Last Weekend

Well, match.com girl fizzled out and is no more. Oh well, that's life....and she can go f*ck herself.

Other than that, things are going well. Last friday I took off work early and went golfing with Killa and his cousin Danny (who I played club volleyball with in HS). Danny is the superintendant of the course we played on and Killa is one of his minions, so that was free, plus it was dollar beer Friday!!! Here I am mid-backswing. Some people call me the White Tiger.
Here is Killa, some call him the Brown Tiger. Wait a second...
That evening Killa, Tommy Brooks, and I went down to P & L. It just so happened that Aron "Barn" Barwick and his wife were in town and were hitting things up with some other Gracelanders. Here I am with Barn at PBR Big Sky, aka "the bar with the chicks wearing chaps."
Here I am with Mrs. Barwick, and for some reason we decided to do a couples pose.
Sunday we started working on the new patio again, and my future roomate Ben K. (and his truck) helped us out. You can see we are making process, and we should have it done by this Friday after we put the decorative rocks down. I'm already worried that I didn't take the sump pump pipe out far enough, so I may have to extend that at some point. However, I'll hope for the best since I'm having a party this Sunday to celebrate the new patio, Killa moving out/Ben K. moving in, and Blue Springs South vs Rockhurst being on ESPN. GO JAGS!!!

Well that's all for now, but this weekend should be fun filled. The Hoyt clan is making the trek down, and Katie and I are going to the American Idol concert on Friday. Hopefully I'll have a good time, instead of being pissed off that Dave Cook is making millions while I slave away in a cubicle all day and have to supplement my income by babysitting drunks...but I digress.

Yard Work, My Cat Is Weird, and the Match.com Girl

First things first: I'll give you all an update on Lara, aka the Match.com girl. Things were going pretty well, I think I told everyone that I even cooked her dinner. Well she was out of town all that weekend, then I went to her place for the first time last Monday, nothing too special, but things seemed good. Then all last week she seemed kinda shady. Not super shady, just not acting like you do when you are interested in someone. She didn't return my calls/texts a few nights, but she randomly texted me Friday night (though I think she was drunk). We didn't talk Saturday, barely talked Sunday and she seemed weird, so I was about ready to give up hope. But then this week has been totally fine. So as you can tell, I over-analyze everything. I also have no idea if things are moving anywhere, as nothing is that bad but nothing seems to be progressing. Ah well, not like I have anyone...errr, I mean anthing....else to do right now. She was supposed to come over tonight but she got out of work really late (and lives over 30 minutes away), but she invited me out with her friends on Friday night. To be continued...

The big news right now is that I'm starting a new landscaping/yardwork project. My sump-pump pipe has been screwed up for a while, so my backyard was a swampy shithole. Last weekend Killa and I (yes, I'm doing this whole thing while I have free labor) finally started and fixed the pipe, as well as lowering it and extending it. We think we might not have gone far enough, but we will see. Below are some "before" pics for you all, and hopefully my lazy ass will get around to having the "after" pics done in the next week or so.

Here's the view facing the back of my condo. The pipe used to only go out to about to the edge of the stairs, although the pipe was busted only about 3 feet out from the house, so that whole area would flood bad. You can see where we dug a trench and extended the pipe. We also buried the gutter drain so it now goes down that way instead of draining into the area where I'm going to put down the new garden/rock/grill area. What the hell do you call it when it's not really a patio, but I'm not really going to have a bunch of plants? On the side of the house you can see the pavers and lawn bricks as well. I got all of these used from my parents and grandma, which got me to actually do this project.
Here's the view from the side. All of this area under the deck and between the stairs and house will be the garden decorative rock things (once again don't know the technical term), and then it will extend a few feet closer to where I am taking this picture, with a semi-circle to the right of the stairs/deck out into the yard. I'll put pavers down right next to each other to form a mini patio area between the stairs and house to put my grill (trust me, the are is bigger than it looks), and the in the area closest to the camera in this picture will have the pavers act like stepping stones, with the rocks in between. I'll be tearing out the concrete pad and have pavers there as well.
After all of our hard work doing the pipe work, Killa and I decided to have a beer. OK, so the mugs actually held like 3 beers. But we deserved it, we worked hard.
The following pics are just to show that my cat is freakin' one of a kind. Here he is sleeping, and no he's not lying down. He was just sitting up, but instead of lying down he just bent down, put his head on the ground, and fell asleep. He's done this a couple of times now.

Update

Hey kids, it's been a while since I've done a big, random post on what's going on in my life, but I swear there's a reason. The biggest is that I used to do most of my updates over my lunch break (wink wink) at work, but now I'm actually busy as hell and usually work through my lunch (that is actually true). I work at least twice a week with my side job, have softball one night (thank God that is now over), have been on 5 dates lately (more on that later), I'm starting a new landscaping project, and when I'm not doing one of those things, I am usually drinking with my friends.

But anyways, here are some updates/stories/random thoughts...

-About a month ago I had one of those situations where you swallow your manliness and do something for your girlfriend that you don't really want to do. Oh wait, I don't have a girlfriend, and I had to do this for a friend, without having the incintive that at least I was getting a piece of ass for it.

Anyways, I was at work at our main North Kansas City office, and my friend who works for the same company as I do was at our Lee's Summit location (we both live in LS as well). Well apparently, her "medicine" was running out that day, and she didn't want to drive all the way to NKC to pick up the prescription from our onsite Pharmacy. So I get the following call. Non-Girlfriend: "Matt, will you do me a huge favor." Matt: "Possibly. What is it?" Non-Girlfriend: "I need you to pick a prescription for me at the clinic and I'll pick it up from you tonight at your house." Matt: "Just get it tomorrow." Non-Girlfriend: "I can't miss a day." Matt: "Geezus, it's your birth control isn't it?" Non-Girlfriend: "Maybe." Matt: "God Dammit....Fine...But you owe me a beej...and I'm not picking tampons for you, so don't ask."

So my single ass has to walk into the onsite clinic at work and pick up fucking birth control for a female who I'm not even getting any from, all so she won't get pregnant by whoever the next tall, dark, and handsome Blonde/Mosaic he-whore she goes home with next. So pretty much I am doing all the boyfriend dirty work without even being a boyfriend. Oh, and what happened a few weeks after this? The two of us went out to lunch, and she had to stop by the store on the way back to work to pick up tampons. I stayed in the car.

-Match.com finally doesn't suck!!! A while back I stated how my friend Laura was going to online date for me while she was bored in Milwaukee. Well, she chickened out, so my friend Leah stepped in. Leah is a few years older than I am and she's married with two kids. On top of that, she got married when she was like 14 or something so she's never dated anyone besides her husband. Calm down Leah, I'll let everyone know that you were 19...

Anyways, I didn't meet any women from Leah's barrage of messages and "winks" to the other desperate singles of Kansas City, but in an indirect way it helped me find a girl I've actually been out with a few times. I was online one night seeing who the latest girls I (Leah) emailed, when I saw a profile of a cute girl I hadn't attempted to talk to before. I was too lazy/tired/hungover to send her a message, so I sent her a wink. For those non-online daters out there (oh wait, that's all of you), a wink just lets the person that you saw there profile and you are interested in them. Well, as interested as you can be in someone who you've never talked to and all you know about them is the two paragraphs they wrote.

Anyways, to my shock she actually wrote me back, using proper English and not talking about Nascar, and she seemed pretty funny. After many emails back and forth, we talked a few times on the phone and decided to meet up. Things went really well, we went out a few more times, even met up with friends one night, and last week she came over and I wooed her with a home cooked meal. Hell, I even bought her flowers and sudafed (she's alergic to cats). Anyways, things seem to be going pretty good so far, we're just taking it slow and having a good time. Her name is Lara, she's my age, went to K-State, she writes for a small town newspaper in a Kansas suburb, she has the same sophmoric sense of humor as I, and she is extremely cute. Actually, when we first met I was kinda pissed that she was as attractive as whe was because I figured I didn't have a chance. Luckily for me she must be either REALLY desperate or is attracted to guys with double chins and skin tags on their neck.

-Real work is going pretty good except for the fact that I'm busy as hell due to the fact that our team was downsized, but my boss gives us freedom to actually work on our own and doesn't micromanage like my last boss, so that helps a ton. My side job is actually pretty fun, mostly becuase I know what I'm doing now and I can be a dick to people and it's totally cool. Although I'm one of the worlds smallest/wimpiest bouncers ever, so I need to learn some takedown techniques or something for when the day comes that I actually have to get physical with someone. Carrie, if you're reading this get in touch so you can show me some of your cop moves. Oh man, I'm having to get take down techniques from a girl. Man I'm a pussy.

-So last weekend me and Killa went out to lunch with my Dad after we picked up some landscaping bricks from the parents house. We went to Wendy's and as we were chowing down on Jr Bacon Cheeseburgers and Frosty's, when I noticed Dad's shirt. As I'm sitting across from the not in very good shape man eating the 1/4 pound hamburger combo meal, his t-shirt reads "I went hungry so kids don't have to." It apparently was from some Habitat for Humanity thing, but the irony of the whole thing was pretty funny. Killa wants to get my dad one of the "I Beat Anorexia" shirts. Dad even thought everything was pretty funny too, so that was good. And what sucks is that I know I'm going to look/act exactly like him in 30 years. Sigh.

Visiting the Twins

Two weeks ago I took off a day of work and headed up to the QC to meet the twins, and of course to hang out with Katie, Carl, my Mom (she was up there for a few weeks), and most of all Carter-man. I jetted from work about 4:30 on Friday and was so excited I actually missed my exit to get on the interstate, so my dumb-ass was delayed about 20 minutes. After battling thunderstorms all through Missouri, thinkgs cleared up in Iowa and I chilled listening to the new Shinedown CD. All was well until I hit my normal truck stop on the east side of Des Moines, about 2 1/2 hours from Katies, when things went bad. Do you know what's more boring than driving through Iowa by yourself? Driving through Iowa by yourself without a stereo. Yep, right as I pulled into the truck stop the radio made a weird noise and then went out. Long story short, we still don't know what's wrong with it (my roomate was a car audio guy for a few years at Best Buy), so right now I'm screwed. The rest of the way to my sisters I pretty much called everyone in my phone book, plus played poker on my cell phone. Safe, right? On the way back I borrowed Katie's iPod, but about two hours into the trip home I found myself singing out loud to Madonna's "Like A Prayer." Man, I'm gay.

Without further delay, here is a pic of Tristan and Tyler with Uncle Matt, just minutes after we met for the first time.
Here I am feeding....we'll go with Tristan. Actually you can tell them apart because Tristan is always in blue, and Tyler is always in something besides blue. I did a good job telling them apart until right before I left, when they were in matching white swaddles. One of them started crying and my sister asked who it was, and all I could say was "the one on the right." She kinda got pissed that I couldn't tell my own nephews apart, but they are IDENTICAL TWINS!!! But we had a good laugh out of it. Now, I didn't volunteer to feed them, but Katie's so busy she just gave me a baby and a bottle and said "here ya go."
Here is Carter waiting for me to take him outside to ride his tractor, while I'm chillin' with Tristan.
This might have been my favorite moment of the weekend. Carter really took to me right away, and this was on Sunday afternoon when he grabbed his toys and insisted that I play with him. He was so close to me that I couldn't even see anything, but when I tried to shift him a little bit away he would crawl back to be right next to me. Notice his mardi gras beads, too? He's a party animal.
Here's a pic of Carter on his all time favorite toy, his John Deere tractor. The funniest story of the weekend was definately the last time I took Carter out for a ride. The back story is that Carter doens't quite totally get the whole concept of driving. Sometimes he doesn't want to press the gas peddle, he doesn't have the best aim when steering, if you cheer for him hell take both hands off the wheel and clap for himself, and if you wave at him he'll 0nce again take both hands off the wheel and wave back, not looking where he is going but not letting of the gas. Oh, and if he runs into something, he also doens't let off the gas.

OK, so his favorite thing to do is drive right at you, and then you jump out of the way real quick or lift up a leg and let him drive under. Well we were doing this one time, and just as I was about to lift up a leg for him drive under, he decided to slightly change course. I didn't have time to shift my weight properly, so i just stood there while Carter drove straight into my nuts. So his head is pretty much right on my junk, he's now leaning back so far that his hands aren't on the wheel, his hat falls off (but the pacifier stays in), and of course this whole time the pedal is to the metal (well, actually plastic). Katie is watching this thing the whole time and is laughing so hard that she pees herself and has to go change her underwear. I finally kinda move outta the way, Carter finally stops then and looks back at me like "what the fuck was that all about?" Sorry Carter!!!