Shoe shopping and babies...

This past weekend I went shoe shopping. Yes, I'm talking about shoe shopping. I've officially run out of things to talk about and in the process I've set the notion of blogs back a few years. I might as well talk about what I had for dinner last night.

Anyway, I digress.

Shoe shopping is always an interesting experience to me. As most of my students/readers know, I'm pretty much color blind when coordinating the elements of my wardrobe. I still live in the dark ages when geeks and nerds wear button up short sleeved collar shirts, complete with neon green matching pocket protector. Unless Ashton Kutcher (responsible for making the trucker hat famous and fashionable) decides that pocket protectors and thick-rimmed glasses are in style, then I'm pretty much a lost cause. Damn it! I digressed again.

Needless to say that I rely on the people around me when I try to coordinate my outfits. Usually this daunting task falls on the girlfriend, but in some cases it also translates to sales people. Unless you were the sales person we had helping us this weekend:

Me: *trying on a pair* So yea, this looks fine right? I think it'll go well with pretty much anything.
Cheryl: I think so, it's going to be your work shoes right? I've never actually heard of that brand name before though.
Me: Yea, me neither but then again. I've never heard of any of the styles here in this store.
Pregnant sales person: Those are, like, really nice shoes, the good thing is they go with pretty much anything even the stuff you have on. (read: dress shirt and pocket protector)
Cheryl: I think they look good, I've never heard of the brand name before though.
Psp: Humm, yea actually me neither. But you know, this store only carries brand name shoes.
Cheryl: ...
Me: ...
Psp: Please buy these shoes so I don't have to sell my baby!

Surfing the web at work...

They recently implemented put in some web filtering here at work. I mean, I understand that it is unproductive when people start surfing pr0n site when you're supposed to be answering disgruntled phone calls. But these days, I get notification that certain websites are blocked. For example, Yahoo 360 is blocked because it's considered "Online chat", flickr is blocked because it's considered "Network storage" and friendster is blocked because it's in the "Dating" category. Not to mention that things considered "Personal" websites are blocked as well.

Today, I came accross a category called "Tasteless" which boggles my mind. Isn't tasteless a subjective term? What I mean is, Tasteless by who's standards? The site that I was trying to browse should be in the "Funnier than your over-paranoid butt" category. Bah!

An email....

Dear Anna,

I'd be a horrible stalker... Ya know why? Well, I got an alert this morning on my organizer that it was YOUR birthday. So I figured that I'd drop you a quick e-mail on how we've lost contact but I still think that you're definitely one of my cooler friends cause ... you're pretty cool and really nice (not to mention funny). I was going to say things like how missed our e-mail exchanges were and how proud I was of you for graduating, but even before I could compose anything my plans grinded to a halt.

I couldn't find your e-mail address.

I looked through my long list e-mails and couldn't find one trace of you in my mailbox. Don't take it personally, work kinda trashed my inbox and for whatever reason (largely due to my incompetence of using my organizers throughout the years) I couldn't find your e-mail anywhere. So I started looking through my old bookmarks, thinking. Man, my e-mail address is so easy to find. Surely google would be my friend but it wasn't. So I decided to look through the old websites you had like blogspot, and xanga. You'd be amazed at the time a person can take sifting through a few years of blog entries just looking for an e-mail address. But nothing.

Eventually, I saw this: [insert link to geocities site with flashing banners and other misc. glowing graphics]

I'm not actually sure how, but yea. The e-mail address I'm using was published on the 'stuff' page.

So there it is a long winded entry on how I became your stalker for a few hours. I hope this still works because it would be horrible if this e-mail bounced back. Worse yet, if you didn't even remember me. I mean it has been a few years since we last talked right? Anyways, this is what I really wanted to say:

Happy Birthday, I hope you're celebrating it with lots of good people around you and hopefully it's a memorable one. Have a good one!

Ritchie