. . . was uttered tonight on the way home from spending the day with grandma: “Amanda, stop eating that rock!”

(Amanda enjoys rocks. We don’t know why. But she picks them up like little souvenirs whenever she encounters them, which is seemingly everywhere because it’s rare to find a house in/around Phoenix without a gravel-covered front yard. She grasps these things like they’re actual treasures, brings them home, and by the time dinner is over, she has forgotten about them and now we’re stuck with these random rocks. Do we throw them away? Are they garbage? Or do we toss them in the yard, which could prove problematic if she keeps this up indefinitely - we’ll soon have a multicolored yard. Or are they recyclable? These are all concerns that I never could have imagined having two years ago.)

At a restaurant not too long ago, I got a kick out of watching a family of four that came in shortly after us. The two kids had their Ipod-type devices’ headphones on the entire time, mom and dad weren’t talking, and, in fact, pretty much the entire time we were there no one acknowledged anyone else at the table. RANDOM!

When merging, drivers will do nearly anything to avoid being behind me. I’m starting to get a complex - does my truck smell or something? If not, get the hell behind me and quit cutting me off (especially when there’s 200 feet of open space behind me but a mere car-lenghth’s room between me and the next car)! COMPLAINT!

My building at work is terrorized by someone who apparently wishes to be known as “The Booger Bandit.” I know this because he actually wrote “The Booger Bandit was here” on a bathroom stall wall, I assume after creating his latest masterpiece. His reputation precedes him, as even women know who he is, and I’m going to have to assume that he’s not leaving his calling card in their restroom. He has, however, recently expanded his canvas to include doors and walls outside of the bathroom, which just proves the point the police often make about how criminals will grow more and more brazen as they elude capture. While this guy being caught would be a relief, I’m also worried about finding out who exactly it is that’s doing this - because, you know, it might be someone I know and had occasion to touch him or things he’s given to me. I’d much prefer the behavior to just stop, but like most criminal and/or disgusting behavior, that’s going to require that the Bandit hit rock bottom. I do admire his tenacity, however. I mean, the someone that is doing this obviously hears the commentary about his actions and continues. I’d think hearing people say things like, “Man, I saw that the Booger Bandit struck again - looks like he’s got a runny nose this week” would kind of get to you after a while. But not this guy! RANDOM! COMPLAINT!

There are more people named Bob Pringle than I would have originally guessed. RANDOM!

I need this. You know you need one of these too. Who could live without a little yellow snowman robot that responds to its environment? I used to have a Coke can that danced to sound, so I understand how you might think it’s just like that or one of those dancing sunflowers or what have you, but those only move in response to sound. This thing has a camera in each eye, a microphone in the nose, and so responds to anything around, as you see in the video where he “watches” people as they come near him. You can read a bit more here.

The first of multiple weird, annoying, and/or weirdly annoying things to happen today started with traffic on the way to work. I was already late, having taken longer to wake up and get ready than usual, but then I ran into a huge block of traffic inching forward on the route I take. I jumped off and took side roads, which really threw me off - I know it was faster than sitting in the traffic, but my internal clock kept ticking away, telling me how late I was becoming because of the “short cut.”

Then I found myself far hungrier than usual and ate part of my lunch, figuring I could substitute it with a bag of Skittles, which has become a strange addiction of mine lately. I can’t deny my desire to catch the rainbow of fruit flavors.

In the meantime, my computer freaked out while I was moving a rectangle in Illustrator, causing each movement to leave ghost-images of the rectangle all over my screen. And then my mouse died - completely died. No shining red laser light from underneath, no movement on the screen. I did a Print-Screen of my disaster, alt-tabbed to Outlook, opened a new email, and emailed the screen grab to myself for later submittal to our managers as more evidence of why we desperately need newer, faster, stronger computers.

Just before lunch, I stopped off at the restroom and next to me in the stall is a dude who was apparently mostly naked. His pants were crumpled up on the floor with what I believe was his underwear, his shoes were off, and all of this was almost in my stall. Oh, and he’s making weird noises in there. I can’t even guess what was going on in there, but I wanted to imagine that he had wet-wipes and was cleaning something off, because it sounded sort of like that. I also thought maybe he was just coming back from working out and was changing. I didn’t want to know, but there are some combinations of weird goings-on that leave you helpless but to wonder.

When I finished washing my hands and was about to leave, the guy came out of the stall and it was just him – no bag or extra clothes, nothing extra, but at least he was dressed. I can’t imagine what was going on in there, and I really, really want to stop trying to do so. It’s not happening.

Then I went to our breakroom to get Skittles. I tried to get Skittles, at least. I put my money in the vending machine, made the selection, and watched as the screw-type thing that holds the bag turned and pushed the Skittles out off the shelf. And then it stopped, and the bag just hung there. I tried jiggling the machine but it wouldn’t budge. Another guy I know came in right then and we both tried to knock it down, but it wouldn’t move. He gave it a shove on the side and instead of the Skittles, a bag of peanut M&Ms randomly fell out. I can’t eat those (because chocolate, while delicious and wonderful, is one of my migraine foes,) so I gave up and invested another 75 cents in Skittles to get at least the one bag out. At this point, I was willing to sacrifice one bag of Skittles for another, being able to predict the outcome: A couple of weeks ago, this same chain of events happened and I wound up losing 75 cents on another bag of Skittles that got stuck pushing the previously stuck one out.

This time, however, both bags dropped and I had to walk back to my desk holding THREE bags of candy. I felt a bit like a pig. “Look at all the candy I’m going to eat!” I guess, in a roundabout way, I got my 75 cents worth of candy back from a couple weeks ago in the form of those M&Ms. So now Alissa gets a bag of the peanut M&Ms she so loves, and, apparently, I have extra Skittles for another day.

It’s only Monday, people.

If you haven’t played with Google Maps, you’re missing out. I checked quite a while ago and saw that the image of our “house” turned out to be nothing - the image was taken before our house was even built 7 years ago. But today I checked again and found that it’s been updated with a very recent shot:

I wish the image resolution was higher so I could zoom in on what’s in our backyard. I’m really curious at to what’s on the right side of our yard. As hard as I try, I can’t place what most of the shapes would have been. Being able to do that would make it easier to figure out when this shot was taken, too.

Oh, and the alternative for this post title was “Our house - in the middle of our street,” but since we’re on the corner, that wouldn’t make as much sense. And I’m a bigger fan of Pat Metheny than Madness.

The Duggars, who may be known by some from the Discovery/TLC/Discovery Health/Discovery Lots Of Babies/whatever channel(s) show “We Have a Lot of Children and We Can’t Stop,” have had their 17th kid this week. All of the kids in this family are between 2 and 17. If you’re doing the math, that’s one kid a year since 1990 (there are, however, two sets of twins in the family, so they got a break for a couple of years.) It’s like a collection. They want to see if they can collect the whole set of possibilities in their gene pool. Maybe they’ll contact Brad and Angelina or Madonna to see if one of them wants to trade some of their collections.

I’m getting visions of The Meaning of Life’s “The Miracle of Birth” where the baby just falls out of the mother while she’s washing dishes . . .

By far the coolest remote control vehicles ever, this dude builds steam-powered ones but usually with a twist, such as his centipede-train (my favorite.)

Tell me you don’t want one. I won’t believe you.