Ever plan on going to a Penn State football game? I'm sure you have. But were you ever curious what to expect when you got there for the tailgate? Well be curious no longer. The Captain is back with his list of what to expect at a PSU tailgating extravaganza! Of course this comes from personal experience so any opinions and/or views that may conflict with yours is just tough. Suck it up and quit being a baby about it. Here it comes, in your face! It's Captain Jimmy's Top 10 Ways to Get Jiggy Tailgating at PSU.

10. Make sure you bring your earplugs because if all the generators aren't loud enough, the music from the amps that they are supplying power for will surely make you think Beethoven had flippin' dog-like hearing!

9. Forget your 6-pack of beer? No worries. Just walk up to some stranger's cooler and grab one for yourself and your friends. They'll be too drunk to care. If the strangers do happen to ask, just say you were looking for some shots. Oh, and if you say that, you'll be expected to do some.

8. Forget your crazy, drunk friends that you don't like to hang out with because they are crazy drunks? No worries. There are at least two every 20 feet.

7. You'll definitely want to make sure you brush up on your Flip Cup skills. Or maybe your Beer Pong skills. Okay, maybe just your drinking skills.

6. Three words, Dizzy Bat Relay. Race your friends (or complete strangers). Spin around a Wiffle bat 10 times with your head down, sprint 20 feet, down a cup of beer, sprint back, next in line goes! Oops. Wiffle bat break? No worries, now you can fill it up with beer and drink from it!

5. Don't ever, ever, ever wear the opposing team's colors. Unless of course you enjoy getting the finger and obscenities yelled at you no matter where you are. I hope you like hearing the F word!

4. Make sure you have plenty of gas in your tailgate vehicle. Not so much for while you're tailgating, but for when the game is over and you're attempting to leave the parking lot. If you're one of the lucky 10,000 that get stuck in the middle of the lot, you're looking at a minimum of 2 hours before getting the heck out of there. I hope you like the smell of exhaust and getting high!

3. If you have a small bladder, you might as well forget about going tailgating all together. After you wait in line for 45 minutes you'll have peed your pants twice and gone thru 3 beers. By the time you get in and out of the crap-filled portipottie, you might as well get back in the line so you don't wet yourself when you have to go again.

2. Are you an attractive chick looking for a nice guy? Are you an ugly chick looking for the love of your life? Are you a chick that's drunk off her crapper looking for a dude that's the same so you can make out? What's the difference? They're all the same when you're a drunk chick.

1. Don't bother bringing petty foods like bags of chips and pretzels. What will most likely happen is some drunk guy that you just met will end up tripping over himself at some point and come crashing down on the chips, or he may just deliberately jump on your bag of pretzels, because, well when you're drunk that's fun apparently. In fact you're much better off meeting sober people in the other parking lots and being invited to kick-a** food tents with all the hot dogs and sausage you could possibly dream of! If that doesn't get your juicy intestinal track gurgling and leaking, I don't know what will!

If you really want to have a fun time, just bring your fun hat and join in the festivities. It'll be an indescribable experience and if you ever embarrass yourself just remember; nobody else will likely remember. Oh yeah, don't forget to scream, "WE ARE! PENN STATE!" "Thank you!"

So here I am in a place called Reston, VA. What am I here for? Training. .NET training to be exact. So let's start at the top shall we?

The Boss and I signed up for this quite some time ago. The place where we go for the training is made for training. It's their job. They train people in technology for like two grand a week; stuff like databases, code, wireless, networks, all that good, fancy stuff. This company has training locations all over the world: Virginia, Maryland, even Paris and Tokyo. Now, less than a block from this learning center is a Hyatt hotel. And of course that is where the learning center recommends staying. Because then, you know, you can just walk yourself across the street and go to class. Like college but without the hangover. Well, The Boss had stayed in that Hyatt in the past and said it was too fancy for him. So instead, he signed us up for the "comparative," most cost effective Comfort Inn! Now if you've ever stayed in both hotel chains before you know that they really don't compare. Take these personal examples for instance. Hyatt - friendly concierge and helpful staff members: Comfort Inn - Ms. Personality at the front desk doesn't have a clue where you should eat or why the treadmill isn't working. Hyatt - big bathrooms with luxurious showers: Comfort Inn - the shower head dribbles water out slower than a tortoise onBenadrel . Hyatt - floors stacked so high with properly engineered integrity you don't even know there are 15 more floors above you: Comfort Inn - the foreign guests in the room above yours don't know how to use the shower curtain properly when they bathe, turning your bathroom door into a waterfall.

But sorry, I got off topic a little here. What I wanted to talk about was the city of Reston, VA. Let me tell you a little about this supposed "city." Now I thought if something was classified as a city that it had to have a certain population? That's how it was on SimCity anyway (remember that game? I loved building huge metropolises then demolishing them with a Godzilla attack!). Let's see, how can I describe Reston, VA? It's like a modern day ghost town. Picture, if you will, New York City: huge buildings and skyscrapers, little restaurants and shops everywhere, skinny little streets, parking garages, more high rises and construction. Yeah! That's Reston! Except NYC has PEOPLE!!! I'm missing something here because I find no people in this city! The streets are completely bare, there is no one shopping, no one eating, no one driving, heck I don't even see people working! I don't see people! Where are the people?! Before we get to the learning center, we park in a free parking garage. The garage is filled; filled with cars! Where are the people driving them!? Maybe at 5 o' clock the streets become packed with people leaving work and whatnot, but not during the hours of 9AM-4PM. I have no idea how this place employees anybody. In fact, if you can picture this, I literally walk down the streets and yell, "Where are the people!!" Of course after not seeing any speed limit signs either I made the assumption that most of this city must exists on some parallel plane of existence r dimension. Maybe if I can find the door that connects this Reston Dimension with my dimension I may find some housing property back in The Cove that doesn't cost me an arm and a leg to purchase.

I still stand by the claim that I'll never be a city boy. I've never been a fan of the big cities and I never will. After spending an evening in New York City the other weekend I remembered why I never cared to venture into those places just for "something to do." As if the ridiculously bad service at the Film Center Cafe wasn't awful enough, the sheer prices of everything in the city would just make me never want to spend money period. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed spending time with my friends, it was a great time, but if I didn't have friends that lived there, I wouldn't have gone. Chasing down a train by rushing thru Time Square and sprinting thru the station to catch the 1140PM departure so we wouldn't be stuck at Penn Station until 140AM ain't my idea of a good time. Although it does give me good stories to tell.

Now, my friends say where I live now stinks. No, they literally say it stinks, as in smells bad. Sure there is poop all over the place (farm land people, not in my house) and a paper mill just miles away, but frankly the smell of poop is a fresh scent. When they get the liquid stuff out and start spraying the fields it's a little nauseating, but aside from that, you know you're not breathing in any toxic fumes. Now the big city smell; wow I don't even know what the ef that is! It's some bizarre combination of urine, exhaust and B.O. all wrapped into one scent. Yummy! Why pay $7 for a beer or $10 for a Margarita when I can get $1.50 drafts at Big Dogz (not to be confused with Big Guns) and free shots down at The Creekside? Also, when sodas come out in little 6 inch glass bottles, you know you have just forfeited your right to free refills and paid $3 for a Coke. And the people! My word the people! They are everywhere! What in the heck are mobs, gigantically large mobs mind you, of people doing wondering the streets at 1130PM? In Altoona you'd be hard pressed to even find a single soul meandering around at that time, let alone a single bar open at that time. The roads are practically bare!

So kudos to all you rich people out there that enjoy the city life. As for me, I'll continue to enjoy my much less stressful life here in The Cove. So you have giant skyscrapers, Lexuses and tons of things to do. I live in a two story house, drive a Chevy, and need to travel thirty minutes at 70MPH to get to the nearest mall. Sure it may not sound like much, but that's what volleyball and The Office are for. And boats too. Those are really fun!

I typically don't write about specific other people (in general) however I'm willing to make an exception in this case. I'll change the names here to protect the innocent though (although if you'd consider any of the people mentioned in this post innocent you must be on drugs or something). So this past weekend there was the annual First Rites beach volleyball tournament in Rehoboth Beach, DE. I came out with a nice 3rd place victory on Saturday and a 1st place win on Sunday. But I'm not really here to talk about that. If you aren't familiar with Rehoboth Beach, well then either you haven't been reading this blog for more than a couple months, or you're not up on your current Delaware beach geography. It's funny. I'll tell someone that I'm going to Rehoboth Beach for the weekend and they usually respond with, "Oh the gay beach?" "Yup that's the one."

Rehoboth Beach is known mostly for its, well its homosexual atmosphere. If you're not into playing for my team, and you're looking for a good time at the beach, Rehoboth is the place to be. Just to make myself clear, I'm not homophobic, nor do I hate these individuals. Just because I don't share their same viewpoint on members of the same sex doesn't mean I don't like them or am afraid of them. So now that we have that cleared, let's move onto my story shall we.

Some friends and I were groovin' at the Frog Pond Saturday night. Now in case you haven't read my post on bars that are named after animals and colors, dated 05.20.2006, then you should check that out first before reading on. We go to the Frog Pond because there is a great band that plays there and the music is pretty much the best around. The fact that chicks are making out with each other all over the place really doesn't inspire me to be there (mostly because they aren't as hot as they should be). So like I was saying, some friends and I were out getting down with our bad selves on the dance floor when suddenly a stranger named Kathy approached my friend Darla. Kathy reached a hand out as if to introduce herself to Darla. For the first couple moments I thought perhaps that these two dancing machines knew one another. Approximately 3.14 seconds after that thought, I realized what was actually going on there.

Now picture 5 friends dancing in a small circle having a good ol' time: loud music, drinks in hand, smiles all around, wild crowd surrounding them. Now picture only those 5 people stop dancing in an instant with super large eyes and mouths wide open while the rest of the club continues to jam. It was a scene right out of some horrible porno made in my buddy Tim's basement.

Finally Darla extended her hand which allowed Kathy to shake Darla's hand for what seemed like minutes on end. Kathy's mouth was going none stop while Darla just held her gaze with eyes the size of golf balls and a jaw dropped half way to the floor. Finally after what seemed like ten minutes (probably only really being less than one Earth minute, unfortunately the mind seemed to wonder while all this was going on mostly to the thought of, "Why is Darla not talking??") Kathy left. There Darla stood, unmoving, like a deer caught in the headlights of an encroaching sports car. Now I don't remember if it was one person or all of us at the same time but I know at least one person said, "Who the heck was that?!!" According to Darla, who may or may not have been actually experiencing some form of disrupted reality at that point in time, the conversation when like this:

Kathy: Hi, my name is Kathy.
Darla: (head slightly nodding) Uh huh . . .
Kathy: I was sitting over there at the bar and thought you looked pretty awesome and hot.
Darla: (head slightly nodding) Uh huh . . .
Kathy: So I just moved here not to long ago from [enter city of choice here] and just got out of a three year, long term relationship. My dad died not to long ago and since then I have been blah blah blah blah blah.
Darla: (head slightly nodding) Uh huh . . .

At that point Kathy finally walked away. Note how there was no introduction from Darla, nor was there an exchange of greetings or farewells. All Darla could muster up was the phrase "Uh huh." I mean seriously here. How much nerve does it take to walk up to some stranger in a club, obviously dancing with a small group of friends, and tell them you think they're hot (and gay for that matter)? A heck of a lot more than I'll ever have. What makes this story even better is the person Darla was dancing next to during all this was her boyfriend. Who, by the way, was just as speechless as the rest of us and said absolutely nothing during the above conversation. Now Darla claims to have been giving him the I-need-help-now-idiot eyes, but I can assure you that wasn't the case. And frankly when you're witnessing a train wreck, there really isn't anything to say to anyone at that time.

But I think the best part of the night, may have been the car ride back to the house. During the walk to the car all we did was recap and laugh at the incident. Then, after about 2.72 minutes in the car Erin buzzingly blurted out, "I'm sort of jealous! Honestly why didn't some chick hit on me? What do I need to be wearing some kind of color or something?"

This ain't no April Fools joke, but if you're ever in Gettysburg, PA looking to transport a giant 15 foot stalk of bamboo and root, get something larger than a van.

Like Chappie says, "The state will pull you over and give you a ticket for not wearing your seatbelt, but they won't do a thing when you have a giant marijuana plant obstructing your view."

I gripe about driving quite often on The Blog, but frankly people irritate the crap out of me with their driving and here’s why:

The first thing is merging. Sweet lord do people stink at it here. In case you were curious (which obviously no body is) the proper way to merge onto a major interstate is to get up to speed before actually merging onto the interstate. Now let me define the “get up to speed” part because that apparently confuses people too. Now I understand that by definition speed limit means that is the fastest you should be going. But in reality this means that by all means you should be making your best effort to maintain this speed, if not go 5 over. I’ll come back to this after I finish my gripe about merging. So yeah, when you cross that white line to officially be on the highway you should at that point be going the speed limit. The actual highway is NOT where you should be accelerating. If you are, you merged completely incorrectly and I am now flying past you, staring with a confused look on my face that says, “What the flip are you doing?” in the left lane. The same goes when getting off the highway. Decelerate once you are off the actual interstate. Now there are times when the deceleration ramp is too small to do this, in which it is okay to slow down before getting on the ramp, but frankly here in PA, rarely will you find this. We have obsessively large entrance and exit ramps for our interstates and we should use them as such.

Now, back to the speed limit grip. Yes I understand sometimes the weather calls for you to slow down to under the speed limit. However one example when this is not the case is when there is snow on the side of the road (key words there are side of the road). If there is no snow on the driving road, or there are perfectly dry 2 feet wide tire paths, the speed limit should then be maintained until driving actually does become hazardous. Also just because its nighttime doesn’t mean the speed limit has decreased; remember that. 50 MPH during the day is the same speed as 50 MPH during the night. Just like Shakira’s hips, your speedometer doesn’t lie. Oh yeah and just blatantly ignoring the speed limit by going slow is just irresponsible and obviously tells me that you are not paying attention to road signs whatsoever and you should be removed from the roadways immediately.

I’m not exactly sure why these things bother me. I’m not really in a rush to get anywhere. I guess I just think if we are allowed to drive vehicles weighing thousands of pounds and affect tons of people all around us, we should not be driving in a idiotic, brainless, dim-witted matter. Of course, just like everything else on The Blog, this is my opinion.

It seems like I just left work Friday afternoon and then came in the next day (which turned out to be Monday) for the new week. As Randy from American Idol would say, “Aight, so check it out dawg.” Friday I got home from The Workplace and wound up going over to my friends place for dinner where he made some great deer steaks from the giant buck he murdered the previous weekend. After that and half a movie later I was headed back for home to grab some shuteye for the volleyball tournament on Saturday. I then woke up Saturday morning nice and early and headed on down to Bedford for the tourney. About 40 kills, 12 service aces, 1 painful facial from a D-I men’s volleyball player, and a 3rd place victory later I was in my car and headed for Messiah College and a Jars of Clay concert to meet up with The Neighbors and another good friend from college.

Now the concert I thought started at 7PM and I left Bedford around 5PM giving me just enough time to arrive at Messiah just before the start, with my disgustingly sweaty and smelly self intact, however, I found out just as I was leaving the tournament that the concert didn’t start until 8PM. So I took a little side trip and broke into my friend’s house to grab a quick shower on the way down there (don’t worry, she knew I was doing that [just incase you’re concerned about me taking showers in your house without you knowing, fear not as I do tend to let people know a couple hours ahead of time]). Around 730PM I grabbed what I thought was going to be a quick burger at Sheetz which turned out to be a massive waiting game where I wound up stuffing my face with burger during my 5 minute car ride from Sheetz to Messiah.

Finally I arrived just before the concert and got to semi-sing along with one of my favorite bands. I guess I should have kept up with their albums, as I didn’t know most of their songs since the last album I listened to of theirs is about 5 years old.

Hey guess what, it’s side story time. Now since this concert was at my Alma Mater the majority of the people at the concert were in fact current college students. No big surprise to me at all. What did surprise me was that while I sat in my nice familiar chapel seat, that I spent oh so many chapels sleeping thru with my “borrowed” Lottie Nelson Cafeteria coffee mug full of pipin’ hot chocolate in one hand and my head in the other, and looked around the gymnasium I noted the sheer amount of students with their cell phones open taking pictures, or texting or what-have-you. Now I didn’t get cell service in the gym and I use one of the biggest carriers in The States (or so they say) so I can’t imagine they were all making phone calls. Now taking pictures I can semi-understand even though pictures from cell phones stink and are crappie as all get-out (the majority of people in this world don’t really care about quality for some reason), but the people texting messages for half the concert just didn’t make any sense to me. Why even come when you can sit in your nice comfy dorm chair with your laptop and the band’s latest CD playing and IM your friends for free?! I just didn’t get it. But then again I have noticed that I’m not a college student anymore and usually I tend to find most people younger than I am (the majority of which are students, and note I said most, not all) idiotic and lemming-esk¹.

So back to my super-fast weekend. After the concert I grabbed a coffee at Sheetz with my friends and took off for home once again. One Breakfast Blend coffee and 34 songs on my iPod later I made it home and into bed around 2AM. Since God has a hilarious sense of humor far beyond that of my own I didn’t sleep at all that night thanks to my muscle aching body and thought-consuming mind. So at 8AM I pulled myself out of bed to get ready for the Stiller game! I met up with the other members of The Steelers Fans-tastic 4, which is now The Steelers Fans-tastic 4 Minus One Because She Moved to Alabama But That’s Okay Because We Picked Up a Great, Fun Replacement. So, yeah The Steelers Fans-tastic 4 . . . still. We made it to the game with our long underwear and heavy jackets in place under our heavy coats. Seven Kit Kats, 47 Swedish Fish, 3 giant chocolate thin mints, 2 beers and 1 Italian sandwich later we made it to our seats ready to cheer on the home team. We were a little cold during the first half, so we went inside to warm up during the third quarter. Come the top of the fourth I was ready to be back out there again to scream and shout, so we went back outside to watch the end of the game. From the beginning of the game, 213 rush yards by Fast Willie Parker, 5 Steelers touchdowns, 1 really bad Roughing The Passer call, and 31,416 verbal profanities later we were on our way back home from The Steel City. Another Italian sandwich, countless college/friend stories, 7 unfinished rounds of Deserted Island, and one Booze Bus story later, I had arrived home around 1030PM last night and stupidly decided to post my pictures from the Stillers game online (which can be found here, or on my Facebook account) which allowed me to be in bed by 1130PM.

Next thing I knew my alarm was going off and I had to be at work in less than an hour. WTF? Where did my weekend go?

¹Lemmings (as in the Lemmings video game series) are small, green-haired humanoid beings that mindlessly walk en masse into any danger in their path, following the popular myth that real lemmings behave in a similarly suicidal fashion (Wikipedia).

So you’ve probably heard of The Booze Cruise (made infamous by that episode of The Office in season 2), but Tuesday I went on The Booze Bus to Baltimore. So check this out, the past few days Rockwell Automation has been having their annual automation conference where thousands of people from all over the world come and gather, exchange and display project ideas, pretend like they are the smartest people ever, and give hand on labs and lectures regarding the latest in automation technology. So our distributor of Allen Bradley products took a few of us down to Baltimore to join the “festivities.” These are the actual events that took place during this three-day “business” adventure.

So our coach bus left Ebensburg around 3PM on Tuesday headed for Baltimore. About 5 minutes into the drive one of the guys in the back of the bus yells, “Who wants some beer?” Here the group from Pittsburgh brought 3 cases of beer with them to make the trip go quicker. Our whole bus group consisted of about 20 people (somehow there were 23 people on the bus on the way down, but only 19 on the way back. I don't quite understand that, but oh well, I'm not one of the four that may or may not be super upset). So the whole flippin’ bus partied all the way down to MD. Then Tuesday night we checked into our hotel, unpacked and got back on the bus to go to Cheers, a sports bar and grill, where it was CED-paid-for all you can eat and drink until 10PM. So me, and and a few other members of The Booze Bus started the evening with beers. And then moved on to more beers, at which point I then moved on to hard liquor, and then more hard liquor and more hard liquor and the next thing you know, it’s time to leave. The bus ride home was entertaining as the whole flippin’ bus was hammered!

So wake up time came pretty early there in Baltimore, especially for some members of our group who were unable to get themselves out of bed and down the hotel stairs. Another group member nearly threw up on the way to the conference, but eventually everyone caught up with each other Wednesday afternoon at the fair exhibits. So Wednesday evening we were wined and dined at Camden Yards (yeah that’s right, the ball park). There we had a tour of the ballpark and got to step onto the field and enter the dugout. Also of course we drank, and drank, and then came back to the hotel and drank some more.

Now the trip back was its own adventure, but let’s flashback to Wednesday morning though first. Our hotel was approximately 17 miles from the convention center and we were told we had to take the train to get there, as our bus would not be making the trip. However we opted to get on The German Bus that was on it’s way to the same convention center from our hotel. Who were these Germans in suites on the bus? We have no idea, but it was free and it worked.

So lets get back to the trip from Camden to our hotel. We were supposed to take the train back to our hotel from the ballpark, however we opted to hop on The Syracuse Bus that, low and behold was on its way back to our same hotel. Since we heard the train took about 1.5 hours to get back, and there may be approximately 3 white people on board, there wasn’t much of an option. So we pretend we were from Syracuse and began to make our way back. Then we missed our exit on the highway so we turned around, at which point we missed it again coming back. After about an hour we pasted a road sign that read, “Camden Yards next exit.” WTF! We were going in a flippin’ circle! So then we stopped at a gas station where some guys caught a smoke and bought some Nowalators (which apparently were 50 cents, but used to be 5 cents when they were in school). The bus driver then got off the bus and just started walking around. Sweet mother! We just wanted to get back to the hotel! So we beeped the horn and hollered for everyone to get back on the bus (keep in mind, we are just stowaways on this bus). So they got back on and finally after an hour and a half of driving, and stopping and driving again, we made it back to the hotel.

Once back we, of course drank some more. Are you kidding me?! I thought this was going to be a job function affair? It turned out to be The Booze Bus Party of the Century! It had been quite some time since I had that much to drink in two nights.

So now we’re sitting on The Booze Bus making our way back to PA as I’m typing this. Half the bus is hung over and the other half is talking about trains that don’t have steering wheels. Oh yeah, I did get see some booths and junk at the fair, but all I kept thinking about was, “I can’t believe people couldn’t get out of bed this morning!” And then of course I would laugh out loud to what other people there must have only perceived as me being retarded.