~Friday~ I hit the snooze button one too many times this morning, which eventually precluded my making it to the bus stop in time for the 8:15 city bus.
I used ncsu.transloc.com to time my arrival at the Wolfline #9 Greek Village Gorman and Kaplan stop to pretty much just step onto the bus—not without time, though, to glance at that gotriangle.org sign to see that it still hasn’t been corrected. I imagined some work order somewhere crawling its way through some bureaucracy.
Two very good-looking guys sat across from each other, talking in Spanish I believe, and the one on my side of the bus was a very animated speaker, with lots of vocal inflections and arm gestures. They laughed a lot talking together.
A girl sitting across from me obviously has not been getting enough sleep at home, and I feared that both her body might slide off the seat and her glasses off her face.
I kept looking at her glasses trying to see if steam was forming on them from her breathing, but never could see any.
My boss and I had a “working team meeting” today to which we invited our intern, Vanessa, and it was quite a productive meeting, once we got all of our technology hooked up to display on the wall screen.
At one point in the meeting, we wanted to see what kind of Facebook presence NC State had, and later I posted this status update on Facebook:
I opened the last box of Daily Affirmation Gum today, the Monday box, and its affirmation was: “All things considered, you are better than everyone else.”
On the Wolfline bus on the way home, a guy had on an IBM t-shirt, and I was tempted to say, “Happy Birthday,” to him, but: 1) I didn’t know if he’d get that I was saying happy birthday to IBM, and 2) IBM’s 100th birthday was actually yesterday.
At home I packed for the beach in ten minutes. Joe arrived at just before 6:00 and we headed out, hitting a little traffic jam on I-40 just leaving Raleigh, but then, other than the two speeding tickets we saw other people getting, we had an uneventful ride to the beach.
We stopped at an Arby’s for dinner at the Warsaw, NC exit, where I had two Jr. Roast Beef sandwiches, an order of their jalapeño poppers and a drink.
We arrived in Wilmington at around 8:00 and checked into the Quality Inn, where the people are always nice. They had constructed some wooden outdoor sitting areas—one with a decorative ceiling to it, but not covered, and the other one just a railed-in seating area. Both of the ladies behind the registration counter said that the people who had erected them called them a type of structure whose name sound like garbanzo, as in the beans.
We arrived at the Toolbox between 10:30 and 11:00, and the place wasn’t very crowded at all. We ran into Alan, who’s as much a fixture there as I am at Flex, and he was disappointed that his pictures from Lady Gaga’s concert that he attended in Raleigh recently weren’t on his new phone so he could show them to us. Oh darn.
We left there at close to 1:00, and stopped by Costello’s for one drink, and then walked a couple of blocks to a most delicious pizza place, the Slice of Life Pizzeria and Pub, right around the corner from Ibiza. We each had one slice of pepperoni and sausage pizza, there and then stopped at the Super Walmart just down the road from our hotel.
In there, we ran into two guys in Navy uniforms who were totally trashed. We saw them walking down a frozen food aisle, where one of them bumped into the glass like a pinball as they walked.
Joe and I walked down an adjacent aisle and back around, and came up to them from behind. They were both trying to walk while reading their phones. When we passed the one who wasn’t bumping into the glass, he said, “What’s up, fuckers?” to us.
We stopped and started talking shit to him, and in responding to something we said (which I can’t remember), he said, “Well, I’m straight, but…”
It turned out to be a funny conversation in a lot of ways. He was stationed at the Naval Hospital at Camp Lejeune, so I was able to share some “Lejeune talk” with him, having lived on Camp Lejeune myself from 1970 through 1975.
The other guy had totally distanced himself from us and was leaning against one of the glass frozen food cases, reading and texting on his phone.
I thanked the guy we were talking to for his service, Joe and I picked up a sub sandwich in the deli section and two cans of Pringles, and we made our way back to the hotel.