Where is H&R Block?

Dating is like taxes… there I said it! Dating is like doing your taxes. You have to do it, no matter what anyone says, as horrible or as wonderful as it might end up being you have to keep doing it, year after year. It might have been exciting the first couple times you did it, but the monotony of it soon catches up to you. You never know what you are going to get out of either experience, whether you are going to come out with a good return, or end up owing; isn’t known until the very end. A lot of it doesn’t make sense, and they keep changing the rules, and every time the rules change you seem to lose more. And finally the most important similarity, even though you can do it yourself, shouldn’t we leave this up to the professionals? What happened to arranged marriages?

25 Random Facts about me - Facebook got me in the end

1. I was a dual citizen of USA and West Germany... until I was 21.
2. Now I'm just a US Citizen
3. I have lived in 32 different places in my life... I also happen to be 32 years old - not sure what is going to happen next year... but it might be 33 for each.
4. In college I could do 20 pull-ups with 35 pounds tied to me. I can't do that anymore
5. I could also do a 360 dunk - I can't do that anymore either
6. I've been asked to speak in church this Sunday - it is at 1:00 if anyone wants to come.
7. I've been fluent in 3 languages in my life - none of those were German
8. The last vacation I went on was Mexico - I'm headed to Morocco this spring (trying to get all countries starting with the letter M - since that is the same as my last name.... okay - that last bit isn't actually true).
9. There are 5 kids in my family growing up - and it is my sister that sells athletic equipment in Florida
10. I have been an "expert witness" in court
11. I have dated 3 Miss USA Contestants, 2 Broadway Actresses, and 1 NFL Cheerleader and I’m still looking
12. When I started High School I was 5’1” and weighed 85 lbs
13. I am now 6’1” and weight 185 lbs – I think now is better than then
14. I have this strange desire to own leather bound books – I think it is distinguished
15. I once got paid to load a moving van with furniture in Switzerland while spending a month backpacking Europe – I think it was ligit
16. I was also accused of smuggling Lebanese women into France – which I didn’t do
17. I have been accused of smuggling cigarettes into the US from Canada – I didn’t do that
18. I did break into an embassy in Paris (of a certain south east Asian country), and didn’t get caught
19. I have never been married, nor asked anyone to marry me, but I think I might have been engaged once for a while
20. Every girl I have seriously dated has married the very next guy she went on a date with after we broke up (except for one)
21. I have literally saved several people’s lives, including my dad in a hotel room in Manhattan when he had a heart attack
22. The best/worst x-ray I ever saw was a 12 year old boy who had inserted an entire Suave Shampoo bottle up his rectum – he told his mom he slipped in the shower – she believed him
23. The x-ray I wanted to get even more was the guy who had a golf ball up his butt – he pooped it out just before we got the film
24. I have no idea why people want to stick stuff up there… I don’t want to know either, I wish people would stop trying to explain that to me when they come to the ER… just say you slipped and it happened to end up there
25. I once performed standup comedy on Broadway.... I was asked to come back

Good Luck Chuck.... er Moss

I'm not sure if anyone saw the movie "Good Luck Chuck." I saw part of it once, but I think the main point of the movie was this: there was a guy who dated girls and then they met the perfect guy - next... something like that.
Anyway, after today - I think I am the real life living version of this story. Every girl I have actually seriously dated in the past 10 years (save one) has met, got engaged to, and married the next guy that she met/dated... and it has never taken more than a year for this to happen - and it is ALWAYS the next guy. I mean seriously - looks at my surprising results. I ought to sell my dating services on late night infomercials.
"And it comes with a money back guarantee even - if this amazing product doesn't work for you all you have to do in return it in the mail..." "You'll be amazed by the results!" I could even get testimonials. "I used the Moss product and look at what it did for me, I was single - but now, husband, three kids, house, car, leer jet, pet leopard... the benefits don't stop there..."
Melissa - 1 year
Tana - 8 months
Andrea - 6 weeks
Nicole - 7 months
Koko - 6 months
Lissie (the one stand out of this group)
Nicole - 4 months
Leah - 3 months
Emily - 6 months
There you have it, the entire list of every girl I have seriously dated in the past 10 years and how long it was from the time that we broke up until they were married to someone else. And shockingly - every single one of those girls married the very next guy they went on a date with. I am shocked more girls are not trying to date me just for the near guarantee that they are going to marry the next guy that talks to them...
Anyway, the reason I bring this up today - just found out about the last one on the list - Emily getting married next month - a cool 6 months after we broke up.

6 months Later

Okay, I understand that it has been a long time since I actually wrote in this blog. I think it just comes down to the simple fact that I am not a great blogger. However, I am going to try to rectify that a little bit and try to help anyone catch up that wants to know what is going on in my life. Since I last wrote things of note:

1) Finished Residency in Emergency Medicine

2) Moved from Danville, PA to Eagle, ID

3) My youngest brother (Craig) got married to Katie

4) Vacation to Vegas

5) Sister (Lisa) moved to Florida

6) Start working in Idaho

7) Buy house in Meridian, ID and move in

I think that is a decent quick review of what has been happening in my life - in essence - I no longer live (and am sooooo thankful for this) on the east coast. I'm back west, I think where I belong a little better. I have a good job, life is treating me fairly well at the moment.

Beckwith's Biology Project

Everyone that attended High school had that one science teacher who was just a little off, he is the guy that gives all science teachers the image of being slightly out of their mind. Well, at Centennial High School ours was dear old Mr. Beckwith. Beckwith was the tenth grade Honors Biology teacher, and I believe the other Biology classes as well. He was an older gentleman, mostly bald on top, but with that crazy, brilliant white Einstein hair poking out all over the sides and back of his head. Then of course to top off the picture he had that giant tuft of white hair coming out of his shirt collar. It seemed to have a mind of its own and who would auspiciously unbutton that top button and come creeping up towards his throat. I do believe that if he didn’t try to force it back down every hour it would’ve wrapped itself tightly around his neck and strangled him in the middle of one of his lectures.
The year that Jeff and I were freshmen it seems that Mr. Beckwith had a student enter some national competition and win. Since he was her science teacher at the time and apparently he had collaborated with her, the two of then had won an all expense paid vacation to Florida to watch a shuttle launch. Beckwith’s good fortune in this one instance cost us, the following class, dearly. We were all forced to enter national competitions, as a way to “broaden our horizons and learn more about science that interested us as students.” Now, I have no problem with National Competitions, and I really don’t have a problem with forcing us to enter them, it is just when the purpose seems to be so that the teacher can receive another freebee trip to Florida that I begin to have a small problem. We were given plenty of time, told at the beginning of the year that we were to complete a national competition. We were even given leeway to do it ourselves or to get a group, we could enter any science based competition, it just had to be completed before February.
As far as options go this was one of the better projects of all time. The one problem was that we as students all knew that the only reason he was having us do this was so that he could win some prize that none of us cared about. Some students loved the idea from the onset (they would later come to curse his name). But we who started off cursing his name ended up alright.
My team consisted of three members, Jared Callister, myself, and of course my classic partner in all mischief Jeff McCauley. We choose our topic and proceeded to do just as most tenth graders do… procrastinate. While many of our fellow classmates began time consuming projects such as testing seventy different homemade fertilizers on green bean production, we chose a topic. We would do a report on the history and future of the telephone. We obviously chose this one because we couldn’t image that it could be all that difficult to do research. We really didn’t want to write a senior thesis with all the research involved. So we set out to do absolutely nothing for five months.
It truly is amazing how fast five months can pass you, the only way I can imagine it going faster is if you spent the entire time in a coma, or with the supermodel of your choice. Although I do believe, for the general population, falling into a coma by doing cartwheels off the top front end of a moving train and only landing on your head, with out getting run over by the train itself is more likely than dating Gisele for five months. One evening maybe, but most people can’t last forty-eight hours in a relationship like that, much less five months. Whatever, five months came and went, February arrived and Monday of that week, when it was due came. Monday came, but no one said one word about it until Tuesday – the project was due on Thursday. The next two evening were spent downstairs on that old fake oak children’s table we used to have writing, or should I say creating our report. I use the word creating our report, because other than the World Book Encyclopedia we didn’t have any reference material. Jeff and I contrived material out of thin air and wrote it with gusto while Jared began illustrating our work. We could called it a pure fiction book with hand drawn pictures when we were finished, but we couldn’t, we had to call it our five month project on the future of communications.
It was a masterfully done fraud. Eight pages of loosely put together information, complete with a stapled binding and crayon/colored pencil illustrations. It may have been one of our finer forgeries of all time, to say the least. It may not have looked good, but it sounded more intelligent than a State of the Union Address.
Well, Friday morning came around and just like everyday before, so did second period Biology. Right at the beginning of class Beckwith called for the projects. Jared, Jeff, and I gave each other one last look and passed our masterpiece of lies in. Beckwith took those papers with an almost greedy look, I think he had cotton balls in his mouth to suck up all the saliva he was salivating in anticipation to his next prize. He collected his “pets” and sat down to go over them while we were supposed to “read the chapter.”
It didn’t seem to take him long to come to ours. We were quickly called to the front of the room, all three of us. We knew we were in for it, having fabricated an entire report that he wanted to send into a national competition we were sure that we were heading straight to detention. We all moved with one accord to the front of the room to face the music. We crowded around his desk, he looked at us and said, “Boys you forgot to attach your bibliography.” I almost laughed, of course we forgot to attach our bibliography, we didn’t really want to write, “this report is from the minds of Jeff McCauley, Jared Callister, and Brian Moss.”
I quickly responded that we had indeed forgotten our bibliography and apologized for the oversight. I then quickly suggested that we be allowed to leave class to “go get it.” He understood and gave us the necessary pass. Slowly we walked from the room, the door clanked shut behind us, and we took off running at full speed to the library. Charging through the door we headed straight for the librarian and asked her to help us use the reference computers to find everything we had about telephones and communication. She helped us and up came thousands of references. That was no good so we cut down the search a bit. Ah, down to near two hundred references. Print. We grabbed them and began looking them up to see if they would apply. Until it struck us, how are these things going to apply, we made up the entire report? So like any good kids would do, we decided to just hand that in. Which we did. Only this time we made a mistake, we handed them in call numbers and all.
Beckwith didn’t buy it. He was a smart one, that Beckwith. He spotted right away that the call numbers were attached and that there was no way that was our true bibliography. So I took over once again. I told him how of course that wasn’t our real bibliography, our real one was at home. We had just hurriedly created that one so that we could turn it in. But that if Mr. Beckwith would give us passes to leave the school we would gladly go to my house and retrieve the lost bibliography! He bought it again and so we took off again, with the false bibliography we had just given Mr. Beckwith. I have no idea why he let us keep that forgery, but he did and it was a good thing he did. Of course at my house there was no bibliography either, but with the fake bibliography we had just printed off the libraries computer making one wasn’t too difficult. Thankfully we had a copy machine at my house and so we took as few of the two hundred references, basically the first fifteen that sounded like they might apply to our report. Cut them out and then removed the call numbers, next we placed them on the copy machine and whalla we had our bibliography, which had been “misplaced.” We returned to school, handed him our copied bibliography (if you looked close enough you could see black lines outlining each reference which represented the cut paper before copying took place). We really didn’t expect much from that project, especially when the grades started coming back, people that we knew had spent countless hours doing experiments and slide shows were receiving C grades. It wasn’t fair, we had resigned ourselves to a C at best, but more likely a D. As our group was called we went forward to retrieve our paper, and to get our grade… 95% A! As I said many students wound up cursing his name, we on the other hand couldn’t believe we had pulled it off. An A on a five month project that we did in two days and turned in an obviously bogus bibliography, the grading gods weren’t fair that day to the rest of the class, but they smiled down upon us who refused to take high school too seriously!

Frustrations of Paperwork

There are very few things in life that are more frustrating than coming to an impasse. In life, on the road, in a relationship, anything really works. When you are trying to get something done, or do something and you come to a place where you can't do anything else... it makes you feel like someone has dumped you in a giant glass jar and begun slowly filling up that jar with Caro-syrup. The sides are too high to reach and pull yourself out, and the glass is too slippery to shimmy out. You are trapped, no matter what you do, or how much you want to get out of the jar, you are one stuck ant. That is sort of where I am sitting right now, sitting and trying to get things taken care of for post-residency. I need to get a number of things done before I can start, such as Medical License, Pharmacy License, DEA #, Hospital Privileges.... and they all depend on each other, but you don't seem to be able to reasonably get one without the others already. And they all take too long to get. I know what I need to get done, but I am sitting on my hands while others take all the time in the world.
All I want to do is get all that paperwork finished...

Don't Rent - Find a Valet

It seems that I have been getting hammered by people that want a new entry on this thing - I honestly didn't realize that anyone really looked at my blog... So here we go... I just got home from Peru a couple days ago - now I could tell you how amazing Machu Pichu was... and it was, it is one of those things in life that you have seen photos of, and thought... " wow, that looks like a cool place" but once you are standing there, it is something entirely different.... you take some photos and think - my photos are going to totally capture the essence of Machu Pichu - but they can't capture the majesty.

However that wasn't what I was going to talk about. I just have one comment that I feel constrained to mention - if you ever go to Peru DO NOT rent a car. Up until this point in my life, I had always thought that the Italians were the worst drivers in the world. Peruvians make Italian drivers look like a small furry kitten playing with a feather on a warm summer afternoon. Peru on the other hand is a complete anarchy on the road, I don't believe that there are real driving laws (and was told that there are in fact no traffic cops). So lanes are bi-directional, speed - whatever your car will do, personal space is measured in millimeters between mirrors, drivers licenses are based on if you have enough cash to buy a car not on your ability to operate a vehicle, and finally roads are pot holed strips that lead somewhere - but not necessarily to where you want to go.

My advise - hire a cab, a driver, a guide, train, gondola, or any other method that you can think of that will keep you from renting a car in Peru.... with this in mind you too can have a wonderful Peru holiday.