Very pissed right now, at my girlfriend, because honestly, no one can piss me off like she does. Why am I pissed? Simple answer and a more complicated one. Simple answer, I asked her on the phone the other day what her work schedule was like for the upcoming week so I could have a rough idea in my head of when I might have a chance to see her, she responds by answering my question and then saying something to the effect of, (at least this is how I heard it) "You take up too much of my time." WTF is that about? I've barely seen the girl all month, and when I have, its not like we've spent what I would call quality time together, so how the hell can I be taking up too much of her time?

Then she calls me yesterday as she's getting ready to go see a show in NYC with a friend, and I'm still pissed, and planned on telling her that, and she acts like nothing wrong. I think she finally got the hint that I was pissed and we argued a little back and forth, but no resolution came of it because she needed to go finish her makeup or she'd be late. Priorities I see. Thats OK, I needed to get ready to go into work too, as I was just getting out of the shower when she called. Didn't hear a thing from her until this morning and she acts like nothing ever happened. That ticked me off the most, because it makes me feel like she thinks nothing wrong and the fact that I'm mad means nothing to her. She was on her way to get something to eat with a friend, which again, must've been her priority. Although its not like I could've argued with her over the phone anyway.

After I come back from lunch I see thats she's online and she IM's me. Not to talk about whats bothering me, but about her upcoming audition and that she's going to read a scene with the agent from Smallville (one of my favorite shows). Again, she's all focused on herself and couldn't seem to care that I'm the one thats mad here. She ended the conversation with, "I know you're still mad, so we'll just talk later." Priorities again.

So the big reason I'm pissed? Because a relationship is supposed to be a balance of give and take. Instead, lately, hell, through most of the span of our relationship its been about me giving and her taking, and very little going in the other direction and I'm getting a little fed up with it. A little bit of her time at night when I'm done working isn't too much to ask for. If she's got so much stuff to do, what is she doing during the hours that I'm at work? This was the same thing with my ex-girlfriend, she totally took advantage of me and I would like to think I learned my lesson. I don't like being taken advantage of, thats for sure, so I need to make that abundantly clear.

I'm sure, in the end that I'm blowing this way out of proportion, but I'm still upset. I know this will be our one fight for the next six months, but I'm still pissed about it. 25 minutes until I can leave work and then she'll be getting a piece of my mind.

Today so far has, and probably will continue to suck. After being in East Hampton yesterday, the rest of my department minus the guy I was with yesterday are out there today. So its just me and one co-worker minding the office. The problem with that is that most of the problem tickets that come in, I have no clue what to do to fix them as they fall outside my scope of knowledge (not a bad thing, I have my specialties and I'm damn good at them, fixing documents and macros in Microsoft Word just isn't one of them). Then the tickets build up and my boss gets ticked that there are so many. Oh well. What to do? Nothing!

Once the work day is over I shall be heading home and going out tonight with Elena to make up for what we didn't do last weekend. Dinner and a movie, how cliche, but fun, so I don't care. I really want to see the movie and grab some good food, and possibly add get drunk to the list as I think I'll need it once this day is over. Here's to hoping. Elena sounds like she's in a good mood, so hopefully that'll spill over into tonight and put her in the mood. Did I just say that? Oops, oh well.

Back to work. Have a great weekend everyone!

Spent the down out in East Hampton today, you know, just taking in some meetings with some big Hollywood types, swinging by Billy Joel's house to lay down some tracks, and wrapping it all up with a little shindig at Puff Daddy's or P. Diddy or whatever the hell he calls himself these days. Yeah, right, I wish. I spent the day in a new office my company acquired, setting it up with a connection to the Internet, which in turn gives them a connection to our office and new PC's. Tons of fun.

I've come up with one fantastic revelation about rich areas. I already knew the Hampton's were upscale and filled mostly with wealthy people. But, you can definitely tell how rich the area is by the amount of money the quick withdrawal at an ATM offers. By my house its usually $40 at the bank I usually go to. $60 at another one closer to town. But out in East Hampton, $100. To me, thats a lot for the quick cash option, but thats just me.

All was accomplished and I sped home, getting the Jetta almost to an even 100 mph at two points in my trip. Damn those other cars on the road! They got in the way of my fun.

Thankfully tomorrow is Friday and I don't have to drive back out there tomorrow, because it is far and it can be a pain in the ass, especially in the summer. Don't even try to approach in the summer, it could take you two hours to get to the next town or two. Plans for tomorrow and the weekend include a make up date with Elena for the one she cancelled on me last weekend, so dinner and a movie. I really want to see In Good Company, and hopefully she won't drag me to see that new Christian Slater movie, the one with Tara Reid, because it looks retarded. Unfortunately Elena is a huge Christian Slater fan, and I doubt even a dumb movie like Alone in the Dark could keep her away, but who knows. Hopefully no dumb movie and we'll see a good one. Here's to hoping. Not sure what's on tap for the rest of the weekend and I don't care, as long it involves relaxing and sleep.

It seems I have a ton of fun stuff coming up. The only problem with that is that its months away. In the interim I'm bored. Elena and I are spending the weekend in NYC for her birthday and going to see a show on top of it. Thats Easter weekend. U2 is right before Memorial Day and we're going to see another show, Wicked, with my whole family right before Father's Day in June. I also just scheduled to take the day off on Valentine's Day so Elena can spend it together, all by our lonesome with no one around.

Only problem with all of that is that I need something to do now. Hopefully this weekend we'll have something interesting to do. We're hoping to make plans to go out on Friday night with Gina and Rob, Elena's cousins. I still want to go to the movies on Friday with Elena, so hopefully they can all come with and we'll get some dinner or something before hand. We shall see.

In the meantime, its Wednesday and it sucks. I want the week to end. The weekends really aren't long enough. I would have no problem with working 4, 10 hour days a week instead of 5, 8 hours days. Three day weekends all year round would be the best. Oh well. Here's to dreaming.

Back to work. Enjoy your hump day!

Its pretty insane when a band can sell out Madison Square Garden, which seats close to 20,000 people, in a matter of minutes. I went online to Ticketmaster, with my fan club pre-sale code in hand at 10:00 AM to buy tickets to see U2 at MSG on Saturday, May 21. By the time I finally purchased my tickets, at about 10:12 AM, the only thing left was the first row of the 400 section, which is nosebleed territory. Crazy, right? And its just an Internet Fan Club Pre-Sale. I doubt there will be anything left when they go on sale for real on Monday. Glad I joined the fan club yesterday, huh? It should be a blast though. Last time I saw U2 was during the Pop-mart tour at Giants Stadium back in 1997. Wow, almost a decade ago. Scary. I'm getting old.

So at least this gives me something to look forward to for the next 4 months. I'm also going to see Avenye Q in March for Elena's birthday, and Wicked with my whole family and Elena in June. Should be fun all around.

In other news, I'm back on the diet with a vengeance as of yesterday. Although technically I was back with a vengeance the first Monday of the New Year. Hopefully I can avoid my usual pattern, which is this. One week of being really good, one weekend of being pretty good, one week of being somewhat good, one weekend of being bad, one week of horrible and then one week of being really good. Rinse and repeat as needed. Lets see if I can stick with it this time because I really want to start to try to take off all the weight I put back on. I know its not going to be an instantaneous thing so I just need to stick with it. It sucks, but in the end its for the best, I'm sure.

Alright, back to work, all of you!

After one busy week of work, a blizzard that dumped about a foot of snow over the weekend and a website outage I'm back on the air, with a vengeance! Just kidding. It is good to get back in the swing of things. Work was just kind of crazy last week, not the worst kind of crazy its been, but just enough to keep you occupied and not bored, so thats a good thing I guess.

The blizzard was interesting, thats for sure. It started snowing Saturday afternoon around 1 PM and started to really come down around 3 or 4. I was supposed to hang out with Elena the night before, but she cancelled on me, saying she didn't feel like going anywhere and that she just wanted to stay at home. I was pissed since I hadn't seen her in weeks and really wanted to hang out with her and to go see a movie, so in my state of pissed-offness I said I didn't feel like going to her house. I told her to call me when she would find out on Saturday if she wouldn't have to work and I would go and pick her up so we could be snowed in at my house together.

She called me at like 1 PM, just as it started to snow saying that she didn't have to work, so I said, OK, I'll come pick you up. She said no thanks, she wanted to stay at home because the house was empty and it was peaceful and its never like that. I continued to try to convince her every so often to no avail. I had given up as it started to really get bad outside, but at like 4:30 I walked the dog and noticed the roads had been recently plowed. So I called her up and made one last ditch effort for her to let me go get her. She finally said yes so I embarked in the middle of a blizzed to drive 15 miles in my mom's truck to go pick her up. (Let me tell you, I love my mom's truck now. An Acura MDX, that thing was like a tank and just powered through all the snow). An hour later we were back at my house and we just hung out all night, and watched TV all day Sunday until I took her home because she was feeling sick.

There's definitely something going on with her as she hasn't been herself for the past month. I don't want to go anymore into it, but hopefully she'll start to get better soon. I think a lot of it has to do with her career and how not much has happened for her since she got back. But she just recorded a really great demo during the week and has a meeting coming up, hopefully, with an agency she's been trying to get into for weeks. Maybe once some things start happening she'll be back to her old self. In the meantime I just have to be as supportive as possible, even though its hard when she breaks plans and makes me mad.

So thats about it. I'm back at work now on a bright Monday morning. I must have some snow stuck in the rims of my car because the second I would hit 50 mph the car would start to vibrate. 60 mph the vibration was almost intolerable. I thought the wheels were going to fall off or something. Thankfully I made it in one piece and hopefully the snow will melt and the drive home will be uneventful. I may go to Elena's so we can watch 24 together. We'll see how that pans out.

Hope everyone has a good Monday!

I must say, I'm pretty psyched as this should be a pretty good, well deserved weekend. Elena is on her way back from hanging out with her best friend in Connecticut today, but I probably won't see her until Sunday night, which is OK. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, right? So the plan for today is as follows:

I have to take the dog to the vet at 1:15 for a follow up on his leg. He seems OK, he's been running around and jumping like nothing ever happened, but I'm sure some of that was just the drugs talking. The vet will tell me for sure, and if need be, my little man may have to have some x-rays to determine for sure. I'm sure he'll be fine though as he was back to his old self pretty quickly.

Here's where things get tight time wise. My older brother Randy, who just came back from having a chest x-ray to see if the pneumonia that kept him home sick all week is gone, wants to go see Elektra today, and I'm for it. Have I mentioned my profuse love of Jennifer Garner in this space before? If not, here's so more. I think she's awesome. I'm a huge fan of Alias and anything she does. Elena loves her too, which is good so I don't feel so bad fawning over her too much. Thing is the movie starts at 2:10, and I need to be home by 4:30 for the Jets game, so I need to get out of the vets office in a somewhat timely fashion. Should be interesting.

The only really crappy thing about that is that I know Elena wants to see Elektra too and I'm not waiting for her. I'll just have to be bad and tell her that I didn't see it yet. I'm sure the movie is good enough to warrant a second viewing, especially if Jennifer is looking hot. And before you jump down my throat for being a horrible boyfriend, we were talking Sunday about movies we wanted to see and I mentioned that I really wanted to see The Aviator. Elena called me Thursday night to say her and her friend were on their way to see it, so ha! Two can play at that game. But hey, what you don't know can't hurt you.

Plans for tomorrow involve heading into work for an hour or two to do some quick things and then being a lazy bastard for the rest of the day, probably watching football or playing some X-Box. Randy just got X-Box live and I was playing some online Halo 2 with some of his friends yesterday, getting my ass kicked, so I need to brush up on my skills a bit more. Sunday night I should see Elena, so the weekend will end nicely.

Hope everyone else has a good weekend!

P.S. - The next person to leave a comment will be leaving my 100th comment, so comment away! (legitimate non-spam comment, that is. I've been spammed like crazy before, but thanks to a anti-spam plugin its not so bad anymore).

In case it wasn't entirely evident earlier, I love movies, or if I'm being proper, films and cinema. Hell, I majored in film theory in college (fat lot of good it does me working with computers, but hey, I needed to graduate and fast, and the B.A. that hangs on the wall in my room is legit). Back in college, I prided myself on my VHS collection, and damn I had a big one, or so I thought. I had about 90 or so movies and all the people in my building would come to me when they wanted to borrow one. I kind of became known as Mattbuster Video. Of course a few disappeared permanently from time to time, like Basic Instinct (no shock there) and Braveheart, but most of the time people were good about returning them.

Of course, now with DVD's, VHS has fallen by the wayside and rightly so. Since we got a DVD player, way back when in 1998 our collection of DVD's at home has grown, a lot. With the holidays and my dad's birthday just passing, a lot of titles have been added to our library. So much so that I had to buy a new rack to hold all these DVD's and of course they're so out of order it wasn't funny. I had it in mind to sit in the den with my laptop and type out a complete list of what we had. Elena was actually looking forward to it, because at the same time we could tag what was mine so I know what I can take with me and what I'll have to fight over when it came time to move out. Once I had that master list I could reorganize and start moving stuff to the new shelf, fun.

Problem was, I'm lazy and didn't feel like typing it all out. Enter the best computer program I have ever come in contact with (unfortunately for you Windows users, you're out of luck, because its Mac only! Ha!) It's called Delicious Library, and as sad as it sounds, it made cataloguing my DVD's fun. Using my iSight webcam (bought to video chat with Elena when she was in London) I used it to scan the barcodes on my DVD's, the software then looked up the code at Amazon.com and entered it into the database, complete with a picture of the cover. For some reason typing it all in would've sucked, but scanning was fun, don't ask me why.

I also found a way to publish said library onto the web, so here you go: Matt's Movies. It may take a little bit for the page to load. I tried to make it as small as possible, and its still 8 MB. My only other complaint is the way it exported. I did it in alphabetical order, which unfortunately means anything and everything that starts with "The" is under T. It was either that, or have a list in the order I scanned them, or another program had them is semi-alphabetical order, but not quite. This was the lesser of three evils. Another thing of note, not all of these movies belongs to me. A lot of them are the property of my brothers or my dad. So, chances are if a movie is in there that sucks or is pretty lame, its not mine. So enjoy, and let me know if you want to borrow one!

This week sucks, and its only Tuesday. Can you tell I'm not looking forward to Wednesday or the rest of the week? I'm not. Work has just sucked the past two days. Very busy with a lot of stupid stuff. But hey, it pays the bills. Add into the equation that for the past two afternoons I've felt like crap at the end of the day and you have a recipe for being miserable. Yesterday it was my head that was killing me. Today its my shoulder, for reasons unbeknownst to me. Oh well.

In other news, my weekend was pretty damn good I must say. Friday night Elena and I went to her cousin's new house for dinner and then we watched Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle on DVD afterwards. The ladies didn't care for it, but Rob (Elena's cousin's husband) and I thought it was funny. Maybe its a guy thing. Saturday Elena headed home for work kind of early and I just relaxed at home. Brett came over later in the night to watch the Jets game and man was it a great game. I'm so happy and stunned they won. I have a feeling the Steelers are going to destroy them on Saturday, but here's to hoping. Sunday I didn't do much either, but Elena came over later in the evening and we watched the season premiere of 24, which was damn good too.

Other than that, nothing new to report. Macworld San Francisco was today, so check out Apple for some cool new things. If I didn't already have a Mac, that Mac mini would be right up my alley.

I had so much that I wanted to jot down today, but all that seems to have fallen by the wayside for now, because I feel like crap. All of a sudden too, although it should come as no surprise since my older and younger brother were under the weather all weekend. About an hour ago I got a headache that 3 Advil couldn't chase away. I was supposed to go to Elena's tonight to hang out and watch 24, but I think that idea is going to be scrapped. Unfortunately though, I still need to swing by there as she has a change of clothes for me that she packed before she left my house this morning, the reasoning being I'd need them when I went to her house later. I'll see how I feel when I get to her house. If I'm OK, I'll stick around, if not, I'll get my clothes and go home. I hate being sick.

So it was back to the vet for Keyser yesterday. It wasn't about his kidneys, thankfully, as he tested clean last time they checked. Nope, this time he hurt his leg by either jumping off the couch really weirdly on Sunday morning, or from the five thousand time he barrels down the stairs and jumps to the ground floor three steps early. He was really out of it Monday night and he yelped a few times I went to pick him up. Elena was feeling around his arm and she said she thought a muscle or something under there was knotted. She tried massaging it a little (I know, her helping the dog, who would've thought) and he yelped again. He was also wary of going up or down the stairs, so I thought it best to get it checked out sooner rather than later.

The vet said he could tell there was definite swelling in his leg, but its not broken because he can still walk. He gave Keyser a shot of some anti-inflammatory and some pills that do a similar thing to take for ten days. I need to bring him back in a week or so for a recheck. The only problem is the shot and the pills will make him feel better, but won't heal whatever is wrong with his leg, so he has to take it easy for a week or so. He may feel fine, but he could end up making it worse. So, for Keyser there will be no jumping off the bed or furniture if it can be helped and no going down the stairs (oddly, going up is OK) That should be interesting. If he's still acting weird in the next 24 to 48 hours I need to take him for X-Rays, otherwise its just a recheck in a week or so. If the swelling is still there, they'll X-Ray for a possible bone chip or hairline fracture. What fun! Poor guy though, he's definitely not himself.

In good Keyser news, he did lose 4 pounds in less than a month. The vet tech that weighed him said another 4 or 5 and he'd be at a good weight. So Keyser's diet continues, even though he hates it.

Not that my New Years was bad or anything. It was quite enjoyable. Elena and I went to her cousin's new house and just hung out and helped them get settled. They just had new carpets installed earlier in the day so they had to put a lot of stuff out of the way and were just in the process of putting it back when we got there. Elena helped her cousin setup the bedroom while her cousin's husband and I setup the TV, cable box, DVD and home theatre system, you know, guy stuff. We ate some Chinese take out, had a visit from her cousin's sister and their mom, watched some old home movies and saw the ball drop and we went home shortly thereafter. We spent the rest of the weekend just relaxing.

I bought new bedding and stuff from Bed Bath & Beyond on Friday and we threw it on my bed the next day. Went to Costco yesterday and dropped about $100 on this foam mattress top. I know, it sounds expensive, but its like 2.5 inches of foam. At the moment its draped over my dining room table as I wait the 24-72 hours for it to retake its correct shape after releasing it from its vacuum sealing. Should be comfy!

We went to see Meet the Fockers on New Years and damn was it funny. If you haven't seen it, go now. You'll laugh your ass off. We thought it was great. We then watched Anchorman from Netflix, and although funny, I think we were so impressed with the comedy in the Fockers that it just didn't seem to compare. It was funny, don't get me wrong, I think I was just expecting more from Will Ferrell.

Then it was a day of lounging around on Sunday, watching 24 on DVD and just being lazy. My dad had to one up me. I'm no longer the person in the family with the newest car. I got to enjoy that one for about two weeks. He was looking into getting rid of his A6 and getting a Touareg, but it was too much (ha ha), so he got the Infinit FX 35 instead, which I think is fugly to the bone, but thats me.

Back to work today and I so didn't want to go, as evidenced by the fact that I didn't get into the shower until well after 7 AM, which is usually when I leave the house. Still got to work by 9, which is when I'm supposed to be in, I just like being in earlier for the OT. Oh well. I'm so looking forward to going home and relazing though. Hope everyone had a safe, healthy and happy New Year. Adios!