With great pride and joy, I would like to formally announce the newest notch on Jeff Sauer’s bedpost.

Last night I was out to dinner with my parents at Cody’s Roadhouse in the Tyrone mall near St. Petersburg, Florida. Wednesday night is 2 for 1 fajitas night, and we were on a mission to eat fajitas at a heavily discounted price! Apparently, so was the rest of Florida, because when we arrived at the joint (in its classy strip mall location), we were greeted by a 1 hour, 10 minute estimated wait time. Sifting through a sea of geriatrics, white trash with wispy stouches (my word for mustaches… it’s fun to say, and implies the person has a stache and is a douche, hence stouche), and all other kinds of depressing circus freaks, we had to decide whether or not it was worth waiting over an hour to get discounted fajitas. We ultimately decided yes and chose to wait it out in the bar area, and I am glad that we did.

That’s when I saw her. The prettiest darned thing I had ever seen in my life. The yin to my yang, the love of my life. I am now a believer in love at first sight. Every cliché about love and romance that I have ever read culminated in this one precious moment. Magically, the 70’s rock ballad “Dream Weaver” started playing in the background, and I glanced across the bar and saw my one and only. Amazingly, my parents were kind enough to document this moment with a photograph.

That’s not really what happened. As excited as it would make me to announce to you, blog readership, that I met and fell in love with this prune, I can’t tell that to you in good faith. But there is a story behind this blog post, oh yes, there is a story.

And that story may be even better than the prospects of locking lips with the Florida Raisin above.

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On November 16th 2003, Google commenced an update (the Florida update) which had a catastrophic effect for a very large number of websites and, in the process, turned search engine optimization on its head. It is usual to give alphabetical names to Google’s updates in the same way that names are given to hurricanes, and this one became known as “Florida”.
Source

Since I am a nerd who does search engine optimization for a living, when I decided on a title for this post, all I could think of was to call it my Florida Update. It just stuck in my head and even though it’s not completely on topic, I knew it had to be the title of this post. Fortunately, unlike the notorious Google Florida update from years ago, my Florida update has no negative implications or repercussions. In fact, it’s generally rosy on all fronts for Jeff Sauer.

For the past 4 years, my parents have rented a condo down in Florida. For the past 4 years, I have visited for 1-3 weeks. For the past 4 years, I have completely thrived in the situation.

Florida in February is my escape from the outside world. My escape from the harsh Minnesota winters. My escape from the ghost of “relations” past. My escape from working in an office or from home. My escape from day to day responsibilities. My escape from a poor diet and below freezing temperatures causing a lack of exercise. My escape from the little things in life that are either taken for granted, or over analyzed. It’s me time baby.

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If you enjoyed the NFC portion of this preview, then you’ll love the AFC! This post includes references to bursting burritos, cutting meat, explosive diarrhea, tough ass steak, consistency in rice, and medium salsa.

Here is the link.

Hey all - I wrote a guest post on a blog that is written by three of my college friends called TK on Toast.  They are sports nuts and their site is pretty awesome.  It is written from the point of view of a sports fan (with a slight Minnesota bias), and I think they are doing a great job.

Anyway, they have a feature on their blog where they let their friends do guest posts and sound off on whatever topic they like to talk about.   I decided to do an NFL playoffs preview comparing playoff teams to ingredients in a Chipotle burrito.  It turned out to be a pretty solid post, and I encourage you to read it if you have any interest in the NFL or Chipotle.

Today’s post was about the NFC playoffs.  Tomorrow I cover the AFC.  Enjoy!

2008 Burrito Bol - NFC Playoffs Preview  

As part of my livelihood, as well as lifestyle, I am required to be on the Internet pretty much all the time. As a result, I come across awesome web sites pretty much every single day. I am always emailing and IM’ing the funny sites that I find to my friends, and I figured I should also post some of them on here too. Check these out!

Site - Hot Chicks with Douche Bags

Synopsis - This site is amazing. The author (DB1), posts pictures of beautiful women accompanied by guys who are total Douche Bags. He posts several times a day, and it is always hilarious. There is at least one post a day that makes me literally laugh out loud. I wish I would have come up with this idea years ago when I defined the term “Douche Nozzle” on the Urban Dictionary (I am sowcow50).

Signature Post - The Gator. This guy is the epitome of douchedom; the fake tan, the blank stare, the overly tight shirt. You name it, he can ‘bag it.

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After spending over a week in Europe, and not being able to speak the common language of the public, I was delighted to be heading to Barcelona for a weekend trip. I took countless years of Spanish in high school and actually was proficient enough in the language that I tested out of my college language requirement. For whatever reason, I just naturally picked up Spanish without even studying. I think it has to do with the fact that my family watched the movie La Bamba like 500 times when I was growing up, and the fact that I have a Mexican uncle. Or maybe I was just born to speak Spanish; who knows.

Anyway, after spending a week in Europe, and the only words that people said to me in public were “Speak English?” from the beggars in Paris and “Hey man, Coke” from the drug dealers in Amsterdam, I was totally pumped to use my Spanish while in Barcelona.

Since Barcelona was pretty far away from Brussels, taking a train was not an option. Fortunately, there is a discount airline that flies out of a town called Charleroi (which is south of Brussels), that offered flights to the Barcelona area for like 100 Euros (commercial airlines charged 400-500 for the same flight). The airline is called Ryan air, and it is pretty well known in Europe as the cheap way to travel. For those of you who haven’t traveled the airline, imagine flying on Sun Country airlines with the self seating arrangement of Southwest airlines. Throw in a dash of utter chaos, some rough landings, and a perfect 10 on the “there’s a good chance I’m going to shit my pants on this flight because I’m scared that we’re going to die” scale, and you have Ryan air.

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Tyler and I went to Amsterdam on a Wednesday for one night. Coincidentally, two business associates of mine, Dallas and Rob, were actually in Amsterdam at the same time, meeting with the Dutch company that we sell coffee for in the US. The company is called Smit and Dorlas, and they are headquartered in Amsterdam. Our site is the exclusive seller of this coffee in the USA. It’s some great coffee, so buy some if you’re a coffee aficianado!

We arrived in Amsterdam via a train from Paris. It was a 4 hour train ride, which was sort of annoying because it ate up much of our day, but it was nice because the train took us right into Amsterdam’s central train station, so we were about 2 blocks from our hotel when we arrived. I booked the hotel online (much like I did for Paris), so I had no idea what to expect. Booking hotels in Europe is a complete crapshoot. You can pay over $100 Euro a night for a shoe box of a hotel (aka our France hotel), or you can pay the same or less for a gigantic room right in the center of the city (which happened to us in Amsterdam).

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There’s nothing more romantic than spending two nights in Paris with your friend since 3rd grade. On second thought, I hope that there’s a lot of things that are much more romantic than this scenario. Anyway, Ty and I went to Paris about 5 days into our Europe trip, and we ended up having a great time. We got lucky as well, because this is a trip that almost never happened.

The night before we were supposed to leave for Paris, Ty came down with an illness. This wasn’t good, because when Ty gets sick, he REALLY gets sick. I could hardly sleep that night because I was worried that if Tyler couldn’t go to Paris (we had already booked hotels and $400 worth of train tickets), then this could really throw off our entire Europe trip.

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After spending a few days in Brussels, we decided that we needed a change of scenery. We went to the train station, and on a whim, we chose to board a train to Antwerp (quite inexpensive too, about $4 US). None of us knew much about the town (go figure), so we just decided to hop on a train and check things out. The train ride took about 40 minutes, and we were immediately impressed by the beauty of Antwerp.

We left the train station and walked around with no destination in mind. Within a few minutes it became clear that we made a good choice in visiting Antwerp. The town was beautiful, busy, and had the perfect combination of modernity and history. There was a very long street filled with every designer shop imaginable. Just beyond the street, we could see a towering cathedral peaking out above the buildings. We walked down the street with the cathedral as our ultimate destination.
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Brussels is the town where I spent most of my time while I was in Europe. Tyler and I flew into Brussels, and spent the entire first day trying to find the place we were staying in Waterloo, which is a town about 10 miles south of Brussels. This is where Tyler’s girlfriend, Aly, was staying, and she had arranged for us to stay there for a few days during our trip (as well as leave our large suitcases at the house so we didn’t have to carry them around all day).

Leading up to the trip, Tyler and I hadn’t really done any research at all as to where we were staying. In our defense, we were both working 14 hour days trying to get enough work completed so that we could justify leaving the country for 2 weeks. We were so ill-prepared that we didn’t even know the official language of Belgium! We soon learned that it was French (with Flemish also being spoken), but that didn’t help us much, since neither of us knew a single word of French. Yes, we were typical stupid Americans, but we were determined not to propel that stereotype, so we did our best to fit in. This didn’t always work very well.

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