My plans for having fun this weekend were altered because Adale & I got sick, and I actually was worse off than her. God damn germs. Didn't go see Wayne Hancock Sat night, no world record zombie walk Sunday. I did get to catch up on the third season of The O.C. (yeah Netflix!). I won't be done by the season 4 opener this Thursday and have not decided whether to start watching the season or not. Fortunately I have a few days to mull over the pros and cons. I just can't imagine how Marissa died.....car crash, jumping in front of a bullet to protect Ryan, overdose, who knows.

I did find out some pretty depressing information yesterday. While at a Barnes & Noble waiting to get a coffee I picked up a book on the counter. It was one of those dime-a-dozen business books, Success the Starbucks Way or something like that. I picked it up just pass the few minutes in line. The inside cover promotional text started off with a line about the success of Starbucks and how the stock had risen 5000% since 1992. I worked for Starbucks from 1990-1992, and right before I quit they were just beginning to give employees stock options. There was a three or five year vesting period where you had to work there before you could actually buy the stock. I did actually think about staying in order to get the stock but finally decided that I couldn't deal with working there for another 5 years in order to take advantage of the options. If I had stayed long enough to pick the options and still had them today I would be a multi-millionaire. Just $1000 in stock in 1992 would be worth $5,000,000 today. Instead I went to Indonesia for four months, and then moved to Dallas. Over the following two years I worked two different coffee jobs (one running an espresso cart, the other at the coffee shop at a Borders Books), so it's not like I turned my back on the service industry. I very easily could have worked for Starbucks (and would have if they were in Dallas). I very easily could be totally fucking rich right now. I used to think "I wish I had worked at Microsoft for a few years back in the day" only because I grew up close to where they started & it would awesome to have made millions in stock options, but that daydream was never realistic because I never wanted to have anything to do with computers. This is different, because I not only did I work at a place where I could have struck it rich, I enjoyed doing the job (more often than not). Things are going well for me right now, and I have tons of advantages because of my family, but it kind of sucks thinking that I could have been very rich.