I took my work keys home with me last night to see if I had the key for my display case on the ring.

I didn’t.

I searched around my house again in a fruitless effort to recover the damn thing, but I couldn’t find that key if my life depended on it. It is officially gone. Enter the locksmith.

I called one of those 24-hour places just to price stuff out. Turned out I had two options - either I could have them come to my place and make a key for the display case at a cost of $85 - $125, or I could take the display case to them and they could make a key for $25 - $35.

No way was I paying $85+ for a new damn key. But it was also equally unlikely that I could get the display case down to the locksmith shop.

Some ginger work with a screwdriver and some pliers, and one of the locks was liberated from the case. A little more work and it was back in its original shape.

I took the lock into the locksmith’s shop this morning. Ten minutes and $17 later, I had two keys that worked better than the originals. (Of course, I could have bought new locks for cheaper than it cost me to get a new keys made, but that would mean I’d have to pry the display case apart… nah.)

Watching the locksmith guy work was amazing. I mean, the guy was a machine - a little picking and some prodding on the lock, next thing you know there’s a key that fits it. I respect anyone who knows what they’re doing - if you can do a job and make it seem like you’re performing magic, that’s when you’re a real professional. It’s like when you see these shows on TLC where you have this team of like three guys and they build a new house in an hour and a half or something. It’s crazy and wonderful and downright amazing. That was this locksmith guy. It was cool and it made me want to learn how to be a locksmith. But then, there’s another part of me that really doesn’t want to know how he did it so I can retain that sense of mystery. Once you learn the magician’s secret, it’s not magic anymore.

Sometimes I wonder if that’s what people think when they see the programs I write up. Do they think, “Wow, like magic, that totally solved the problem in an elegant fashion!” or is it more, “Good - problem solved… moving on now…”? I’d like to think that I maintain that same level of magical professionalism that I saw at the locksmith’s shop today, but most of the time I think the stuff I do is taken for granted because of its intangible nature. Not much I can do about that.

Speaking of TLC, it looks like Trading Spaces is going to be on this new Discovery HD Theater thing that’s coming out. I’m hoping that we’ll get that with our digital cable; I’ve got an HDTV and I’d love to see how it performs.

After some quick research, I found two things:

First, we don’t get Discovery HD Theater in our area by default. That’s something you have to special request.

Second, it costs like $5 - $20 a month. It’s a subscription service, not just another cable channel!

Now, I enjoy my Trading Spaces as much as the next guy, but if I’m going to be paying $20 a month for a channel, it’d best have some boobs on it. And I don’t mean the scary native ones you see in National Geographic.

Lots of stuff to get through today, but due to the latest exciting virus that’s going around, I don’t have a lot of time to put it all in and integrate fancy segues and so forth. So it’ll be a little random, but that’s how it’s gotta be.

I have this thing for orange marmalade. I’m really not a peanut-butter-and-jelly kind of guy, but when you slap a little of that orange zestiness on some bread, I’m sucked in. It’s got a sort of bite to it, like it’s giving you attitude just for eating it. It makes me want more, regardless of whether I’m full or not.

Hung out with my friend Aaron this weekend. He’s moving down to San Diego, CA, this week, never to be heard from again by the likes of me. Apparently he’s roped himself a job of wondrous proportions, passing up a reasonable opportunity up here in Portland, OR, to move away from friends and family and live in the heat. (Actually, he has some family sort of close to there, I guess, but there’s a lot of prep work picking up and moving down there that I don’t know I’d be ready to undertake.) We wish him well in his endeavors, and will probably be visiting him come time for the next San Diego Comic Con.

In the meantime, he referred me to the place here in Portland at which he passed up an offer. It looked to me like it might be for a little more money than I’m getting now, but the [rather short] description I saw of the position looked like I might have a great deal less freedom and opportunity than I have in my current position. That scares me; I’ve always maintained “I’m not in it for the money,” and though more money than what I’m getting now would be very nice, I more than highly value the learning and implementation opportunities availed me by my current job.

Went to see Darkness Falls this weekend. After downloading the first ten minutes of it from Yahoo!, Jenn and I were totally sucked in. It ended up being rather enjoyable, if a bit predictable, and it maintained a good sense of humor throughout. I don’t know that I’ll be picking it up on DVD, but I don’t feel that my money was wasted at all.

Rented a couple movies this weekend (Barbershop, Soul Assassin), borrowed one from my parents (About A Boy) and bought one at Costco (Undercover Brother), but only ended up watching one (Barbershop).

Barbershop was okay. It wasn’t as funny as I had hoped it would be… or maybe I just missed something. I will admit that while I watched it I felt a little… uh… conspicuous being a caucasian… but I had a good time with it and loved the performance from Cedric the Entertainer.

On Saturday we went down to one of those storage places and got a 5’x5’ closet for $40/month. So far we’ve been able to move the bed out of the spare bedroom and several boxes of unused items into the closet. I’m really excited to be able to reclaim a little space around our apartment. I’m really feeling cramped and exceptionally frustrated with the current setup, necessitating change. The last thing we have to move into the closet is this stand-up display case I have a bunch of action figures stored in. The problem is, I can’t find the key to it. It used to be taped up on the top of the display case, but it’s not there now… so where is it? I’ve got a key on the ring of keys I have at work that I don’t know what goes to; I think I may have accidentally put it on there. I’ll take it home and check it out. If that doesn’t work, I guess I’ll either hire a locksmith or get a lock pick kit. (There’s this Kwick Pick thing that I’m sort of interested in… maybe it’s time?)

My parents are thinking of going to Hawaii at the end of this summer. We were invited to go along, but it’s looking like it’ll cost around $2000 to go for a week (for both Jenn and I). That’s a little rich for my blood, so it’s not looking like it’s going to happen. Maybe I should look at the higher paying job after all…?

So Jenn and I were folding our clean laundry last night before bed. We had probably three big loads of stuff to put away and, lazy people that we are, we decided that it probably would be okay if we just did it later.

During the folding effort, though, I realized I didn’t have any clean socks. I proceeded to dump out the load of whites (one of the loads we had decided to do later) and fold it. Jenn was all, “What are you doing? We’re going to fold those later!” I told her I had no socks left. Her response: “Well, then, just dump the socks out of that load and fold those.”

How am I supposed to dump just the socks out of a load of laundry? That would mean I need to get some sort of sock colander that allows me to dump a whole load of laundry into it and have just the socks trickle through.

But since that wasn’t in the cards, we ended up just folding the whole load and calling it a day.

I was just at the local Haggen and bought a Nestle Crunch “Mocha” bar. I’d never had one before, so thought I would give it a shot.

Buying a bar with the word Mocha appended to the name sort of implies to me a coffee-esque flavor.

Not so.

After tasting it, I realized I had been duped - the only thing the bar resembled to mocha was the color. It was a nice creamy light-brown hue, the result of mixing white chocolate and milk chocolate. Sweet like nobody’s business, but not at all what I was expecting. Bastards.