last night i had this weird dream where jessie bought me a shirt from some upscale department store (*ahem* H&M *ahem*) and either the size wasn’t right or something so I went back to return it and maybe see if a few other things fit my fancy.

I shopped around for a long time amassing a huge heap of clothes. Which is weird because I don’t buy many clothes* and the clothes I do have are not very fancy either.

* I talked with laaazlo yesterday and we both reminisced of our years of cargo short abuse. From 1999-2003 I probably wore cargo shorts every day of my life, yet only owned approximately 3 pairs of shorts over that 4 year span. They were extremely utilitarian pants. I never knew if a CD was going to be dropped into my full hands, but I was always prepared with a CD-sized pocket on my thigh. Or maybe I wasn’t quite ready to put away that book I was reading; the pocketed pants quickly became a useful “holster of knowledge” with just enough book showing so that people would think I was super smart.  Those were the glory days.

Back to my dream.

I go to check out with my assortment of t-shirts and pants and the total comes up to $2800!  Whaaa!?  The panic that can only be felt in dreams starts to set in:  ”She’s already rung it up!  The price is fixed! I have to pay!”  Then a moment of bravery strikes and I gently ask the cashier to take an item away.  It knocks about $300 off the total.  Relieved, but afraid Jessie would be angry that I spent that much on clothes, I took a deeper look at the collection of clothes I had decided to buy.  Most of them were terrible t-shirts with terrible innuendos on them (i.e. one of them had the name of a popular Eagle Rock restaurant that is 2 doors West of the Coffee Table).  Still in panic of making a misrepresented purchase, I was able to make quick judgements and my pile of clothes had diminished to nothing.  It turns out I didn’t want any of those clothes.

Fin.

So I leave it to you, Daniel called Belteshazzar, to interpret my dream.  I have a few thoughts but I don’t want to interfere with your psychoanalysis of me.  If it helps, my current outfit is a pair of jeans my wonderful mother-in-law got me for christmas, a well worn hoodie (you know when the wrist cuffs get kindof rigid with snot), and a $5 Minnesota North Stars t-shirt I got from the MightyFine Sample Sale.  I’m going to just leave it at that and see what happens.

This weekend we’re going to Bakersfield.  Vroom Vroom.

On Dave’s way home from the gym yesterday, he calls to tell me to check my e-mail. . . this popped up in my inbox.

This guy sweats romance. Buh-duh cha!

It’s yard sale day… actually Saturday was.  Hot off the cusp of the season premier of Jessie and I’s favorite show Clean House on the Style Channel perhaps we were energized to finally have our own yard sale.  If you haven’t seen the show, the premise is pretty simple, they come into your house which is filled with “clutter, foolishness, mayhem” and the like.  It’s a pretty hilarious show with a cast that keeps you pretty entertained.  We probably watch the show 2 or 3 times a day.  We like the people so much, we stalked found them all on myspace. 

We got up early and hauled the overflow from our marital material merger (MMM). Our possessions are really pretty sparse.  But we sold and sold and sold and made out with like $190 (a guitar got sold in there).  Not too shabby.  It’s nice to sell stuff you’re never going to actually use.

But how do we do all that we do? OOOOOH Honey! You know it’s not by ourselves.  We brought in a little help from Cate (DJ EggiP), our yard sale diva.  Who made out like a bandit! And our two new french horn playing neighbors Katy and Amy!  They made us some vegan pizza that was off the hook!  Possible vegan venture for the Ruperts?  I doubt it.  That night we pigged out on chicken nachos… d’oh!

Now I realize we should have promoted our yard sale a bit in advance, but to be honest we failed at having this thing like 3 times already.  But now it’s finally done and under our belt.  We might try to craigslist a few things (like my car) but that will have to wait because we have a TRIP TO AUSTIN coming up!  August 15th ~ 25th!  Get your game face on!

In yet another issue of self-deprecating posts (remember the one where my wife calls guest services? or the one about exercise?) I decided I have to show & tell you about my new t-shirts.  Due to the rapid shrinking of my previous issue of Hanes™ undershirts Jessie and I decide to upsize my t-shirts to XL, plan for shrinkage, and then I’d end up with a perfect fitting t-shirt and be the envy of my hipster neighborhood.

Unfortunately, the experiment hasn’t yielded the expected results that quickly.  And instead of a custom tailored outfit, I end up looking more like a Computer Scientist (as you can see in the above image).  Add a Dell logo to that shirt and hot dang! you’ve got yourself a total nerd.  The nerdiness is then amplified by the fact that I am more or less a Computer Scientist and I spend 9~10 hours a day at my computer.  Geeze.

I was telling my wife.. it’s like this…

• If I put on a L-size t-shirt, it sort of tells everyone “Hey, ya, I know I’ve got some extra pounds.”
• If I put on an XL-size t-shirt, it says “[nervous laugh] What?!?  [nervous laugh] What weight!?  i don’t know what you’re talking about!!?! [nervous laugh]“

Just experimenting with wordpress for iPhone. It works. Kinda like a charm. More on sunny San Diego later I’m sure!

yesterday jessie said she found me a wedding present online. she was extremely excited about it and said “Guess what it is!”

After a game of 5 Questions (not unlike the game 20 Questions) i gathered that the present in question is the following:

• big
• red
• japanese

these are pretty good clues.  the only thing my imagination can come up with, however, is a “big red japanese refrigerator”. japanese-lacquer (shikki) red. this is obviously wrong. she said that i’ve seen and touched this object.  for the life of me i don’t know what it is.

part of me hopes it’s a gigantic refrigerator-sized red-lacquer japanese xbox360, but it won’t be. jessie is anti-xbox-in-the-house.  i can empathize because it’d end up being long nights of me wearing a headset and yelling profanities at the TV (to teenagers online). that would probably de-romanticize the newlywed experience pretty quick.

my guesses get more terrible from here. is it red samurai armor? it it a japanese koi? as you can see, i’m not too deft at this game. i guess i’ll have to wait and be surprised.

Jessie and I have begun the process of combining our stuff together.  Without hyperbole, it’s a bit like 2 Solar Systems of stuff colliding into a small 600 sq ft. house. As a result, it’s become apparent that we have too much stuff. so in an effort to change junk into cash, i turned to craigslist.

this is my first attempt at selling on craigslist and I’M ADDICTED TO IT!!  this thing is better than a meth amphetamine sandwich! 

seconds after posting i had offers pouring in with potential buyers. that’s when the compulsive email checking started.  every “refresh” click was rapt with joy.  this is a tell-tale sign that you have just become e-addicted to something.  after every new email i began buzzing around the house rummaging through boxes trying to find other stuff to sell: my jeans, the cat, that half eaten bag of cheese sticks, my left arm; i want to sell everything.

i think i’ll calm down soon, but this blog post has already got me scanning around the room for stuff to hawk. i might have to go to the hardware store and buy a crowbar to get the cabinets down (sorry, dave and merner).

hello everyone. this is the groom, dave rupert, here. and this is my triumphant re-entry into the blogging universe.  upon my engagement to the beautiful Jessie Conklin, i decided to retire my tired blog.  dorky as it sounds, it was 5 years in the making and was quite a sad thing to quit.  but retiring it was -as the episcopalians say- “meet and right so to do”.

i’m excited about blogging with my future wife jessie.  she’s incredibly funny and hopefully we can make a good run of it.  the first month of blogging here will be a lot of catching people up on our relatively brief yet sappy history together (T-minus 50 Days Until The Wedding) . but i hope to spice those stories up with some good relevant-to-now posts as well – this will probably turn into a TV blog.

so. now that my “self promoting intro post” is out of the way, let’s get blogging! …. gosh, i’m such a dork.  without further ado, here’s a picture of my fiancé’s new hair do.  enjoy!

Kick off posts put a lot of pressure on the writer.  I had a blog for a short while that I updated extremely infrequently, mostly because every time I sat down I thought, “Really? Really people want to know what I am thinking at random?  People want to read my feeble attempts at being witty and relevant?  REALLY.”  Then I went on to think, “Do I want people to be able to see my feeble attempts at being witty and relevant? How embarassing”  At that point I would string together some sentences that made me seem slightly unstable and post.  But since I am engaged to the King of Blog (according to me and any wimpkiller enthusiasts) I am confident he will did edit it when I am not looking and make me look like a real pro.  Now that the pressure of the kick off post is gone. . .Let the fun begin.