This is what comes of not watching the news

I just found out today that George Carlin died on Monday. I found out when I was looking another comedian up on Comedy Central dot com. I blame not having watched the Daily show this week for my not being up to date on vital news stories. I know I should pay more attention to the "real" news (not that they would have necessarily mentioned it, them being far more concerned about "important" stories, like lapel pins), but watching it just makes me so...angry.

It's sad to lose one of comedy's best. You have to hate when someone so sharp and brilliantly hilarious leaves the ranks. Especially when in a time like this, when stupidity is running rampant, and we could really use them, and there just doesn't seem to be enough people of similar caliber stepping up to the plate. I don't think I can say anything that hasn't already been said, in fact Lozo has a great post on Carlin. I'm going to honor the man in the best way possible: going and listening to his material and giggling my ass off.

Noodles

::::I am so lame. I honestly have good intentions towards blogging often. I even come up with good topics and interesting things to say about them. I just get distracted, a lot. And sometimes I find that the written word is not my best medium, and that can be disheartening. Recently I've had praise heaped upon me for being "hilarious" and awesome in all manner of conversation and story telling situations (unsolicited praise mind you). However, I find myself often at a loss as how to turn my verbal prowess into witty blog fodder. How do you translate the inflections, expressions, cadence, mimicry, sound effects, and nuance of a captivating performance into a paragraph that will give the reader exactly what you were intending to feed them?

Maybe I'm just not a very good writer, hey?

::::I think a low-carb diet seems to overlook the fact that many of us are alive today because of noodles.

::::I tend to oscillate between different projects. This week I have been organizing and reorganizing all of my genealogical information. I've also been poking around online looking for some new leads for the more trying and mysterious branches of my family tree. Nothing promising had turned up yet, and I've acknowledged that my next step will involve the (probably) tedious task of tracking down the documents that will provide verification for my ancestry. Not that I mind, of course, there is a secret, highly nerdy delight with each new discovery, and who knows what will turn up in the course of my research.

::::Forty days, give or take, until moving day. I've reached the point where I'm starting to get excited about the move. Not about the actual, physical lugging boxes and furniture up and down steps at the height of the August heat and humidity, but the getting a new place and arranging all my stuff therein.

I am *so* bribing people with pizza and beer to help me move.

Updates pt.2: crazy weather and tests

::::Yeah, the weather has been a bit unsettled lately. The entire month of May was unseasonably cold. NOAA reports that the whole country on average had a pretty cold spring. I thought March and April were pretty much par here, but may was very cool which, of course, made me happy. Then, as one would expect, as soon as I went on vacation the temperature hit 90 and stuck. Blech, I hate high humidity. After the rapid temperature we've gotten whomped with thunderstorms pretty regularly. Everybody acts surprised. It's summer, it storms. Why does everybody forget this sort of thing every single year? Here in NW Ohio we have gotten off pretty lucky with the severe weather that's rolled through. Not too much rain and only a minor tornado or two, unlike other places in the MidWest that are experiencing record flooding and/or killer tornadoes. There has only been one storm here in the Beege that sent us scrambling to the basement.

::::Last month I was required to take ServSafe. It's a food safety course, and it's recognized anywhere in the US. Also, it's required for me to keep my job, so kind of important. If you don't pass the first time you can retake it, but on your own time and money. Again, kind of important. Now you can take the course at the community college as a class and it lasts six weeks. The retake course is six sessions. The all-or-nothing/failure-is-not-an-option class I took was one day. Pretty much it's just a review of the material, granted, I got my book a month ahead of time, so it's not unreasonable to expect people to have studied the material. The only really tough part is remembering all the bacterias, viruses, and parasites that can cause food borne illnesses, the symptoms of those illnesses, and what foods are affected by which pathogens. I made flash cards.

Passing grade for the test is 75%. The test had 90 questions, but 10 are "pilot" questions that don't count, so 80 questions which means you can miss 20 and still pass. 20! I honestly think that the passing threshold is a little low. I mean, what they're saying is "Food Safety is Important!!! But if you know three-quarters of it, that's good enough." I read the book, I studied my flash cards, I took notes at the review (she even went over which pathogens were most likey to be on the test). When I finished the test I double checked my answers to make sure I hadn't fucked up somewhere. Then we had to wait a week to get out scores.

I got 100%. I got congratulations from my boss and boss's boss and the teacher of the class and pretty much every manager in the company. "That's not something that happens very often," the teacher told my DM in the email she sent with our scores. One of the manager's who took the test with me was in awe, "I thought I did really good (He got an 88), but you got 100, that's incredible." "Attaboy"s rained down upon me.

Honestly though, when I was taking the test all I could think was, "Dude, this is a fucking joke."

*Shrugs*

Updates, pt 1: Drinks

I've been trying to scrape together a post for the last couple days. I don't know what my problem is. I'll start typing and then get distracted or off on a stupid tangent. *shrug*

I was on vacation last week. It was nice, nine days without having to go to work, which was pretty much the extent of what happened on my vacation. I did some shopping (yay for bonus checks to spend wantonly). I watched a lot of tv, visited with friends and slept a lot. My roommate and I and one of our fellow managers SH went out for drinks twice. SH actually works for another store in our company, but their sales are so low in the summer they can't afford all of their manager's salaries, so SH gets to spend the summer with us. She's pretty cool, very nice and funny. It's nice having another manager around who is my age, and well someone I can talk to at work. With the employees there's always that little bit of space you have to keep in your work relationship.

So anyway we went out on Monday to Nate & Wally's Fishbowl to get their signature drink which is called, of course a Fishbowl. I'd never had one before, so SH was totally excited for me to try one. The Fishbowl is served in a plastic fishbowl and comes in two colours, not flavors, colours: blue and purple. Apparently there used to be a red one, but they no longer serve it. I didn't catch what all constitutes a blue fish bowl, but I gather the purple one is made with whiskey and something like purple kool-aid. I opted for the blue one. Unbeknownst to me the blue one is coconut flavored, and I am not the biggest fan of coconut. It was good, just very coconutty, so I only drank about a third before gifting it to SH who was happy to finish it. We also went out Saturday night. Not much going on here in the Beege that night either. I think the wildest thing going on was some girl's choice of fushia leggings with a zebra print skirt. Oh, and the guy who had vampire fangs, they were actually pretty well done, but the overall effect was rather skeezy.

Saturday night was also the scene of the worst long island ice tea I've ever had. It was even worse than the infamous clear long islands at Howards (home of the "Scariest Bathrooms in America") a while ago. I say that these were worse because the clear ones had no mixers at all, and you kind of know what kind of trouble you were getting into. I should have known there would be trouble on the horizon as the first round of drinks were rather strong. I'm of the opinion that drinks that are mixed too strong are just as bad as ones that are water down. But we went back for more mixed drinks, like cows to the watering hole, stupid, stupid cows. Our barwench for the evening did not seem to be enjoying her job or maybe it was just our request for drinks that required making. She began by filling the glasses with ice, completely. I mean, they were big cubes, so there's still room for plenty of liquid, but you know what I'm getting at. Then she grabbed the first two of the four liquors and did a long pour filling the glasses half way. Perhaps she realized that things had already begun to go awry. With the second set of liquors she did a shorter pour, the glasses were now three quarters full. I was concernicus. She then squeezed a bit of mixer in and the glasses were full. Not to be daunted by this she grabbed a shaker and shook each drink and poured them back in the glass, giving just enough room for a squirt of the second mixer. And then we paid for the drinks and attempted to drink them. My thought, after a few sips of vaguely flavored lighter fluid, was that we should request a pitcher and a few cups of mixer and sort the whole thing out for ourselves. We settled on getting a glass of coke to balance them out. And you might think that after having consumed the vicious brew that we would all be quite smashed. Rather, it took us so long to drink them that I believe we were all sober by the time we were finished.

Well, I have more, but it will have to wait. My laptop's batter is pretty low and I can't plug in to recharge right now because the fourth (or so) thunderstorm of the day is rolling through. Don't worry, we have wi-fi, so I'm not going to get the hell electrocuted out of me. Laters.