criminals are stupid

well except for maybe the white collar kind who have JDs and MBAs. but even they are probably stupid beyond IQ.

they caught my burglar. i'm estatic only in the fact that he's currently in jail and will hopefully be there until i move. i'm not estatic because i have to testify AND i still probably will not get my stuff back. but they caught him, and they were able to link them back to me which gives me some satisfaction because clearly he is stupid and at least this time around law enforcement is doing its job. this makes up for the lack of job doing they did when my car was smashed up.

here's the story:

at eat and park with greg and maria on friday night. get phone call from cop. cop asks me if i lost any mail. i honestly do not know being that i'm the worst person at keeping track of paper records. why is everything not online anyway? cop asks me if i deal with state farm and indeed i do and would not deal with any one else when it comes to matters of my car. asks me if i am from wisconsin. well yes, yes as a matter of fact i am. oh stupid stupid man held onto my insurance statement for reasons i do not know (unless he got wind of the fact that my parents living in wisconsin are secret millionaires and planned to go pay them a visit). turns out that they caught said perp in the act of burglarizing yet another residence and got a search warrant for his house. now i have to say that seems a little bit ironic in a way. dude enters others' homes and takes stuff and now cops enter his home but must get permission first. so they enter with their badass warrant in a way that in my mind i'm going to believe was like some mad bust in law and order because it makes the whole thing seem so glamourous. they enter his house and they find this random statement. and at first i'm sure they are like "who the hell is this chick, she must be in on it. to wisconsin we go!" but then my cop says "hey guys, wait just one sec, that's one of my victims. ahoy, we've linked more crimes to the perp!" and he calls me. he said, and this is a direct quote which i love, he said, "this opens up a whole new can of worms." how awesome is that? because dumbass criminal takes my old school bookbag with an insurance statement that my mom presented me with while i was visiting them in florida and because he doesn't believe in using a trash can like normal people the cops have now linked him to my neighborhood and who knows how many other crimes there. see what i mean? stupid. not that i'm complaining.

turns out that yes, there have been quite a few of the same sorts of crimes in my neighborhood in recent weeks including 2 successfull and one attempted burglary just in my building of six apartments. but then mr. cop tells me that once they get more information they will be calling me back because i need to testify that my stuff was taken. he also said that they were looking into where he sold my computer. but what i am most interested in is how much he got for my computer so i can point and laugh and be like, man way to waste your time hitting my apartment because not only did you get like .02 for a six year old computer with 12 GB of space running 98 but you also got yourself more time because you hung on to my insurance statement (sentimental value?). i have no more to say to you except go smoke your crack somewhere else.

coolest thing since the virgin mary on a grilled cheese sandwich

its time, my friends, to give you a slew of links to check out once again. and you better check them out. because quite frankly they WILL change your lives. all of them.

gizoogle.com : gizoogle your morning news. you'll never read a dull news story again!
sloganizer : type in your name, your favorite food, the song you sing in the shower every morning, anything...it sloganizes it just for you!
and my personal favorite of the morning, Pandora : go here, tell them an artist you really dig, the find more music of the same for you to listen to ala live365 or launchcast only way cooler!

peace, i'm out. for now.

how to minimize the size of my inbox

i use gmail. that thing will never be full because as of right now i have almost 3 GB and it grows daily. the fullness of my inbox is not the point. gmail rocks because i never have to delete anything so if i ever need to reference something all i do is type what i'm looking for in the search box and up it comes. i love my gmail account. i love my friends with gmail because i can see when they are online checking their email and then i can talk to them. you all should get gmail. what i DO NOT love is my family (my friends know better, at least most of them do) who continue to send me fowards, you know the ones with the subject lines that look like this "fwd: fwd: RE: FWD: the world is ending at exactly 10 pm on oct 10" despite my repeated pleas for them to knock it off. i HATE forwards. i hate that you have time to hit the 'forward' button on your email, or fill out a survey that tells me the last three things you ate for breakfast but you do not have time to send me a real email or better yet, pick up the phone and call me. what are you doing? you are adding to the flood of emails i get daily and making it hard to see things that are important like the lastest gossip from my girl amy. so let me give all of you a tip...i know that none of you are adding to the crap in my inbox but you might be adding to the crap in someone elses inbox. you might be one of those people like my family who gets an email telling you that if you don't pass it on to 8 billion people in the next two seconds you will have bad luck in this life and 5 lifes after. you might be one of those people who gets an email quoting some famous person saying how he believes that things should be different in America or from some rich guy saying if you pass it on his monopoly of a company will trace it and send you a check for 1.2 million dollars and you can retired at the age of 14. you know what i do when i get these? 'archive' (in gmail it takes too much effort to delete). if you ever get one of these types of emails from me its because i was smart and went to Snopes to check it out in the rumor mill. please, blog friends of mine, use snopes before passing on useless emails that tend to get everyone riled up in a tizzy. if you send an email that says a plane will drop $100 bills from the sky on friday make sure you check to see if the lovely people at snopes did the research for you on its truth. if it says 'false' don't pass it on. the world is already full of enough stupid people, enough junk mail, and enough spam. YOU can do your small part by not contributing to any of the above.

thank you for listening to this public service announcement concerning my obnoxious inbox.

bad week to decide to stop biting my nails

i was doing well...i really was. i painted my nails on friday and made the comment to greg on sunday that all the nail polish was still on. currently: none remains. had a great time in baltimore, wish this post was about that. its not, this post is about this morning. this post is about my computer not being where it should be. this post is about how random people are sometimes.

i came home from greg's this morning to get ready for work. i pretty much never sleep at home for a few reasons #1 being that quite simply i do not feel safe there. my neighbor's apartment was broken into a few weeks back and while all they took was his mug of change some strange person was still walking around in his apartment while he was away at work. so i hadn't been home since friday afternoon. i throw my stuff down on the couch and take a shower. go into my room to get dressed and notice that my laptop is curiously missing from my desk. i think that perhaps my roommate needed it for something but then realize that jessi is not an idiot and of course would have called or left a note "hey girl, needed the laptop for a project, will bring home later." remembered how my neighbor said that the only thing missing from his apartment was his change. looked in the container (coincidentally i keep it rigth by where my computer sits) with my change. nothing. gone. all of it. realize that yes, i have been robbed. call jessi. she tells me to check the status of her ipod. its still there, in plain view. tv, dvd player, movies, cds, 14k gold necklaces...all still in place. my computer, a knapsack, and spare change? gone. none of this matters to me. my computer is 6 years old and doesn't really work anymore, i hadn't plugged it in in ages and save for 1,000 songs on the harddrive there was nothing of value on it. what pisses me off is first and foremost that SOMEONE WAS IN MY APARTMENT! and that someone took a bag that had a cd with all my digital photos on it and my GRE book and cdrom. what pisses me off is that now i really do not feel safe in my apartment that does not have a deadbolt on the door. what pisses me off is that i have to compromise a little bit of my happiness and sanity to accomodate some probably crack addict who needed a quick fix. and what pisses me off is that this is now the second time in a year tha t a piece of my personal property has been violated by a stranger (there's an entry someone here about my poor cavalier and her devastation). what is wrong with this city? someone needs to fix it! or i just might be one more statistic that contributes to the declining population.

i only hope my nails grow back soon.

Luck 'o the Irish to you...

Happy St. Patrick's Day folks. this holiday has never meant anything to me. sometimes i wear green, sometimes i don't. one time i went to chicago to drink green beer and watch the ducks swim in the green river, that was fun. see below (with college friends bethany and mike):














but most of the time its just another day. today for instance i'm not wearing green, unless you count my columbia fleece. i'm wearing a long sleeve badger shirt because its flippin cold in pittsburgh (take note that i'm wearing capris in above picture) and my boys are struggling to beat AZ in the first round of the tourney right now. the luck of the irish clearly is not with wisconsin today. perhaps i should have attended notre dame as my sophomore in high school self had wanted. wait, they aren't even in the tourney. they're just irish.

so how will mandakay spend her st patty's day you ask? probably with a good book, some knitting and a cup of starbucks joe. me and the gregster must hit the open road early tomorrow to make it to baltimore at a decent hour to commence drinking with his buddies, an annual tradition. i don't quite get it as i feel that most places the festivities were last weekend (i don't get that either, but i guess its like that year that halloween fell on a friday and everyone was confused as to when wisconsin was going to celebrate the damn holiday. for the record we celebrated both weekends, would you expect anything less?). so tomorrow i'll don my green attire and drink some green alcohol and pretend like tomorrow is the real deal. and maybe somewhere in there i'll remember that this is actually a Christian holiday that is actually quite meaningful (history). but right now, at this moment on this st patty's day, i'm going to choose to be mad at ohio state and wisconsin for not SUCKING IT UP and destroying their opponents.

WISCONSIN...

STEP IT UP!!!!!


thankyou

Bracketology

Happy March Madness day! if you need me for the next three weeks you'll be able to find me zoned out in front of the computer intently watching the scores on ESPN.com . Go Badgers! um, at least for a little while i guess. and then, go anyone but the Blue Devils. Duke is like Michigan. does anyone actually like them other than its own students and alum. ps, i hate bandwagon fans. DON'T CHEER FOR DUKE JUST BECAUSE THEY MAKE IT TO THE FINAL FOUR EVERY YEAR, or because you think JJ Redick is hot. Uh Un. Find another team to cheer for, say, maybe, i dunno, Wisconsin?

btw, in the one bracket i filled out, no number 1 seed is making it to the final four. i'm all about the upsets.

fyi coffee addicts

free coffee at starbucks between 10 and 12 today!

who am i?

is the picture of me on the left not the scariest thing ever?

nail biter

i bite my nails which is annoying to other people, but trust me i'm sure it annoys me the most. i dont know what it is but for as long as i can remember i have been putting things in my mouth. i hate freud but i truly believe perhaps i was indeed fixated at the oral stage. so anyway, i bite my nails and right now i'm a little stressed out about some things which means i'm going to bite them more than i already do. and in a couple hours my fingers will undoubtably hurt and i'll curse the fact that i cannot keep my fingers out of my mouth for 2 seconds. and ewwww, this is probably the most disgusting of habits and i know all this but yet i cannot stop.

remedies...anyone?

things i'm growing to love:

powerade option fitness water. beats the crap out of propell
my ipod. oh who am i kidding, i've loved the ipod from the day i brought it home.
the fray. music group from denver. sound kinda like train but not really. check them out on
itunes. might be the end of my bank account.
Newman's Own Rasberry Walnut salad dressing. you can't find it in pittsburgh people, so don't even try.
fiona apples new cd, extraordinary machine. its like jazz with pizzazz.
"Blue Like Jazz" by donald miller. quick entertaining read for my Christian friends, and maybe even my non Christian friends.

where have i been? boycotting technology

sometimes it takes a nice friendly kick in the butt to remind me that i should maybe update so people don't begin to think i've fallen off the face of the planet (thanks pghcitiboy). of course at this point it would take a lot more than updated blogs for people to stop thinking that seeing as how AIM, email, and the phone have suddenly become like foreign objects to me. my appologies to all. i don't know what it is but lately most thing technology have just not been appealing to me, including the TV (*gasp!). of course i do blame aaron spelling for that one being that ever since 90210 went off the air there is just nothing worth watching...i kid, i kid. but in all seriousness, truth be told, i don't even use my car that much anymore. in fact on my return trip yesterday from McKeesport where i've been teaching 4th graders the joy and amazment of community service i began to sincerely hate all things driving. it doesn't help that the majority of people in this city drive for crap, we're talking worse than illinois here.

so as for me, that is where i have been, in the spiritual sense anyway. in the physical sense i've been in florida for the past week. will post pictures and write about fun times with the family in a later entry.

as for you, what do you make of this sudden distaste for modern conviences?