Thursday, October 09, 2003

Let By Gones Be By-Gone and So On and So On

I got up this morning and my mouth actually felt great. There was, for the most part no pain whatsoever, and not even much soreness. I have been trying to make sure that I was able to get by without serious painkilling, so I did not take either the big ass Ibuprofin or the Vicodin before I went to school. I showed up there about 9 and put all the papers I had graded into the computer. I hadn't said anything, but I hadn't thought of doing so either.

Then of course, I started my class. I had a good deal of talking that I had to do in order to make up for the class that we missed on Tuesday. I was rocking and rollin with so much soul that I could rock till a-hundred-and-one-years-old until about 10 am. Then my mouth began to be sore. After another 5 or so minutes I was in pretty severe pain. I did my best to turn the conversation over to the students, even though it didnt really make any sense in terms of advancing the plan of the class. I mean, I always like the students to have input in the class, but they often don't know in which directions they should be going, so I help steer the conversation. Regardless, I let them talk before I had really indicated what they should be talking about and I let the class discussion continue a while longer than was likely educationally necessary in order to take a rest. I ended up dismissing the class about 10 minutes early because I just couldnt handle it. I mean, come on, no one should be expected to deal with that kind of pain and continue talking. I am a person who is able to handle silence when necessary and certainly when the alternative is pain.

Anyway, I sucked it up and headed to my office for a couple of hours. I watched the rest of the first episode of Angel season 5, which was solid. I went to debate practice with Katie last night, so I am still downloading episode 5-2, but I should have it fairly soon. I realized that I left my book at home, so I graded about half the papers I got that day before coming home. Besides that the day has been a series of nice but brief things.

Katie went out and bought some My Little Ponies. They are going to be a bridesmaid thing, but have not been executed yet, I will let you know more later, when she sends them out or something.

We did some other shopping. Katie bought a pair of jeans which look really really solid and some stationary to use on a couple letters she has to send out (I especially dig the stationary, for that matter).

We made dinner, which was Bruschetta Chicken, a recipe that Katie's mom gave us but we hadn't tried yet. It is really tasty, essentially baked encrusted chicken with some parmesan cheese and an olive oil-tomato-garlic-basil mixture. You know, its essentially bruschetta on top of chicken rather than bread. I really like bruschetta and I really like chicken so I was all like "Fuck ya babe! Bruschetta up that chicken. And while you are at it, chicken up that Bruschetta."

Its like the age old question of whether I got chocolate in your Peanut Butter or if, as Pete Nikolai continues to obstinantly maintain, Claire Daines got hairspray in her own mayonnaise. Seriously, I know that doesn't make sense to alot of you right now. But give it some thought, sit down and imagine: "What if Claire Daines did gett hairspray in her mayonnaise. What would that matter. More importantly, who had the opportunity, and who stood to gain from the situation." We can say for sure that everyone conclusively wins when I get my chocolate in your peanut butter. The worst case situation in that world is that the peanut butter cookies you make have a little chocolate sprinkled throughout. Maybe instead you enjoy a tasty sandwich of peanut butter and butter on warm toast. "Oh NO!!! My delicious sandwich was moderately enhanced by the delectable sweetness of this chocolate bar."

Here is what I don't get about vending machines. There are so many different ways that you can vend things nowawdays, what makes a company choose one over the other. I say this because I had to walk through the Alumni Arena at UB today and there were three seperate drink machines side by side. The first was a classic soda machine. The front had a picture of a coke bottle and you hit a button on the side and then your soda appeared in the slot below. If I said: picture a soda machine, this is what you would picture. Its a classic soda machine. Don't overthink this shit, the first one was a fucking coke machine. Maybe Pepsi. Seriously, you are getting us way the fuck off track, its irrelevant what brand of soda was in the machine. Both Pepsi and Coke have machines like this. I even think RC Cola has machines like this, which is weird because who the fuck buys RC Cola. I mean, I know they are associated with A and W and maybe Tahitian Treat or something else, but its irrelevant. Fuck dude, let it be. Fucking soda machine.

The machine next to that is a Snapple Machine, which you may have also seen, they are around a fair amount. They have a little slogan written on them: "Watch the Bottle Drop!!" I am not entirely sure why this slogan is so interesting, since I would imagine that almost everyone has seen many bottles drop in their career. Even if one is not a professional bottle dropper or anything. I don't know that there are alot of bottles which drop in such a fashion however, so that they don't break because they land on a specially insulated bottle drop robber mat. So that is soda machine type two. I have never seen anything besides Snapple in this type of machine however, so the brand is relevant to this question. Do not get soda machine types one and two confused, there is a significant difference between them.

So, machine number three is new I think, I had never seen it before today. Upon first examination, which was admittedly a very very rough examination, or rather, not an examination at all, since I had no intention of purchasing a drink, it seemed to be machine type two. More specifically, I had no intention of purchasing a bottle of milk, which is what this particular vending machine was selling. I did however, run into another woman from my department on my way out of the building, and hence ended up standing nearby the milk machine for a while. At some point I looked over at it and noticed that it had significant differences from type 2. Both of these machines had glass fronts on them. The drinks behind these glass fronts were organized in rows going back away from the glass. The purchaser can see the front of the bottle while the others of the same variety are behind. When you buy a drink, specifically a Snapple, from machine type two, the bottle will fall down from its row onto the specially insulated bottle-dropping pad and can then be retrieved through a pushable area much like would be found on a candy machine. Its pushable area is essentially a plastic triangle. But anyway, you push that in and get your drink. On type number three there is a little elevator thing which moves to the row and column that you have selected. Then the bottle slides out onto this elevator mechanism. That elevator carries the bottle to a little bottle retieval area, similar to machine number 1.

The point of all this however, is very simple. Why the fuck do we need these three different types of soda machines and maybe more importantly, what is next in the soda machine development of the world. These are the questions I hope to answer over the course of this blog. God speed!

Peace,

MB-K

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