BY THE NUMBERS

Here are a series of numbers to describe Captain Cheddarstorm's recent doings:

616: Estimated number of beers Captain Cheddarstorm has slain YTD. This is based on an average of 11 beers per week. The average accounts for the following:

• 2 "End of the Day Beers" per week. These are the beers that, in the 1950s, my wife, cooped in the house all day, would bring to me as I loosened my tie, mumbled "What a day," and turned on Edward Murrow's program after a long day at work. But since this is 2010, and I am a conscientious person who doesn't think one sex should be enslaved to the other, I'd usually just walk over to the fridge and get "end of the day" beer myself. Anyway, I don't have a wife or a girlfriend. Captain Cheddarstorm sails the high seas alone.

• 1 "Restaurant Beer" per week. I don't usually like getting beers when going out for food. It fills my stomach too much. I get scared that I'll end up like my father, Gout Gooser. He looks like one of those smartass kids who sticks a soccer ball in his shirt to pretend he's pregnant or fat. He's got skinny chicken legs but a bowling ball belly. He also has gout. God bless him.

• 7 "Weekend Beers" per week. These are the beers that I pound when we dock the ship in port and go out looking for a fun night on the town. I can easily put away seven on a Friday or Saturday night. But there are also about 7 weeks in the summer where I don't drink at all cause of my job. That skews down the number a little bit.

This comes to a total of 11 beers per week and 616 per year. That's really an ungodly amount. By definition, it might be alcoholism, right? More than one drink per day? I'm not sure if the estimate is accurate. I want to start keeping track so I can know for sure.

516: Number of Facebook friends I have. This is disgusting. If there were a sporcle quiz where I had two hours to name all my FB friends, I'd probably only get about 30-40 percent. My FB friend list is basically an inventory of everyone I've ever shook hands with and introduced myself to in the past 6 years, minus old people and business colleagues.

91: Wins I expect the Mets to have this season. Hopefully enough for the division or Wild Card.

81: Days since Captain Cheddarstorm last posted on his blog. I just lost steam for about a week or two around Christmas and New Years. Then, after that, I was too ashamed to click on my blog link cause it had been such a long time since I logged in, and I had made a vow to update every day when I started the blog. The problem got exponentially worse. Each day I ignored my blog, I felt less inclined to open it, etc. I had some free time tonight and didn't feel like playing guitar, so decided to exorcise my demons. But I'm already getting bored. I hope I can come up with some good numbers to make the rest of this interesting for both me and you.

35.13: GB of music I have on my computer. This is alarmingly high, considering I have only about 23 GB of freedom left on my hard drive. Let's check out some of the stuff I've never even listened to:

• Animal Collective: everything I have by them is unplayed except "My Girls." Man. Going to the zoo freaks me out and so does listening to Animal Collective. I might change my mind one day.
• Dispatch: why can't I bring myself to delete these jokers from my iTunes? Fuck, maybe one day I'll really want to listen to "The General" while kicking around the hackey sack on the quad while skipping classes.
• Elliot Smith: nearly all his albums are unlistened to. I really liked Either/Or in high school but I only have patience for so many death-voiced introverts, and I currently prefer Conor Oberst.
• Lou Reed: I recently downloaded Transformer but haven't listened yet. I'll get around to it.
• Minus Story: Goddamn I can't believe I would listen to this stuff when I was homesick freshman year of college. One more band, this is getting sad.
• Spank Rock: I tried to listen to this a few times, probably after I came home from Urban Outfitters and wanted to be more urban. I wanted to like it. I wanted to be cool. It didn't happen.

15: Number of days I've been skiing this year. Really disappointing considering I live 30 minutes from my mountain. I'm going to get in 7 days week while in Salt Lake City, so that should bump me up toward my season goal of 30.

Alright. Getting uninspired. Last number:

2: Number of haircuts I got in 2009. One in the spring and one in September. I'm at 0 for 2010. I'll probably get one in the spring or the fall. I'll keep you guys updated on that.

Dinner time.

God be with you.

CAPTAIN CHEDDARSTORM