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I came home today and the entire house reeked mildly of skunk.

Ostensibly a skunk, or some angry skunk ghost spirit, got into the house two days ago while I was spending the weekend at Wai’s.  The increasingly intense smell which my Dad described as “burnt rubber” prompted him to go on an in house skunk hunting adventure in the middle of the night.

After finding nothing, the next day him and Jon tore up the basement trying to figure out where the skunk actually was.  His plan was to air out the house, and then locate the skunk based on the leftover smell.  I wasn’t here for this, but as I was being told this story I was hoping with all my heart that they found the skunk and it sprayed one of them in the face and attacked the other.

But they didn’t find it, and after some cursory internet searching my Dad learned that skunks are nocturnal.  So at 5 past the witching hour that night he went outside in his robe, with a brick, and a flashlight.  I guess he had the brick just to plug up the skunk’s burrow, but I’m sure he would have chucked the brick or at least postured with it as a weapon if he saw the skunk.

Anyway, he found a burrow under our front stairs, but instead of a skunk there was a possum, which did what possums do… and just stared at him.  He stared back, and after about a minute of the two staring at each other my Dad went back into the house to do more research on the internet about possums.

Wikipedia says they’re pretty harmless, and he guesses that the possum got sprayed by the skunk and stunk up our house by proximity.  They don’t fight cats or dogs or eat wood or anything.

So now we have a new pet possum who lives by our front doorsteps.

I’ve got a problem. I like writing on Twitter much more than I like writing on this blog. I am actually pleased that it exists and I think that 140 characters is the superior blogging format.

Now, let me help you get something straight here. I know damn well that 99% of Twitter is crap. Most people mistakenly respond to Twitter’s prompt “What are you doing?” with what they are actually doing at the time. Eating, lamenting the weather, being depressed. I do not care.

In fact, really only follow @Waiyeecita, @Perrymecium, and @CobaltIfinity. They’re my 1%. “Johnny Depp looks even more like Elijah Wood in IMAX 3D than he does on the posters. If nothing else, see it for the Tron Preview”. That little tidbit of information is actually something I wanted to know, something that doesn’t warrant a blog post, and probably wouldn’t come up in conversation considering that this is real life and not Seinfeld.

Beyond passively partaking, I like writing. This is because most of the hatred that I want to archive in the cloud for all of time is already instantaneous and under 140 characters. “Quentin Tarantino should have won Best Director for most Nazi’s killed in a movie,” is all I wanted to say. It’s still relevent a day later, but I probably wouldn’t have been motivated to say it if I had to wait or if I had to write a coherent post.

Tweets are not without thought either. Like I’m sure my 1% does, I pause for a bit to think about each tweet that I send out. It’s a punchline. How do I make it fit? Is this how I want to say it? This might make me a tool, but since I already have a blog, I don’t think it really matters.

I’m fresh off Team USA’s loss to the Canadian ice hockey team in the Olympics, so excuse me if I sound a little more cynical than normal.

But sports do nothing but break my heart.

The Cubs almost making the playoffs, the Illini losing to North Carolina, the Bears forgetting they were at the superbowl, and now Team USA all make for a very dismal sport-watching-career for me.  It’s not like I watch sports a lot, I only tune in for the big games where one of my guys is in it.  But I still get riled up!  And no matter what, I almost always have my dreams shattered.

Getting emotionally invested in a game must be bad luck.  Even Apolo Ohno, my half-asian brother, got unfairly DQ’d when I started to watch his races and trailed behind the Canadians in the relay.  The only difference is that I was watching.

Still, the Olympics are pretty awesome.  I’m a little bit more inspired to be the best in the world at…. well… something.  I’ve got competition fever in me in short.  I don’t care what it is, I want to win.  Could I maybe be the best developer my company has ever seen?  Really good at school?  A Starcraft II master?  As long as I’m not watching myself, then it’s possible.