Summer's Gone By


Not that summer is any vacation or anything (it's just a very hot and muggy any-other-season), but it sure zipped by fast. Ask any of my cousins and they'll tell you that summer's going by way too fast (except for K-mart who gets an extra month of breaktime). For me, however, I'm still in a depressed state because this licensing exam is going to whoop my ass. I can't stop worrying about it, but I also can't focus on it. It's do or die time for this and I'm going down with the Titanic.

Thus, this explains why in the all important month of August, I've only had two blogs so far. You'd think the blog month of my birthday would reign supreme, but no. Each and every blog leading up to my September 12th exam will unfortunately be about preparing for the exam. Even the one on my birthday will be about the test. Mark my words.

And things at work are getting crazy. Co-worker Mike, whose job I am inheriting, will be leaving in two weeks which means I will have to actually take on his duties solo. That guy had like 6 different jobs and now guess who has to do them.

As if I didn't have enough on my plate, I'm organizing the group ticket sales of Thoroughly Modern Millie co-starring our own Prisoner Tribbiani. Get this... group tickets go on sale tomorrow, but he doesn't start rehearsals till August 22nd. The only tour stop in California will be in Palm Desert, which is muy far from here, but we can't miss it for the world. For Wicked, we had 25 people. This time we'll have close to 40 people. That is insane. That will be around $2,340 on my new Platinum card. Am I crazy for volunteering to handle these things? Yes.



Gotta study,

Ricky
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Bl-august Daze and That Damn Exam


Blargg, I'm bored. It's scorching and I'm cranky and I don't want to study.

Work is grillin' me. First pain is having to drive in to work now. We affixed a carpool of four individuals, including myself, and were each assigned to be the driver one week per month. Not such a bad deal, but traffic sucks a doobie.

Second pain is having to study! There so much to know for this licensing exam and I don't retain information as well as I used to. I hope I can just get through this. Then I'll never have to study again. Ever.

Usually I'm upbeat around this time. I've got my birthday coming up and my birthday and stuff. But I'm just not feeling it. It's because of this damn exam. So basically nothing can seem fine until I have taken and passed the test.

Don't you hate things piled up on your shoulders?



Wasting blog space,

Ricky
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And He Shall Rise From the Ashes


As you know, I had reported weeks ago, in a little hissy fit of rage, that Errol, my iMac G5, passed to the hereafter. Yup, sadly, I only had him in my possession for five weeks when his... heart... crashed. But he's taken a tip from his friend, the phoenix, and was reborn anew! Errol 2 is now with me and though he is officially Errol 2, I'm just too damn lazy to say the number after his name, so I'll just lovingly refer to him as just Errol. Yes, from this point on, he will just be... Errol.

Errol's great again; if not even better! Sure I have to reset every single setting I had before, reload every single program and widget, redo i(friggen)Tunes AGAIN, but Errol's running smoother (thus far) and quieter even!

So hopefully we won't have to see Errol 3 rise from the ashes. Otherwise I'll just kick Errol to the curb and apply his cage to a new Powerbook! Though in two years, I am thoroughly committed to buying a Powerbook (to name Fawkes) and live wirelessly ever after.

In other news, Father Routes has decided to kick out a tenent at his apartment complex who has only been living there for four months. She has only paid for one month of RENT and has displayed that she has el zilcho dinero. I don't understand what people don't understand. When it comes to renting a place out, if you can't pay, you can't stay. See ya el pobre. Thar be no freebies in this world from us. We slaved for weekends making over that apartment and we're not about to just let someone stay there for free. F that.



And F play counts!

Ricky
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Friend or No


Have you ever seen someone you haven't seen in ages and are pretty sure that it is that person that you think it is, but there's that .01% of doubt that prevents you from initiating the "catching up" conversation?

One instance of this occurred just last week at the Harry Potter Premiere. As I mentioned on July 16, I saw Captain Gable at the bookstore. When I saw him, I immediately recognized him, but as I approached him to greet, I suddenly doubted myself. I don't think its necessarily a case of forgetting what someone looks like, but the fear of embarrassment if that person is not who you think it is.

Case in point. I know all my co-workers' names. But when I see someone pass through the halls and they greet me, I can't bring about myself to greet them back by their name. I always look five seconds forward at the worst possible scenario where I have called them by the wrong name. To me, it's safest to say just "hi" back. No risk at all.

So, back to my encounter with Captain Gable. I approached him, but didn't say anything. I looked away until from the corner of my eye, I saw that he recognized me. Then and only then, I turned and said something.

Well that brings us to yesterday. At the gym, I was running on the treadmill when someone jumped onto the treadmill next to mine. I looked over and I was fairly/pretty damn sure that it was an old friend from high school; one who knew how much of a Disney freak I was and made fun of my cartoon loving ways. Well, the level of doubt was higher than usual because she looked exactly like she did back in high school and I fully expect that people change in six years time. I was thinking that it could have been her younger identical sister.

Well anyhoodle, I just kept to myself and kept on jogging and walking. I was wearing glasses at the time, so perhaps she didn't know if it was me or not. I think she was looking over at me, but I couldn't really see. Then, because of the massive oil runoff from my forehead into my eyes, I took off my glasses. I could see, through the corner of my eyes, this blur looking over toward me continuously, but still she said nothing; perhaps because I was listening to my iPod.

The time came for me to end my cardio, so I took out my earphones to give her a chance to say hi, if it was indeed her. Then I stopped the treadmill. She didn't say anything in the 1.3 seconds I gave her, so I just hopped off the treadmill and walked away, never looking back. Maybe next time I see her at the gym, she'll say hi. I mean, if it was really her, she would have totally known it was me. My face hasn't changed much since high school. I have just about the same stringy hair. And I was wearing a big giant Mickey Mouse T-shirt!



Standoffish,

Ricky
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King Tut-and-Yawnin'


We went. We saw. We went home.

The "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs" exhibit has been in Los Angeles for a while now and we finally went to see what all the hoopla was about and in my eyes, well, I'm sorry to report that there isn't much at all to hoop and hollar about.



I really had no expectations for the exhibit. Lee Leman asked if we wanted to go and I thought it'd be a cool thing to cover on my now-pretty-much-defunct website. However, like many stupid museum stuff, cameras were not allowed. So Timotei and I tagged along anyway; even though the ticket price was pretty damn steep ($35).

The thing is that I don't really have any interest in King Tut nor Pharaohs nor Egypt nor tombs and stuff. Hell, I didn't even much like The Mummy movies. So I went in not knowing what to expect and with very little knowledge of King Tut's history.

The history was interesting enough after I read about it throughout the display; and yes, there was a shotload of reading. King Tut was king since he was around 10 years old and died when he was 19. His death is a mystery. I'm not sure what he did that made him so significant, but meh, I didn't really care.

The museum exhibit was sort of ho-hum because to be honest, it wasn't really that cool looking at the artifacts. I could have seen the whole thing on a Discovery Channel special on TV and been happy. Nothing there was a *must-see-in-person* thing. In fact, if you can't make it to the exhibit in its limited run, just go to the official site and view the pictures of the artifacts there. There, I saved you thirty bucks.

So you see a bunch of old busts, jewelry boxes, canes, and figurines and you finally come to the room dedicated to Tut's burial chamber and... they show you a projection of his mummified body. Very anticlimactic.

Throw in a half a billion people all trying to look at the tiny displays and it just wasn't worth the time or the money. Maybe I'm just spoiled because you can see the same types of things in the Met at New York, with far less crowds, and take pictures with them. The only difference is the brand name. All you get in New York is a generic Pharaoh; the Dr. Skipper of Egyptian kings. But hey, it sure as hell doesn't make a difference to me.

It's okay though. I can now tell all my friends that I saw the King Tut exhibit and they'll reply, "Oh really? What do you want for lunch?" Lousy uncultured swines.



Biding my time,

Ricky
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Grim Sum


I am here today not as my cheery self (Go Team!), but as a pissed off mo fo of a customer who had the shittiest experience at a chinese dim sum place called New Capitol.

I didn't notice what grade the place had, but I'm sure if they displayed it properly, it would be close to an F. I hate how nasty chinese restaurants are. They keep the entire place as well kept as the moss-filled tanks they keep their barely alive lobsters and fish.

It was gnarly nasty. We waited half an hour to get seated. We got there at around 1:30pm and they unofficially stop making dim sum around that time. We got some dishes right away including a shrimp dumpling dish that had a dead ant on it. So we told the lady pushing the cart that there was an ant on it and she gave us a new dish, picked the ant off the dumpling with her hand and put the dish back on the cart to sell to someone else. Then there were instances I saw of people sticking their chopsticks into the carts to pick what dish they wanted (and many times changing their mind and putting it back).

After only about 7 small dishes of food, barely enough for our appitites, the food stopped coming. We just watched as the ladies with the carts cleaned them off and set them out to dry. We waited there for half an hour hoping anything would come out to eat, but nothing did. So after several audible complaints by yours truly ("This place fucking sucks!") and trying to make as much of a mess and fuss as possible (spilling tea all over the table), we left angrily and gave them a one dollar tip; a generous 4% if you ask me.

So to dim sum things up, the place is nasty, unsanitary, bad servicey, and just plain sucks. Never again.

Routes Restaurant Rating (out of ****):

Food - **
Service - Big Fat Zero
Price - ***
Eating Conditions - *
Overall - *



Thinking that I could have farted in my mouth and it would have been a better meal,

Critical Ricky
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Defense Against the Dark Farts


Yesterday I farted.

There, that makes the name of this entry valid.

Now on to pressing matters. I finally finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. With last weekend so busy and work occupying most of my time, I only had time to read here and there, on the bus, on the train, at the few hours at home before I passed out. But it doesn't matter because I finally got through it and much quicker than I realize. I mean, the book read so fast that I hardly knew it when I was coming up on the final pages.

So anyway, I loved the book. It's my third favorite in the series, just after Prisoner of Azkaban and Goblet of Fire. And events within the book have upped my rating of Chamber of Secrets. What exactly? I won't say.

Of course, it would be wrong of me to discuss such things as spoilers, so I won't. You can rest assured Samantha Wu. But this seems to be the darkest yet in the series, but at the same time, the fluffiest. I'm really excited to see this book as a movie, but will it just be Harry and Dumbledore standing over a birdbath? That's not really a spoiler since it's the cover of the book. Well, I don't know the answer to my question; and it wasn't really a question to be answered. But I do know this: I like beans because of the effect on my gas, not the means to the end. What the hell does that mean? That, my friends, is a question for another time. When that time will be, no one knows for certain. But allow me to ask upon you this: Did I really have more to say in this blog other than I finished the book and that I loved it? Now that I cannot answer at this moment, but I can tell you yes. The rest of this blog was entirely a waste.



Avada Kablabbering,

Roonil Wazlib
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Reunion Reloaded


So back in high school, my old group of friends affectionately known as The Loud Crowd made a pact. Written on the skin of forty pigs and signed with blood, we agreed to meet up at the Main Street Cinema at Disneyland on its fiftieth birthday. Well, instead of July 17th, we placed the reunion on the eve of the fiftieth and all but one of The Loud Crowd made it.

It was pretty fun. We all caught up pretty quickly and somehow picked up where we left off, channeling our loud and obnoxious high school selves. Yes, it's funny looking back. You see high school kids these days and roll your eyes at how cool they think they are. They're just noisy and moronic. And yes, that was our group. People grow up in time though.

These weird tangents I go off on. I apologize.

Anyway, we talked, we joked, we ate, and well, there was a lot of chest honking (to put it lightly). It was very very interesting and a lot of fun. Tiring as hell, but fun.

And in more exciting news, two people close to me are engaged! Loud Crowd alumni, Meechi, got engaged recently to her boyfriend of four years. She's a freakin' sweetheart and I can't wait to be the best man coughnudgenudgecoughphlegm.

And in my family, Charmin just got engaged to her boyfriend Tony-Toni-Tone of two years. Word had leaked to nearly everyone before Charmin had a chance to tell us herself. I'm really excited for her. The first of our generation of kids to get married. And Tony-Toni-Tone is a cool guy so I give my blessing. Yeah, I know. No one asked for it. Be that way then. Maybe I just won't take up your offer to be ring bearer.



Delusional,

Ricky
Loud Crowd Alumni
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Ideal iPodder and Harry Potter


Before I endulge myself into the sweet sixth year at Hogwartz, I would like to tell you the splendid events that sprang forth before I got my hands on the book.

Day started with work. Nothing new there. At work, I made an appointment for a "Genius" to take a look at my iMac at the Apple store in South Coast Plaza. We drove all the way down there and while we waited for what seemed like forever, we bonded with some fellow iPodders and Mac users. They were having problems too and gave me some sound advice: Be strong. Be polite. Be persistent.

Finally the time came and it was as simple as... 1) Here's the error code I received 2) No, anything of importance was saved 3) Sign the dotted line for it to be repaired. The "Genius" said that I was the ideal Apple customer because I did all his work for him. He then showed us how to open up the iMac. Three little screws and boom, it's opened. It's such a beautiful layout inside too.

We drove back through traffic and after a quick liquid dream of a dump, we went to pick up Lindz and Rionheart to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was pretty good but not as good as I expected. Johnny Depp was awkward in it. Still a very entertaining movie with a good message.

Anyway, before the movie, we picked up our numbers to buy the Harry Potter book (sort of the Borders fastpass). Each customer is allowed to buy up to three books and therefore get three numbers. I got three just in case K-mart and R-man showed up to buy. My numbers were 093, 094, and 095.

K-mart came by while we were in the theater. I handed her one of my tickets. So I had two, but I was only getting one book. So I was about to just hand it off to a random person when I saw Captain Gable, Princess Karlita's brother, at the store. He had come alone to get the book. He told me that he was #375 to get the book, so I told him that was unacceptable and I gave him my #095 ticket, to which he was grateful. It was cool catching up with him. He's a really good guy.

After that, Timotei, Lindz, Rionheart, and I went to In 'n' Out Burger for some shakes and snacks.

So now I'm off to read a few hundred chapters about the half-blooded prince. Some news to leave you with. Stephen Lynch is starring as Robbie Hart in The Wedding Singer musical! I am so there next Spring.



"So wait and see / I will be / Everything you never let me" - Rufio

Ricky
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The Rockin'est Homecoming


We begin with some words from Scott Sellers himself:

We'll leave today with the windows down
And we'll ride away like we own this town...
And living on our own...
These nights are fading away in the distance
An open road in the darkness
With a street sign that says home

Those are some of the lyrics to my favorite song at the moment. Wow, it's been a while since I've had one of those.

Yesterday, Rufio's latest album came out. I am a freakin' die-hard Rufio fan. They are hands down my favorite band in the world (with Dashboard Confessional next in line). I've only seen Rufio play twice and I'm afraid that's the most I'll ever see them. I feel that I've outgrown the moshpit crowding days. Too many kids nowadays (not to mention mostly bigger than me). But man, if I had the money, I would totally pay them to play at a party or something.

Anyway, so their new album came out and it ROCKS! Although I instantly loved their freshman and sophomore albums, it took me a few listens to really love this album. I'm the kind of guy who dwells on great sound and deep lyrics and this album really delivers. My one complaint is that the songs generally all sound alike. There was more variety from the previous albums, but hey, I still love it.

And I recently donated $10 to the band after their band equipment was stolen from their hotel. It seriously was the least I could do. I wanted to give them more, but for $15, I could get a nice shirt from the band. So $10 is a pretty justified donation. I sound cheap.



I heart Rufio,

Ricky
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