Unprecedented discipline

That's right, folks. Blogged two days in a row.

But apparently I'm not blog-core yet. See, I jumped on this message board about the Google homepage, where I chimed in about adding some Blogger functionality to the homepage options.

Of course, Hidden Nook had to go shutting me down. Apparently my blog pales in comparison to those who administer many blogs or have a bunch of blogs (not like I'm a professional blog administrator or anything). Apparently, making blogging easy is an offensive idea to those who strive to make it as complicated as possible. But hey, if it were easy, everyone would be blogging.

Wait a second ...

On a slightly more positive note about the Internet, big ups to craigslist. Two weeks ago, my special lady Sara and I bought a washer/dryer for $150. Nice condition, fairly new Whirlpools. Great for our new place, which coincidentally has all Whirlpool appliances.

And the dryer only smells a little bit like burning after frequent use. If anybody knows what causes this or, more importantly, how to fix it, please email me.

But today, craigslist came through in a big way. Josh, Rood and I sold the home gym we bought last summer, since none of us will have a place to put it now that we're moving out.

Yeah, I have some fond memories of that gym. Ruining my favorite pair of shorts while putting it together. Lifting some weights. Feeling guilty about not lifting weights enough. Lamenting not having bought a foosball table instead. Being out of shape and foosball-less.

And the newest one: delivering the bench to a guy named Sonny's house in Surprise. That's a long way from Tempe. Coming up the 303, Josh, Sara and I could see the tall fireline of the Cave Creek Complex fire in the mountains to the north.

And you want a real surprise? I was surprised to see that when you Google "surprise", Surprise, Ariz. is the first thing that comes up. Here I was expecting a pleasant surprise (sorry, none there either).

We dropped off the bench at Sonny's house, which was amazing. He said he's in real estate, and, in the true spirit of Phoenix, he and his fiancee bought an amazing house in the middle of nowhere, and she said she commutes at least an hour to her job in Scottsdale.

They were really nice, giving us Dr. Peppers and cookies and offering beers, but they also gave me and Sara the inevitable lecture about how we could have bought a house for not much more than renting. Of course, Josh jumped at the chance to bust out his real estate war stories.

Moral of the story: use craigslist if you're buying on the cheap or selling on the fly, and avoid conversations about real estate at all costs, unless you're buying a house. And fire, although devastating, looks really really cool.

If only we had brought a camera.

Woot woot.

Blogging 101

Welcome to my first-ever blog.

I'm the guy who should have been doing the blog thing since day one. As a college newspaper columnist, an editor, an aspiring fiction writer and a word-of-mouth movie critic, I really missed the bus to the bolgosphere.

The blog would have been a great outlet when I put in six months as a college graduate working at Best Buy. I could have shocked the Internet with painful descriptions of how it feels to have an amazing discount but not get paid enough to use it on anything.

But that's behind me as I said "later" to Best Buy, and now, amazingly enough, blogging is my job. Don't get too jealous, fellow bloggers. I'm not getting paid for this.

But I am getting paid to put together a rockin' Web site that covers the happenings in Mesa, Ariz. The driving force behind this site will be (you guessed it) blogs.

So here I am, testing the blog waters. Before long, I will be spewing uncensored political dogma and/or gushing high school-grade poetry about my teen-angst feelings, even though I'm 23.

Or maybe I'll just keep it cool and try to throw in some sweet links and interesting commentary. And if I'm really in the mood, I might even crack wise.

For example, yeaterday a SlashDot post linked to an article that said scientists have re-animated dead dogs. Now while my journalistic instincts tell me this story is a bunch of bull, my inner mad scientist really wants it to be true. Although the picture is convincing, it's still a slang-laden article from an Austrailian news source (nothing against our brothers from Down Under, it just seems that if American scientists reanimated dogs, some American news source might have the story).

But this gives me a cool idea for a short story in which a guy liberates a dog from a lab in an attempt to impress a hot animal rights activist. The dog is a low-maintenence pet - never barking loudly, never whizzing on the carpet - and this guy succeeds in totally impressing his new ladyfriend. But when some neighborhood pets start turning up with their brains eaten, will this guy be able to confront the possibility that his wingdog might be a zombie? It's Night of the Living Dead meets Old Yeller!

Woot woot!