After a week of silence, you might be asking yourself "Where's Enke?"

Enke's got sidetracked with some other stuff and entered a short term shame spiral for neglecting his readers.

Enke's ship has been righted. Expect his regular return no later than next week.

Thanks for keeping the faith.

Matt's art dealer friend showed up Tuesday night to check out the mummy. He had a moustache with a little goatee and shoulder length hair cut straight at the shoulders.

It made him look like Robin Hood.

He said he might be able to move it, but the foul odor and salsa stains were going to make it difficult. He said he'd make some calls and get in touch with us yesterday. He never did.

The mummy's gotten better about leaving the volume on the TV at an acceptable level and he doesn't usually break stuff in the cabinets if we leave him some food before we go to bed. Matt got hooked up with a couple cases of fruit snacks and the mummy seems to like those, so I think we're in the clear for the time being.

Yesterday they moved Oscar to the cube in front of Angela. The desk is right under the heating vent and Oscar's really fat, so he spent all yesterday bitching about the heat.

At one point he said he was "hotter than a ten peckered mink". Later, he said the heat was drying him up "like a camel's cunt".

They might as well have moved Oscar's desk right into HR.

This mummy sucks.

On Thursday the cops came because "we" were watching a 'Planet of the Apes' marathon with the volume all the way up.

We kept them waiting at the door for way too long as it took us awhile to distinguish 'cop banging at the door' noise with 'mummy ripping the fixtures out of the kitchen walls' noise.

When we finally determined the source of the noise to be police at the door, we rock-paper-scissored it to see who would go out to talk to the cops while the other two were subduing the mummy.

I 'won'.

I got out and the Chinese family from upstairs and body builders from the downstairs were standing behind two very pissed off looking police officers. One of the cops asked why it took me so long to answer the door, and I told him I was sleeping.

He told me I was lucky because the people behind him hadn't been able to get to sleep on account of the noise coming from my apartment. He told me to tell whoever had the TV on to keep it down or they were going to come back an issue a citation.

I heard bottles breaking as I shut the door behind me.

I walked into the kitchen to see the mummy standing in front of the fridge with half the contents emptied out on the floor. A couple of pickles were laying in a pool of broken glass and brine. The mummy was standing on a tube of mustard with its face stuck in a jar of mayonnaise.

Gerald said it went for the fridge the instant they turned the TV off.

Matt taped up the volume button on the remote so it wouldn't work. We didn't have any problems for the rest of the night.

The next day Gerald and I went through work half asleep. I could hear Angela making wedding plans all day.

First she called up the bakery to talk about the cake. Then she called her fiance to talk about the cake. She accused her fiance of not caring about the cake and not caring about the wedding. Then she called her mom to cry about her fiance, and then went off to the bathroom for 30 minutes for the assumed purpose of crying some more.

Sue came by and asked where she was. Gerald said she looked drunk when she got in.

When we got home that night it smelled like the mummy had pooped in its wrapper. We weren't sure whether it was actual poo or whether the thing just stunk from all the food sitting in its body undigested.

We wanted to change its bandages so it would stink less, but Matt's antiquities trader friend is supposedly coming over Tuesday to take the thing away (hopefully).

On Saturday we found out the mummy had changed our Tivo settings and we had about 10 hours of QVC saved to it. We ended up getting a bottle of Tequila and watching it with him. I think we might have even had him answer the door when the pizza came.

Somehow, between the booze and the sleep deprivation, we've found a way to live normally around a 3,000 year old man that smells like a dumpster watching the same 10 hours of people peddling collectible dolls and antique swords for 30 hours straight.

Gerald's even gotten comfortable enough to take advantage of the situation. He blamed the mummy for his dirty dishes and all the pornos that showed up on our cable bill this month.

He's also been saying, "Mummy - kill!" when he sees someone he doesn't like on TV. Matt and I both wince every time he says it, but it seems to crack Gerald up pretty good.

So far, he's put hits out on Rachel Ray, Dr. Phil, this lady from a Febreeze commercial, Ryan Seacrest, Anderson Cooper, and the Hamburglar.

I've told Gerald there's blood on his hands if any of them end up dead.

Matt's friend will be here tomorrow to look at our friend, so we ordered pizza to celebrate. We got the mummy a jar of queso and a 2 liter of creme soda from the dollar bin at the supermarket.

Might as well send him off in style.

Last night Gerald, Matt and I barricaded ourselves in the room again. We didn't want to be accessible when the mummy found out we locked the cabinet with all the snacks in it.

This time, he watched old war movies with the volume turned up all the way.

We got up this morning to find one of the cabinet doors hanging off the other by the baby lock Matt had put on. The mummy had consumer a jar of salsa and half a container of powdered cocoa mix.

He was laying in the box right where we left him. There was a salsa stain on one of his bandages.

When we got into work, we rode the elevator up with this guy who works on our floor with the blind guy who hates the animal lover. He always asks us if we just started and then introduces himself like we've never met before.

Gerald thinks he suffered some type of brain injury that keeps him from forming new memories. Today I told him my name was Clarence.

When we got home, Matt was standing in our doorway talking with two of the upstairs neighbors. It was a little girl and her grandmother, who only speaks Chinese.

The grandmother would yell at Matt, and the little girl would translate for her. It was pretty funny, as the girl kept acting out her grandmother's mannerisms as she translated.

They were complaining about the noise and said they'd call the cops tonight if it happened again.

Matt said we should write the mummy a note, but I wasn't entirely sure he could read. If he could, I assumed he could only read heiroglyphics, and I can't imagine there's a glyph for "television".

We ended up drawing a picture that showed a TV with jagged lines coming out of it to symbolize sound and a stick figure holding his hands over what would be his ears. I hope this gets the message across.

Last night the mummy kept us up watching the Game Show Network. There was a Price is Right marathon on.

I've had the theme stuck in my head all day. I would have been happier if that mummy had strangled us.

We were all too afraid to go out and tell him to turn it down. No one wanted to see that mummy watching TV with his dried up eyes.

When the morning came, we walked outside to find the mummy in the box right where we left him. It looked like he had trashed the rest of the apartment.

There was an open box of Oreos and a bunch of half eaten cookies on the table. Beside it was an empty carton of milk.

It looked like he had been drinking it right out of the container.

We went into the kitchen to find a bunch of tortilla chips and Cheerios scattered across the floor. This mummy is a total slob.

Gerald and I had to get to work, so Matt said he'd clean up. I thought it was only fair, as he was the one who wanted to keep the stupid thing.

Gerald and I spent all day at work Googling mummies. I used a bunch of different keywords to see if I could find out who our houseguest was:

"sloppy pharoah"
"messy pharoah"
"sloppy king egypt"

etc.

All Gerald found was a place you could order Yummy Mummy cereal in bulk. That stuff has been of the market for 15 years or so and Gerald was ready to order a case of it.

I figured he'd probably eat one bowl, find out it was stale, and leave the rest of the case in the corner of the kitchen until someone threw a tablecloth on it and turned it into a wet bar or something.

I told him they took that cereal off the shelf because kids who ate it were going blind. It seemed to work.

We got home and the mummy was still in his box. Matt said he hadn't seen it move all day.

Matt had equipped all the cabinets and the fridge with those baby-proof locks in the hopes that would keep the mummy from making a mess again. I don't know why he's already doing stuff to piss the thing off, but I'm also not the one who's going to have to pick up after it.

Gerald and I got stuck driving behind a station wagon on our way to work today. There were kids in the back seat and the woman was driving real slow.

It had been awhile since I had driven behind a station wagon, and I forgot how awkward it was to drive with people looking back at you. It's like going to a restaurant and being sat at a table with complete strangers.

Gerald got sick of driving behind her and started flashing his hi-beams so she'd let him pass. She started veering back and forth on the road as if she was taunting us. The kids started rocking from side to side in the back. One of them gave us the finger.

At one point, she slammed on the brakes and Gerald sped up and drove around. I saw the woman throw a Snapple bottle at us as we drove off.

When we got to the cemetary to park, I saw the station wagon pull in not too long after us. It came to a stop about 10 feet from us as we were about to hop the fence.

The woman driving had three kids in the back seat in addition to the two in the way back. The space that wasn't taken up by kids was filled with garbage.

She said, "What the fuck are you doing driving like that?" Gerald told her that wasn't any way to speak in front of her kids. She swore some more.

We hopped the fence and started walking to work. I looked up and saw Sue looking down at us.

I didn't read anything in the employee handbook about not making arrangements to park closer to the office, but I have to imagine they'd rather not have said arrangements involve a cemetary.

Sue walked by us as we walked in and didn't say anything. Either she doesn't care where we park or she's getting ready to fire us.

When Gerald and I got home, Matt was sitting in the living room with the crate on the floor in front of him. He said Mitch, the guy who took the slushy machine, had brought it back.

Mitch said he couldn't find anyone interested in a crate of fragile steak knives. I could see the crate had been pried open.

Matt said he decided to open up the crate when it came back, and said we should have a look at what's inside. He lifted off the top to reveal what looked like at first like a bunch of sliced up sheets and some large pieces of beef jerky poking out of it.

Beef jerky shaped like two hands. Beef jerky shaped like two feet. Beef jerky shaped like a head with a face.

It was a whole body of beef jerky. It was a whole body.

"That's a body," I said.

We all paused a moment. Gerald said, "That's a fucking mummy, dude!"

We all sat and stared some more. It sure looked like a mummy.

Gerald wanted to get rid of it. He said his cousin lived next to a cranberry bog, and we could dump the thing in there.

Matt said we weren't going to dump it. He knew someone who 'traded in antiquities' who'd be able to come by and have a look at it in a few days.

I wondered if this was the same person who traded in groundhog hats and slushy machines.

I told Matt I liked the cranberry bog idea better, as there was a lot less potential for getting strangled in our sleep by the undead. Matt said there was no way we could get rid of it tonight, as none of us have a car that could fit the box and we didn't have a bag we could load the mummy into.

So, the plan is to barricade ourselves overnight in my room and use tonight's success at not getting killed to forecast how the rest of the week will go.

Today Gerald got in trouble for trying to give part of his sandwich to the seeing-eye dog of this blind guy at work. I guess you're not supposed to feed them, as it keeps them 'off task' when they should be keeping their master from walking over open manholes and such.

The blind guy's job is to come around and collect the trade sheets we fill out whenever we perform a transaction on someone's account, but it seems his job also entails keeping people from bothering his dog.

He's even gone so far as to put a sign on the dog's harness that reads "Please don't feed or pet me while I'm working".

It's funny that he wrote the message as if it came from the dog, but I guess it's no more feasible that he wrote the thing himself.

Fitzy was telling me the blind guy works next to this woman named Ruth who's a real animal lover. I guess she kept buying the dogs treats and toys until the blind guy finally flipped out on her.

They had to have a meeting with HR to resolve the whole thing, and now their correspondence is limited to e-mails passed through their manager. I guess Ruth has been caught using a dog whistle on more than one occasion since.

We haven't been parking in the remote lot since Gerald rented that plot in the cemetary next door, but today someone mentioned how the "beater everyone threw their trash in" had been removed. I guess someone saw a bunch of coyotes hanging around there late one night and complained.

We got home tonight and the box was still gone. Matt said he had found someone interested in the groundhog hats, too.

It's a President's Day miracle!

We had today off from work on account of it being a market holiday. I think our company likes their customers to think we're answering calls on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and they feel shutting down the call center when the market closes maintains this illusion.

Gerald and I had a fairly uneventful day drinking beer and watching Animal Planet. After the weekend, we needed a day to decompress.

That box really scratched the hell out of our floors, but Gerald said the landlord might understand if we told him the situation. I agreed with him, only because I wanted to see him explain how the marks on our floor were caused by a haunted box we stole out of the back of someone's car.

After telling him that, I got that feeling you get after feeding peanut butter to a dog.

On Friday I told Matt he was going to have to store the steak knives in his room if he wanted to keep them. Saturday morning I found him sleeping on the couch in the living room under a bunch of towels.

He said he woke up to find the box next to his bed "chirping". He ran out of his room and was too scared to go back in for his blanket, so he ended up grabbing towels out of the bathroom for warmth.

We both decided the best thing to do was to get rid of the box, and brought it out to the curb.

That night Gerald and I went to Reynaldo and Marcia's party. We didn't really want to go, but we figured we'd head there a bit late so a crowd would have already gathered, say hi, then take off unnoticed.

Gerald said there was a bar down the street that had $5 pitchers and free hot dogs, so we could go there after.

We got there a little after 10, and the party consisted of Marcia and five people from the prison she works at. She said Reynaldo had just left to drive her cousin home and would be back in awhile.

They were all in the middle of a game of poker, so Gerald and I grabbed a beer and sat on the sofa next to the table. One of the guys was telling a story about how he paid someone $50 to take a shot of pepper spray to the face.

No one really acknowledged our presence. It was sort of like we were watching the whole party through a two way mirror.

Gerald got up after finishing his first beer. Around 30 seconds later he called me on my cell phone and said he was waiting outside. He told me to make up some excuse to get up so I could meet him out there and we could leave.

I asked Marcia where the bathroom was. She pointed in the exact opposite direction of the front door. I went into the bathroom, washed my hands, and walked back through the living room and right out of the apartment.

When I got out, Gerald said he didn't want our exit to be all awkward. I failed to see the grace in making me look like an asshole.

We went to the bar with the free hot dogs afterwards and went home to find the door to our apartment was left open. Matt wasn't home and the place smelled of old leaves.

I was taking my shoe off in the hallway when Gerald walked into the living room and asked what the box of steak knives was doing in there. I walked in to see it standing right in the middle of the room.

I wondered how in hell it got the door open.

I stood there staring for a bit while Gerald looked at me and asked again. I told him Matt and I had put it out on the curb.

He asked how it got back in the apartment then, and I said I thought it got itself back in the apartment. He laughed and asked how the thing got the door open.

I had been a bit reluctant to let Gerald in on what had gone on around the box, mostly because I didn't believe a lot of it myself. I wasn't entirely convinced it wasn't just me until Matt got spooked by the thing, too.

I explained to Gerald what happened, and told him I thought we should leave the box back out on the curb. He wanted to crack the thing open, and went looking for tools.

He ended up trying to pry it open with a hammer and a screwdriver, but ended up breaking the screwdriver in half. He said he'd keep the box in his room if it scared me that bad.

Later that night, I woke up with Gerald in my bed. He said he woke up to a thump and turned on the light to see the box move.

As he was telling the story, we heard a thump again. Then another one.

It sounded like the thing was making its way down the hall.

The rest of the night Gerald and I sat awake listening to this box thump its way around the apartment. It stopped at some point, and both of us managed to fall asleep.

When I woke up Gerald was spooning me, and Matt was standing above us asking why we brought the box back in the apartment. He didn't seem to want to cover why we were in bed together.

We walked out of my room to find the box lying diagonally in Gerald's bedroom doorway.

Matt said he had someone coming by with a truck to drop off a few TVs. The guy had is own waste disposal company, so he'd ask if he could take the crate with him.

The guy came by and asked Matt why we were getting rid of it. Matt said no one wanted to buy a crate of fragile steak knives.

Matt's buyer didn't show up for those creepy steak knives tonight, so I ended up sleeping on the couch. There's something wrong in principal with being driven out of your room by a box you believe to be haunted, but I wasn't so interested in getting into a war of ideals with possessed cutlery.

When I checked this morning, the box was laying across my bed over my pillow. I think I made the right decision.

Gerald drove to work, and let me know on the way he had made arrangements to park a bit closer than the remote lot today. We drove towards the office, and too the right before that into the cemetery behind our building.

Apparently, Gerald had the idea awhile back that he was going to play a plot owner a small fee to park on their empty spot, and one Ernest DiGiacomo was all to happy to take him up on the offer. We got a spot right in front of the fence along our parking lot, right next to Mr. DiGiacomo's late wife.

They moved Angela to the cube next to mine. She said it was too loud where she sat and asked to be moved.

Angela is marrying this guy named Joey this summer, and she beats him mercilessly. She must have called him five times over the course of the day.

"No, Joey! Call her back and tell her we want the red ones. The RED ONES!"

"Don't wait for me in the parking lot Joey. I'll call you when I get there."

"Joey, you're not listening, Joey! Joey, are you playing Tetris? ... Well, I hear the music in the background!"

As much as I've disliked working with Angela thus far, being around her sort of makes me appreciate the times she's not around more. Poor Joey doesn't have that pleasure.

Today two people were driving through the cemetery as Gerald and I hopped the fence and got into his car. I think I could have gotten a nicer look from them if I had exposed myself.

Last night I fell asleep with the crate of steak knives sitting on the floor across from my bed. I had a dream I woke up and I could hear someone crying inside the box. Matt ended up giving me this big metal spoon his grandmother brought over "from the old country", which I used to pry the crate open.

I don't know if such a spoon exists, but it made sense in the dream.

When I got it open, a man with no skin popped out and started gnawing on my arm. He said he wanted to eat my muscles.

I'm unsure how he said it while chewing on my arm, but I remember that part distinctly. I also remember being most freaked out by the fact he didn't have any lips. The "no skin" and visible musculature didn't really phase me all that much.

I woke up kind of shaken up by the whole thing to find the steak knife crate standing upright in the corner of my room. I had to sort of sit and stare at it for awhile to make sure it wasn't part of the dream. Then I heard a rattling sound that I *thought* came from inside the crate and ran for the door.

Matt's girlfriend must have been using the bathroom while I was asleep and locked the door from the other side, trapping me in my room with the definitely moving and potentially rattling crate of fragile steak knives.

I ended up climbing out on my fire escape and banging Gerald's window with a hockey stick so he could let me out of my room. I slept on the couch for the rest of the night.

It was snowing all last night and Sue sent out an e-mail before we left work letting us know the blizzard was NO EXCUSE for not showing up for work on time. Gerald and I both got up late because I wasn't sleeping near my alarm clock, and Gerald didn't have me to wake him up on time.

We got to the remote lot a little later than usual. Whoever plowed the lot had pushed all the snow around the garbage car we stole the steak knives from so all you could see was the bent door of the trunk sticking out.

A bunch of empty coffee cups and other breakfast related rubbish was stuck in the snowbank right above where the trunk would be. I guess old habits die hard.

Gerald and I got to the office a bit late, and Tom was waiting by our desks. I told him we were late on account of the storm, and he told us it wasn't snowing in California.

I told him it wasn't 9 AM in California. He went back in his desk to verify the fact.

When I got home the crate was still standing in the corner of my room along with a bunch of other boxes that weren't there when I left. Matt said his buyer couldn't make it out due to the storm, but should be here tomorrow.

He said the other boxes were surplus Groundhog Hats that were supposed to be sent to the Groundhog's Day celebration in Punxatawney, PA and ended up getting 'misrouted'. Something tells me they were misrouted off a loading dock into the back of Matt's car.

He apologized for throwing them in there and said he didn't have anywhere else to put them. He said he'd give me 15% of whatever he took in if I let him keep them there.

I said it was OK, more because I want the 15% so I can calculate what the going rate is on 600 post-holiday groundhog hats. With my luck, tonight's the night we get raided.