What does this MEEEEAN?

This started off slow for me, and then there was one moment when I lost it. Now I can't get enough. I may be the last person on the internet to see it, but if you haven't yet, it's only 3 minutes of your life. Double rainbow, all the way.

My Wife is Pretty Funny...in Four Parts

Part I

So I'm all jazzed up about my new iPhone, and came across this app called Errands or something like that. It's pretty self-explanatory, and so I emailed my Target shopping list to Michelle. She replies with "Fancy." Pretty sure she's being sarcastic.

Then when I get home, I hand my phone to her, and she proceeds to type out her own errand for me to do. It's titled, "Make Michelle Happy," and it goes like this:

Coffee
She can quit her job
Stay home with Murray
Spend lots of money on whatever she wants
Buy her a Range Rover
Hardwood floors
Re-do kitchen
Take her to Hawaii

Priority: Urgent

Part II

She then knocks over the ironing board in the office, which I left open, and then when I try to close it up, and it won't close.

Joe: You broke the ironing board! (angrily)

Michelle: Oh good, you can add it to your list! (cheerfully)

Part III

I'm sitting in traffic at a light, and this blond lady wielding a Blackberry comes flying out of a parking lot, and wedges herself right in front of us, wanting to pull out before we can move. I'm more of a timid driver than Michelle is. When I'm in the passenger seat, I sometimes resemble this guy.


Ok, I'm being dramatic. Michelle is actually one of the best drivers I know. But she's a bit more aggressive than I am. Well when she sees Blondie, she comes out with something like this:

"I would not have let her in if I were driving. If she doesn't move quick enough to my liking, I want you to beep at her."

Part IV

We're driving through the Stop & Shop parking lot, when I spot a juiced up tan man in a wife beater and tattoos all over his arms. He may or may not have had a blowout. Upon seeing this, Michelle says:

"I really wish I knew how to whistle."

Poor Family Health History, and Looking Toward the Future

I have been blessed with a high metabolism. I was always a chubby little kid, since I loved my meatballs and cheetos and pasta and bread and anything salty. It wasn't until I was in 7th grade that I hit a "growth spurt" where I finally thinned out a bit. I put that in quotation marks, because I only made it to 5'6" and a half.

This high metabolism, however, has also served as a curse. I say it's a curse because at my last doctor's office visit, when I learned that I was only 5'6" and a half and not 5'7", I also learned that I had a very high cholesterol level and an absurd level of triglycerides. At my last visit, my triglycerides were at 373. Should be under 200. So there are two reasons behind this, as far as I can see. The first is my family history. There is not much I can do about this. My dad and I can compare horror stories of foods that cause wicked heartburn, and his triglycerides I think once crossed 900. His doctor couldn't figure out how he was sitting there talking.

The second reason my blood lipids were so bad is that I don't make the best choices when it comes to food. Now I don't go to McDonald's very often, perhaps 4 or 5 times a year. (Filet O' Fish during Lent...sing the commerical to yourself now, I love it.) Every night I eat at least one vegetable. My dinners are always pretty healthy. But I have other problems. I don't eat breakfast on a regular basis. I know this is bad for me, I just can't help it. Sometimes I'm just not hungry at work, and by the time I know it, it's 11:00 AM so I just wait until lunch before I eat again. Then when lunch hits, I scarf down a meatball sub, covered with two pieces of provolone cheese, on a giant sub roll. When I eat pizza, I'll throw down 4 slices. Pie? I can't stop at one piece.

Here is where the curse comes in. It's great that I stay relatively thin (I have a small gut, yes, and was in much better shape in high school), but my insides must be rotting away. It's amazing how I can say, well my outsides look ok, but completely neglect my insides. I've been justifying my inaction by saying it's not my fault, and I'll be on Lipitor before I know it, anyway.

My doctor told me to take fish oil pills everyday, and start exercising. I took the pills for a while, and then sort of fell off the wagon. Not intentionally, I just forget, and get lazy about remembering. I need to start exercising. Even the busiest people in the world exercise. The President of our country exercises, and he has way more important crises going on than I do. I need to stop sitting on my ass, and do it. This may be a futile attempt that fizzles out like other resolutions I've made, but I hope not. It doesn't take a lot of effort to exercise on a regalar basis, and this is what I need to keep in mind.

I just picked up "The Last Lecture" by Randy Pausch, and only read through the Intoduction and first chapter, and it has already inspired me. This professor was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and was looking at a few months to live, leaving behind a wife and three children under 6. I don't yet have any children, but they are definitely in my future. This poor guy probably didn't do anything to get cancer, but my potential health problems are fixable and potentially avoidable. I want to be more aware. I don't want to be in my 40s, looking at a life or death situation, wishing I did something more about it when I had a chance.

Here's a problem I have. Some people will smoke cigarettes and say, well something will probably give me cancer down the road anyway, so I might as well enjoy myself now. This is what I'm doing. Sure, give me another piece of bread and butter, I can't help my family health history, so who cares? Well if I can do everything I can to try to prevent bad things from happening to me and potentially leaving behind my wife and a young family, what am I waiting for?

Yes, I am posting from my iPhone. What up.

Testing the Waters with Some Bad TV

Getting back into it...

I've recommended TV shows in the past. The following is not necessarily a recommendation, but more of a list of shows I should be embarrassed about watching.

"Stop emasculating me!"

If you don't watch the Bachelorette, then you probably missed the most uncomfortable relationship fight in TV history. Jake the Pilot, I'm sure he has a last name but I don't care enough to look it up, is nuts. He was trying to make himself look like the good guy, and he failed. I was rooting for him to keep talking, because every time he did, it got worse. And either his ex-girlfriend is a great actress, or she was genuinely upset, because I really felt for her. That, and I love Chris Harrison (the host...I know his name). The people on this show make his job easy, but I still think he's great. "Ali, gentlemen, your final rose tonight." Regarding the actual season currently going on...Go Chris L.

I also am sucked into Secret Life of an American Teenager. I don't know how it happened, but before I knew it, I knew every plot line and character on the show. Now I'm into it.

I also wish I could go back in time and join glee club in high school. Or at least find a school with a glee club with some nasty singers. But when we're watching Glee and the commercials come on, I scream at Michelle to fast forward the DVR. At which point she whips the clicker at or near my skull. She doesn't take any crap, to put it lightly.

MTV now has an HD channel where I live, and Jersey Shore is back soon. But I'm afraid it will be TOO fake. The first season was so funny because these were regular people living how they do (I think) but I'm afraid the expectations are too high for them to be "real." I hope it doesn't turn into the Hills where it basically becomes a scripted reality show. Although the Hills never did it for me anyway. We'll see. I will watch Jersey Shore either way.

I also watch good television, but this post was dedicated to junk.

I also recently got an iPhone for the first time, and I don't want to keep posting, I want to go play with my phone. I thought I was cool with a qwerty keyboard so I could text fast. Wow, was I missing out...

Stupid Things I've Said or Done

I'm watching the Olympics, as usual, and they're showing all the Canadians in the stands loudly and proudly singing their national anthem. Then I see the Canadian women's hockey team, also singing. So I say, "They're going to get their ASSES handed to them." Then Michelle says, "This is their gold medal ceremony."

Then one time we were driving through Bridgewater, a suburb about 30 miles southwest of Boston, and we were admiring how great the town was. I was all caught up in the moment, and I go, "Wow, look at the Shaw's (supermarket chain) down here!" Again, Michelle says, "Uh Joe, I think that's Shaw's headquarters."

When I was about 13, my buddy got a new bike. He had it all decked out with new pads. I'm like, Dude, pads are lame. You should take your pads off, like my bike. Well later that week, my friend rode his bike down a hill, and his feet slipped off the pedals. He smashed his teeth on his crossbar. They said if he didn't have braces, he would have lost all his front teeth. He ate through a straw for days, maybe weeks, I forget. I still feel terrible about this. Don't take my advice on how to look cool.

Another friend of mine had an older brother, who had a .22 caliber rifle. We used to shoot rounds off in his back yard, aiming at targets we set up, trees, birds. Well I decided to shoot an aerosol can. From about 5 feet away. In his basement. Let's just say I'm lucky I didn't kill myself, my friend, or stay permanently blind. I couldn't see straight for quite a few hours after rinsing the poison from my eyes.

The same friend with the rifle went off a jump that I made out of plywood. The jump was very, very steep. His bike was very heavy. He went up, held on to the handlebars, and went down. Bit through his tongue and smashed up his face pretty good. My bad, again.

I once had the brilliant idea of walking along a 2 foot wide stone wall. On one side was a main road, with dozens of cars going by. The other side had a 20 foot drop to some shallow water. Not sure what prompted me to do that one. (Mom, if you're reading, it was the narrow bridge on Winter Street.)

The time I googled how to fix a clogged drain, and didn't realize that there was a tube hooked up to the sink which subsequently flooded our house with chewed up food.

The time I was the real slim shady.



There may be a part 2 (or 3) to this, depending on how many stories Michelle can contribute...

The Lead Singer

So I've decided to start this blog in order to chronicle my...oh wait. I already had a blog. Oops.

So pretending like I haven't missed a beat, here goes.

Murray Man has been neutered. His cajones are gone. He's still got his cash, just no prizes. Or as Michelle says, he still has his lead singer.

Although, he never really had cajones. They were undescended. I didn't like telling a lot of people that fact, I feel like Murray wouldn't appreciate it. But then again, he's had some pretty embarrassing stories plastered on the internet. Michelle was very, very worried. She was afraid he was going to die on the operating table. When she heard that he was fine, you could almost physically see the relief being removed from her shoulders. And he recovered really quickly. Everyone said that the next day he would be acting normal, but I didn't believe it.

Since Murray is constantly jumping on and off our bed, it was decided that I should sleep in the living room with him so he wouldn't rip a stitch. When I say it was decided, I really didn't have a say in the decision. It was more like I was nominated for the job. And then didn't have a choice. So I guess you could say I was forced.

The second night, I convinced Michelle that we should all sleep in the living room. She blew up the air mattress for me, and she ended up on the couch. We had a little camp out. That night, we also rented Couples Retreat on demand. It was ok, but overall, pretty disappointing as far as Vince Vaughn movies go.

In other news, I've been spending every spare minute doing my CFA studying. And I actually enjoy it. So far. I enjoy it a lot more than studying for the GMAT. The GMAT was an odd test, and I honestly didn't like what it tested, or how it was graded. Apparently it's an accurate way to test how people will perform in grad school, but I think that's crap. So far, the CFA encompasses a lot of what I studied in undergrad, but on a deeper level. That, and it will basically be about 8 Finance classes rolled into one giant exam. Taking advice from a friend, I'm taking it one page and one day at a time.

Over the last 9 days, I have been obsessed with the Winter Olympics. I love the sports, the athletes, the venues, the special interest story lines, the announcers, everything. I can't even think about the poor guy from Georgia who died competing in a goddam sport. There's been enough said and shown about his life and death, so I won't get into it all here. I just feel terrible about the whole ordeal.

I've even watched every possible minute of Curling. The sport is great. I'm a huge fan of bowling, and it reminds me of that mentality and atmosphere. I really only like candlepin bowling, which I think is limited to Massachusetts, or at least New England. But I'm going to try and make the US Curling team for the 2014 Olympics in Russia. It's good to have short-term and long-term goals, I think.

Another Olympic thought, I love listening to Scott Hamilton do the play by play of a figure skating routine. I may not understand the technical aspects of the scoring, but I have to respect when someone is that passionate about anything. I was watching Evan Lysdhjfacheck's routine the other night, and he landed a couple jumps in a row, and Hamilton just moaned. Just "Augghhhhhh!" At the time, I didn't understand why, but seeing as how he won gold, I'm guessing it was a good moan. Anyway, the guy kills me. And the lady announcer was brutal. One of the other Americans did a single axle or whatever, instead of a double, and she was all, "Oh it's over." No sugar coating from the figure skating announcers. Which I also can't understand what the difference between a triple axle and a trip toe loop and a triple lutz are. They all look pretty similar to me. I think my favorite part is when they spin. It's crazy impressive. And I love the drama with the Russian kid calling everyone out for not attempting a quadruple jump. It really adds a lot to a sport I never really care about. Another one of my favorite Olympic subplots.




In food news, the Whirley Pop is back in our lives. Michelle's on a kick that microwave popcorn will kill us all, so we've bought a Whirley Pop, and it is the best tasting popcorn ever. Beats the pants off of movie theater popcorn, since we can control the butter/salt ratio. If you haven't tried it, you're missing out. After posting this picture, Michelle just informed me that ours is black. So paint it black in your mind.

Now go and youtube "Paint it Black" by the Rolling Stones. Or don't. But it's in my head now.