[I have the worst headache right now, and I’m not sure if it’s from a lack of caffeine or too much caffeine. I’m feeding it coffee and Excedrin Migraine to see if it will go away. If anything, hopefully I will shortly be in a better mood.]

Even if you are not a science nut, you should enjoy this report on the electron band structure in Germanium. Trust me, this is the bomb. I couldn’t have written it better myself. Apparently, this guy actually turned this in. I’d have given him an A.

Okay, before I get into this weekend, let me state for the record that I found another poster that I need to get. I don’t know where I’d put it; I don’t have anywhere available in my apartment. But it calls to me. It says, “Buy me! Buy me!” It does this with unrelenting intensity.

Thus far, I have successfully exercised my will against it. I’m not sure how long I can hold out.

This weekend, Jenn and I went to a costume party. I went as a ninja; Jenn went as Mary Katherine Gallagher. Her costume was way better than mine, I think, but only because I ended up making my costume out of a sweat suit.

The party itself was very cool. There were probably 15 people over at my friend Jason’s house playing pool and air hockey and generally having a good time. Great food, too, which I’ve come to expect at Jason’s parties. He and his wife, Tracy, really know how to kick it up.

Other costumes at the party include: a Musketeer, two medieval ladies, a whole herd of army soldiers, and an Oompa Loompa. I was particularly pleased with the Oompa Loompa costume as it probably held the most childhood-memory-value of all of them. (Besides the fact that the movie was great, I dated a girl 4’4” tall a while ago and tried to get her to dress up as an Oompa Loompa, but she absolutely refused. I thought it would have been a great costume. Oh, well. It was reasonably cathartic when one of the partygoers showed up as an Oompa Loompa.)

I’m a still irritated with Amazon. I picked up my email today to find that they rejected my credit card again. I’ve tried two different cards, both of which have been rejected. I called the respective credit card companies and found that the cards haven’t even been tried. Argh. So I went to contact Amazon to find out what’s going on, but you can only email them, you can’t call them. I emailed them, now I have to wait up to 24 hours so that they can tell me (I’m sure) that they don’t know what the damn problem is and I should call the credit card company.

The irony is, you know the card that they keep rejecting? Yeah, well, on Saturday they successfully billed that card and shipped a whole other order I had placed with them. So I know the card’s good. It’s their stupid software. Bitches.

During my commute this morning I was graced with the presence of yet another driver who doesn’t know how to merge. It seems that some folks just don’t get it. It’s real simple, folks. It breaks down like this:

If you’re merging, adjust to the traffic around you. Don’t just expect traffic to stop and let you in because you’re a moron.

There is a tiny corrollary that goes along with this:

If you think you’re going to miss your exit because you waited too long to merge, that’s your tough cookies. Go to the next exit and turn around. Dumbass.

Let’s put that in pictures for the people in the cheap seats.

This is actually what happened to me today. This punk bitch decides that, rather than just easing in behind me where there’s plenty of space, she will just cruise on up and jump in because - hey - who wants to wait in line like the rest of the crowd? She was obviously someone very important, too. I know this because she thought it beneath her to even signal that she wanted in my lane; she started easing over, then started signalling. Courtesy for us proletariat folk.

Needless to say, she did not get into my lane. She nearly took off my passenger side mirror before she figured out that I wasn’t going to cave in. I gave her a liberal dose of the horn and continued on my merry way. Surprisingly, she did not try to speed up and give me the finger.

I think if I ever get laid off, I’ll sign up to become a traffic cop. I swear they’d never have to raise taxes again. I’d be the hardest-assed traffic cop this side of the mighty Mississip’, I kid you not.

As any reader of this blog knows, I’ve been waiting ever so patiently for my copy of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City to show up. When it does, I’m taking a week off work for vacation and a bit of the old ultraviolence. Oh, and to get my cat declawed and fixed. But that’s not the point.

I went in yesterday to Amazon.com to see why my order hasn’t shipped yet - the game’s out, it says it ships in 24 hours, so where the hell is it?

Turns out, they keep saying that my credit card’s being rejected so I need to enter new credit card information. Odd, since I just made a purchase at Barnes and Noble the day before. So I re-enter the card information and the site says everything’s cool.

I get an email this morning that says my card’s rejected again. What?! So I go back into the Amazon site and it’s asking for me to re-enter the card info again or enter a new card. Fed up, I just entered the number for a different credit card and things now seem to be rolling along again… Of course, I’m waiting for the rejection email on that card, too, but we’ll see. Either way, the delivery of my game is now pushed out until like November 7 - 13, when it should have been here by this coming Monday.

I called the credit card company for the card that got rejected twice, and they don’t have any record of my card being rejected. In fact, a separate order I made at Amazon was authorized on that card and they paid it on the 30th. They don’t know what the deal is.

Regardless, this has put a wrench in my gaming plans. I desperately need a vacation or I’m going to have some sort of a nervous breakdown, so just what I needed was another thing to postpone my time off. Needless to say, I’m pretty irritated.

I realized late yesterday that I never really tied the entry yesterday to its title, A Special Joy in Coffee Black. Yesterday was one of my few coffee-drinking days (and of course, no one filled the fucking pots) so I was drowning myself in caffeinated bliss.