Attention, USB Thieves! (You know who you are!)

To whoever stole my USB drive on Sunday:

(Or, perhaps more accurately, whoever picked up the USB drive I accidentally dropped somewhere, sometime between, oh, 9 AM and midnight on Sunday):

I'd really like it back.

It's my own little status symbol - my "Precious" - I guess.  I can't afford the new Iphone, or the American Express Black Card, but if you want a bootleg copy of the upcoming "Harold & Kumar" movie or the latest Miley Cyrus album, I'm your man.  I mean, I had to wait a real long time in line at Staples to get that Black Friday doorbuster item.

It's not a question of security or privacy, really - I'm not worried that you now have any useful information. Even if it was on there, my checking account number could probably finance your getaway trip only as far as Elgin, and I have a credit score that wouldn't even get you a Dominick's Fresh Values card.  And, once you get a load of my resume, after you stop laughing, you'll wonder exactly what I did to ever earn a paycheck for the past twenty or so years.  ("Wow - up until the point that he entered high school, he seemed to have so much promise.")

I suppose it is my curse that I have to bear - the same thing happens whenever I try to buy anything fancy.  I can't tell you how many times I have bought the high-tech, ergonomic Dr. Grip pens for $8.99 each and then promptly lost them in less than a week.  So I always end up using the same free Bic pen I got from my bank three name changes ago.  Same thing with those nice Pyrex lunch containers, thermal coffee mugs, and headphones for my Ipod: gone, long gone, and gone by the end of the day.  It has gotten so bad that I now buy absurd quantities of the cheap varieties and simply pre-position them everywhere I think I will ever need them.
Actually, I think there is kind of a retro, coolness factor to being cheap - not just anyone can drink their coffee from the Dixie cups with the jokes printed on them.

But, I digress.  If you want to make a swap, I'll be glad to give you my Swiss Army knife and one of those cool, anti-updraft umbrellas - you've got a couple of days to contact me before I lose those, too.

Thank you for your consideration.

(On second thought, we did do our laundry on Sunday - my USB drive is probably keeping company in clothes washer purgatory with that beige, right hiking sock and a couple of my wife's scrunchies.)

Go and read something else worthwhile (err...Welcome to My Blog)

I'll have you know, there is a lot of pressure associated with producing the very first entry on a blog.  I should know a little something about this topic - this is like my fourth attempt at establishing an on-going blog (emphasis on the word 'on-going').

So, to set the tone for all of the upcoming pearls of wisdom and wit, do I: write something pithy and topical about the BP oil spill, write something upbeat and entertaining about the Cubs or Blago, or simply author an accounting of my personal life?

No - I choose to cheerily go on my way and ignore the pictures of the poor birds and the poor BP retirees in the UK, no - those lovable losers/Illinois politics have pretty been much unmitigated disasters during my entire lifetime, and no - I don't even want to read about what random oddity or perceived slight passes for a crisis in my mundane day-to-day existence.

Instead, for my first act, I will just bail here and direct your attention to what a real blog should look like:
underherthumb.blogspot.com (*)

This is written by a charming and excellent writer named Jackie, who used to write an insightful personal finance blog for The Daily Herald.  Now she has turned her rapier wit to: her fast-track career in the banking industry, the Wedding of the Century (well, the non-British, non-royalty one), and the joys and splendid triumphs of being pregnant.  (Okay, I'm kidding about that last one - if I had to undergo even a fraction of the mental and physical strain that Jackie describes, I would be so insufferable, my wife would roll me away like a giant Japanese Violet Beauregarde, never to be seen again.)

It really is a quite fantastic and self-deprecating look at the various aspects of modern life, and how to manage to figure it out and not get screwed by it all.  (Yeah - that is the dust-jacket quote I will pick for her best-selling book, if she ever decides to publish it.)  'The Sopranos', corn mazes, and being falsely accused (allegedly) of license plate frame foul play - it is amazing the detail and humor she can bring to such disparate topics.

If you get a chance, do check it out.  And once I have finished reading up myself on how this is supposed to be done, I might just write another post of my own.

* - I've looked up the phrase 'under her thumb' to see what exactly it is referring to, and I came up with this example: "Paul won’t do anything without asking his wife first.  She has really got him under her thumb."  So, from this rather instructive title, we already kind of get an inkling about the dynamics in the writer's relationship.
Told you she was good, right?