It's a big enough umbrella, but it's always me that ends up getting wet.

When it rains, it pours.

Wait, that's too damn obvious an opening line for its own good. Let's start over...

It's been one of those weeks.

Better, but not quite there. Kind of generic. I guess it'll have to do, though. Anyway, let me tell you a story about a busy bee named Maki. This is a story that actually has footnotes so you know it's substantial!

Maki generally didn't like to talk to people about his work because that's boring, but he figured that he might as well for a little bit since he hadn't posted on his blog* for a while. Maki had scheduled himself about 5 to 6 weeks to finish a rather large project at work. Maki's deadlines and due dates kept getting pushed back because salespeople are good at making excuses. And oh, how they made excuses! Excuse after excuse was presented so their sales deadlines could be pushed back. Maki accommodated** their requests and moved his deadlines back accordingly. Eventually the salespeople's excuses caught up with them and they realized they couldn't push their project's due date back any further than it already was. So what did these salespeople do instead? They moved the due date up for the project almost a month so that Maki was suddenly left with only a week and a half to do his 6-week project. Maki felt sick to his stomach. Literally. And that usually only happened to him after somebody started yelling "Jaeger bombs!" and his head nodded involuntarily in the affirmative.

So Maki realized that he was going to be pulling some long hours in the following 10 days. He wasn't going to be pulling any standard long hours. These were going to be old-school crazy doctor-residency-type hours. Maki's blog suffered as a result. Maki's energy suffered as a result. Maki's social life could have suffered as a result. But Maki persevered, scheduling social activities somehow. Maki went to a trivia night with Matt and his teacher friends. They did not win, and that is all that will be said about that.*** Maki went to a birthday party for one of PK's friends. Maki played beer pong for the first time in years and drank a lot more than $10 worth of the all-you-can-drink beer he paid for. A lot more. He ended up spending the night on Caz's couch, waking up when Caz did for work. This was at 5:30am. Maki was surprised at how many cars were on the road on a Sunday morning at 6am. Maki was surprised he was on the road himself, actually. Maki went home and avoided looking at a computer that day since his head swelled five sizes too big whenever he tried.

After a decent but generally uneventful weekend, Maki returned to work on Monday to slave away for 12 hours or so on his now-ridiculously-shortened-timeline project. Upon returning home long after the sun had set**** he discovered that his phone and internet no longer worked. This was hell of vexing, considering he actually wanted to post something that night but repair was not arriving until at least the next morning. So he ended up posting Tuesday (after another 12-hour day) since, for once in their miserable lives, BellSouth came through in the clutch.*****

The moral of the story? Maki will use any excuse to refer to himself in the third person. Or to use a line from a Police song in the title of a post. Of course, this post had a much different tone when that title was first written. It was all mopey and "poor me" and jokeless and it kinda sucked a lot. Not like it is now, where it only moderately sucks.****** The title came to me while I was grocery shopping for ingredients for the chili cookoff at work Friday and yet another song I like came over the grocery speakers. Ugh.

Oh, by the way, I'm now in a dodgeball league. If I can dodge a wrench, I can dodge a ball. First game is tomorrow night at 9pm. AWESOME. I am also going to win the chili cook-off because I am that awesome. I smell blog fodder!*******


* A blog is like a personal website, called a blog because it's a cutesy shortened version of "weblog," in case you didn't know!
** Maki always tried to spell accommodated with just one "m," every single time, and he never knew why but he kept doing it.
*** They got their asses handed to them Ken Jennings style because people don't listen to Maki The Trivia Strategist. To their peril.
**** But in time for the Jack Bauer Power Hour, which was immortalized for a week on his blog!
***** There's a lot more annoying crap to the story, but this post is too long as it is.
****** You people wanted a post, so this is it. Hey! Footnotes!
******* Or chili.