A crap ton of comics and more

::I just finished posting a whole pile of strips to Help Wanted. I set my personal goal at a minimum of three per week. Well, I fell way behind and have just today caught up. Hopefully I can now stay caught up and even increase that number. Click here to go to the first in the lot. Also, I've added a link, titled "Next" (look how creative I am!), to each of the posts so you move through the strips without having to backward and forward a bunch of times. Thanks to Mark for suggesting the idea. :)

::Blogger forced me to move to the new version a while back. I am enjoying the faster posting. What's the big deal with labels though? Am I supposed to put some on for you people? I guess I first thought that Blogger picked them out, then I noticed the box to enter them in. I haven't bothered because, well, I couldn't be bothered. Does anybody even use these things?

::My work shedule is engineered so that I get off work on Friday by 4pm and don't have to go back until Sunday at 4pm. Besides giving me 48 hours of no work this has the added benefit of insuring that I can go out on Friday and/or Saturday nights if something is going on.

It's Saturday night and I can say that I don't feel like I've accomplished much, but I really did get a lot of little things done. I took a shit-ton of stuff to the recycling center (apartment building = no curbside pick-up), and that place was packed. Good job people. I watched Appleseed (meh, some fantastic cg animation, but v. doll-esque characters, and plot was a bit weak), Clerks (because I'd never seen the whole thing in one sitting), and a couple episodes of Firefly. Also various errands, including securing some cooking supplies.

::Because I decided to turn my kitchen into mad science does dessert this afternoon and do some cooking. So I made Peanut butter pie and mint chocolate truffles, mmmm, sinfully delicious.

Bounceback

Hi Blogland, it's me, Becky. You know that first day that you feel better after being ill (or in pain) for a while, the one where you're like "oh my god, this is the best day evAR!". Well for me, today is that day.

I came down quite ill last week. And no, it wasn't from running around without a coat. Let me tell you, if you've never had a bladder infection you should get down on your knees right now and thank whatever it is you thank that you should be so lucky. Go ahead, I'll wait.

All done? Great. So last Friday, after a week of that, I broke down and decided I needed to see a doctor. I hadn't been to a doctor in over six years, I forgot how much fun all of that is. Without medical insurance or a regular doctor I decided to go to the Ready Care at the county hospital. I wasn't in a life threatening situation and Ready Care is cheaper than the emergency room, so I thought that everything would be okay. I neglected to take into consideration the catastrofuck that is any trip to the Wood County Hospital.

All the old bat at the front desk could tell me was that the Ready Care didn't even open until 6pm. The girl in triage practically tried pushing me into a room so they could start "treating" me. I wasn't having any of it. I wanted to know what kind of fees I was facing first. She refused to tell me anything, said they couldn't know until after everything was said and done, that there was nobody who could tell me anything. Bullshit. I just said "Well, I guess I'll figure out something else then" and left. I had to because there were some choice four letter words and a good rant queuing up to be unleashed.

What irritated me the most was the fact that no other profession/industry could expect you to be alright with not knowing what something was going to cost you until after they gave it to you. I'd never allow a mechanic to work on my car with out an estimate, for example. They know they can get away with it because if you don't have insurance and you've gotten to the point where you're sick enough to go to the hospital then they know they've got you. Not me, I have no problems suffering excruciating pain in order to spite them.

I returned home and hit up yellowpages.com to find an alternative. I quickly located a place in Maumee (about 20 minutes away). A quick phone call to get their rates, which were reasonable, and I was off. The place I went to was great, fast and professional and clean. The doc told me to take my perscription to Meijer to get it filled because they have some deal right now where leading antibiotics are free. Saved me 25 bucks. Woot. Drugs in hand I went home to curl up on the floor and whimper for a couple hours.

But hey, I'm almost done with the antibiotics and feeling much better now.

Tonight's Forcast: Blizzard

The Blizzard of '07 has rolled into town. I don't know why the news people always have to come up with a stupid name for any weather event. The Weather Channel is calling it 'February Fury'. The local news is going with 'Big Blast'. Stuuuupid. My boss called me at quarter to six this morning to tell me that we were under a level three snow emergency [only emergency personal are supposed to be out on the roads] (see what Colonel Eggroll says about that); she went on to say that they were going to try and have eveybody come in two hours later. It was my turn then to inform her that today is my day off. Thanks a lot, jerk.

And any discussion of snow in multiple inches in this area cannot avoid bringing up the Blizzard of '78. It's true that this county was the hardest hit by that particular storm. They had to call in the national guard to dig people out. It's the measuring stick by which all snowfall is judged by the media around here. Yesterday was not up to that level of craziness, but it was a nice little blizzard all the same. 10 inches of snow (give or take), 35 mph winds, and near white out conditions. The storm kind of tapered off suddenly last night or we would have probably recieved another 4 or 5 inches.

I put up some snowy pictures on my flickr if you're interested.

Oh and I did get out my winter coat last night when I went out to help one of my neighbors get his car unstuck.

A rich, full weekend

Obviously, if we got to Wednesday before I finished this and posted it, it would be safe to say I got distracted. You may blame my ps2 and "Champions of Norrath". In leiu of everything I had typed, and then today decided to delete, here is a quick synopsis of last weekend.

Friday: Straight to the Withdrawal show at Grumpy Dave's Pub featuring awesome original music by the band, some great covers and some hilarious covers (they made J do a Jewel song, poor guy). Also was dashing through 3 degree weather without coat.

Saturday: Dorktivities

Sunday: waffles, pajamas, a few boring hours at work, video games, and I didn't even watch the Stupor Bowl.

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Just a few more hours until Lost. I've only managed to make it through the last three months by putting the matter out of my mind completely. By not dwelling on it I have managed to avoid going insane from the suspense. Just killing time here until then.

There are new comics up at Help Wanted . If you haven't check it out lately because I went, like, a month with out putting anything up I apologize again, but there's new stuff and I've got more stuff I'm working on that's nearly ready to go. So check it out. For anyone who's seen the rough drafts, and cares, we're in the middle of the 'New Guy takes down the flag' series and will be getting to some of the great Laze material soon.

It is a balmy 10 degrees (Fahrenheit) outside here. We had a 'warm' front pass through yesterday bringing a bit more snow and pushing the temperatures up into double digits. I was weak, I bought some gloves today. Not because I don't have any. I have some really thick ones that are great if I'm shoveling snow, or sledding, but not so great for just wearing around. I just picked up some of those cheap coloured ones to get me by since mine have gone awol. However, I still have resisted breaking out the heavy coat (go stubbornness!). I have a light one I wear to work; other times I just wear a jacket or a scarf, and gloves.

You are all retarded

I had kind of an angry day today. And by angry I mean that my pissed off levels had reached critical mass and became self perpetuating, requiring no external stimuli to maintain and/or increase said levels. So angry that I'm going to insult the mentally handicapped by using the word "retarded", and I don't like to have to do that. So here is a short list of things that have been pissing me off over the last couple days. (And cue the ranting.)

1.) On YouTube - There are thousands of you out there who need your uploading privileges revoked. You are ruining everything that made YouTube great. At one point a person could actually find interesting clips, hilarious homemade videos, and even whole tv shows. Not so much now. Now it's spam up to the eyeballs. Every search turns up a whole steaming pile of crap because you feel the need to put a bunch of random words and every number from 1 to 238 in your video description so that any search I perform HAS to pull up your crappily edited montage of anime clips set to Linkin Park. And then, when I actually find some clips from Saturday Night Live that I was looking for some amateur Spielberg has added music to the damn clip. I can hardly hear the original audio, you know, the part that has the damn jokes!

2.)Idiot Alert at the Highest Level

3.) A certain coworker who feigns ignorance of how to do her job. I had extra work to do this morning and didn't need to be bother with stupid, simpering questions. I know she's just doing it to be annoying and to suck up my time and to get attention. I don't care, she needs to stop it and grow up...And she's the oldest employee there.

4.) Spam and the people out there who must be buying into in to make it worth someone's' while to inundate the rest of us with it. I've covered YouTube spam, but there's still email spam, regular mail spam, infomercials, telemarketers, comment spam, whole blogs that are spam, email spam (I'm really tired of that, so it gets mentioned twice), and good, old fashioned door to door soliciting. Stop it!

5.) A certain home improvement store I worked at last summer. Legally, a company is supposed to provide you with your w-2 forms by January 31st so that you can file you blasted taxes. Thus far I have not received my w-2 from them. Attempting to call the store has proved somewhat futile. Yesterday I got somebody's voicemail on one extention and the other I tried was busy. Today I got somebody, but they just transferred me back over the HR person who is not there! So, I left a message that time; hopefully I get a response before Monday because if I don't I'm going to be ringing up the corporate office, and if this isn't resolved quickly I'm going to damn well report them.

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Sorry to gripe, I'll try to have something better to say next time. Now I'm off to finish my chores so I can go drink beers and watch Straight to the Withdrawal's show tonight.

Happy Febtober!

If you have no idea what I'm talking about this will explain it.