The Omaha Steaks Brochure

One fall day during our college years we were magically misdelivered a catalog for the Omaha Steaks. It languished around the couches receiving little attention for a few weeks. Then one day someone picked it up and looked at the goods that the Omaha Steak Company was selling. We were in awe. The number and diversity of steaks along with the sides and knives that they included amazed us all. We spent the next several hours debating about which packages we were planning to get and how we would divide them. We were going to eat like kings from that day forward. We made our plan and then gave them a call to place an order. But the deals in the catalog were only good for the names that they sent it to, and we were not on their “exclusive member” list. And like that our hopes of brashly made steak purchases were dashed. It were those spur of the moment purchasing decisions that led to us being delivered $170 worth of Fatheads or an entire case of 40oz Camo Silver Ice’s.

My Triumphant Return to A2

I just got back from a week long trip back to Ann Arbor. The purpose of the trip was to attend

the career fair and recruit some talented engineers, but in many ways it was more than that.

Friday:

I chose to take a vacation day and fly out early to A2 last Friday. When I got to A2 I went right to some friends house after picking up BTB and a Four Loko that my sister had given me. Four Loko is like sparks on steroids. Then I went to my old roommates house for a quick Wimmy session, because no trip to A2 is complete without a Wimmy in the basement of 1001 state street. Then I went to the house of one of the kids I lived in the dorms with. He had a little pre-funk and before I knew it my fifth of Cuervo was empty. A couple of rounds at Charleys later, I found myself back at my sisters place getting messy with a Vito from Jimmy John's.

Saturday:

I woke up and went to go tailgate. My old roommates have apparently spent the last year and a half tailgating with a homeless man. They justify it by saying that he protects them from other bums, but when one showed up our "protection" looked like this.

I met some of the guys who now live at the Box house. I was content to let it die, but if these kids are going to try to be Box they need to step it up. Their tailgate was pretty weaksauce, but I blame the cops for some of that. I did get my lunch from the guy who let me haggle the price of a burger after I got kicked out of Michigan Stadium 3 years ago. I like that guy.

I went to the game and was impressed with the expanded stadium. The one negative is that they removed the troughs from the mens bathroom. Never again will I be able to partake in the walking pee that occasionally happened.

Saturday afternoon I watched Night at the Roxbury (a terrific cinematic masterpiece) and eating Mr. Spots. Saturday night we started off at Charley's before making our way to Rick's. As we walked up I realized that I knew the doorman, who was a kid I met because he used to come over and hangout at 510 Benjamin with Jake. It felt good to still have a good connection in Ann Arbor. I met up with some lady-friends at Rick's. At one point me and these three girls were getting some shots and one of them mentioned "Bruss, you know you've hooked up with all three of us during college"? I found that amusing.

Sunday

I woke up Sunday at like 1PM. Then I went out to lunch at Noodles with my sister and her boyfriend. After that we walked everywhere looking for a gift for my dad for his birthday. I got to check out the new North Quad which is very much "the shit". It's really nice in there. We walked all around the city and eventually got my dad some birthday crap. We met up with the 'rents and our grandma at Pizza house. Afterwards I went back to my old roommates place and watched Boardwalk Empire and Swamp People. I came away equally impressed with both. Then I couple of us dudes checked out Packard Pub. Decent bar, but not the most lively. We were the only patrons, but it was 1AM on Sunday night.

Monday

Monday was the day I was supposed to fly in to town but since I was already there I really didn't have much to do. I spent the morning talking to my lawyer, Gail "The Hailstorm" Lawyerlady. I'm still in court with my landlord from 2009. I gave Al my power of attorney so things probably won't go well for me. We also talked about how the guys who lived in the house last year are being sued for $19,000. Glad that's not me.

I then rode the bus for a bit to catch up on my bus driver gossip. After that I had a date I made a few nights prior. Zola and I were going to go to CIAYCELB for lunch Monday. We rode the AATA route 36 there and back. I scarfed down 7 slices and got a Zola Salad (just meats, cheese and dressing - no lettuce). After that I spent all afternoon in the fishbowl snickering at the idiots who were still in college and had to do work.

That evening the manager who was doing the career fair with me flew in. I met up with him and we went to The Jug for dinner. We ended up playing some trivia and then going to Charleys. Nothing too epic.

Tuesday

We worked the career fair. Talking to potential candidates and explaining that we don't take interns and we do not sponsor visas. It was a lot of standing and talking, but overall wasn't bad. That night I went out to Grizzly Peak with a friend and then met up with a guy who was also in town recruiting. We drank a few rounds, but I had to get back to the hotel early (1 am) because I had interviews the next day.

Wednesday

We spent most of the day conducting interviews. I did college recruiting last year and enjoyed it. Going from the interviewee to the interviewer is really interesting. Getting to ask good questions and seeing how the people respond is great. Also, as a note to my large undergraduate readership: GPA isn't as important as you think it is. Being personable, interested and eager go farther than a few points on the 4.0 scale. I took my manager to Za's for lunch, where no other than Rashad himself was working. It's like even after I leave I still have connections.

That night we went back to Pizza House for dinner before meeting up with my friends at Charley's. We started doing rounds off the Charley's shooters list and got really, really drunk. It was just like the old times, a few of the faces were different but the result was the same.

Today I flew home after a mammoth trip, and now I counting down the 15 days until I go back to A2 for the Iowa game.

E-Mail Analysis

My cousin turned me onto this nifty widget Google Chrome has that will analyze you're Gmail inbox and give you a pretty cool graph. It is located here. I have been using Gmail as my primary email for over 6 years now. That's a large number of emails that I've sent and received. It comes out to almost 25,000 archived emails. I once read a great blog post by my good friend Brian where he ran an analysis of his Inbox. It was pretty interesting and I wanted to do something similar. I tried for like five minutes trying to figure out how to download all my email data as CSV, and then gave up and drank a Keystone Ice. I found that while the Ice was harder to come by, the black label looked really cool.

Blue are all emails, Red are sent emails

I had assumed the top chart would look something like this. It's like you can tell which months classes started and finished each year. The second chart gives some information that I always wondered about. How much of my email traffic comes through early in the week. Well if November of 2008 is any indication, Mondays and Tuesday accounted for like 50% of the email traffic in a given week. You can also see that like most people I receive emails at a much larger rate than I send them by about a 1:10 ratio. But that's pretty common.

So where did all those emails come from? Let's go to the chart.

Wow. Of the 25,000 emails I have archived about 1 in 8 are facebook (blue) related. That is a little scary. The other ones are from the U of M class web-based site Ctools (red), online risk (orange) and emails from bus drivers (green). Combined these account for like a third of all the emails I've ever received. It looks like I played a lot of online risk in July of 2008. The really cool graph is the bottom right. I've stopped getting emails from my classes which makes sense. My online risk playing must have gone downhill. I am definitely less social judging by my reduced use of Facebook to near Sophomore year levels. Finally, my job doesn't spam my personal email address so often. It looks like I much be more boring now. Maybe that is the cause of the reduced blogging.

Perhaps I'll do some more graphing of my emails to try and determine exactly when I started overusing the term "buttmuncher" in my emails.

The Roommates: Cameltoe

Between my sophomore year shithole of a house and my junior year shithole of a house Peter, Ross and I had about three months between our leases. We all ended up subletting an apartment at Arbor St. and State St. from Peter's somewhat ex-girlfriend. It was a good summer of hanging, grilling and meeting Phucking Phil. We had a basement apartment that was less than 100 feet from two liquor stores.


After spring term Peter and Ross both moved back home for the last two months of the summer. Taking their place was one of the girls who was going to live in the apartment for the next year. She was a big ol' white girl from Texas. Her last name started with "Cam" and was difficult to pronounce and the first time we met her she was wearing some ill-fitting pants, so she got the name "Cameltoe." She just kinda showed up one day to move in and Peter hadn't moved his stuff out of the room because I think we were out of town (I pretty sure it was the weekend we left Peter in Bloomington Indiana) so she just put all of his stuff in the living room.

Soon after Ross and Peter had left me alone with Cameltoe I got to see how this girl was all sorts of crazy. Besides her interesting dressing habits she managed to light a grease fire the first week and then tried to put it out with water. Sometimes when we would both be home it would be just kind of awkward because she spoke poor English, which is somewhat rare for students of U of M who were American.

By far the most memorable and crazy part of Cameltoe was her taste in men. She would routinely bring back very large men. Every night it was someone new, there was the basketball player from Eastern Michigan, a couple of guys from the football team and my favorite: Rashad. Rashad was one of those people that I lucked out in meeting that totally paid off the rest of my time in Ann Arbor. Rashad was in his mid to late twenties and was one of the most consistent guys to be at my apartment. He technically lived in Ypsi, but he spent most of his time at my apartment. Sometimes I would wake up and Sara would be gone and Rashad would just be chilling on the couch watching Sportscenter. So I would pour myself a bowl of Cocoa Pebbles and watch with him. I would go to work and just leave him in the apartment alone.

What was great about Rashad is that he worked or had worked at almost every establishment on South U. So all junior year when I would go to Za's he would be working and we would talk and he would hook me up with an extra garlic bread. Eventually Rashad started working the line at Charley's and BTB Cantina. He would always be really cool to me and get me past the line and stuff. It was all because of those months living with the Cameltoe.

You guys are awesome

It looks like my readership has been supporting the cause because I just received word that The Google is sending me another check in the mail for $100! This is great, because I really like money. I use it all the time. Last time this happened I asked my fledgling readership what I should do with it. So again, here are some options for what I should do with this money I really didn't do anything to earn.

1) Put it towards a new laptop for mobile blogging.
2) Bet it all on college football until I've turned the $100 into $1,000 dollars and then divide it among my readership. I think you each get $50.
3) Buy a gun.
4) Get really drunk and tell chicks that I'm an internet sensation. I'm not entirely sure how I use the $100 in this scenario.
5) Give it to charity. Ha!
6) Spend it on my novelty Michigan outfit, and take a picture of it and post it on this blog.

My last payment was October 2008. It took me 12 months to get my first payment but it took me 23 months after that to get my second payment. I'm guessing with my small but loyal following and an uptick in posting I will get my next payment in March of 2012. So in a mere 18 months expect me to ask this question again.

One year of real life

Today marks the one year anniversary of me starting my professional career. One down 33 to go. It's been an interesting past year. I went from being a poor college student to a young professional. I've made twice the amount of money this year than I have in all the jobs I've ever held combined. It has allowed me to buy a bunch of stuff that I could never have living in slums of college housing. It still surprises me how much money I make and subsequently spend now.

Working has it's other benefits than the paychecks as well. I get to travel and sometimes go places I would pay to go anyways. Next weekend I'm going to DC and getting to visit some friends. Plus, every year so far I've gotten to take a free trip back to Ann Arbor to recruit. I find recruiting trips to be mucho fun-o.

One of the hardest things about beginning the life of work is that you have to go every day. In college I might have had to wake up early a couple of times a week. If I really didn't feel like getting up I didn't have to and there were absolutely no consequences. When I worked during the summers driving buses I usually only had to get up early one or two days a week which I could always muster up for. I got a taste of it when I had my internships, but this is really it. A change in the past year is that I now drink excessive amounts of coffee.

After the 20 roommates I had in college, I finally got my own place. Having complete control of my living space was awesome. Paying bills and rent by myself really wasn't. After a year of that I moved into a townhouse and I finally now have a decent roommate, a house with real furniture, hardwood floors and two big TV's. I've lived in the suburbs, a medium sized city and a huge city. I now live in really small town, which I really like. I've always been attracted to the charm of small towns with lots going on and living where I could walk downtown. It's nice, because there is the small town feel with the big city just a ferry ride away, I see it as the best of both worlds. Also, for the first time I live in a place with views of mountains and water.

I've gotten used to life in the Pacific Northwest. The people, the rain and the time difference. If you think about the country the Pacific Northwest is really isolated from the rest of the country. It makes for long flights but a cool uniqueness about it.

All in all, I think this whole 'working' thing has really worked out well. It seems better than most of the alternatives. I think I'll keep doing it. That is until I find some other way to get really rich. I don't think I'd be one of those people who become billionaires and still show up for work every day. But no complaints here.

10 Things I intend to teach my kids before they go to college

I believe that there is a set of skill every person should know regardless of if they ever use them or not. I intend to teach them to my offspring regardless of gender or willingness to learn. I just don't want my kids to enter a world and feel foolish for not learning something that everyone should know. I made a small list of things I intend to teach my bastard children by the time they're 18, and I added when I first learned to do them.

1. How to drive a stick.
   I didn't really learn how to drive a stick until I bought my Camaro after college. Sure, like everyone I "could drive one if I had too". But the instant anyone says that to me I immediately think "You have no idea, do you?". That was the type of thing my dad would have loved to teach me, but the opportunity never arose. Well, he eventually did teach me, just not until I was 22.
   
2. How to to grill a steak/use a charcoal grill.
   It seems pretty easy. Light charcoal on fire, add meat. Wait. That's all I thought from watching my dad grill out at our house. We had propane, so it seemed reasonably enough that grilling a steak wasn't a skill. In fact it is a fine art (charcoal chimney anyone?) that can be done many different ways correctly, and many ways incorrectly.
3. An appreciation of classic rock
   I don't really care what music is popular when I finally get around to procreating. I'm going to demand that my child knows a Led Zeppelin song from a Lynyrd Skynyrd tune. I'll work in some more modern stuff, but I just can't imagine my child going off to college and not being able to identify a Bruce Springsteen song. I don't care that the music will be like 60 years old. They will learn it.
4. How to fire a gun
   This may be the one that is used the least, has the worst impact and is probably unnecessary but I like it. I'm sure we all would like to live in a world where there are no guns and bad things don't happen. My children will be realists. It's one of those skills I would rather they would have and not need, than need and not have. They don't need to be great marksman. I just want them to be familiar and able to pick up a gun and shoot a zombie if needed. Beyond BB guns, I didn't learn how to shoot a until my sophomore year of college. Once, at Scout Camp I saw my dad rock some clay pigeons with a 12-gauge, but I don't fault him for never teaching me.
5. How to mix a drink
   I can't imagine this lesson getting too in depth, but who knows maybe they will have dropped the drinking age back to 18 by then. Just a lesson on what mixes well with what, and how to drink a Guinness.
6. How to start a fire in the woods and tie a decent knot
   I learned this somewhat in Boy Scouts, but didn't master the skill until senior year of High School. I took a wilderness survival class that ended with all of us going camping in Canada. It is something that I still use when I go camping, and nice to know if I ever get lost outdoors.
   
7. Good movies
   I don't plan forcing my kids to watch The Godfather or Back to the Future, but there are some movies everyone needs to have a working knowledge of. I can't imagine walking around not quite knowing who Yoda is. I'm not sure exactly what I would show them, but around the time I was 16 I really went through the family movie collection. At least Blazing Saddles, Dumb and Dumber, Old School, Shawshank, Pulp Fiction and most of the IMDB top 100.
8. How to use power tools
   As a kid I used to help my dad out on all sorts of projects. Usually he would give me a shot on the drill or table saw. I couldn't believe when I went to school that some kids couldn't drill a pilot hole, or even hang a picture with a hammer and nail. I would have felt downright foolish not knowing those things. Thanks pops!
   
9. How to hook up a entertainment system
   When I moved into one of my college houses, there were only two of us who knew how to hook up all the cables and internet properly. That shit was even color-coded. I'm making sure my kid know how to hook up system, and the differences between formats which will probably be 2160P vs 1440I. Or whatever future shit they have by then.
10. How to tap a keg
    I had the benefit of my dad insisting that we get a keg for my high school graduation party. About 40 minutes before it started he took me aside and taught me how to tap a keg. It was one of the best things I've ever learned. It came in handy a couple of times freshman year but was really useful sophomore year. Once people moved out of the dorms and into houses they would throw parties, but generally no one would know how to tap the keg. I think that year I tapped between 20-30 and probably more than 100 in my collegiate career. It's so simple, but if you do it wrong you get beer sprayed in you're face. The experience also let me master other crazy taps like a latch design and minor tap repair.

I don't like thinking too much about having kids, but occasionally I'll think to myself "Gee whiz, I'm really glad I know how to do that" or "Damn, I wish someone would have taught me that". So I will ensure that my kids know how to do all the important things, like light their farts on fire.