This is Alison Morris. Perhaps you've seen her on TV. I was seated at a big table with her on Saturday night to watch the Pitt game. She's well-educated, well-traveled, has a great career in broadcast journalism, and she's beautiful. There's only one problem. She's a bitch.

Bugger!

Last night's last-second loss stings a bit. It's not quite as bad as 1992/Braves/Pirates/Sid Bream, but it still hurts.

So, I was trying to make plans with my friend Michelle to watch the Pitt game tomorrow afternoon, and we were communicating via text messages and emails. And then, out of nowhere, she called me on my cell phone because she thought it would be easier. Easier to talk on the phone than to try and set up plans using text messages and emails. Huh. I think she just might be on to something. We'll see if it catches on.


And just a little while later . . .

While I was getting my hair cut today, Kelly was telling me a story and she was telling me about how she had posted photos from last weekend on her MySpace and Facebook pages. I don't seem to be able to get away from it.

It's been quite a while since I've been to an actual nightclub. Apparently, now young women talk on their phones, while men simply watch them. I suppose if they want to dance, their phones are their dance partners.


I bet all three of these young women are on Facebook.

Today I added the word "Facebook" to the spelling check feature of my email because it kept getting flagged when I used it in emails. But that's as far as I'm going.

The saga of The Tunnel to Nowhere continues . . .

Well, are they going to finish this disaster or not?

I was sitting at the bar in a local restaurant last night having dinner and a couple of drinks while watching college basketball. A woman came in with her young son and were seated at a table close to where I was perched at the bar. Apparently, her dining experience was not as good as mine because she complained about seemingly every facet of her meal and her son's meal from the moment they sat down. She immediately alienated her server somehow which I didn't quite catch. Then when her server wasn't around, she would grab the attention of other servers passing by to make requests and complaints. She asked for an extra ranch dressing for an appetizer, and then complained when it didn't arrive quickly. (Why don't restaurants just give you an extra dressing or sauce when you order something? It saves us all the trouble of asking for another one and the server having to go get one.) Then when their main courses came, she complained that both her and her son's food were cold, and she sent them back. I didn't stare at the table, but I did look over once or twice, and I noticed that the woman had a perpetual scowl on her face from the beginning of their meal to the end. Shortly after their meals were returned from the kitchen where they were apparently heated up, I sneaked a peek and saw her putting her nose up to the opened end of a bottle of A1 steak sauce to smell it and then making a face of contempt. It wasn't long before she flagged down her server and asked for takeout containers so that they could take most of their food home. Before they left, however, the manager came over to the table, and the woman told her about all of the things that had been wrong with their dining experience. Meanwhile, from what I could tell, the server who waited on them was polite and professional, despite being on the receiving end of a lot of complaining. And I thought to myself that it would probably be impossible to please this woman. For whatever reason, no matter what restaurant she and her son would have gone to or what they would have ordered, she would have complained about it. She was a scowler. And scowlers are never fun. Why would someone like that even go out to dinner if she's not going to be satisfied? It would not be a very pleasant experience, and I think that going out to dinner should be a pleasant experience. And I realize that this sort of thing happens all of the time in restaurants all over the place. I just wonder why.

More adventures for Jim with Facebook . . .

Jim: I got an email that a woman I went to high school with wrote on my "Wall". Still not sure what that means exactly. But I can say with a pretty high degree of confidence that in four years of going to high school together, she never spoke one word to me. Of course, that goes both ways. I don't expect that I ever talked to her either. And not that there's anything wrong with that.

Now I have some kind of graffiti or vandalism on my Wall. What is the etiquette here? Am I obligated to respond to this, even though I've never spoken to this person? After all, what it really boils down to is she's just trying to be friendly, right? And, I assume, she wouldn't have had access to write on my Wall if I hadn't accepted her email request to be my "friend". So now am I being rude if I accept her as my friend, but then ignore her message on my Wall? I don't need to go pissing anyone off. Look what that guy in Alabama just did because he perceived that some people had slighted him...

Email . . .

Jim: My wife invited me to be her "friend" on facebook and talked me into opening an account this week. How cool am I? Only I've now come to find out that facebook is passe and all of the cool kids are Twittering. But at least I now have 33 "friends" already on facebook, almost all of whom are people from my high school class who I never talked to or hung out with in high school and have never been in touch with ever since our high school graduation.

Is this really what the internet has come to? God I miss the days of free internet porn.

Dave: Apparently, Facebook is the new big thing with people in our age range. It's scary. I keep getting invitations from people to be their "friend," and they always say that they tried to hold out but that they eventually gave into the "peer pressure" to join. I'm not doing it.

Jim: But now I'm finally popular!!!

I haven't felt compelled to write about anything recently. I have gotten into a bit of a routine, which helps me to keep the worst of the depression away. I still have good days and bad days. But I've been able to manage fairly well since I returned from Florida four weeks ago today.

I've been thinking a lot about Sidney lately. He's just such a good dog. I can't really say that I or my mother have done anything particularly special to make him the way he is. I think he just came that way. And to think, I picked him out on a website for dachshunds in search of new homes. And then I drove to Ohio to meet him and bring him home. Now he is a very important part of my parents' lives and my life. I'm very much looking forward to when he returns to Pittsburgh with my parents in early April. It will be great to see him and play with him. Maybe he can even come stay with me for a few days. Just a little visit to his first home after I adopted him. Hopefully, someday, Sidney and I will be reunited for good.

Writing about Sidney also gives me an excuse to post a photo of the handsome little fellow.