I was sick last week and I can't decide if I'm sick or not this week. By the time I get to work, I don't feel so bad. I'd attribute it to the holistic healing properties of my workplace, but I feel like crap again when I start working. Of course, I feel like crap when I'm working while I'm not mortally ill also.

Today is the end of February, the shortest month of the year. If it was a leap year, February would have a fighting chance against the other months, but this year, it's got nothing. Wikipedia has a lot of interesting facts about February. It says that February is shorter because the Roman Emperor Augustus yoinked a day from it and put it in his month, August, so that it would have as many days as Julius Caesar's month, July. Wikipedia also says that this claim is not well supported. Sometimes Wikipedia is wrong though. The main reason why February is the shortest month is because I don't have much to write about.

That's all. Here's to a nice March.

Argh! I've been robbed! Plumbers dude. They might as well hang a Jolly Roger on their trucks and carry swords in their toolboxes. Oh, and wear eye patches. And maybe have parrots. All they want to do is come by and plunder all of your precious booty. Bah, pirates. Yesterday, the Pirates of Plumber Bay came by and stole half of my day off. I spent like 4 hours waiting them to come over and then another 2 hours to figure out that the job couldn't be done, an hour at Home Depot picking out new parts and another hour watching the guy finish the job. I want my half of a day off back!

Well aside from that, I had a pretty tasty ZOMBie Ommie at Hobies with some non-zombie friends yesterday, so that was cool. I haven't been to Hobies in ages. Their coffee cake is still badass. Hmm, come to think of it, I think one of my non-zombie friends might have been a zombie. I have trouble distinguishing between zombies and non-zombies because my zombdar doesn't work very well.

Waiting for the plumber gave me a lot of time to think about something to post about. It's become a trend in all the personal webpages that I read where nobody is updating. Sri is even outsourcing his blog posts to a disturbed Emo dude. Well here's an entry about something that many people can relate to. And by "many people" I mean me, and just me.

Sometimes I get stuck in my pants. It's true. Sometimes the zipper gets stuck or the buttons become very troublesome or the drawstring wove itself into a Boy Scout-worthy knot around my waist. I'm sure this is something that happens to everyone. Except for those people who don't wear pants. Getting stuck in ones pants may seem like a laughing matter but it isn't. Over 34 cases of some poor soul getting stuck in his or her pants is reported to the Bureau of Made-up Statistics every hour in the state of California alone. Here, I will present an illustrated guide to what happens when I get stuck in my pants.

The first step is always denial. No one wants to admit that they're stuck in their pants, not even me. So the first thing I will do is to try and fight my way out of my pants. This generally involves a lot of futile wiggling and squirming. But within moments of wiggling, reality will set in and I come to accept the fact that my pants are stuck. But that's when I start to become afraid...very afraid. Notice the fear in the diagram on the right. The first thought that scares me is the realization that I might be stuck in these pants forever. The thought of anything that will be stuck on me forever is absolutely terrifying. I named my ears Heebie and Jeebie because they are stuck on me forever and scare the crap out of me.

While fear is tightening its icy cold fingers around my waistline, I start to imagine all the hardships I would need to go through while stuck in these pants. The basics aren't that bad. Coding shouldn't be a problem: Neither should eating: Sleeping might be uncomfortable, but it won't be because of the pants:

The real trouble comes when trying to wash and dry the pants: Washing myself is also no trivial task. In the shower, the pants will get wet. Wet pants stick to my legs and that just feels...ugh...yuckerific.

My career choices will be somewhat limited because I'm forced to wear one pair of pants all the time. Astronaut and ninja are out of the question just because I'd look ridiculous in that get-up. However, I could do pretty well as a construction worker or a fast food store worker. I do have an engineering degree after all.

The really terrifying thought is that when I die, I will be laid to rest wearing these pants. What's worse is that thousands of years later, after my body has long since evaporated, the pants, with their awesome sticking power, will still be there. Archaeologists will dig up my coffin and find the pants in there: They will then come to the conclusion that our civilization was in love with our pants and buried our pants in nice boxes so that we wouldn't need to run around serving French fries in our tidy-whities in the afterlife. Fortunately, the fact that we might some day be regarded as a society of pants-worshipping liberal arts majors is enough to scare the pants off of me. To this day, I have never been stuck in a pair of pants forever. Knock on wood.

I heard this on the radio this morning and felt the urge to write about it. There are two kinds of earwax: wet and dry. The wet kind finds itself in the ear canals of peoeople of African or European descent while the dry sort is more prevalent in folks of Asian descent. Both types are pretty evenly distributed among North and South Americans. Some dudes in white lab coats have found a gene that determines the type of earwax that can be found in ones ears. But wait, there's more. This gene is also linked to sweating and body odor. People with wet earwax (Africans and Europeans) tend to sweat more and have more body odor. People with dry earwax (Asians) tend to sweat less and have less body odor. I'm not sure how valid this can be though. Everyone knows that Asians smell like mothballs and Tiger Balm so it should be impossible to detect any body odor, however bad it may be.

On a non-smelly note, Senator John McCain had a cameo on last Monday's 24. What did the legendary John McCain do on the show? He handed a document to Audrey. Thank you Mr. Senator.

Welcome to February. The shortest month of the year and the only month that features naked flying dudes with arrows and groundhogs. I take that back, they were selling stuff for Spend-Money-on-Your-Woman-or-She'll-Hate-You Day in January too so Cupid gets another month of glory.

Superbowl XXXYZ was this weekend. Of course, I was working so I didn't watch it. However, I did catch a few minutes of Puppy Bowl II. It was supposed to be so great last year that the animal channel (or whatever they call themselves) brought it back. What's the Puppy Bowl? It's a lot like the football game that happened on the same day but the players are cuter and more cuddly. Basically they just put a bunch of puppies into a football stadium-looking, er, stadium complete with fake fans and real advertisements. The gameplay was very similar to actual football: the puppies run around, chase each other, jump on each other, roll around, grab balls, and sniff each others' butts. Not at all unlike the sporting festival that manly men watch while us weenies watch puppies. They even had penalties. A ref (human, not cuddly, not furry, not cute) threw a yellow flag onto the field, then walked in there, picked it up, and walked away. Oh yeah, one big difference between the Puppy Bowl and the Supper Bowl was that they had a Bowl Cam where you can watch the puppies drinking water out of the bowl at one end of the field. There was also suppsed to be a half-time show featuring kittens, but I was lying semi-concious, face down in a pool of my own slobbery drool long before half-time.

There is only one way to describe the Puppy Bowl:

One of my old co-workers is on a crusade to get this picture into presentations at tech companies all over the world. Please help out in this noble cause.

On a side note, I think the work that was keeping me busy for the past couple of weeks is winding down now so I'm not going to work on the weekend for a while now. Somebody please make sure that I keep my word on that.