Mikey D

Item: ‘Take Grace shopping because she truly enjoys doing it.’
Okay, Grace and I just had our three year anniversary (Saturday), and she has been wanting to visit an outlet mall on the eastern shore of Maryland right over the Chesapeake Bridge. So for our anniversary I suggested that we make a day out of it and have ourselves a little shopping spree at the outlet mall, which, not surprisingly, was met with a positive reaction. So today (yesterday Grace had to work) we drove down and spent a good four hours shopping. It was nice for me to as I needed a few things as well, and I’m usually too cheap to spend anything on myself, but today I splurged. And I know Grace was happy with the loot she was able to score, and I have to applaud her for showing great restraint in some of the store. She actually put items back that she liked. That is huge for my shopaholic girlfriend. Anyway, very good day that I’m glad Grace enjoyed.

Item: ‘Buy at least one pair of work pants and one pair of jeans that are better fitting than the ones you have now.’
Since we went shopping this was as good of time as any to knock this item off the list. Always the bargain hunter, I got a pair of work pants for $17 (65% off) and a pair of jeans for $20 (Old Navy, always cheap)- and they fit! Mission accomplished. But since I was splurging today, I also ended up with two more pairs of pants…eek. Mission more than accomplished.

Item: ‘Read Kevin’s Carl Sagan book.’
Tonight I begin the book. In leafing through it briefly I noticed that the print is quite small, so this maybe a long read. But I shall do it, for the check mark and because I’m a man of my word. I said I’d read it, now I will. Why did I say I’d read it again?

Item: ‘Resist the temptation to bet on football games this season.’
In the past two weeks I’ve gotten three pieces of mail from betting sites. They are on to me. They know I’m weak. They even sent me a book that provided me a team by team look into the upcoming college football season. They had everything from past stats of how the team has fared against spreads and such to analysis on the season’s schedule. And there a lot of colleges to analyze, but they had everything. To make matters worse, not only are they sending me mail, but I got a call yesterday about a deposit offer to one of the sites. I put in at least $50, and they’ll double my deposit on the spot! Ahhh it’s almost football season. You can smell the gambling in the air…And I will do none of it!

Item: ‘Delete contacts out of cell phone you have long since stopped contacting.’
We all have numbers in our phone of people we have long since stopped communicating with (at least orally) that just take up space. They are people you have to scroll over just to get to the person you really want to call. So to me deleting them would be an easy task because I would be organizing my phone, and I like organization. But it was much harder than I thought, as each contact I considered erasing made me think, “What if I need or want to call this person someday and I don’t have their number?” It was something I paused each time and thought about, before finally pressing the delete button. I figure if I ever want to contact them again there are plenty of social networking sites available on the internet to get a hold of them. So the contact list has been organized.

Item: ‘Play the Mega-Millions lottery each time the jackpot is over 100 million because you should take more chances and this is as good a place as any to start.’
Our tickets have been bought for next Tuesday evenings drawing. Tuesday should be a good day. First I’m going to have the best fantasy draft in the history of mankind, and then I’m going to win $252 million. Definitely going to be a good day.

Item: ‘Purchase two more pictures for the kitchen, and frame them.’
Two pictures purchased online. The first part is done, now I just have to wait for them to arrive and slap some frames around them.

Item: ‘Network Grace’s computer and my computer so we can access each other’s music.’
This was surprisingly easy; I didn’t even need to consult online messageboards or instructions on how to do it. Last summer I had tried to network our computers but failed miserably because Grace was operation on Vista and I was on XP. I know there is a way to do it (at least there’s supposed to be), but try as I might, it just wasn’t working out. With my new computer running Vista, I was able to network our computer within minutes. Now we can share music and pictures with ease. Grace also suggested I network the printer as well, which after downloading the driver onto her computer, was able to do. It’s nice to not have to use just my computer to print things, and it’s nice to not have to trade flash drives to transfer music and pics. Job well done.

Item: ‘Create a list that ranks my favorite bands of all-time.’
I gave myself some parameters and limited the list to only the Top 50 bands. That way the list wouldn’t go on forever, and I’d have more than ample room to include my most favorite groups (I have many, if you didn’t know). Yesterday I worked out a rough outline of the fifty bands that will be on the list and now it’s just a matter of putting them in the right order (the hard part).

~Mikey D