I’m heading out to Detroit Metro Airport (actually located a good 20 miles from Detroit proper) to pick up Squeaky in about, oh, ten minutes…

I know this is going to upset Squeaky, who was shocked and appalled at the amount of pepper I used while I was in Memphis, but I figured I’d blog my dinner since I haven’t done any foodblogging in quite some time.

This is one of my favorite “bachelor chow” dishes, requiring only simple, cheap ingredients and quick, easy preparation.

• One 15-ounce can of Hormel corned beef hash
• One Kraft single
• Five cloves of garlic, minced
• One-quarter of a white onion, chopped fine
• Two Jalapeño peppers, chopped fine
• Black pepper
• Red pepper
• Cayenne pepper

Throw all but the cheese into a pan, cook until the corned beef is browned, then add the cheese at the last minute and mix it in. Voila, everything you need in one dish: meat and potatoes, garlic, some sweetness from the onion, plenty of spice and heat. Best served on a plate of questionable cleanliness and eaten in front of the television.

Some time ago I asked for assistance in finding affordable movie poster frames. My ever-helpful readers responded immediately with… resounding silence. Seems that bricks-and-mortar stores are all too pricey, while online stores have great prices but horrible shipping costs.

Well, I finally stumbled on a good deal: $25 frames on sale for $10 each. And my posters have, at long last, been freed from their cardboard-tube prisons:

Lou Reed and Robert Quine doing an unusually slow version of the song; I think this would’ve been ‘82 or ‘83.

Editor’s Note: Squeaky wrote the following post because I’m lousy at blogging about personal stuff. After all, I’m a GUY; I can’t very well talk publicly about feelings and relationships and all that mushy crap. So I let her do it:

Dear Intarwebs,

TD didn’t feel equal to the task of announcing his feelings about our relationship on his blog, so I offered to do it for him, and he will post it if it suits his opinion well enough.

I’m going to make this simple, so as to not embarrass him too much. You know how guys get when they’re embarrassed - they do things like grunt and slap their chests and break things to prove their manliness.

I would hate to see TD get embarrassed and do something like smash his laptop. Those things cost more than, say, a salad plate to replace.

Anyway, as I mentioned in my post, we’ve been talking for around 8 months via teh intarwebs. Neither of us is sure when exactly that happened, or why, but we both have a hunch that we “met” in the comment section of Tam’s blog. Hence the reason why both of us feel we owe her a beer.

It began as friendly commenting on each other’s blogs. I was with someone at the time, and had no intention, no matter how unhappy I was, of engaging in an emotional affair, particularly with someone who lives so far away. That’s just silly. It went from there into a sort of partnership, as TD offered to let me host my blog and website on his Dreamhost space. In addition, since I’m more than a little technologically retarded, he helped me to upload things, make my home page look simple, but interesting enough to make people want to click the photo to come to my blog, helped me re-do my template, and various other tasks that led to more than one instance of me having a shit fit out of frustration. This took place over IM, by the way, and it’s a testament to both his talent and his patience that anything whatsoever got done, because I’ll be damned if I didn’t want to give up after 10 minutes of that shit.

He tells me that the photo I used to use on Blogger for identification caused him to think I was out of his league. Emo glasses? Check. Red hair with purple streaks? Check. Lord only knows what made him think that. The boy needs a self-esteem boost. He also tells me that by October, he began falling for me. Insert collective “awww” here.

Not so fast, though, because I was still with my boyfriend, though things weren’t exactly hunky-dory. Through that, TD was a gentleman and didn’t do anything more than be a good friend to me.

When that relationship began falling apart, he offered a virtual ear (and virtual shoulder), keeping his distance emotionally, even while we’d made plans to visit each other, as friends and fellow gun bloggers. Throughout this plan making, he made it VERY clear that he would do nothing to make me feel uncomfortable. No flirting, no touching, nothing - you know, unless I *wanted* to…

Well, the day arrived, he came to Memphis, and aside from the initial feeling of, “WEIRD - you’re here!”, I’d say that things went pretty smoothly. There was no awkwardness. Neither of us had any trouble adjusting to speaking to each other straight out, rather than in type. Skype probably helped that transition, honestly.

Despite the front he puts on here, he has a lot of feelings. And they became quite apparent within hours of his arrival. To save him the aforementioned embarrassment, I’ll leave out what was said/done. The obvious next statement is that I shared those feelings. We talked about them, and both agreed that we didn’t want to do a long-distance relationship.

Then he started talking about WHEN I come to Detroit…WHEN he visits me again…

That was when we pretty much figured out that whatever was going on, we were just going to roll with it, because we were already too entrenched in it, and it hadn’t even been 3 days (IRL).

By the 8th day, when he was leaving, it took everything I had to walk away from him as he disappeared through the security checkpoint. He offered more than once to buy me a ticket to go with him…jokingly, of course (of course).

Now he’s cleaning his room in preparation for my arrival, which we all know means true love.

So, Intarwebs, I hope you enjoyed that little foray into the personal psyche and very heart and soul of TD, even if I had to do it for him, because he’s too much of a perfectionist to be able to make the entry himself in a timely manner.

LUV AND KISSES!

-Squeaky Wheel

Believe it or not, they exist.

Blogging has been  light over the past week since I’m simultaneously catching up on things after my trip to Memphis and getting ahead as much as possible in anticipation of Squeaky’s visit next week.  Oh, and I was staying up into the wee hours Skyping with her, too.

That meant days which started at 6:45 AM and ended at 2 AM, give or take. Good thing I’m already an insomniac.

It also means I’m spending the weekend cleaning house and cursing my pack-rat ways. Now, I’m not pathological about it, storing jars of my own urine a la Howard Hughes. I have no psychological aversion to throwing things out. I’m just a profoundly lazy housekeeper and voracious reader who isn’t bothered by clutter. Things tend to pile up…

Which explains why I just threw out an issue of Wired from 1994, and a stack of old Macworlds with articles like “Preparing for System 7.” I’m just about to pitch 90% of my old notes and papers from college, because when am I ever going to need my Psych 100 notes again?

And miles to go before I sleep…

Do not, under any circumstances, do the following:

• Walk past your cow-orker’s computer while he’s on a bathroom break.
• Notice that he’s using Excel 2007 to work on some spreadsheets.
• Create a new spreadsheet.
• Move to the extreme bottom-right cell (in Excel 2007 that’s row 1,048,576, column 16,384).
• Enter a single space into that cell.
• Save the file as the default template (click here for directions).
• Quit and re-launch Excel.

Don’t ever, ever do that.

Because if you do that, every time your cow-orker creates a new spreadsheet and goes to print it, Excel will try to print 40 million pages. And that’s just not very nice.

Spitzer to Resign Following Reports of ‘Involvement’ With Prostitution Ring.

Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving slimeball.

TD does not care for public restrooms. In fact, he goes to great lengths to avoid them. He will hold off until his shoes tighten and the whites of his eyes turn yellow.

When absolutely forced to use a public bathroom, he invariably chooses the handicrapper stall, since it’s roomy and (usually) fairly clean. Urinals, of course, are tactically unsound and shunned by the wise man.

This afternoon in O’Hare Airport, TD needed, and I mean needed, to use the facilities. Severely. And friends, it was ugly.

In deference to his readers’ delicate sensibilities, TD will spare the details. Suffice it to say, fifteen minutes later TD staggered out of the handicrapper stall ghost-pale, sweaty, and trembling slightly…

… only to come face-to-face with actor and comedian Brian Posehn, who walked right into the freshly-vacated, now-toxic stall. That poor, poor bastard.

Then again, that single moment was funnier than the entire run of Just Shoot Me!