Free at last, free at last

The picture you see here is an item we call "The ECS Relic". It was given to our old team manager years ago as a white elephant gift at a Christmas party for the managers. When she left Email Customer Service (ECS), she passed it on to the "Acting" manager, who passed it on to her friend when she (the Acting Manager) left ECS, who then passed it on to me when she in turn left ECS.

I liked having the Relic around because if it wasn't the ECS Relic, then I would be. I have now been on the ECS team longer than anyone, ever. I have watched my teammates get promoted, have their contracts end, quit in disgust, get fired, and have their jobs outsourced from under them. I am still here, nearly seven years later.

Or at least I will be for another hour and a half or so. The picture of the ECS Relic above is of it sitting on Will's cube, for I have duly passed it along to him today, on my last day on this job.

It feels so strange. I have been doing this job so long, I have trouble remembering what it was like to not be doing this job. As I box up my stuff to take home, recycle all my old training papers, and delete all my e-mails, I just feel weird. Odds are I'll be right back here in this same building sooner than you can say "contractor", doing a different job as a temp through Volt. But this is still the end of an era of sorts for me.

Alright...I'm outta here now. MATTBEAR OUT.

What comes around, goes around

There's a news story out this week that exemplifies a little phrase I use sometimes. When a weird coincidence happens, I'll say "God's playing Nintendo with my life."

I don't believe in God, but it's how I feel sometimes when the same people pop up randomly in my life or the same theme keeps cropping up all day. The closest I've come to the weirdness in this news story was when I was in a motorcycle wreck and one of the surgeons who worked to repair my spleen was the doctor who lived across the street from my grandparents. This was not too surprising, though, since it was in the small town of Pendleton, Oregon.

But this news story happened in the not-so-small town of Buffalo, NY...a teenage dishwasher who also happened to be a volunteer fireman performed the Heimlech on a woman choking in the restaurant...who turned out to be a nurse who performed CPR on him and saved his life seven years earlier.

In other weird news, last week a judge in Tacoma ordered her courtroom to cheer "Go Seahawks" before starting a manslaughter trial. Talk about poor judgement (pun very much intended). Somebody that insensitive should be remanded to handling traffic ticket court only.

Mitchell Rupe, the robber/killer too fat to die, finally died. Rupe was supposed to be executed long ago, but weighing 400 pounds he argued that hanging (then Washington's default execution method) would decapitate him, which constituted cruel and unusual punishment. He could have chosen lethal injection, but refused to, thus saving himself from execution. He also had cirrohsis of the liver and hepatitis C that were slowly killing him anyway, and even tried to get a liver transplant to save him from that. Luckily, the state refused to waste a good liver on a murderer. The state changed the primary execution method from hanging to lethal injection just to make sure we didn't wind up with another un-executable fatty sometime down the road.

Politics! I haven't posted anything political here in awhile, so here you go. Rep. John Murtha, already getting good press on the sane side of things for calling for a near immediate withdrawal from Iraq, put another bitch slap on the Bushites by publishing an open letter to Bush with a 4-point plan for withdrawal and rebuilding our security and military. God damn, this is the only person in politics who sounds even half way intelligent to me right now. If the Dems put Wesley Clark up in '08 with Murtha as his VP, I would vote for that ticket in a heartbeat. They put Clinton anywhere on the ticket, I don't know what the fuck I'm going to do.

Alrighty! Enough for now. Mattbear out.

That Not-new-but-new-to-me Car Smell

There's a couple of things I've been wanting of late...a diesel vehicle in which to run biodiesel, and a truck. Being a homeowner, one often finds need for a truck to haul crap around in. Trips to Home Despot, the dump, whatever.

So Friday I went and bought a big diesel truck, thereby killing two birds with one stone. It's an '82 GMC Suburban, with a 6.2 liter diesel V8. It is HUGE. I've driven bigger vehicles back when I was doing delivery, but I've never owned anything this big. It is a monster.

I always name my vehicles. Generally, they have female names because I always think of my cars as girls. The Saturn is "Caroline", the Volvo is "Ella", and the VW is "Starchild" (you have to give a 1969 VW bus a hippie name, it's like a law or something). But the Suburban is too huge and ugly to be feminine. I don't want to give it a guy name though, so it's just going to have a nickname: Big Dog.

I love driving big vehicles, so I'm pleased as punch with Big Dog. That diesel engine has some guts to it, and there's so much room...even though it doesn't have the third row seat, I could comfortably fit six adults in the seats for a ride, and when we got where we were going those same six adults could comfortably have group sex in the back. It's that roomy.Alrighty...it's past my bedtime. That is all for tonight. Mattbear out.

The only certainty is change

So, I've been making some changes in my life, and have some changes coming up.

First off, getting healthier, especially losing weight: At the beginning of January, I entered into a little contest against my boss and co-worker to see who could shed the most pounds in a month. My reputation for being fat and lazy is doubled or tripled at work, where I am often seen eating McDonald's breakfast and getting stains on my shirt. As such, neither of the other contestants thought I stood a hope in hell of beating them. But oh, I had a surprise for them! Today was the day of reckoning, and I've dropped 14 pounds in the last month - which made me the winner since they lost 9 and 7 pounds respectively. Go me!

Second, my job. Anyone who has known me for long knows my love-hate-but-mostly-hate relationship with my job. Well, that's finally changing. I gave my resignation (with, naturally, 2 weeks notice) today. There is something on the horizon for me, employment-wise, but I have to leave the Evil Empire first. Trust me, this is a good thing. Huzzah! I am Free!

Third, my "bachelor" days (long since only a technicality anyway) are going to disappear. Jen and I will be getting married come March 16, which is the 15th anniversary of us being together. Our intent is to have only a small ceremony with the minimal people present (The good Rev. Charley, and two witnesses). Jen says big party after, though.

Anybody dieing from shock yet? No? Good. Mattbear out.