Day 97

What to have for the awesomosity for a beautiful Saturday, that is my question. While I think about it, I think I'll cook up some rice for lunch, it only takes 7 minutes. Wait. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? I think so Brain, but how are we going to get that many motorcycle riding cheerleaders on such short notice?

Just kidding, we were both thinking how awesome it is that you can cook a side dish (or in the case of a bachelor, an entire meal) in only 7 minutes!

Today I went with Terayaki rice, which was good, but I gotta admit it, I've had better. But that's not the point, the point is that there are delicious meals (or side dishes) available at your local grocer cheap.

And you've got options. From flavored rice (I really like beef flavor, especially with some hot sauce all over it) to noodles and sauce. Something to remember is that the store brands are as good as (and sometimes better than) the name brands.

Your Task o' the Day is to try a delicious side that is ready in less than 10 minutes. But not just straight out of the box, spice it up a little. Today I put cheese in the rice (cheese makes everything better). try some Worcestershire sauce or perhaps some chicken. I'll let you decide the details.

The picture today was taken in mt very spacious (but seriously lacking counter space) kitchen.

Thanks everyone, yall make it all worth it. See you tomorrow.

Day 96

For today's awesomosity, I'm going to go back 2 days to when I talked about creating the Awesome League of America. So, after I wrote that blog, I googled "Awesome League of America" just to see if there was already such an organization that I should be a part of. Turns out, I found a few interesting things.

First another t-shirt site. I know I have written about them before, but this one is definitely different and special. Check out www.AllAwesomeShirts.com. Totally worth your while. If you want to buy me an awesome shirt, I wouldn't object.

Secondly, I found a League of Awesomeness. I think this all started with something similar to what I've got going on, only this guy, Ze Frank (thats what he calls himself), has been doing this much longer and taken it much further. But hey, he started the League of Awesomeness, so that's pretty awesome.

Unaware to me, apparently the NBC show, Chuck, has a guy on it sometimes named "Captain Awesome". And Captain Awesome has a site, called "Captain Awesome's Tips for Being Awesome!!"


Now, granted this is NBC promoting a TV show, but they did put a guy in there called Captain Awesome. That's pretty awesome.

The most awesome thing that I found, and therefore today's awesomosity, is that there is an International Day of Awesomeness! A few things that are especially awesome. It was originally the National Day of Awesomeness, but they figured that awesomeness exists all over the world, so they expanded it. Second, it is on May 10th. Why? Because Chuck Norris was born on May 10th. I'm trying to make up a good Chuck Norris Fact here, but I'm drawing a blank. Any suggestions?

The only downside to this International Day of Awesomeness is that it already happened, and they make no mention of it coming back for 2009. Well, I'll have to have some kind of celebration, don't ya think?

Task o' The Day: Put your favorite Chuck Norris fact as a comment on this blog post. I think I have never laughed as hard as the day that Dan Hartke told me that "Chuck Norris' tears cure cancer. It's too bad he never cries." Seriously, I think I almost peed myself.

So, my picture today was taken outside, simply because its a gorgeous day. Go enjoy it.


Thanks for reading, talk at you later!

Day 95

So many things that could be awesome today, and all of them relate to my last night activities.
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I know, the anticipation is killing you...
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I WENT TO MY FIRST BLUES GAME OF THE YEAR!!!!

So many awesome things about it, where do I start? The goal 11 seconds in by the young stud Yan Stastny? Or that we scored 6 more goals? The big fight right in front of us? The 7 or 8 total fight? The fact that like 10 guys got kicked out? So much awesomeness.

I think I'll go with our tickets. You may notice from the picture that there are only 4 rows between me and the glass. Yes, our tickets were in the 5th row. And perhaps the awesomest thing of all was how we got the tickets. Let me put it this way, if we had extra tickets, the same guy could have helped us.

That's right, we got our tickets from a scalper. He had a bunch of tickets, that according to him, were $125 tickets. He was going to give us a bargain for just $75 a ticket. What a deal! We told him we would give $20 a ticket, he said 30, we settled on $25. Now, the ticket listed price was $0.00. Did we get a good deal? Did he? I think so.

Task o' The Day: (sorry no bold, and the late blog, but hey, you're still reading, eh?) Go to a sporting or entertainment event without tickets. Try a scalper. Here's the trick, you always have to be willing to pay cover price from the box office. Then you always have options. Never pay the first offer, pretend you're in another country, they expect you to bargain (exception to this rule: playoff games and Celine Dion concerts). In general this won't work with sold out stuff. Give it a shot, I'll be willing to go with, assuming its a Blues game.

All right, thanks for reading, I'll try to get the blog out earlier tomorrow.

Day 94

So, today's awesomeness comes from what I found when I arrived home last night around 10:30. No, nothing got stolen again, but I did get a note from my downstairs neighbor. There were a few things sitting outside my front door, and he put them in the basement so they wouldn't get "lifted".

In the basement, I find first, a PBR bags game. Awesome. This came from when I went to a benefit concert a few weeks ago. They had "Hoosier Olympics" set up, so of course I played. I won the washers tournament, then did horrible in bags, then won again at horseshoes. Then, there was this game I have never seen, but it was really cool. They called it something like toilet horseshoes. Basically, they buried a plunger, with the stick sticking up, then you tossed toilet seats at it like horseshoes. Awesome. By this time, there were only a few of us playing, so I took second (out of 2). Then, we played ladder golf, where again I took second (out of 4). As a result of all the contests, I won the 1st Annual Hoosier Olympics at the Trade (a bar my neighbor owns). I even got a trophy (A horshoe glued to a bolt that is attached to a 2x4, quite awesome). If I think of it, I'll post a picture tomorrow. I also won the bags game. Anyone up for a game?

The other thing that was down there was a package from Tower Books. I was told to buy a book, but I couldn't find it in any store, so I went online. I found it at a good price at Tower. Then I saw that I would get free shipping if I spent $25. Well, this book was already like $15, so I looked around. I found two other books that have been recommended to me, unChristian and The Shack. So I bought them all for like $27 and got free shipping. Hooray! Anyway, here is what I don't understand. They only shipped me one book so far. So, they gave me free shipping, but then spent 3 times what they would have spent on shipping. Oh well, I don't run their business, I just support it (I guess, by buying books, I support a bookstore, right?)

Now, there is plenty of awesomeness there, but here is the kicker. When filling out the form for where they should send it, there is a blank for "Organization". Little do they know how mucha guy like me enjoys a free shot like that, just ask my church.

Recently my church began redoing their website. They wanted to have more people put in their own information. So they had a big push for the new "update your profile" button on the website. I did. Then I found that they had a "nickname" option. I am assuming this is for people whose name is "Andrew" and they go by "Andy". I did not take it this way. My first nickname was "The Man". They began to send their letters to Ben "The Man" Muehleisen. For real. Then I think it was "Blue" for a bit. I know I used "Stud" at one point. I am sure I haev used other "nicknames", but I am currently on "Hugger". So all my mail from the church is addressed to Hugger Muehleisen. Awesome. (By the way, apparently they only do this for me. My friend dAN tried to change his nickname and was denied.)

So, what am I getting at? This:


I know it is hard to read, but as I have said before, my cell phone camera kinda sucks. If you can't make it out, the organization I ordered this book for is "The Awesome League of America" Yes! Who else wants to join? Membership is free (for a limited time only!).

Task o' The Day: Create a sweet nickname for yourself, or maybe start an organization next time you have to fill out a form for something. Teach people that maybe they don't need all that information they ask for. It's really easy to do, just next time you have to fill out any personal information, use every blank they give you, and make up awesome stuff in the ones they don't need!

Here is my picture, which I took this morning at my place, so you could get a different background. Thanks for stopping by, talk to you soon!

Day 93

Sorry for the off day yesterday, I am not sure what got into me (or didn't get into me, if you see it that way). I am back on track today though.

So, today's awesomosity could (as often) be one of many different things. At first, it was going to be the whole Blues offer for "Name your own price" thing, but after a little playing with it, it doesn't seem all that great. I tried to get a 10-game pack, but it was going to cost almost as much as face value. Same deal with single game tickets. I think they just set how much they would accept for the few leftover tickets they had and put up the deal. It is a great thing from a marketing perspective though, I am sure there are a lot of people talking about it. And I am always a fan of people talking about the Blues.

So, since that couldn't be the awesomosity of the day, and chiggers and attics (two main concerns of main as of late) are certainly not awesome in any way, that leaves Instant Viewing on Netflix.

I have talked plenty about being a big fan of Netflix before, but now things are getting very cool. You see, I have been watching Heroes now for a while. Last night I finished up season 2. Too late to watch the 3rd season live, but, alas, there is a solution. Netflix!

I thought maybe I could watch them on Hulu, which I can, but I don't like those little commercials they have all the time. So, I checked Netflix, and sure enough, I have unlimited instant viewing and they have the new episode posted every Tuesday. Awesome.

Task o' the Day: (I thought maybe if I put it in Bold maybe you would do it, or at least let me know what you thought of it) Watch some TV instantly on Netflix. If you don't have Netflix, let me know, I'll send you an e-mail good for a free month (ok, so I get a free rental out of the deal too, but that's besides the point). So far, I have watched like 20 movies and 5 whole tv series. I think its a good deal, but I don't feel like doing the complicated math right now.

So, here is the picture of the day, taken in afforementioned (worth at least $.50) attic.


See you manana!

Oh, and please vote on the new (and related to this post) poll.

Anyone want to go to the Blues preseason game tomorrow night? It'll be a lot of fun!!! Let me know.

Day 92

I truly apologize for being so late today. I really have no excuse for being late writing this. I was busy today, but most of it was laziness. Oh well.

So on the awesomeosity. Lion's choice. Real roasted beef, ready right now (I should totally be getting paid for this). on the way home from an inspection, I just couldn't pass it up. For those of you unfortunate souls that don't live in Saint Louis, Lions Choice is the best roast beef sandwich anywhere. Imagine Arby's but good.

I think the real secret is in the sessoning salt they use. Its way better than Lawry's. And the au jus. Definitely the au jus.

The task o the day is simple. Have some roasted cow. Preferrably at Lion's Choice, but if you're not able, I guess I understand.

Sorry, I think this is an off post, I've kind of had an off day. It'll get better tomorrow, I promise. Now, back to Heroes (season 2 on DVD). Thanks for stopping by!

Day 91

Ok, so one other thing that was really awesome yesterday at the land. The whole trip was so great that I am dedicating an entire weekend of blogging to it. So, besides digging up buried treasure, what else was awesome? A giant bonfire. For real, when is a giant bonfire not awesome?

So, here is how it went down. At the land, there is a firepit. Or, at least there used to be. Greg has spent a lot of time and effort finding giant rocks to surround the campfire, and had a very nice little firepit. There was even a sizeable stack of wood, very neatly organized near said firepit. But what happened (the same thing happens at my place all the time) is that as wood was brought to burn, none was burned, and it was all just thrown on the pile, getting less organized as it went (now, at my place, its usually clothes, or mail, or paperwork stuff, that just piles up until it becomes a nuisance).

Then after a while, the grass stopped getting mowed around the firepit because there were a lot of sticks and stuff in the grass. Well, it took three of us a little bit, but we mowed the grass amd cleaned up the pile a bit, but to really get rid of the mess, we needed to burn a lot of the wood. We were then presented with two choices. We could build a nice size fire and continually feed it for a long time, or we could pour gas on a portion of the giant pile and let it burn as a whole for a long time. Any guesses as to what three grown men decided?

I was about 20 feet away and still very hot

Of course we burned the giant pile. Now, I know what some of you are saying, "Ben, you already had fire as the awesomosity before (Day 8), what gives?" Well, that fire was the reasonable sized fire burned for a long time, constantly fed. This was just one big burn. This is way more awesome, but you can't do this in Manchester, where the last fire was.

So, the Task O' The Day (I finally saw the results, and I promise I'll have a new poll up tomorrow) is to have, or at least attend, or if necessary, plan to attend a bonfire this fall. I don't blame you if you wait until it is a little cooler for it. If possible, play pass the hot orange coal with Brent Mackey, where you pick up a hot orange coal and bat it around passing it back and forth. Ask me more if you want to know.

Here is the picture, taken as I prepared for my fantasy hockey draft (my team is decent, though I could use a better backup goalie).


Thanks everybody, you make writing this worthwhile. See you tomorrow!