember where all of my illigitimate children are again... I'M KIDDING!

I know where they all are.

Giving me 5 weeks in town is apparently like giving a honey bee a honeycomb and setting him next to a wild bear - then telling the bear not to eat it. They clear away a 5 week block for me to recover and then give me SIX "short" trips that I have to go on during that time. SIX . *sigh*

So I go with a coworker to a short job the other day down in central Texas. Man it was a nice day down there. The flight was short. The travel was smooth and problem-free. Everything was happening better than it ever had been. Liesurely lunch, the work went well, etc.

Just to give you some background... I'm on a string of bad-luck trips right now. Sometimes things go wrong on the job, but for the most part its the travel that is getting me. I once was on a trip during which my coworker managed to get the last flight on the last plane out of town after some travel delays caused us to miss our first flight out. I ended up driving 6 hours home - fortunately I wasn't in California or something like that. But it was just stupid! I'm WITH the guy the whole time and somehow he gets to go home and I don't. grrrrr. Then comes the standard weather delays and my 12-hour layover in the Pittsburg airport. They have about 300 escalators and a really mean bartender at the airport and thats really all I remember. I've had a whole bunch of other mishaps lately, inlcuding another flight delay that caused me to have to fly into Chicago and take a rental car home to madison - got home at 3am.

Anyways, I'm with that same guy on this trip. And the SAME THING HAPPENS! We were really late in getting to the airport and he made it through security, but the people at the desk wouldn't let me print my boarding pass because the guy at the gate had closed the flight already - my coworker sat on the plane for an hour as they let 5 other people onto the plane after denying me and then they were stuck at the gate with the plane door open because there was a mechanical problem with the plane that had to be fixed before they could leave - I would have MORE than made it if I had crawled on my belly through the airport to get to my gate. Moral of the story, I guess, is to print out your boarding pass if you can before you get to the airport. Mistake on my part. Anyways, I had to fly to Chicago and take a rental car home. My coworker was home by 9pm and I was all snuggled and tucked away by 415am. Fortunately I only had to get up at 615am to go to work. It was almost a short night of sleep...

Flying is stupid. Planes are stupid. People are stupid... travelling is stupid...yeah.... I'm going to go find something to eat... or whatever....

A Traveler's Life

I understand how glorious I make my job and my travel sound to you all... fortunately all you hear about are the horrible things that happen to me, and you only hear about 2% of those. I never posted about being stuck in Pittsburgh for 12 hours at the airport, or the flights I have been on that were cancelled while we were on the tarmac, or the flights I took that never got to the airports they were supposed to so I had to get a rental car and drive untold numbers of hours, or all the fast food I have eaten to survive, or how many smoke-filled wet-dog smelling rental cars I have driven, or the several times I have had to fly to a completely different airport and drive untold numbers of hours only to arrive home past 3am, or the TWO times I travelled WITH the same coworker and HE managed to make the flights home but I DIDN'T, the hilarious number of people that smack their heads on the baggage compartment when they stand up at the end of the flight, the way people really get scared of me when I laugh with excitement as our plane skews sideways while we're trying to land, the fact that McDonalds's almost always forgets the barbecue sauce for your nuggets (is the fad to eat them dry these days?), the life-threatening encounters I have had with genuine southern-style sweet tea in Georgia and Mississippi, the various times I have heard gunshots from the hotel or business I was visiting, the way TSA people are programmed to treat travelers in casual dress as if they were morons (they're right a large percent of the time, though), the sheer number of morons that travel, and why I think the federal government should make people pass a short touch-screen exam before they are allowed to go through security (complete with sturdy electric shock administration for stupid/wrong answers), the countless hours of my life I have wasted playing spider solitaire in airports, all the nasty hotel rooms I have stayed in with roaches and burn marks and things I don't even want to tell you about, the magnificent hotel rooms I have stayed in with king-sized beds and pillow-top matresses and little fluffy clouds from heaven for pillows, or the time I watched a semi back over those big parking lot tire spikes the wrong direction, or the time I watched a semi drive over a stop light/street light in slow motion, or how many times I have gotten completely lost in a city I have never seen before, or the number of times my directions to my jobsite (given to me by someone else) included a random "u-turn" in the middle of a 4-lane non-divided highway, or how many times I have bottomed out on sharp inclines with my rental cars, or the time that I hit an igloo cooler that fell of the truck in front of me at 75 mph that flew over the median, or the times that I have gotten to go crazy places and haven't told you about, or how much food has gone bad in my fridge because I didn't use it all before it rotted into slimy bags-0-brownslush in my fridge (cucumbers are special in that category... try it once. its cool), or the fact that I'm trying to date an amazing woman while running around the country like a raving psychopath... so who knows whether you'll ever hear about that kind of stuff...