Welcome to the Event Horizon

I'm back!

2011-03-30T09:27:00.006-05:00

Zomgwtfbbqawesome.

I didn't mean to take such a long break from here, but craploads of crap have been going on.

As I mentioned in my post from several eons ago, I started on a new weight loss plan the first of the year. It's a really great, simple plan: diet and exercise. And it's working. I weighed myself today, and I've lost 30 pounds. 30 pounds in just under 3 months! That's the most I've ever lost, I've gone past my low weight from 4 years ago, and I've lost over 10% of my body weight (which I've been told can greatly improve your health). I'm not doing anything crazy either. No bizarre eating restrictions or starving myself. I can eat up to 1800 calories a day, although most days I only eat about 1500. I won't lie, it was hard at first. I was pretty much hungry all day every day for two weeks. It took another week for me to start feeling full from the amount of food I was eating, but it has totally worked! Now I have no problem eating this amount. Essentially, I've done all of the hard work of the diet. In the past I'd tried gradually stepping down how much I was eating (which is probably what you're supposed to do). Eff that noise. You end up being hungry for months on end and then give up. Go big or go home I say. I had a few crazy weeks at the beginning, and now everything is copacetic. I'm not hungry all the time and I keep losing weight. It's like goddamn magic.

I also painted this painting. It's some quick art I made up for one of my friend's band's album cover. There's some text that got added after. The name of the album (Through a Birdless Sky) goes in the upper right corner and the band name ('tis) down in the lower right. Btw, that's not the corner of the paper that is folded back, it's just painted to look like it is. Cool, no?

The biggest thing going on right now is that I'm looking at buying a house. It's kind of funny considering I just sort of decided to do it on a whim. One day I was just sitting there and the thought occurred to me that this was a good time to buy a house (what with interest rates & housing prices being low due to the crapful economy), and I was in a position where I could not only afford a house, but benefit from doing so (i.e. build equity & possibly have a mortgage that is cheaper than my rent). I went today and got pre-approved for a loan. It's not a huge amount, it's just me applying as I am solidly single & I'm not exactly rolling in dough. I do, however, have a good credit rating/history, and because of the economy there's plenty of sweet hook-ups for first time home-buyers. I've looked at a few houses here in BG, but I've accepted that it's very unlikely I'll find anything I can afford in town that isn't a complete disaster area. BG home prices haven't fallen as much as other areas, so I'm looking @ one of the smaller towns in the area, or perhaps out in the country. More details to come as things develop!

In somewhat related news I've acquired a roommate for next year, well, Aug to May anyway (in a college town that's how the lease years run). He's agreed to be my housemate instead if I purchase a house. In fact he's visibly more excited than I am sometimes, I think dorm & apartment life has been wearing thin for him. He's a bit like a big puppy, easily excitable, likes attention, and wants to be liked by/be friends with everyone, so I have a bit a fun trolling him @ work. The whole reason I chose to take on a roommate, I do like having a whole place to myself after all, was that it neatly (and nearly completely) will provide me with extra cash for the big trip to Australia that Julia and I are planning for next year.

We're looking at May 2012 for out big Australia trip. Nothing has been set yet, just lots of ideas being thrown into the idea hat. Later this spring we're going to go back to the travel agency and start getting things sorted.

April 2012 is when my friends Steve (former roommate) & Stephanie are getting married. It's all been very exciting and disgustingly cute. Her parents are paying for most of the wedding, so it's going to be super fabulous. And I'll give her some respect because she's really on the ball, they've already booked the place and a bunch of other stuff. She has a whole binder full of stuff. I'm going to be a bridesmaid, so I'm excited about getting to dress up and drink free booze. Though I'm glad that there's no plans on going dress shopping until late summer. If I got something now I have a feeling it wouldn't fit in a year.

So that's what's going on. If anybody still reads this, how are you? :)

Wooooooooo! What's up?

2011-01-09T02:33:00.003-05:00

Dude.

Things are pretty awesome right now. I'm doing clean-up for the party I just had at my apartment. Nothing crazy, just some people from work and associated significant others and roommates. We had some booze and plenty of laughs. Now I'm just rounding up the empty beer bottles and dishes and glasses and munching out some chips and buffalo chicken dip. I wore one of my favorite shirts and my two new necklaces. Also, I'm watching stand up comedy. I love stand up comedy. And the last one, Bill Burr was pretty good, and now Louis C.K. is on and he's hilarious. Also, kinda buzzed still from drinking and I'm having another while I clean, so I'm laughing and rather enjoying myself.

What was I saying...

Oh, yeah. I'm supposed to blog at least once a week. That was one of my New Year's Resolutions. So I'm doing it. Buzzed, tipsy, very mildly drunk. Awesome. Because you know what? I'm in an awesome mood. Things are going swimmingly. I started on my eating healthy for the rest of my life plan (not diet, 'cause that implies going off the diet someday) a week ago. I have lost 7 pounds in the first week. Wooo! I'm sure that'll drop off after the first couple weeks. Of course, with the party I've not done so well today. As bad as it may be, I saved all my calories (save a few) for the purpose of drinking and eating some junk food. Ah well, you only get one life.

I think that the couple of months I've spent mentally building myself up to go on this eating plan have really paid off. My resolve has been freakin' awesome. Sure, I've been tempted. Portion shock is a bitch. And much of the week I've spent being hungry, but the hunger is a bit like the pain of getting a tattoo. Yeah, it's not exactly pleasant, but the result is going to be kick ass.

So, other resolution: blogging honestly. Okay, what should I talk about here?

Dunno. I'm gonna go eat some more chips and giggle @ comedians on tv. Laters.

Happy New Year

2011-01-01T02:34:00.002-05:00

Time for some resolutions!

I am resolving to blog more often, at least once a week. I also resolve to be more open and honest in my blogging, not that I've lied to you dear reader, but rather just not been very deep or meaningful. And definitely not emotional, but then I keep my emotions mostly to myself in real life; I play my cards close to the vest. I'm trying to work on that too.

As for my other resolutions, I have some creative projects I want to work on/finish up this year, credit cards to pay down, and weight to lose. I only lost a net of 10 pounds this past year, and I want to lose much more this year. I've been examining my strategy and refining it. New reasons to lose weight (besides the I'm tired of being out of shape and want to be healthy ones) have cropped up, namely that I'm going to be in a wedding in spring of 2012 and will also be going on a big trip and want to look awesome.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2010-11-25T09:41:00.003-05:00

I should be sleeping right now. I've got to be at Thanksgiving Dinner in less than three hours and I haven't slept yet. The reason I haven't slept is because I decided to finish my November Novel for NaNoWriMo today. Or rather, yesterday. So in 9 hours I cranked out over 14,800 words to not just hit the requisite 50k words, but to actually finish the thing. It's got an Epilogue and everything. (Although I have to admit it's not all I have for these characters. Nay, I have scads more about them. I have three pages of outline in tiny print, and I used up, let's see...exactly one bullet point of my outline. I think I may have diarrhea of the imagination.) Anyway.

52,931! Boom! I'm done, baby.

The goal is 50k words in 30 days. Crazy right? Well, I'm a firm believer in the saying, which I made up, "If a crazy thing is worth doing, it's worth doing crazier." So last year I did it in 25 days. This year I pulled it off in 22 days, and I didn't even write on all of them. Why? Cuz I'm freakin' crazy. And I think what I put down on paper (metaphorically speaking) was even better than last year's. And that 9 hour sprint was some awesometastic stuff, stuff that surprised even me. There was even a part that made me cry, like full on, tears crying.* Does that make me weird? If so, screw you, don't judge me. It's emotional (and I haven't slept).

Now I can get some other stuff done. What's next? Oh yeah, Thanksgiving dinner, black Friday shopping, and putting up my xmas tree.

Laters.

*Some epically sad violin music helped.

I'm Not Superstitious, Just Extrastitious

2010-11-21T01:45:00.003-05:00

Maybe not even that much. Maybe just mildlystitious, stitiously-inclined? At any rate, I am 'stitious enough to recognize an omen when I see one. And I'm certainly perspicacious enough for a week worth of ominous omens to do more than casually ping on my radar. Now, nothing specific mind you, just a series of unsettling dreams, stock omens, and general weirdness. You know how omens are, just things that bode. However, in spite of all of this non-specific boding this week has gone swimmingly. Nothing bad had actually happened; I'm not worried about anything actually happening. Good moods have prevailed in myself and others, and all of my schemes are proceeding nicely.

It's just weird, so I'm just saying.

....

Speaking of dreams, I have a lot of weird ones, so in order for something to really stand out it has to really.....well, stand out. So I will leave you with two words which may just blow your imagination's mind:

Chainsaw Olympics.

I Came. I Rallied. I Restored Sanity.

2010-11-18T03:29:00.008-05:00

Well, it has been 2 months since I posted. Crap.

Things have been just sort of the usual day in day out stuff during the last two months. Except for the trip I took to Washington, D.C. for the Daily Show's Rally to Restore Sanity. Which was EPIC. I know that word gets bandied around a lot these days, but this is one of the few, true instances where it is totally applicable. Just me and 225,000 other people chilling out on the National Mall in support of rationality, reason, and sanity. The only thing that wasn't superb was the hour I spent Friday night around 7pm driving in Downtown D.C. traffic. It was dark, bumper to bumper traffic, tons of out-of-towners (including me), roundabouts *shudder*, buses and taxis cutting in and out from everywhere.

The weather was perfect, mid to low 60's, light breeze. Mother Nature, who can pull some radical shit when she feels like it, decided to support sanity, too.

This shot is facing east. The next one is west. They give you a bit of an idea of what being in the middle of a 200k+ crowd looks like. I will also say that this was largest gathering of people I've ever been in AND the mellowest. Everybody was super cool and friendly. People made space for each other and switched spots so no one was blocking anyone and were in general super awesome about everything.

It was also an incredibly diverse crowd. Plenty of young people, but others too. There was a couple behind me in their 60's from the "reddest community ever" in the Smokey Mountains who were asking people for little mini-interviews to record to show folks back home. There was a guy and his wife from Minnesota. A family with a couple young kids (probably 9-12). And not just a variety of ages, but races, religions, and political affiliations (even a few brave republicans), too. Everybody was just mingling and having a good time.

Speaking of having a good time, there were tons of special guests. Including The Mythbusters! They came and nerded it up with some "experiments" using the "largest sample size ever." The coolest one was when they had everybody jump up & down at the same time and had actual seismologists w/seismographs record the shock wave (not very much, but still cool).

Speaking of nerding it up. R2-D2!

There were a shit-ton of other guests. I forget them all but a few were: Ozzy, Kat Stevens, Jeff Tweedy & Mavis Staples, Sam Waterson (who read Colbert's Poem, hilarious!), Don Nevello "Father Guido Sarducci", Tony Bennet who sang "America the Beautiful", and a zillion more.

I also really loved the song Colbert and Stewart sang "The Greatest, Strongest Country in the World." It was a wonderful bit of comedy. And kudos to Jon Stewart for singing in front of tens of thousands of people when you know you're not the greatest. Colbert might not have any shame when he's in character, so I think nothing fazes him. And Stewart's "keynote" speech was really, really good. That doesn't do it justice of course, suffice to say it was eloquent, sincere, funny, and to the point, all at once.

Then there were the signs! A snapped photos of a few of my favorites.

"Blessed are the Cheese-makers"
A Life of Brian shout-out, woot!

Not pictured, but awesome:
"The Civil War was an inside job"
"Hyperbole is literally destroying America"
"Muslims killed Dumbledore"
"Donde esta el bano?"
"That's what she said"
"Down with this sort of thing"
A giant Mario invincibility star
"You found me!" held up by a girl dressed as Waldo

And here's one more. One of the best ones I saw all day. It made me laugh, and I knew I had to get a photo to show you guys, especially Mark. ;)

After the Rally I spent the rest of the day wandering up and down the Mall. The museums were thronged (and close to closing), so I chose to take in the outdoor stuff instead.

The Smithsonian's Sculpture Garden was cool. I particularly like this geometric sculpture (and it was huge!). It has a sort of Escher-esque feel to me.

The Washington Monument. Didn't go up inside, you have to get up pretty early in the morning to get tickets for that. Still, check out my sweet photog skillz (namely, being in the right place at the right time...).

Even after the Rally finished up, most of the people were still hanging out on the Mall. I've been to touristy places before, but this was the coolest because all the Rally people were so mellow and laid back. It was like a get-together in somebody's backyard, a 100k person get together in the country's sweet-ass back yard.

The Lincoln Memorial was the place to be. All the cool kids go there and hang out, just chilling on the steps.

If there was only one thing I could take away from this, it would be the incredible sense of camaraderie that was present that day. Well, the whole weekend really. Driving in and out of D.C. on the interstate fellow Rally-goers would honk and wave to each other (perfect strangers) when they saw each others' signs. I really wish we could experience more of that camaraderie in our daily lives. I don't think it's a conscious thing that we don't, just that we're all so busy with our lives. We get caught up in our tv shows, facebook, all of our gadgets, trying to make ends meet, trying to get ahead in life, trying to do right by our kids and spouses, that our lives become like bubbles. We're so focused on our own, tiny sphere of influence that we just don't have the time to bond with other people in any kind of significant way. For example, I barely know any of my neighbors. When I was kid we knew all of our neighbors and most of the people up and down the street. It's nice when we can get our bubbles together, join them up, and make something of the moment.

This is another one of those moments where I'm not sure if my metaphors are brilliant or retarded. I like to think retardedly brilliant, so now I present:

Random bridge over the Potomac, from the rear of the Lincoln Memorial.

Say hello to my gigantic marble friend.

I like that they actually refer to the memorial as a "temple." There is definitely a sense of reverence there.

The Vietnam Memorial.

Nothing will impress upon you the sheer number of soldiers who lost their lives in that war like seeing all of the names chiseled, in none too large a font, on that immense stretch of black stone.

Now THAT is a signature.

(Oh, Herbie Hancock, you silly thing.)

Then, to top off this most perfect of days, the evening decided to be really pretty.

My last photo came out perfect. So I won't ruin it with a caption. Laters.

Summer has come to pass

2010-09-06T02:40:00.007-05:00

Summer's winding down, and I, for one, am glad. The hot, sticky quagmire that is the weather of June through August is my least favorite, and July may be my least favorite month of all. It's so freakin' hot and humid and it just seems like it will never end. June sometimes has nice days, and August at least has my birthday, but July.....bleargle. Also, crappy things always seem to happen me in July. This year my cell phone was stolen. In years past I've been in a car wreck (though I wasn't driving), gotten poison ivy, gotten poison sumac (a different year than the poison ivy), had the muffler fall off my car, and been lightly mauled by a dog. July can go sit on a rabid porcupine.

We had a shake-up in a our management team at work back at the beginning of August (still can't believe it's already September!). The week before our loaner manager for the summer was due to go back to his regular store, one of our managers decided to take a bus to crazy town when he got written up for being late and walked out. That left just me and my GM, but they transferred in another girl the following week. I was glad we got her as she is awesome, and we get along well. I have no idea who we'll get to cover for her when she goes on maternity leave in a couple months...

I picked up some crochet books from the library a while back to look for some new patterns. I also found this a while back and the sheer awesomeness of the project has inspired me to do some 8-bit crochet, which you can see here. I learned a new stitch, the tunisian or afghan stitch, in order to make the bag. Unlike most other crochet stitches it has a front and back side which works perfectly for bags. I even lined the bag so nothing would catch on the back side of the crochet, go me! I've got some super mario stuff in the works, and a messenger bag for a friend that will either feature the mooninites, or possibly something from invader zim if I can make a pattern that looks good. The old Nintendo stuff is perfect for this sort of thing as it is expected to look pixelated, and the each stitch of the crochet is like a pixel. I've got some legend of zelda pictures that I might give a go at some point too.

Busy, busy, busy!

The previous post has been removed due to it sucking.

2010-08-25T01:14:00.002-05:00

If we can all agree that the Internet has one great failing it is that subtlety of nuance and tone are completely lost in print. What had been intended as a sarcastic, light little rant perhaps came off to some as a vitriol laced diatribe. My intent had never been to malign anyone or anything, simply to express minor irritation on my anonymous blog. If I had felt that there had been any real problem, or if I felt my whining had any merit I would have pursued officials channels to seek some kind of change. Let's move on.

Yesterday was my birthday and it was pretty awesome.

2010-08-05T02:03:00.003-05:00

The day started with the rather mundane. First some errands including stopping at the BMV to renew my license plate tags so I don't get pulled over, and then paying rent and getting groceries. So I had to fork over a bunch of cash on my birthday, but I found out it's okay if I have a yard sale. I'm pretty stoked about that. I promise it'll be a small and tasteful yard sale. That solves my dilemma of what to do with the pile of stuff I have that I no longer need/want, but is too good to throw away, but I don't feel like taking the time to deal with Craiglist to sell it.

Next was back home to get my baking skills on. I made peanut butter cookies (those were from a package, everything else was scratch), two batches of truffles, and a frozen chocolate cheesecake. I didn't have enough time to whip out a couple peanut butter pies, especially since they are supposed to spend a night in the fridge before serving. Oh well, I still have the stuff, maybe I'll make one up and take it to my cousin's bonfire this weekend.

Then, things got interesting. Whilst getting ready to go to dinner with Julia & Eddie I got a phone call from my boss. She was calling to let me know that the other manager of our three part team had been fired. Long story shot: he was a dick. I was quickly inundated with texts and calls from my crew asking if I had heard, asking what happened, etc.

Anyway, we still went out for dinner, screw work drama I say. Had chicken wings and beer, and it was delicious. There's something barbaricly satisfying about eating meat off the bone. Then back to my apartment for a little gathering. Mostly friends from work (bet you can guess the main topic of converstion); enjoyed the baked goods and beer, and we just hung out and bs'ed for a few hours.

Later, I went across the street to meet up with one of the people who couldn't make it because she had to work, although, her boyfriend had come over (another buddy from work). She made me brownies. Well, actually she told her boyfriend to make them while she was at work and he made another friend of ours help him make them. In spite of their comedy of errors the brownies turned out all right, but she had them put chocolate chips and peanut butter chips in the brownies And frost them AND put sprinkles on top. Probably the best brownies ever, but I think she's trying to kill me. :D

Plans and storms

2010-06-11T13:48:00.002-05:00

So. How's it going?

I am hanging in there. The fact that vacation is less than two weeks away is keeping me going through all the normal BS that is life. Work is okay. Half of our management team will be on vacation next week, so we're getting an extra guy from another store. Then the next week the other half of the team (which includes me, yay!) get to go on vacation. I chose to split my vacation between two weeks. Normally I have to work five 10-hour days a week, so out of the two weeks I have to work 5 days and get 9 off. The first week I have 5 days off, the second 4, but they're both over the weekend (Wed-Sun & Thurs-Sun). This also means that I get 4th of July Weekend off. I haven't had a 4th of July off in forever. Steve & his gf Steph & her friend Amanda are coming to town that weekend for a visit which will most likely include drinking too much and a cookout, somebody blowing something up (fireworks).

That 5 day break is when I am going on vacation to North Carolina. Plans are looking pretty freakin' sweet. I decided to break up the drive on the way down. I've sacrificed Monday to a 13 hour day so that I can leave at 2pm on Tuesday, drive to Hocking Hills and get a hotel. I'll hit up my favorite trails and then get up early-early the next day to tackle the other 10 hours of the drive. Right now trying to make up some playlists.

I picked up some books for vacation and some crochet books to get some ideas. Once I get a few projects finished I'll post pictures of my handiwork.

....

What else? I've been fighting off a cold for the last couple days. I made the (apparently stupid) mistake of sleeping with the windows open on a nice night a few days back and have been sniffling every since. The nice weather followed the more usual hot-and-humid-as-fuck weather that generally occupies the Ohio summer.

Of course, the transition from suck to not-suck in weather is never smooth in the summer and we had some seriously bad storms. The EF4 tornado (winds abt 175 mph) that hit millbury and destroyed Lake high school was about 15 miles from where I live. The EF2 tornado that hit Dundee passed about 500 feet from my dad's house! The NWS says that this tornado was 800 yds (almost a half mile) wide, one of the largest in years. Luckily they were not home when it happened, they had already went for shelter as my dad's home is one of those modular/mobile homes. They did have some damage (siding pulled off, skirting pulled off, the wooden stairs rolled and broken) and my dad said their was a some debris piled up against the side of the house too. I'm guessing they got some sideswiping winds from twister. He's got most everything put back together, but will have to build some new stairs as the other ones are kind of busted up. Unfortunately there were many people who were not as fortunate. The pictures of damage are horrific, especially when you consider that this all happened at night. Night tornadoes are scary as fuck.

Vacation!

2010-05-20T20:59:00.003-05:00

Well, not yet, but I did make reservations today. I'm taking my first "real" vacation next month, and by "real" I mean not camping and more than a couple hours away. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I love camping, and the other close by places I've gone I've really enjoyed. I decided this year to pull out the stops and go somewhere farther away.

I explored a few options before settling on one. I considered Maine, it's pretty, there's ocean, and Acadia Nat. Park sounds awesome plus if I remember correctly you can sometimes see whales there [citation needed]. However, it's a 18 hour drive. I also looked at going to the Adirondack area in upstate New York, again very pretty, lots to see and do (museums and shopping and such), and only a 12 hour drive. Then quite a few people I know are going to the Outer Banks and other parts of the coast this year, so I thought "hey, I'll look into it." I surfed around google maps, looking at reviews before deciding that I was deciding that this was it.

I ended up choosing a hotel in Atlantic Beach, NC. I chose that area because, while there are still plenty of hotels and condos in the area, it's not as built up and ridiculous as other places like Myrtle Beach, Hilton Head, etc. One of the reviews was like, "there's not a whole lot to do" and I was like, "Awesome." Let's face it, a beach is the one place you can go on vacation for a week and do literally nothing and no one will find that be strange. And that's pretty much what I intend to do: take some books, a sketch pad, sunblock, and veg out for 4 days. I also plan on checking out the critters at the North Carolina Aquarium and the couple of trails they have. Other than that not much planned. I'll probably cruise around and see if there are any cool local shops.

I'm pretty stoked about the whole thing. Oh, and the hotel is right on the beach and all the rooms are ocean front with private balconies, so even if it rains I can still sit by the sea. The only "downside" is that I had to spend a little more than I wanted because the only rooms they had left were the ones with a jucuzzi in the room. It'll be tough, but I'll live with it. ;)

Wait, what?

2010-05-15T00:39:00.004-05:00

I am trying to sell a couple pieces of excess furniture (including a futon) on craig's list. I say trying because it seems the people who use craig's list have trouble conducting a transaction as simple as this. I posted the offer ad and photo. I tried to be descriptive without being long winded, and listed a price, mentioning that it was negotiable.

So far I've had 4 responses.
One asking if the futon was still available. Okay, that's not too bad.
Two simply said "I am interested in the futon." That's it. Nothing else.
And the last asked if I was selling the items. Ummm... that's kind of what my ad said.

Maybe I'm the one who is missing the point here. Maybe I'm committing some social craig's list faux pas. Honestly, how do I reply to that?

I say: I want to sell this futon.
You say: I am interested in this futon.
I say: ......um....ok? Good for you.

I just think if you're responding to an ad for something you'd like to buy you might put something more like this:

I am interested in buying the [thing] you have for sale for $[Amt]. I am willing to pay $[offer], and I can pick it up [at your convenience/Tuesday/next weekend/etc]. You can also reach me at [phone number].

Thanks,

[Your damn name]

Look! See how much information is there? Now we can proceed with our transaction/haggling. Saying "Want!!!!!!!!!!!!!1" And demanding I call the phone number you've listed seems a trifle rude to me. Can we not communicate in sentences and complete thoughts? Please?

But, hey, maybe that's just me.

I wish I had taken a picture

2010-05-04T00:43:00.002-05:00

Several weeks ago I started some seeds for my garden. I had a bit of a surprise when I checked on them the other day. I lifted the dome off the cheap plastic incubator-thingy. Amongst the neat rows of cute, baby plants was an abomination. It was a many tentacled vision of (very mild) horror nestled in the tray (okay, it was more like brief confusion, than horror). It was the sort of thing that gives you a fleeting moment of What is that? What is that?!?

Brief confusion because I realized that the hairy white tentacles emerging from the soil were the roots of one of the seedlings and the damn thing had sprouted upside down! I pulled it out of the dirt and, sure enough, the leaves were in the ground. How does that even happen? As a plant you've got, like, three jobs to do: photosynthesize, make oxygen, and grow towards the light (upwards), oh and give people hay fever. If you, as a plant, fuck one of these up then the future does not look bright for you.

I think I have a retard plant.

Incoherent Narrative #9,348

2010-04-29T23:43:00.003-05:00

Went out last night for my friend L's going away party. We've worked together for 5 years, and it will be weird not having her around. It was a good time though, but a little bittersweet. I had to close the store, so I didn't get there until late, like, almost 1 am late. There was some karaoke (not by me), good times and laughs had, and I drank 3 Budlight tall boys in an hour and a half. I achieved the perfect zen state of drunkenness and was trying to wax philosophical about it, but nobody was listening so that's alright. If you've ever hit that state you know what I'm talking about. Everything was mellow and awesome at the same time. We ended the night at Taco Bell, which of course, was the most delicious thing ever. Then the meal devolved into everyone trying to throw sauce packets down the front of everyone else's shirts. Except me, I watched with bemused detatchment. Thankfully, we didn't get thrown out.

The reason I got out of work so late was that we had a corporate inspection yesterday, and everyone was there until after 10pm which meant that pretty much no actual work could happen until they left. The inspection went okay. So I ended up staying over yesterday, and the day before that we did a bunch of extra cleaning so we stayed late (and I had come in early to do an orientation for some new hires). I also did 8 more interviews yesterday in the time before all inspection hell broke loose. Then I had to go in today (well I did have to) to finish the crew schedule. It has been a looooong week.

Other than that I've just been relaxing and decompressing today.

This post is about a dream

2010-04-21T00:12:00.002-05:00

So, you know, if you think dreams are boring and stuff feel free to skip this one.

A bit of background, I dream almost every night. My dreams are usually very detailed, sometimes convoluted in plot, and on many occasions incredibly lucid. This makes for some rather entertaining, or occasionally terrifying, dream experiences. Ok.

The night before last I dreamed that I traveled to Australia. Which could have been an awesome dream, but mostly left me bemused. My subconscious was obviously trying to bullshit me. It wanted me to think it knew what Australia looks like. C'mon, subconscious! It looked like Ohio, but with less trees and bigger, kind of weird flowers. I spent half the dream wondering why Australia had so much corn.

At least it got the volcanoes right last night.

Updates and stuff

2010-04-15T02:17:00.003-05:00

I wish that I had a device that allowed me to telepathically dictate my thoughts into blog posts. I always think of things to write about, but then, when I finally have a chance to sit down and type, all thought goes out the window and I end up on Failblog. Of course, any such hypothetical thought-to-blog dictating device would have to have some kind of filters. I mean, does anybody really, really want to hear anyone else's train of thought?

So.

What has gone on in the last two months?

Me?
I've done some bonding at a couple family events;
discovered I actually like some foods I thought I didn't, a fact which has made me suspect that perhaps it was the cooking (won't name any names) and not the food;
had a complete schedule change at work, as we are now down to 3 managers instead of 4;
had a visit from Steve & Steph (his gf) which mostly involved drinking champagne and playing cards, and was awesome;
lost 10 pounds;
saw both and Alice in Wonderland and Clash of the Titans, but neither in 3D (in fact, I have yet to see a movie in 3D), and thought that while both were visually stunning they really didn't quite satisfy;
introduced my mother to the awesomeness that is IKEA;
started planning my summer vacation, which will probably be a road trip to upstate New York to wander around the Adirondacks;
finally got around to reading the "new" Stephen King novel (Under the Dome) that I've had for months, it was good - much more psychological horror involved, but still enough gore for those who want it;
took a acrylic painting class (with Julia) at the Toledo Art Museum in which we did a study of The Mill at Charenton by Fracois Boucher - mine isn't finished, but rest assured that when it is there will be pictures;
bought a couch from IKEA (don't remember if that's been more than two months or not, but the couch is still awesome);
and, yes, I have no idea what is up with this list's format.

And I promise to update more often! :D

Homeland Security

2010-02-13T01:38:00.003-05:00

This is random.

Allow me to submit two suggestions for increasing airport security because I've come to realize that most of my fellow American's are rabid on this subject.

1. I've had this idea for a while. I think it came to me sometime after the "shoe bomber." Every time one of these idiots tries to blow up a plane a new slew of restrictions comes out. No scissors. Take your shoes off. No liquids. And just recently we had this new moron the so-called "underwear bomber." So my plan obviously is needed.

Plan No. One: When you report to the airport you do all your check in crap. You had over your luggage. You are allowed NO carry-on luggage/bags/whatever. Sorry. That's the rule. In return they will feed you good food and show you some movie that is at least in the realm of decent. And the airline will promise not to lose your shit. I know that's why most people have so much carry-on: they don't trust the airline. If the airline loses your stuff you get to, I don't know, kick their CEO in the nuts.

That's part number one. In part number two you go through security, and it will be really easy. All you have to do is get naked and get on the plane. Now, before you freak out, you will get to undress in a private cubicle and will be given a paper gown and some croc-knockoffs. All of your clothes, shoes, and whatever go into a box which is locked with a PIN you choose. If you fuck up you don't get on the plane. Then everybody gets on the plane naked, and the flight will be very mellow. Why? Because no one is going to start anything when they are pantsless.

You can thank me later. Like when your naked flight lands because remember, you aren't allowed to bring your cell phone on the plane.

2. Plan one is about making flights "safer." If you don't like that one I've got another. Second idea is a deterrent for douchepiles who might be looking to try something.

Plan Number Two: If someone does something retarded (I'm using satirically! *&#%$!-ing idiots) on a plane, and they survive the wrath of the hysterical, possibly naked, passengers they will receive a punishment fitting for their level of douchebaggery. Plane offenders will be sodomized with hedgehogs. I think this will put a serious damper on anyone's enthusiasm for violent acts in an aircraft. Sure, these would-be bombers/hijackers are obviously not afraid to die, but rarely are they successful. Incarceration would seem a far worse ramification if it involved hedgehog sodomy.

Now some of you may be saying, "Why hedgehogs, Winter? Why not a porcupine?" Simple. Porcupine quills point every which way. Hedgehogs spikes only go in one direction; they will lay flat. You can pet them as long as you don't rub them the wrong way. This means insertion will be a breeze, but going back...well, you get the picture.*

----

*In the interest of projecting animals from cruel treatment I wouldn't actually want any innocent hedgehogs to get involved in this. The whole thing would be insulting to the noble beast. Maybe we could just make those violating the sanctity of air travel listen to Miley Cyrus and Hannah Montana instead.

Long rambling update #1

2010-02-09T23:57:00.003-05:00

I wrote a post a couple weeks ago. It wasn't so much a post as a frustration fueled rant on the stupidity of others. It had bullet points. And I even had to do some research to make sure, for my own piece of mind, that my facts were correct. The whole thing is best never seeing the light of day.

My apartment building is currently surrounded by one to two foot high drifts of snow. We closed up a few hours early tonight since there wasn't much business, and I wonder if we'll open tomorrow. I think all the schools have already canceled, and if we get the winds they are saying are going to happen (sustained 30 mph) the weather people are talking drifts in excess of three feet. While, on one hand, having a day off tomorrow on account of inclement weather would be kind of cool, I would have to make that day up somewhere, and I really, really don't want to give up my weekend. I actually have Friday and Saturday off. Two days off in a row feels like vacation. That's what I kept saying last week when I also had Friday and Saturday off. However, one of the managers came down sick and I ended up having to go in on Saturday and work. It sucked, but I still made it to the bar in time to catch the band I had planned on seeing. Unless a level 3 snow emergency is issued I doubt we will close tomorrow anyway, and right now it's still standing at a level 1.

In a couple of weeks Julia and I are taking a painting class (acrylics) at the Toledo Museum of Art. It's been quite a while since I've taken any kind of class (ServeSafe didn't really count. You got the book a month before the test, then the class was a six hour review before taking the test). Anyway, I am really looking forward to it. I like painting with acrylics, but am completely self taught. It will be nice to learn some techniques to improve my skillz. I actually haven't taken any kind of art class since eighth grade. In high school I never had room for art in my schedule, and I guess never really thought about it. It wasn't until several years after high school that I really rediscovered the joy of art.

My holidays were nice. The only drama llama stampede was at Thanksgiving when people decided to play silly games. Other than that my family behaved. I went to my Aunt and Uncle's for New Years and had a fantastic time that included my first game of beer pong and first Jager shots.

I really ought to update this more often. I've had plenty to write about too! I'm still loving my new car. I adore it. And I love the freedom to just get in and drive where ever I need/want to go. After I got the car I made a trip to Cincinnati to see Lewis Black. I scored my ticket on sale, so that made the gas money not so bad. The show was fantastic and I actually got to meet Lewis and get an autograph. My mother took me and my half-brother to see Star Wars in Concert in Detroit. It was fantastic! It was basically a 2 hour live music video with a few lasers and pyrotechnics thrown in. And it was hosted by the delightful Anthony Daniels. I had a week of vacation in December that I stretched out with the weekend before off and the Monday following as well. I visited Steve & Steph in Cleveland and my friend Sarah in Pittsburgh. I also had an interesting trip to Ann Arbor with my mother.

I made another trip there recently to hit up IKEA with Julia in which we scored some furniture. I sprung for a couch. They actually had the one I had been pining for on sale. It's a dark blue-grey, and the one end is a chaise which makes it look like a corner sectional, but is fantastic for lounging on . There is storage under the chaise, and a trundle that slides out and pops up to make the whole thing into a bed for guests. And it comes apart in sections for easy moving whenever that happens again.

For the time being I've resigned my lease, so I will be staying in my place until at least 2011. I am really happy with my place. It's funny because when I was younger I moved almost every year. I couldn't imagine living in a place for years on end. Maybe I've just gotten lazy and don't want to haul my junk all over town anymore.

I think I am addicted to bejeweled blitz on facebook. Seriously. I. Can't. Stop. Playing! They even updated the game. Before the medals/score tracking only went up to 250k. Now it goes to 500k. I thought that was daunting as I have only ever gotten over 300k, like, twice. However, today I played a game where I scored 509,650. I think that means I've won bejeweled blitz. That game was like the perfect storm. It will never be repeated. I'd retire if I wasn't so damn addicted! :)

Well, it's 3:30am. Guess I should turn in.

November Novel. Done. Finally.

2009-12-17T03:00:00.002-05:00

Okay. My November Novel is done. I'm not awesome enough to figure out how to put a PDF on here, so if you want to read it send me a message or whatever and I can email you the file.

Please realize that this is a first draft, and as such it is fraught with spelling, grammatical, and probably a few continuity mistakes. The progression of time is not equal as the chapters go back and forth between the different sets of characters, something to be tackled for the second draft.

Oh, and there's sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

Well, not the last one, but there's plenty of swearing and violence to make up for the lack of sweet jams.

An Awesome Day in History

2009-11-17T00:33:00.003-05:00

I should be working on my November Novel, need to get in 8,000 words in by tomorrow to be caught up, but I'm taking a break to show you what I bought today, my first brand new car, a 2010 Honda Fit. It's pretty fuckin' sweet. The sweetest part is having a car that I can rely on. Rest assured I will be driving all over hell and back in an expression of my new found freedom. I did feel a little sad abandoning my old car. I'm not sure why, but I've always had an irrational attachment to the thing in spite of all its problems. Sadness was quickly replaced by joy of having a awesomely awesome functional vehicle, with a working radio! and all four doors open properly! and better mgp! and under warranty! and an ipod dock! Woot!

I had expected to be car shopping tomorrow, but I went in for a test drive and one thing led to another and an hour and half late for work but with a new car. I think my boss was more excited than I was when I called and asked if it was okay if I was going to be late. I feel like I got a good deal, and the salesman wasn't a dick either. And I feel badass for having done the whole thing by myself. Even my dad is happy, he didn't have anything to lecture me about.

What's up, Weather?

2009-10-11T02:14:00.003-05:00

Tonight I decided that I finally have to turn the heat on. It's 62 in here right now which, for me, is perfectly comfortable. Although I feel I could use a pair of socks. I set the heat to come on at 60. I don't think I can be faulted for not wanting the temp to dip into the 50's inside my apartment. I do need to remember to insulate my windows with plastic this winter to help keep the heating bill down. I didn't last winter and we had near record cold. The insides of the windows, and the frames were covered with frost. It was like a very small version of "The Day After Tomorrow." I figure if I am prepared this year coupled with the fact that el nino is going on we will have an icky warm winter.

Yesterday I found out that those people who were whining about it being cold in July actually were onto something. Ohio, along with quite a few other states around us, had the coldest July on record. Which is extra weird considering that pretty much the rest of the world had a record, or near record, warm summer. The ice cap is at the smallest ever, record ocean temperatures and people in the midwest are in coats and blankets.

Random bits

2009-10-10T01:21:00.002-05:00

Today, when one of my employees asked if there was anything else she had to do before she could go home, I told her she had to do the macarena. Protesting, she went and recruited some one else to do it with her and they both proceeded to do an out of sync round of the loathsome dance. Sometimes you have to use your powers for evil.

Wednesday night I went out to pick up some stuffed breadsticks from pagliai's. I also stopped at the gas station to get a 2-litre of pepsi.* I entered the gas station to find it full of the usual Wednesday night "goths".** The usual girl with fishnets and black nailpolish, chubby unwashed fellow in black "leather" trenchcoat, dude in baggy pants with a plethora of chains draped from pocket to pocket, etc. I turned around at the counter to notice that there were also a few zombies as well, which I thought unusual. Apparently goth night was having a "Zombie Night" this week, which is actually kind of cool.

Today I tried to name all 50 states and their capitals. I easily remembered the states, but only got 43 of 50 capitals right. Of the seven I got wrong two I had guessed wildly on and the other five I think I was just overthinking. I was a little disappointed in my geography skills, but at least I know Spain isn't in Mexico.***

Last week one of our computer/registers went down at work. It had not been acting strangely in the past couple days, but that doesn't mean anything with these things. Our District Manager, who is my boss's boss, was in the store at the time. She got on the phone with the company we have these P.O.S.'s through. She proceeded to give them hell. We've had so many problems with these computers, at all of our stores, that I think she finally snapped. She made them over-night ship us a new register at no cost to us (we get regular shipping for free). Later, after she had left for the day, I was struck by a sudden idea. I went to the register and pulled out the flash card. I blew into the card, put it back in, and rebooted. And it worked perfectly after that. Thank you Nintendo for important life lessons. We still took the new register when it came anyway.

*I am unsure why milk comes in gallons and pop in litres.

**One of BG's many bars has themes on certain days. Tuesday=drag/gay night, Wednesday=Goth night. I invariably find myself driving through the middle of town, or at another bar on Wednesdays, wondering, if only for a moment, why all the freaks are out.

***That's a whole other post.

Blogging while TV watching*

2009-10-02T21:15:00.004-05:00

Tyra Banks is a crazy person. You can see it in her eyes. Well, and notice it every time she talks. And what is with her giant forehead?

I saw, like, 14 seconds of "The Hills" today, albeit while watching "The Soup". It made we want to stab things.

"The Stepfather"? Didn't they just do this Creepy Suburbia movie except it was called "Disturbia"?

I am suspicious of commercials advertising any food as "Flame-grilled". Isnt' that what grilling is? I mean you could cook it on a flat grill which isn't really a grill. It's a griddle. Then you don't really call it grilled do you? It's cooked. Stop being redundant.

I often wonder how many people actually order the crap shown on late night infomercials. I mean really. And why do they have to be on at that time. If there's any group of people in the world who need good television programming it is the people who, for whatever reason, are awake at 4am.

Another deplorable tract of unwatchable tv is 3-4pm and pretty much all day Saturday (except adult swim, of course).

If you've never watched "Dirty Jobs" you should. I really enjoy the entrepreneurs, the odd jobs that you never knew about. Obviously there's a lot of dirty, grossness too. And Mike Rowe is a fantastic host; funny, personable, smart too (throwing out poetry or Dante off the cuff), and not a bad looker to boot. One of my coworkers is madly taken with him.

Now that I have cable again I can say that my tv watching habits consist mostly of documentaries and cartoons, and the Daily Show. And Pawn Stars. That show's pretty addictive too.

The other nice thing about cable is that unlike watching dvd's you get to the point where there's nothing good on anymore which tells you that it's time for bed. Good night.

*and drinking beer.

2009-09-29T00:42:00.002-05:00

Must. Update. Blog.

If I could update my Facebook status at work

2009-08-20T13:44:00.003-05:00

...doesn't care that you had to stay up until 5am doing homework that you had all three months of summer vacation to do, but waited until the night before the first day back to finish.

...will take the recommendation of her friends whose opinions she trusts on new movies, not those of the girl who said that "The Ugly Truth" was the best movie she's ever seen.

....hates when grown women talk in that breathy little girl voice. Do they think it is cute? Sexy? It is an annoying, obvious affectation if you ask her. Knock it off!

...thinks if a man initiates a conversation about penises more than 3 times in a half hour than he can be moved onto the "Might Be Gay" list, especially if it's not about his own.

...hates people.

... to Douchey McDoucherton "I'm sure you have never made a mistake in your life, sir. That would fully justify your holier than thou attitude."

...wishes her POS car would qualify for Cash for Clunkers.

...just realized that it has only been 30 minutes since she looked at the clock. Fuck.

...doesn't care what gender(s) Lady Gaga is in, but thinks it would be hilarious if she was 100% male.

...is tired of doing all the thinking.

Lazy Picture Post

2009-08-16T12:52:00.016-05:00

Did you miss me?

Everybody keeps asking me how my vacation went. All I can tell them is, "It was okay." Which seems to thoroughly disappoint them. Look, it wasn't bad...it just wasn't awesometastically awesome either.

So here are some pictures. Some are from my vacation, some aren't. As it turns out, all the pictures I uploaded are in the exact opposite order I wanted. Whatev's.

This is the flower that my pumpkin came from. I never realized how big they were.

This is my garden, at the height of its greenness and glory.

These are my pepper plants. The ones on the left are cayenne peppers. I am going to have enough of those to last a decade.

Itteh Bitteh Watermelon Committeh

Here's the only pumpkin I have so far, and probably the only pumpkin I'm going to get. I'm happy to have any as this year was trial and error for my garden. I'm hoping it will get a little bigger and actually turn orange before the plant dies off. If it doesn't turn I will have to employ some tricks to get it ripen off the vine.

This is the waterfall at the grotto Conkle's Hollow. You can see too well because of the mist, and, you know, it's August there's not a lot of water.

These are the 200 ft Blackhand Sandstone cliffs @ Conkle's Hollow.

I always think that this rock looks like some sort of gargantuan beast sleeping away the millenia.

Conkle's Hollow: Trees

This is the bridge over Pine Creek that you have to cross to get into the gorge @ Conkle's Hollow. Conkle's Creek empties into Pine Creek on the other side of the bridge. I've always liked this bridge.

This is Cedar Falls. By volume it is the largest waterfall in the Hocking Hills area, but being August it isn't terribly impressive.

There were some teabags down there with their giant tripods and cameras griping about the lack of water who were almost on the receiving end of some punches to the face. It's August, what do you expect. If you want lots of water come in the spring. Sorry that Nature is inconveniencing you with its cycles that have been going on for eons and all.

This is a big bug. Glad I look before I put my hand on things, and yes, my finger is in this shot on purpose, you know, for scale. It was a quick shot because as soon as I touched the tree this guy was interested in investigating me.

Ash Cave from the top. Those are people down there.

Ash Cave from the bottom. Biggest recess cave in ohio.

Awww, look at my cute little tent.
I put it up myself.

The T-Rex sez, "OMNOMNOMNOM!!! TOURISTS TASTE DELICIOUS! HOLD STILL STEVE!"

"I hope you are enjoying the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Becky. By the way, have you seen my boyfriend? Wait, is that him behind me, breathing heavily down my neck?......"

And this is my tattoo. This is right after I got it, so it's a little red in the picture. I have to go back to get some shading done in the middle. This is the only part of my vacation that exceeded expectations. I am really happy with the way it turned out, and it isn't weird having it. I thought I would keep noticing it in mirrors and out of the corner of my eye and be like "whoa!" but it's like it has always been there.

I realize you can't see all the detail in this shot, so I will have to take a better one. It took almost two hours to do. The guy did an awesome job. He only stenciled the outline from the picture, and did all the detail work referring off that which I think is impressive. It didn't hurt hardly at all. Other than a little chitchat with the artist I spent the time reading a book, which apparently is very bad ass to do whilst getting a tattoo.

How does your garden grow?

2009-08-01T23:58:00.000-05:00

Mine has issues.

Things started out pretty well. I got all my plants outside. I thought some were on the shrimpy side, but they all took off growing once they went out. The watermelons got out later than everything else. I thought they were just piddling around and not growing, but I realized today that they have grown quite a lot, just behind and under and through other plants so I didn't notice. And I think they have a baby watermelon coming along.

My inside garden got a little over watered which gave me gnats. I fucking hate those itty bitty bastards. I moved some of the offending plants outside and got some spray. Gnats are nigh impossible to get rid of until it gets cold, but the genocide of insecticide seems to have been fairly effective. I'm waiting to see if there's a resurgence in the next week or so, they may have laid eggs in my plants (ick). If so I will be waiting with the spray of death.

The outside garden was humming along nicely, but in the last week or so we've had some problems. The two cucumber plants have given me 9 cucumbers so far, but they've rather outgrown their bucket and have to be watered at least once a day. My tomato plants are loaded with fruit, so loaded that they are in danger of being killed by the weight of their own fruit. There needs to be some serious staking action. My pumpkins have two fruit now. One is getting quite large and has bent its trellis all the way over because, of course, the fruit came in right at the top of the trellis I had constructed. Also, the pumpkin plants have contracted the mange. Okay, it's actually powdery mildew, which is annoying, but less fun to say. I don't think there's any help for it but to hope that the white blotches don't kill off all the leaves before the fruit matures. Oh, and now I think the cucumbers have the mange too. My tomato plants also have issues. They either have blight or blossom end rot. The latter, which I think is the problem as it is a common problem for container grown plants, comes from a calcium deficiency and can be fixed. Now, I don't want to jinx it, but my peppers, both kinds, are doing awesome.

So that's what's up in the wide world of plants.

Bringing the Hate for Julys

2009-08-01T23:06:00.004-05:00

Wow I can't believe I haven't written anything in, like, a month. July sucked. July always seems to suck for me. It's hot and muggy and I always seem to end up in a crabby-mooded funk. This year was no exception.

Work has been an extra slice of annoying with a double serving of stressful. At the beginning of the month my boss had vacation which kind of left me in charge. Which at first I thought, "Cool. Authority without responsibility." But actually it was a bit on the vice versa side. And I had to work a shitload of open shifts that week, and "not a morning person" doesn't even begin to cover it. And all summer I've had to suppress the urge to (lightly) maim our junior managers on a daily basis. And we had a bi-yearly inspection some parts of which we sucked donkey balls on. And it's not like at the debriefing when the honchos are asking for suggestions you can actually tell the truth about what needs done (beatings for everybody).

::

This week I found out that my boss is going to have to take at least 6 weeks off to have heart surgery. Yikes! She's only in her forties. I also found out that we are not getting raises this year. According to my irate boss this is partly because they've paid us so much in bonuses even though our store made a lot of money over our budget. Given the choice I would take the bonuses. They're more money, not that hard to get, based on measurable goals and a good indicator of how the store is doing, but that's not the point is it?

You know, I'm not even mad. Why? Because I'm not surprised. Not all the stores in the franchise are doing as well as us and the economy is extra shitty right now. My boss, however, was surprised. And hella angry. Which was hilarious. I normally find her rather silly, so seeing her filled with indignant rage pretty much took the sting out of not getting the raise.

I also found out that one of my crew I trusted was doing some very stupid shit on one of my shifts when I wasn't watching them like a hawk. Which wouldn't be so bad, but they took a video of it with their phone, and showed that around. Which maybe wouldn't be horrible, but they were bragging about getting away with it. Which might not be absolutely unforgivable, but they weren't just bragging about getting away with it in general, but specifically on my shift. And my crew do not understand discretion, or acoustics. And my boss found out. Luckily she had plenty of other crap to be mad about this week, and even if she didn't I think the fact that they made a slip'n'slide out of trash bags and tried it out wouldn't get her too riled up normally.

I was mad though. Stupidity + tangible proof (cell phone video) + bragging about getting away with it on my shift = Sacred Trust Broken. And there's no fixing that. All the krazy glue in the world won't do you any good, and you can't get another one off of ebay, douchepile.

::

But today was the first day of my 9 day vacation.

And there was much, much rejoicing. [Whoa, need to stop starting all my sentences with conjunctions.]

::::::

One more story from work though before we move on. The other day I had to explain to one of my teen aged employees how laws work. She was complaining about the fees she has to pay to get her driver's license reinstated. How she got it taken away at the tender age of 16 is beyond me. Okay, she's technically 17, but I've repeatedly informed her that she is one of those people who is going to be 16 for a long, long time. I don't think my mother has ever stopped being 16... Any rate, she they went on to express as sense of incredulousness that the state of Ohio actually requires drivers to have car insurance. I wondered aloud how she could not have known/believed this as it is posted everywhere dealing with cars, you have to sign a form saying you have insurance when you get your license, and every other commercial talks about having state required insurance. To which she replied, and I quote, "Yeah, but I didn't think they were serious."

I was flabbergasted. I could not understand the kind of logic you would have to use to come to that conclusion, and said so. To answer my "WTF?" she said, "I just thought they, like, gave you a ticket, not like it's a law or something."

"The reason you get a ticket is because you broke a law. That's why they give out tickets, for breaking laws. That's how laws work." I think I may have had a small aneurysm at that point because I was certainly stupider for having had that conversation. This is why I advocate a course for high school students called Real Life 101 because some of them certainly aren't getting it from their parents.

:::::::

Hopefully that's all the negativity for a while. Fun plans for this week are in motion. Pictures and details to follow.

Happenings

2009-06-24T18:06:00.002-05:00

I did a little "out of debt" celebratory shopping yesterday with my bonus money. I ended up buying two dresses. They're both print dresses. Usually I wear solids, preferably neutrals paired with more neutrals, so they're a bit out of my comfort zone, but supremely awesome. And they were on sale so it was only $50 for both. I also shopped for a bathing suit, a process that usually destroys any body confidence I might have scraped together in the last year. However, I found one I liked, and together with the weight loss I've achieved so far I felt that I could go out in public in it without shame. The ultimate test for a swimsuit.

::::

Saturday I went to a graduation party for my step-cousin (my aunt's step-son). Instead of the usual grad party hotdogs & hamburgers my aunt had a taco bar, rice & beans, and nachos. Best grad party food ever. Also, I got to do some pre-Father's day bonding with my dad, drinking beer, blowing stuff up. Well, actually my brother and dad did most of the firework lighting, but it's the thought that counts.

Then one of my family members finally broke the bubble and asked me the "when are you going to get a man and married?" question. I almost made it to 27 without someone asking it. And it wasn't anyone you would expect. Not my mom, or my grandma, or a catty aunt. It was my Uncle K. Which made it even weirder. I could've understood if it was his wife, she's definitely catty. "It's been a long time since we've had a wedding," he said. My family is so weird.

What have you done this week?

2009-06-20T02:57:00.002-05:00

Amongst other things, I made these.

What are they? They're self-watering containers for my plants. Obviously I still have to add the dirt and the plants.

It would have cost at least 40 bucks to buy one of these. I made 'em for about $7 a piece by using instructions from the interwebs and recycling some materials.

They will be way more impressive when I'm showing you the pumpkins and watermelons that I will, hopefully, have in a couple months.

I'm pretty much like Martha Stuart meets MacGyver.

This is just a series of things that are pissing me off - 1.

2009-06-16T15:26:00.004-05:00

Look, I'm not trying to sound ungrateful towards the advice givers of the world, but there is a certain brand of unsolicited advice that I find irritating. I'm talking about the unsolicited soliloquy dumped in the middle of a light conversation, in this case one being held at work. It's great that you know things, lots of things apparently, but if you're going to give a lecture maybe you should have given me a heads up first so I could have grabbed a pen & paper to take notes. There is no way I'm going to remember all this crap in five minutes. And by the way, you're monopolizing the conversation. Conversation is like badminton, if the shuttlecock, or birdie, isn't going back and forth once in a while then we're not playing fucking badminton are we? We're just standing in the yard wondering when lunch will be.

For example, if I say, "I'm thinking about getting a pet zombie." There are numerous standard responses that we can all agree on to be appropriate:

"That's cool."
"We had a pet zombie when I was a kid. It was awesome."
"I know a guy who raises zombies. Let me give you his card."
"Not me, I've had zombiphobia since I was a kid, and watched that one movie with the town that had the rabid zombie population. For me they're worse than clowns."
"I don't recommend it. Zombies smell/they only eat brains and have you seen the price of brains lately?/the gnaw on everything/I think it's inhumane to keep them locked up/whatever reason."

All of these allow us to continue down the merry path of the convo. Here's what is not an okay response:

"Zombies? My third cousin, Rachel, did her master's thesis on the impact of zombie farming with regard to imports and exports in the near Far East during the pre-classical post-revival Gobbledeegook period. She and her husband made a small but crucial contribution to Martin J. Belowme's History of the American Zombie: A Guide to Breeds and a History of Breeders in the Classical Period. I think it's out of print, but you should talk to my husband he knows this one site where you can get books that are out of print, and make money from home. That's what he does, makes money from home, and it's not a scam like some of those scams out there that say you can make money from home, but you can't they just take your money and then you're out all that money, and you can never track them down, and the Better Business Bureau will just say, "tough luck, we can't do anything" which is what happened to my aunt Sally that one time. Anyway, my third cousin, or is she third once removed? Dunno. Anyway, she submitted several articles to Zomb Weekly over the last four and three-quarters years. You can read them, along with others, at her website http://rachelsmith.zombies.wtf/12345/gobbledeegook-blargledeeblarg/nearwesternfareast/6789/pre-classical/articles/\-_++#$5&*!/stfu/zombie-lovin-farmers-of-america/omfgareyouwritingthisdown?=shutup!shutup!shutup!.html. You really should check it out."

Okay, if you can't tell by my mildly poleaxed expression at this point, I am no longer listening to what you're saying. I'm looking for an escape route.

Busy, busy, busy

2009-06-10T12:00:00.006-05:00

I feel that I have been somewhat productive lately. I've reapplied myself to bringing my comic to life. I made a (rather feeble/lazy) attempt at bringing it to the web a while back, but over time it got shuffled to the back burner. Well, I've been thinking a lot about it lately. I've been making some tough decisions about which of my hobbies/interests I am going to continue to pursue and which ones I simply don't have time for. I've put the comic at the top of the list because, well, A. I enjoy it B. I've put a lot of work/thought into it C. It's the thing I've done the most with. I've got a lot of ideas for it, so many in fact that I write them in a notebook, which I then listed in a spreadsheet. However, they're in no order, and the strips I've already drawn are also in no particular order. I would just draw them as I thought of them, jumping to new story lines, not introducing characters, no chronology, etc. I decided I needed to organize all my ideas, fill in the holes and make it all flow properly. I needed to create a storyboard.

Each of the 833 index cards on my coffee table represents at least one strip.

Some of the cards just have an idea/notes that could lead to a whole series of strips, and that's not counting the stuff I have in my head or the filler for the holes. As I was sitting there filling out the cards I was struck by how many there were. Somehow, seeing it all laid out made me realize it in a way I couldn't before. It made me feel prolific, in a small, modest way.

It's not a storyboard yet, but they're all written down and sorted by relevant character or plot line. I'm probably going have to take over the entire floor to get them all laid out in order.

::::

Speaking of floor space, I've slowly been rearranging my apartment since my roommate migrated to Cleveland last month.
Here are a couple pictures of my rearranged living room. So much space! It feels so luxurious to have all this space to myself. And a bedroom that is just a bedroom instead of a bedroom/office/studio/whatever. Also, I've come to realize that I am quite lazy about hanging paintings and pictures.

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Another project I've been busy with is my garden. I use the word loosely as I don't actually have anything planted in the ground. I'm trying my hand at growing a container garden on my patio. I have tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers planted in pots and doing nicely so far *fingers crossed*. I also have a crapload of marigolds and geraniums along with a few oregano, peppermint and lavender plants. All of the plants are from seed I started indoors. Not all of them have migrated to the patio, some will probably stay inside. I'm also taking a crack at growing pumpkins. Crazy you say? It can and has been done. I did the research, thanks google. I've got a big enough container 18 gal, and I'm going to rig up a self watering system. Then as it grows the vines will have to be trained to wrap around the container so it doesn't take over. What I should end up with is something that looks like a shrub. Anyway, I figured why not? Go big or go home. I'm not expecting monster, prize winning pumpkins, but I'm hopeful for some decent jack-o-lanterns. I will post pictures as the garden progresses.

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I have to watch my spending for the next week and a half until I get paid again as my bank account is a bit on the low side. The upside of this is that it is only low because I made a big payment on my credit card and I am now officially, completely 100% out of debt. (!!!!!!!!!!!!!) I took out a personal loan last year to consolidate my credit card debt, but because of my credit they wouldn't give me enough to cover everything (seriously another thousand was going to be too much?). I'm not some crazy shopaholic, I just went through some bad financial times and relied too heavily on plastic. However, it's all gone now. It still hasn't sunk in.

Now I'm looking to save up for a down payment on a new car. Seriously, my car is great if you are ambivalent about reaching your destination. Also, I'd like to save up for a epic vacation. I have a week of vacation coming up in August, but that's going to be a laid back affair. Maybe some camping and/or a trip to the lake (still waiting to hear back on that), general relaxing, and I'd like to get a tattoo for my birthday. Still trying to decide what to get for the last one.

I've also thought back about cutting back on my hours at work now that I'm debt free. Going from 50 hrs a week to 40 is very tempting, even though it means a pay cut, but with higher rent (living by myself), and big things to save up for I'm not sure I want to take the pay cut. However, extra time not spent at work that could be spent, oh say, on the comic strip would be super awesome.

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Well, long post, but now you know what I've been up to. Catch ya on the flip side.

Cerebration

2009-05-09T01:40:00.003-05:00

It's May already. 2009 is nearly half gone. Where does the time go? What do we have to show for it?
I keep puttering around and nothing gets done. The status quo is maintained, but little new growth is had. I want to produce. The ideas are there. The skill is there. How to take them and bring them forth into the light?
Too many distractions. Too many excuses. If you keep waiting for the right time you'll spend your whole life waiting.
Basically I need to get my ass in gear. I have to motivate myself to put in the work that is required to reach my goals. No one is going to give me a pep talk. No one else is going to help out. It's just me vs. the world, and the world had better look out.

2009-05-08T01:41:00.002-05:00

Long time no see, eh? I've been busy, but aren't we all? I like lists, so (in no particular order) are the things that have happened or are going on right now:

::::

I have the beginnings of a cold. Just a tickle in the throat, but I'm not really in the mood for a cold (not that I ever would be), so Eff that noise. I am trying to kill it with some of those preemptive strike medicines. I haven't tried them before, so we'll see if it works.

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I got totally screamed at, cussed out by a customer on the phone the other day. We're talking completely bat shit irrational hostilities, even though I was not personally responsible for the thing she was mad about. The conversation ended with the woman hanging up on me. Anytime I take a customer complaint call I apply my most polite and professional phone voice (I have others), I don't let people get me riled, I don't let them transfer their anger to me. Let's face it, a lot of times the people aren't really mad because we messed up. Their mad at other crap in their life: their dog shit on the floor, their wife's banging some other dude, their kids are demon spawn, their boss is a douche, whatever, but they can't take out their frustrations on any of those people, so who gets it? The first sucker in the service industry who flies into their cross hairs. You don't have to feel bad about taking a big, sweary frustration shit on a complete stranger, right?
Well, I won't let them do it to me. Here's my secret for dealing with them: deep down, I don't care. Sure, yeah, it sucks we messed up. I get that, I'd be (maybe) slightly irritated too, but honestly, I Do. Not. Care. I will follow standard operating procedure to take care of the problem, but you can't make me care and you can't make me angry.
Well, usually. This was hands down the nastiest call I've ever taken. I actually felt upset after. That made me feel worse, that I had let that bitch get to me. I had to go to the walk-in freezer and take some deep breaths because I was as close to crying as I have been in a long time and ever at work. Instead, I calmed down and then went to the office and wrote a very professional, eloquent, composed report to my bosses describing the incident. Apparently I judged my mark well on the tone because they were able to infer how very angry I was with my having to say so.

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There is a drunk guy sitting in the hallway of my apartment building talking loudly on the phone to his, I presume, girlfriend at 3am. Not as entertaining as the guy wandering around my block one night around 5am or so talking on his cell just below the threshold of yelling last weekend. He had no idea where he was and had been wandering around town for four hours after having apparently been ditched by his friend(s). He kept declaring his intent to beat the shit out of them when he got back, sleeping or no. Sounds horrible to tell, hilarious to listen to.

::::

I had to listen to the most appalling twaddle at work yesterday morning on top of only having had an hour of sleep. The conversation was a brainstabbingly ignorant discourse on things political and socio-economical. Warning: it is very "If it weren't for my horse..." I have included a few thoughts in ( ). It ran thus:

The pres. is the devil, excuse me, anti-christ. We know this because of three facts:

he is the president
he is trying to unite everyone
he has two birth certificates

Speaking of birth certificates, if Bob* here was running for president he would show his to everyone, call the media, and there would be no problems instead of just showing to a judge like Obama did and then sealed it away in the Temple of Doom so no one can find it, or something.
(No, no, no. You wouldn't. It is one of your most important personal documents. You don't show it to anybody, especially if you're famous. See there are these things called identity thieves...oh never mind)

Republicans are the best because they are all about you keeping your money.**
(No, they are about them keeping their money. They'd love your money. Gods help us if they figure out a way to invent money magnets.)
Everybody else wants to spend your money. On things. Buffy* is very against this. She does not think her money should pay for other people's health care, and parks, and some other third thing which I think I blacked out during.
(That's right, parks are the devil.)

You know what Buffy really, really would like and would be like, super totally awesome? Free health care.
(I hate you.)
Bob says that in countries that have free health care it is all shitty and you have to wait weeks to see a doctor. This is the gospel of Bob. And some of them are starting to decide that if you are a smoker and have lung problems they won't cover it. Won't cover it! Ludicrous we say! We're better off without!
(Or would if they knew what ludicrous meant.)

Buffy absolutely will not drive a car. "I'm not driving no cars, I've got kids," she declared. She will, however, drive SUV's and trucks, has a driveway full of them if you care to look. All non-SUVs and truck-like vehicles are by this logic death traps that everyone is obviously too stupid to notice.
(Riiiiight.)

The Gospel of Bob also informs us that Congress, dirty, dirty vegans all, is taking cow farmers and all cows to court for Crimes Against Humanity and the Environment. The congressional vegans are going to do away with cows. Cows kill the Environment. The vegans are going to make us all eat salads! We cannot live with out meat!
(This is going to lead to me having an aneurysm.)

*Names changed to protect the stupid.
**I am not making this up, any of it. (Weeps)***
***Okay, I did add in the Temple of Doom bit.

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::::

Good news: in my travels on the highway to health I have now lost 25 pounds. Not bad for 3 months of work. It's always exciting to have clothes unexpectedly fit. I'm very happy about it, in spite of my mother's attempt to take a big slimy shit on my self esteem parade. 25 is a nice big, psychologically satisfying number. Onward, I say.

::::
And lastly, for tonight anyways, I am attempting to grow a mini-garden on my patio. Right now everything is in the seedlings-in-trays stage, but soon my patio will be covered with pots of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and flowers. I did quite a bit of interweb research on container gardening, but other than that it's going to be trial and error. My biggest concern is pests. No, not aphids and the like, but idiotus inebriatedi.

Now it's personal

2009-04-15T00:49:00.002-05:00

Damn you Bush Administration. The recession that your crappy policies (arguably) spawned have finally hit home. Though not stated in the letter I received, I assume that financial reasons are to blame for one of my monthly magazines no longer being published. That sounds shallow, but honestly I think that I'm poor enough that most of what is going on hasn't affected me. In fact our store has been making a profit and we earned bonus for February. I say don't count your bonus before it's paid, so I was quite happy to find that my last paycheck was about $200 more than usual. Woo! To bad it's all going to bills.

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I would say I had a good weekend, but first of all I only had Sunday off. Sunday was good though. I had lunch with my dad's family which was entertaining as usual, my father and his siblings engaged in their good natured antagonizing. My Aunt N has started her own dog walking/sitting business. My Uncle K's wife apparently thinks being barefoot is disgusting. Recipes were argued over. My father passed out various goodies from his work. (They build machines and robots for other companies and get test product to run on the machines to ensure they work properly. After the tests are over they usually get to keep the product. Couple years ago we got cases of peppridge farm cookies. This time it was tea, country time lemonade mix, and Betty Crocker instant potatoes. Hooray for free stuff!)

As soon as I got home from my grandparent's I had to turn around and head over to my mom's for dinner. I didn't end up wanting to punch anyone in the face, so that was a good visit. My mom couldn't wait to tell me that my loser alcoholic uncle apparently has added 'crack addict' to his resume, oh fun.

Oh, and Friday night I broke a toe. Technically, of course, I can't say that it's broken because I didn't go to a doctor and get it x-rayed, but I think swollen+black&blue+pain+can't bend it+still hurts days later=broken. Besides it's a toe! A toe! Even if you go to a doctor and they x-ray it and the doctor comes in and says, "Durrr, yur toe iz broke" they can't do anything about it. They'll tape it (can do that myself) and maybe give you some fun drugs (don't want 'em). Unless it's the big toe, and is, like, turned the wrong way, or bones sticking out, fuck going to the doctor for it. And mine is the little toe, so I feel like a big baby, but standing for all those 10 hr shifts don't help.

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I'm pretty sure that my laptop has acquired some spyware and/or virus type thing. Good job McAfee, way to protect me from that shit. What do I even pay you for? Now I'm deleting files hoping I don't accidentally lobotomize my computer. I'm tempted (probably going) to just transfer all my important files to my new computer and then give the laptop a memory wipe. Fun times all around.

Randomness

2009-04-08T01:36:00.004-05:00

A week-ish ago Julia and I made the trek to Ann Arbor to wander and shop and pick up tons of delicious groceries from Trader Joe's. Everything I've brought back and tried so far has been nine kinds of awesome. Also, while we were there we stopped in an antique shop and I picked up and oodle of foreign coins because I am a dork. As far as the wandering around part went it was a welcome change to have the one white trash couple we saw be the ones who were horribly out of place. Even the homeless people were more cosmopolitan.

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My roommate is going for a job interview in Cleveland this week. Long story: he and his girlfriend had been talking about moving there months ago, better job market, etc, etc. She had applied for some jobs, had an interview, didn't think she got the job, they accepted that they were staying here in the beege, 2 weeks ago she found out she got the job, she is moving to Cleveland this month, he may be moving to Cleveland as soon as next month. Living arrangement wise none of this affects me. Our lease goes to August, but my roommate is still paying his half even if he moves early, or moves half his stuff early, or whatever. I already resigned the lease months ago because I am lazy and do not feel like moving again already. So come August I will be sans roommate which will just give me more space to put my crap (a bedroom that is just a bedroom and not a bedroom/office/studio you say? Sign me up!). The whole thing affects me more at work (and also 2 of my friends are moving 2 hrs away) as this means the company is losing two managers.

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I spent my day off today cleaning and cooking. Some friends from work (including the roommate and his gf) came over and I made dinner and drinks. I made a gigantic pan of lasagna as well as a peanut butter pie and a frozen mint-chocolate cheesecake. I did indulge (I took a little detour off of the Highway to Health, lol), but I sent most of the dessert leftovers home with La for her and her roommates. Hell, it was their complaints about eating pizza every night that prompted our impromptu dinner party. Guess I'll have to take the rest to work and pawn them off on people.

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Meh, I have more, but I'm too tired to finish now. ZZzzzzzz....

Pants and stuff

2009-03-26T01:09:00.003-05:00

As an update to my post from yesterday, when I got on the scale the next morning for my weekly weigh in I was quite close to having lost 20 pounds. Woot. Go me. It's funny though because I feel a little like I'm cheating since the whole process has been laughably easy thus far. I suppose that the truth is that I'm paranoid because it has been so easy, and that I'm worried I'm going to hit some kind of wall soon. Hopefully that will not be the case.

I only have to make it through my shift tomorrow and then I get two whole days off in a row, a Friday and Saturday to boot. Friday I'm planning on donating blood, something I haven't done in, like, a year (Guilt! I have guilt!). Saturday I'm going for my yearly Skywarn training session. Skywarn is the National Weather Service's volunteer Weather Spotter program (we look for and report tornadoes and other severe weather). I always enjoy the class, and usually learn something new every year.

I also need to buy some new work pants this week. The pair I bought a couple months ago was a little on the big side when I bought them, now every time I wear them it turns into a struggle of epic proportions between me and gravity for the fate of my pants. Seriously though, I don't want to be rushing around and get caught on something and end up sans pants. I can't be having with that.

Postcard from the Highway to Health

2009-03-24T21:47:00.002-05:00

Hello. How are things? Everything is lovely here. We are all having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.

Okay, some of that is a lie. The whole Highway to Health thing is going pretty well. It's been about two months and I've lost 15 pounds with very little effort. I'm definitely slimmer, even it's only noticable to me. I'm very happy with my progress, I'm not trying for any drastic quick results, very unhealthy dontcha know. While I was quite excitied to hit the 15 mark, reveled in the moment, it also made me realize I have quite a ways to go yet. So I'm buckling down and plowing forward.

::::

I had to do an early shift (7am-5pm) for the first time in forever today. I was dreading it last week, but yesterday I just made up my mind to deal with it. Everything ended up going pretty well. I even got six hours of sleep which is pretty good considering that I have been falling asleep at about 5am for months now and usually have trouble changing my sleep schedule. Even though 2 of my 3 opening employees were 15 minutes late: The new guy was on time, but no one was there to train him. :( Even though two more of my lunch shift employees were late: Even though half of the heat wasn't working in the building: Even though I had to work with Cranky McRude: everything went very well. I even had time to do the necessary rewrites to next week's crew schedule (thanks for not telling me you might have to take the week off RM). All of this is good since I got the news last week that all of the managers now have to work at least 2 opens per week. Blech.

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If it weren't for my horse....

2009-03-08T22:12:00.002-05:00

Let me start by saying that the girl in the following anecdote is very sweet and nice. Not liking her would be a bit like kicking a puppy (or kitten, if you prefer), a sad orphan one, shivering in the cold, on Christmas Eve. However, we had the following exchange at work a couple of days ago.

Me (to someone else entirely): Don't make me come up there or you will feel my wrath.
Girl: Your rat?
Me: No, wrath. W-R-A-T-H. Wrath.
Girl: Omigod! What is that??? Are you a witch?!?!

*sigh*

Highway to Health

2009-02-17T23:59:00.001-05:00

That is what I am calling my plan of diet and exercise. I like it A.) because I think it's clever, and that's really all the reason I need, but also B.) because it sums it up nicely. It's not a "Diet Regime" or "My plan to become skinny". I just want to get into a healthy shape, preferably a less fluffy one. And I want to be in better shape endurance and strength wise. I'd slacked off in the last year in the eating healthy and exercising departments, and paid the price. I gained a bit of weight and when I went hiking last fall I was taking the hills like the fat kid in gym class.

I did a lot of research before I embarked upon my little journey. I bought a scale. Using it was only the fourth most traumatizing part of all of this.

I've got the eating part down quite well. I'm drinking only the very occasional very small glass of pop, eating more fruit and veg, and I haven't had any crazy breakdowns in will power at work (did I mention I'm a restaurant manager?). It's all down to doing the one thing I said I'd never do: counting calories. I've become one of those people, and I don't do things halfway, so I'm like the those people. It's been far easier than I would have thought, but when I actually apply myself to something I mean it and do it. I'm my own harshest critic and I won't let myself backslide.

The working out side is coming along. I've been doing yoga again and hitting the treadmill. I just need to do it more often, and find a way to work in some toning/strength crap. Thankfully my roommate sleeps like the dead (the kind far away from any sources of zombification) because I usually want to work out when I get home from work which is invariably after 11pm.

So things are going well so far. Tomorrow makes 3 weeks, and I've lost 7 pounds so far which is pretty decent. I feel a lot better, but that could be psychosomatic. And I've started to notice little differences, but I might be imagining it..... Hey, I like cautious optimism, very cautious. As the numbers on the scale keep going down I worry that one morning it's going to say, "Just kidding, you didn't lose any weight. Tee-hee-hee. I was just playing stupid scale games. Tee-hee-hee."

Okay, I might be slightly paranoid, but being paranoid doesn't mean you're wrong, just a suspicious bastard.

Eh

2009-01-22T02:42:00.002-05:00

I'm trying to blog more often. One of those resolution type things. So today you get to read about me cleaning out my email inbox because I lead a rich full life. It's not that I never start to file or delete things. I just don't finish. There was stuff on page 2 (you can only get 50 items per page) that was, like, two years old. Kind of makes me wonder why I bother. Why don't I just leave it all in my inbox. I'm the only one who sees it. It's not like people are going to stumble into my inbox as they are surfing the web like Goldilocks and say, "My what a big pile of unsorted crap you have, Grandma." And yes I just mixed fairy tales. Anyway, it's not like I find myself going back to look for old emails, at least not usually, but now I have a nice clean, empty inbox, dammit.

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One of my young employees was raving about some recent crappy movies and suggesting that the actors therein were the epitome of all things funny. Or he would if he knew what the word 'epitome' meant. Well, I felt that such an erroneous statement could not go unchallenged. Long story short - he didn't know who either Lewis Black or George Carlin were. I guess I can understand Black, but Carlin? Really?

What do they teach kids these days?

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Inauguration Day

2009-01-20T22:27:00.002-05:00

I got up early (read: before 11am) to watch coverage of Obama's inauguration today. Not gonna lie here, it was a little emotional. And it is so, so nice to have a president who, when he speaks, I don't have to be restrained from stabbing myself in the brain with the closest object at hand. You know someone who isn't a complete gibbering ape representing our country to the rest of the world. 'Scuse me, a complete gibbering ape puppet mastered by satan's long lost 3rd cousin.

Anyway, Julia, her husband, our good friend Eleanor and I had a little champagne and pizza party to celebrate. We toasted such things as "don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out...you know who you are." Even my roommate, republican though he is, joined us in some friendly discussion.

I liked Obama's inaugural speech. Some of the pundits seemed unhappy with it, but I think that they were just disappointed that it wasn't full of glib phrases they could sound bite. Guess that's just that whole speaking in full sentences and paragraphs thing, not sputtering sentence fragments at a much abused press corps. It was exactly what I wanted to hear, honestly, and it has given me a small measure of that one thing I've been holding back, hope. I can only hope that this really is the turning point. I really want to believe that the change and evolution that this country so desperately needs. But deep down I am a realist, and the Cynic in my head has had a few things to say. So we'll see. We'll see.

Oh, and as for the 'boos' when cheney and bush were announced at the inauguration...I would say that yes, normally, this would have been out of line at an event that celebrates the peaceful, bloodless transfer of power from one president to the next (even if they are from opposite ideologies) in one of the world's leading countries, and that the outgoing president and vice-president should be granted a departure full of dignity in honor of the work they have done for the country, etc...however...however...I think these d-bags might have, uh, earned this little bit of infamy.

Cheers.

2009-01-17T01:56:00.002-05:00

I like the young kid they have on the late shift at the weather channel. It seems that they've left him to do the weather all on his own, and he's just sort of prattling on and rambling off on tangents. I hope he doesn't get in trouble, it's sort of charming.

::::

I picked up my new glasses today, so for the first time in years I have glasses of a proper perscription. It's weird. I haven't bothered to wear glasses in so long. I'm unused to having to move my head instead of just my eyes, but it's coming back.

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The temperature never got above zero today. I know it's just a number, but it is a psychologically significant number.

Too cold to blog

2009-01-16T02:14:00.002-05:00

Mark this day down. I said it was cold.

And if I said it you know everybody else probably thinks that hell is freezing over. Given the temperatures outside they probably believe it. Right now it's around -15F (-26C) degrees , so with the wind (because you know it's always windy here in the beege) the wind chill is about 40 degrees below zero, and -40 is -40 whether your in Fahrenheit or Celsius and damn cold no matter what. At least it's not as cold as some of the weather they've had in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Regular temp of -40 and windchills at 70 below will freeze your face off. I mean, here your face would freeze off eventually, but it might take a half hour instead of, say, 5 minutes.

This is the coldest it has been in 15 years. But there's a half foot of snow on the ground, so at least it's pretty.

Return from the Sojourn

2009-01-09T00:42:00.002-05:00

Holy crap it has been a while. What's been up? Let's see.

I had the lamest new years ever. No disrespect to my friend SH whose party I stopped at for an hour. I had to close the store, and even though we closed early I still didn't leave work until almost 11, so by the time I got to the party it was 10 'til midnight. When you get to the party 3 hours after everybody else the fun is a bit like the nibbles - they're a bit manky from sitting out on the counter and thouroughly picked over. So I had a sip of champagne watched them fiddle with the wii for a bit. Then it was off to another party to pick up a friend to get them home by their curfew; somehow I got volunteered for that since I had admitted to a lack of intent to drink.

Xmas was good. I got plenty of loot, highlights of which include a 32" lcd tv (from my dad, tho I paid for half), some books, and a miniature sewing machine (thanks Julia!). I haven't used it yet, but it is ridiculously cute! There was, of course, familial drama. My two of my uncles did not turn up at that family's get together in spite having moved it off of xmas itself to the weekend so that no one would have an excuse not to show up. *sigh*

I went to the eye doctor last week to get a check up. I need more contacts, but my prescription is expired. I also decided it was time to get new glasses, my old ones being from something like 10 years and 3 or 4 prescriptions ago. Then today I had to go back and have my pupils dialated some the doc could peer deep into my retinas and check for tears or holes or something. Everything came up fine, but having almost no iris showing in your eyes is kind of creepy looking, and gives me a headache.

Working Vacation

2008-12-18T20:24:00.003-05:00

I'm not really doing anything exciting. There's always some small part of me that insists I should do something while on vacation and feels guilty if I don't. A very small part, mind you.

I've been reading a lot. And doing chores: laundry, dishes, cleaning my room, whatnot. I've also been to two xmas parties for work (one for just our store and one for all the managers in the company). Both were very mild, potluck affairs. No dancing on tables or anything.

Julia and I are supposed to go to Trader Joe's in Ann Arbor tomorrow to finish up our xmas shopping. However, it seems that the weather gods are going to take a big cold crap on our plans with several inches of snow and sleet. So we'll see.

Occupational Mutterings

2008-12-06T02:57:00.005-05:00

So, um, they've finally decided to admit that the country is in a recession, has been since last December in fact. The first thing I said when I read that was "Well DuUUuuh!" Not mature, but not admitting your economic woes isn't really either. National unemployment is up to something like 6.7%. And while we hate to see anyone profit from this sort of thing, an employer might not be amiss to say that they have a larger pool of applicants to choose from and that said applicants might be of better quality.

Yeah, if it were true. We have seen more applications off and on, but if anything they are, for the most part, worse than the normal 'tards drifting through. It seems that the only people mooching around for jobs here in the BG are the dross. I find this all vexing as we are currently understaffed, not drastically, but a half dozen noobs would really round out the crew nicely. Our turn over is pretty high too, although, I believe it is still below industry averages. We've made a few good hires (the HotGuy, my protege, and the nice girl who doesn't work a whole lot of hours), but we still need more, especially since one of our managers has (finally, thank the gods) been transferred to another store.

Then there are those of the rank who need a firm planting of the Boot to their asses. They whine about not getting enough hours. They whine about having to come in. The whine about having to stay for the entire shift. They whine about whatever position they are on. They won't do anything correctly even it is easier to do it that way. If you correct them they whine that you're being mean. They bitch at each other constantly. They whine if you make them help each other. They all thing that they are the only person doing any work and/or doing their work correctly. You just wish you could tell them to shape up because there are ten people off the street willing to take their job, but you can't because while there are people willing to take their job they are the ones who put things about stealing from past jobs on their applications or have been fired from other locations in the company (in the last couple months, like we weren't going to know) or tell you, during the interview, about the operation their kid needed on his privates or just show up "here for work" and they've never had an interview and nobody knows who they are.

So when my guys are running around all night, throwing things, singing and swearing at the top of their lungs, hiding in the equipment, drawing unicorns on their checklists, demanding I google the Captain Planet theme song lyrics for them, chasing each other, making puppets out of product, concocting asinine reasons why they should not have to do their work properly or at all, but not because they aren't going to, but because if they're breathing they are arguing with me, and being so ridiculous you just want to shake them, and then one of them wonders to the others why I put up with them and haven't fired them so hard their grandkids will be unemployed I just don't have it in me to tell them it's because they are my best employees because in spite of all of the shenanigans they get their work done and, for the most part, do it well.

Thoughts, Randomly

2008-11-21T01:31:00.003-05:00

A question for fellow contact wearers: have you ever had your eye eat one of your contacts? You're sitting there, minding your own business, when *blink, blink* your contact suddenly slides back into the hidden recesses of your upper eyelid. It's up there somewhere, you can't see it and you can't get it out. And then you end up in the bathroom, fingers jammed in the offending eye yelling "give it back, damn you!" at the mirror. Anybody else?

Just me then.

:::::::

Well, I'm glad we got that whole election thing (successfully) out of the way. Things were getting awful tense. I mean, I had to break up a (verbal) fight at work the week before, and neither one of them were even old enough to vote.

::::::::

My fiend SH and I were out shopping tonight and browsing through the book shop. I was flipping through a book of lists when I came across of forbidden foods. Either for health reasons or because the species had become endangered. When you're standing there, reading about how foie gras is produced or a maggot filled cheese whose name eludes me at the moment, you start thinking about other things that people eat: crayfish, cockroaches, the brain of anything, sea urchins, snails, caviar, and you wonder where along the line was there a person standing there who said "hey, we should totally eat that!"

:::::::

Dinner and a Curling

2008-10-20T02:20:00.004-05:00

I feel that when life presents you unique opportunities you should pounce on them, so I went curling* yesterday.

The owner of the company I work for went to an auction for the Adopt America Network. She ended up winning a package offered by the Bowling Green Curling Club (I didn't even know that there were people in BG curling). The Curling Club's offering was for a group to come out and learn how to play and have dinner (which was delicious). Our Owner offered that any managers in the company could come to the event, but I wasn't originally going to go even though I didn't have to work. SH, who is another manager in our company, she worked at our store over the summer, and I were just going to hang out and probably do nothing, so I suggested we go if there were any openings left.

I got a call from the Owner a the day before telling me the time, that we would need rubber soled shoes, and to dress warmly. I had to decide how the "dress warmly" thing applied to me. I mean, c'mon, I'm always warm, but I decided pants instead of shorts were probably a good idea and a hoodie. After we got started playing I, of course, got too warm and had to start shedding layers and everyone thought I was crazy, whatevs.

I'm glad I went though. All of the club members were super nice, and seemed glad to be able to share their little known sport. I think everybody had a really good time. There were the inevitable falls one would expect from a group of people who are unused to walking on ice doing so, but nobody got hurt. The club members were all modest "Oh, I'm not really that good", but they still made us look like retarded monkeys.

Other than the basic rules of the game I learned a few important things about curling: it is a lot harder than it looks, and I have no natural talent for it. Obviously, you'd have to learn the strategies if you're the guy at the end calling the shots to your teammates, and sweeping seems something that would come with practice, but there is a whole knack to doing the actual throwing (you don't actually throw them, you slide them) of the stones. The members were all graceful and their stones would actually go all the way down the ice. This one guy actually would slide about half way down the 100 foot long sheet following his stone, all laid out and insanely graceful. Meanwhile there was our group, our rocks would only go a third of the way, or off to the side, and we're falling all over the place. Personally I think I hit me knee every time I threw.

There were just so many variables that every time I'd get one thing right I'd forget something else. You stand with one foot on the block to push off. Hold your broom in the off hand (you know, for balance...hahahaha!). You hold the handle of the stone in the other hand. Then your other foot is on the ice, but it's not just standing on ice, oh no, you've got this little teflon thingy that you're going to slide on (prob why it's called the "slider"). Teflon. On Ice. Do you see what I'm getting at? No fucking traction, none. Then you push off the block, put your weight on the foot with the slider, the other leg is behind you like you're doing a lunge (hence the knee hitting the ice thing for me), hopefully you remember to throw the rock before you lose all momentum, and finally don't fall on your ass as you stand back up (*hint* don't try to stand up on the slider). Oh, and when you let go you have to remember to give the stone that little twist that will make it curl as it slides.

Still, like I said, lots of fun. And I wouldn't mind doing it again sometime. Sometime after my thigh muscles forgive me that is. And during the next winter Olympics I'm sure I will say at some point, "Curling? Omg, I have totally done that!"

::::

*You know, it's in the winter Olympics, sometimes they'll stick 5 minutes of coverage somewhere in the broadcast...4 people to a team, sliding rocks around, on ice, there's lots of shouting and brooms...google it if you don't know what I'm talking about.

We danced, we drank, we carried on

2008-10-09T12:05:00.002-05:00

I think that nicely sums up the situation with the boy from the wedding, but I know you all have been pestering me for details. We grab a snack and kick back.

So, as I started to say in the last post, my friend Sarah, the bride, sent her friend over to ask me to dance, but she didn't even point me out, just told him my name, so he first asked another of our friends if she was me first. Then had to deal with the DM timebomb, as mentioned. After the slow songs ended the guy, let's call him Sven, Sven and I were standing by the wall talking when Sarah's brand new husband bounded over. He said, quote, "I see you got a new boyfriend, huh? Hur, hur, hur!" Seriously, I almost punched him in the face, I don't care if it was his wedding day. When I was telling Julia about it she said Sarah and Hans were behaving like parents do around your date, you know, embarassing you and inadvertantly ninja-ing any chance you might have.

::::
::::

Ok, this is as far as I got with the post before I became completely distracted by IRL things. Since it's been, like, two weeks I'll assume that intrest in the subject has waned.

The fact of the matter is that nothing really awesome appeared to have happened. We didn't make out or exchange numbers or go home together. It was one of those "life is a journey" things, I guess you might say. Also, I found myself struggling to turn out a coherent and interesting narrative about the whole thing. The important things that happened were internal. I made myself talk to a guy and not go immediately to the friend zone (do not pass go, do not collect $200). It was nice to talk and flirt with a nice, attractive boy without having anything emotionally invested already. And he told me I was amazing, which was nice, but I have to say there was a bit of a hang up from a very recent breakup. (She told him he was boring. Wtf! What is with women who feel they have to ruin a guy for the next girl to come along?)

So, um, yeah, that's about it.

In which the blogger forgets what she was writing about in the first place

2008-10-06T01:20:00.000-05:00

The wedding reception was one of the most fun I've been to. It didn't hurt either that I met a boy. Oh yes, there was a boy. My friend Sarah, the bride, sent him over to ask me to dance (Here single friend, go ask other single friend to dance, ya bunch of losers, lol), but hey, we talked whilst we slow danced, and he was pretty cool (and pretty hot). Then he said that Sarah had told him I was her DM, and he asked if that meant I was her district manager. Oh, lord, I thought. I had to say no, that wasn't exactly it.

You know, you might think that the words "dungeon master" would be the coffin lid slamming shut on this situation, but he was unfazed which earned him super awesome points in my book. I was still slightly aghast at the fact that my friend proudly introduces me to other people as her DM. I don't care if people know, but it's nice to soften the landing a little first. Maybe, you know, use alternate phrasing like "story teller" because I'm not ashamed of my dork-tacular status. Do you even know how much work goes into running a really good role playing game campaign? No, you don't because you think that all of us dice rollers are sad social freaks. Well, I spent quite a lot of effort crafting a proper world as the setting for my campaign. I applied my not unconsiderable knowledge of everything from mythology, language families, world history, meteorology, and geography to plate techtonics, cosmology, technological and social developement, political systems, and D&D 3.5 to create as realistic and textured world as I felt possible with out overburdening the game with the actual complexities and humdrum details of the real world. Then I have to engineer a plot that will entertain the players (and myself) without being a series of tropes strung together and create orignial, three dimensional characters to populate the world and for the players to interact with.

Next comes the actual running of the game. I have to take this world and its characters and events and bring them to life for my players through words alone. (Okay, I usually have a few sketches and maps to throw out.) I have to role play all of the characters they will encounter, and please let me not have forgotten to name someone or some town. I have to get information to the players with out giving too much away. Sometimes gently steering them, othertimes breaking out the plot hammer. All the while I have to be constantly ready for any curve balls the players might throw, like taking off to some distant land and completely ignoring my carefully prepared plans and contingency plans. Or maybe killing off some important character, like a major baddie. So, all in all, a lot of work, but a lot of fun.

...

Great, now I've completely wandered away from my original story.

A quick break between chapters

2008-10-03T14:10:00.007-05:00

Julia and I watched the vice presidential debate last night. I thought the whole thing was a little on the ridiculous side. Biden could have easily eviscerated Palin in the debates, but if he had there would have been people all over him saying he was picking on her. Oh man, can you imagine if he had made her cry... You could see the points at which he was laughing at her responses. Responses, I might add, which were ludicrous had little to nothing to do with the questions that were being fielded to her. She even had the audacity to say, essentially, that she had no intention of answering the questions or addressing the issues. Pretty much she made it clear that she was there simply to regurgitate all of the bullshit her party had crammed down her throat. If I was the moderator I would have stopped her and asked her why she bothered to agree to come to the debate if she had no intention of, oh I don't know, actually debating.

Speaking of the moderator, I had been hearing in the news for several days that people were saying that she was going to be biased. Actually what I heard was that the moderator was publishing a book, and that somehow made them biased. When we were discussing it last night the fact that it was a book about the history of black politicians came up. I said I didn't see what that had to do with anything as far as the debate was concerned and asked which candidate she was supposedly biased towards, never making the connection that because the moderator was black and writing a book about the history of black politicians that she would be biased towards Obama. Silly me, I guess I was still confused from all these women, especially the ones from the democratic party, who are going on and on about wanting to see Palin do a good job and not make an embarrassment of herself because she is a woman, and apparently that will somehow reflect negatively on all of womankind. Where the hell does this logic come from?

I think saying that you want to see someone not make a fool of themself because they are a woman is sexist. It's the worst kind of sexism to me, the kind espoused by women. If you want equality you have to be willing to fail as big as the guys in the other group. Did anybody say, "gee, I hope Biden does well because he's a man on one of the biggest political stages in the world, and if he does that's good for men everywhere"? No, nobody said that because it's crazy talk. And pulling your punches because of a person's gender is as bad as attacking someone because of their gender. It's patronizing and undermines our equality.

Palin's success, or lack there of, should reflect on herself and her party, and probably her candidate (after all, he picked her out), but it shouldn't reflect on her gender. I don't think we should look at her as a stupid woman, we should look at her as a stupid person. I guess that's my point here: we have to stop lumping people together in these groups and take each person individually. To steal a line from George Carlin, women "...are like any other group of people: few winners, whole lot of losers."

And if I've missed these people's point, and it wasn't about her performance reflecting on all womankind, but rather just female politicians well, that's bullshit on a stick too. Take each person individually. You are going to have great female politicans (there are plenty all over the world) and you are going to have ones that are the laughingstocks, same as every other type of group you can divide people into. That's the reality folks.

We swam, we hiked, we drove

2008-10-02T23:05:00.003-05:00

Well, now that I've caught up on my sleep from the last week I have a cold. At least I got the cold after I went away for the weekend. Why is it that any time I have a few days off from work my immune system crashes?

Oh well. I had a fabulous weekend. I picked up my rental car Thursday. They gave me a PT Cruiser which I was less than enthused about. I don't think I've ever seen one driven by someone who wasn't a douchebag. I almost got a Dodge Charger which would have been more fun to drive and may have been better in the hills, but would have used more gas and, let's face it, I would have been concernicus about hurting it all weekend, so I was only mildly disappointed. The drive to Logan went smoothly. When I was checking into the hotel the desk lady gave me the best news ever: that the pool was open 24 hours. That was nice. I was expecting the pool to be close by the time I arrived or soon after. Instead I got to take a nice long swim by myself and soak in the hot tub.

Friday was also a good day. Free hot breakfast at the hotel with a quick stop at the Christmas/Candle shop to pick up some goodies. Then I spent the rest of the day hiking through the woods of the Hocking Hills region, contemplating things, soul searching, hang-up abandoning, taking pictures, finding inner peace and a profound sense of calm, and discovering a well spring of confidence. You know, having a profound, semi-spiritual experience, as corny or cheesy as that may sound to some. Whatevs, I'm cool with it.

That night I drove to Pittsburg. Travel at night on windy, hilly roads that one is unfamiliar with can be quite interesting, especially when you're being tailgated by some teabag who won't pass you in any of the available flats. I checked into the (slightly) scary Motel 6. It wasn't an issue of cleanliness. The neighborhood didn't seem bad, but there were signs on the building instructing patrons to lock their cars and signs in the rooms instructing us to lock and deadbolt the door when in the room.

I also realized upon arriving that I had made sure I had directions for all the legs of my journey except how to get from the motel (which was a paltry 100m from the reception site) to the church. I quickly reverse engineered the directions from the church to the reception which worked fine. However, when I attempted to follow the directions in the correct order to go to the reception I got...well, I don't think the word "lost" applies. I tend to think of being lost as not knowing where you are. I knew exactly where I was and what road I was on and could even see up on the hill where I need to go, but I could not get anywhere. After going in a circle and still not finding the road I needed I decided to get back on the highway and go further down. I had no trouble finding my way from there. It took longer, but I arrived at the same time as the bridal party.

There's more to tell, but frankly I've run out of steam for the evening. I need a warm blanket (stupid cold) and some sleep, but stick around because part two is got some good stuff. Like a rant-tangent and what went on an the reception and a boy.

Placeholder Post

2008-09-29T01:32:00.002-05:00

I am back in the beege after my weekend away, and what a fantastic weekend it was. I'm too tired to post tonight, but rest assured that details and pictures will be forth coming.

Falling

2008-09-22T02:33:00.003-05:00

Summer is at its end, and, as usual, I can't say I'm terribly sad. I've tried to keep the whining about overheating to a minimum, and I will say that this summer has been on the mild side for the most part. Still, I'm never very happy in the heat (and humidity!). So, Hooray, it's Autumn! My second favorite season, and Halloween is coming soon, too.

....

I'm having a minivacation this weekend, and boy do I need it. Orignially I was just going to Pittsburg for my friend's wedding, but I've expanded the trip. Thursday after work I'm driving down to southeastern Ohio where I will check into my hotel and spend the evening doing fuck-all and soaking in the whirlpool tub (in my room, I decided to splurg on a nicer room). Friday will be hiking in my favorite state parks and nature preserves then the drive to pittsburg later in the day. I'll enjoy the comforts of Motel 6 (I got the cheapy room here), and Saturday will be the wedding, and drive back on Sunday. I will bring back pictures. :)

Apartment Pictures! (Finally)

2008-09-15T01:38:00.004-05:00

So, as promised, and much talked about, here are some pictures of my new apartment. I spent the afternoon tidying up and putting away the last of the moving debris that has been lurking around the living room and kitchen, so the blogosphere will not think I am a total slob...

The Tour: Living Room.

More Living Room.

Yes, there is a futon in the dining area.

The kitchen...

...and...

This is my dishwasher.
Look at how cute and tiny it is!

It also works very well, a vast improvement from last apartment's dishwasher.

I also have a smallish bathroom, it's not exciting.

Since the rest of the place is immaculate you can probably guess that my room is still craptacular. That's my system: keep piling all the extra stuff in one location until everything else is clean. The only problem is that the one location always seems to be on top of my bed.

Ah well.

This is boring.

2008-09-05T00:26:00.003-05:00

I've finally had a chance to do some cleaning and unpacking today. The more stressful work gets the more cluttered the living room seems to get. A fact that has been exacerbated by my room being an unholy mess with no place to put anything. I tidied up my mosaic of clutter and rearranged my room today. It's not something I wanted to do, but I realized it was the only way. My desk is "L" shaped, but it's the wrong "L" for they way I wanted to set it up. So I had to flip that around to put it together. Since the long side now blocks off one of my closet's sliding doors I had to flip the entire contents of my closet so the less used items (like xmas stuff) were on the blocked off side and the more often used things (like clothes) were on the easily accessible side. However, the closet is nice and deep and I was able to stack things so I will be able to get to them with the least amount of trouble. My room is now in some kind of functioning state instead of me having to step over piles of stuff everytime I walk through. And I've found that as I've shuffled everything around and organized it I have more space than I thought. Hooray for neatness!

I must admit defeat

2008-08-30T03:49:00.002-05:00

I have spent the last hour or so looking for a round piece of blue plastic about an inch and a half long. It's really important! It's the valve for the water bladder for my hydration pack. Without it there's no way it will hold water. It's so important that I must have put it in a PLACE WHERE I WON'T FORGET. Dammit, I never remember where these places are. I've looked everywhere. I've tried every remembering trick. I've opened boxes, found all kinds of other stuff, and completely destroyed any neatness that was present in my room, and I still can't find it!

It's so important. I can't believe I lost it. I hate being defeated. I (almost) always find whatever I'm looking for. I have clutter, but it's my clutter. I know it and its ways. I kept thinking the piece would turn up in one of the caches of small important things stashed about. You know it's bad when you keep wandering around asking yourself, "If I was me, where would I have put this?" With the back pack or back on the water bladder are, of course, the smartest answers. I can think of a dozen safe places for it, but it's not there. And, of course, I need it in a couple hours.

The damn piece isn't expensive, and I could easily order it on the internet for the next time. That doesn't help me now, and I don't know if any of the local stores might happen to have a replacement in their camping gear sections.

Dammit, dammit, dammit.

...

Maybe I'll just take beer instead of water.

Blah and a half

2008-08-26T23:56:00.003-05:00

I have now completed day six of my seven straight days of work.

I wish I could tell you that meant I was working 70 hours in those 7 days, but it's not true. Today, for instance, was 12 hours. And I might have been able to tolerate it all, but with the exception of yesterday these have been some of the most stressful shifts I've worked in a while, all strung together. Our sales have been up because it was move-in weekend for the college. My boss told me we would not need any extra staff, and I listened...because I'm an IDIOT. This is the same woman I spent 13 minutes explaining keyboard shortcuts to yesterday (and our keyboard has what the shortcuts are on the front of the keys). Actually, I did put a few extra people on, but the whole thing is a moot point because most of my crew are already working their maximum availability.

I am getting a little twitchy.

~~~~~~~~

Since all I have done for the last week is work and sleep I have yet to finish unpacking. The kitchen and living room are okay, even if there's still a pile of discarded boxes and none of my pictures are on the wall. My room on the other hand is a complete abomination. I'm hoping if I don't spend all of Thursday in a First Day Off in a Week Coma to actually tackle it. I'm getting tired of weaving in and out of piles and tripping over stacks of books every morning. There is going to be a Reckoning!

``````````

It's been a busy week (or so)

2008-08-17T00:36:00.003-05:00

Since I'm pretty much debilitated by a food coma this evening (grad party: the grad's grandma made delicious german desserts) I am just going to throw out events from the last week or so, in no particular order.

::::I got pulled over twice in less than eight hours this week, for the same thing. In all the moving chaos I had forgotten to renew my license plate tags. Thankfully BG's finest were very kind about the whole thing. Although, I'm curious as to when exactly they started giving actual written warnings. It's been, like, seven years since I've been pulled over, so I was unaware of this new developement. Anyway, no ticket, so that was good, and I paid my fifty plus bucks to get a new sticker so the BGPD will stop pulling me over.

::::I love my new apartment. It is the nicest, best maintained apartment I have ever had. New paint, new carpet, new dishwaster, new countertops, everything works proper. The only con is it is on the small side, but that is forcing me to get rid of some stuff that I should probably get rid of anyway. I will have pictures in a couple days after I run some boxes to the recycling center.

::::It's tractor pull weekend here in the beege once again, and you know what that means: intoxicated rednecks stumbling around town in search of the bare necessities, the local store has giant piles of beer for sale in the aisles with signs directing the pullers towards more piles of booze, and sitting here (a couple of miles from the venue) you can occasionally hear the roar of crazy, souped-up tractors, and if you listen close you may hear the roar of the crowds. *Sigh*

::::One of my friends is getting married in September, and I got the invite. I'm totally stoked about getting to see her since it's been a while. I was amused to see "Formal Reception" on the invitation given how laid back my friend and her fiance are. The wedding is in Pittsburg, which is about a four hour drive from here, so I'm taking the day before off as well, getting a hotel, a bit of a mini-vacation. I'm also renting a car since mine is, well, unreliable as to whether or not it's unreliable. Since I'll have some time in town Friday I'm going to check out the Andy Warhol museum which I have been told is sweet.

And done.

After the Move

2008-08-11T22:27:00.002-05:00

So, my roommate forgot to transfer our cable service to the new apartment until the last minute. As a result we will not have internet access either until sometime Wednesday. I am sneeking some use of the internet at work to check my email and drop a quick post. The move went smoothly, and I'd say the unpacking is about half done. My new apartment is fabulous and I'm very happy all around. I'll be back when I get me some interwebs at home later this week.

13 Days to go

2008-07-26T23:48:00.004-05:00

ohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrap
ohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrap
ohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrap
ohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrap
ohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrap
ohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrap
ohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrap

Nothing is packed! Nothing is clean!

It's not going to be okay!

....

Okay, I feel better now.

Ummm...hello?

2008-07-25T15:51:00.000-05:00

I should be on my way to work right now. Instead I'm sitting here blogging because I am locked inside my apartment. That's right, I am trapped in my own apartment. Maintenance is on their way over because the deadbolt lock on my front door is broken. Apparently it locked just fine when my roommate left for work, but I keep twisting the little knobby thingy and IT WON'T WORK! I live on the third floor, so the window's not an option. My tool box is in the trunk of my car, but even if I could get the lock taken apart and leave, I'm not sure I could get the door locked again. This is BG (aka kleptomania) there is no way I'm going to work for ten hours and leaving my apartment unlocked.

At least my boss thinks it's funny.

Tales from Work

2008-07-21T01:48:00.004-05:00

I don't normally talk much about my job. I'm not sure exactly why not, I mean, I get plenty material. I guess at the end of the day I just feel like not having to think about work for a few hours. However, I had an incident tonight that was just too good to pass up. For those of you who haven't been taking notes at home, I am a manager at a quick service restaurant. We have a drive-thru. It can be every bit as horrible as you might imagine, and in order to to keep our labor costs in line the manager ends up having to run the drive-thru most nights. Oh, goody.

So, I was taking an order tonight. It was a larger order and at the speaker as the woman was relaying it to me I heard a man in the car crabbing things at her/me. When they pulled up to the window I was greeted by a rotund woman with two vacant eyed children and a greasy, creepy white trash guy. As I was taking care of their order the guy kept crabbing more demands at me from the passenger seat. Finally, I passed them the last item of their order, an ice cream, and as the woman took it I noticed an extra sliver of plastic on the cup. When the car did not pull away I opened the window and they told me that there was a hair in (or she might have said "on") the cup. I apologized and remade the ice cream. I thought they would leave after that, but no, the creepy crabby guy wanted to talk to me. I opened the window again and leaned forward to see what the guy wanted, and had one of the most creepy conversations ever.

Scary McCreepo leaned forward and asked in his hick accent, "Hey, since we had to deal with the hair could I get, er, a free ice cream for my retarded daughter?" And he made a gesture towards the one of the kids in the back seat.

[Okay, obviously the "hair" was a ploy to get free stuff. Happens all the time, but "retarded daughter"? Is it more horrible if the girl in question is actually retarded or not?]

In spite of my astonishment I kept neutral and replied "No, I'm sorry. I can't do that. I replaced the item that there was a problem with, but I can't give out free food." I hoped that would be the end of the conversation, but Skeezy Von Creepinmeister had more.

Then he says, "Hey, er, can I ask you something? Are you married?"

Naturally, I answered, "What?!?" I was thinking perhaps I had heard him wrong.

"Are you married?" he asked again. Nope, heard it right the first time. Sound the alarms, it is time to abandon this conversation. Run! Run! Head for the hills!

"That is my own personal business," I replied calmly and shut the window.

As I did though, I heard him say something like "Mine is too" or "It's mine too".

Then I locked the window.

Weirdness and Sickness

2008-07-12T22:42:00.003-05:00

*Cough, cough* How's it going? Me, I've been sick for almost three weeks now. I've slowly progressed through all the cold symptoms in various combinations. And at no point have I been very sick, just moderately to lightly sick. All I've got left now is a bit of a cough. It's been going on so long that it's making me crazy. Crazy, I tell you!

Well, in truth it's wearing me down. I'm tired mentally, physically, and emotionally. I bottomed out early this week, moping around and being down in general. I was trying to do some packing and I just kept looking around at everything that needed to be done and I felt...overwhelmed. I'm not used to being overwhelmed by things. I usually am at my best in a crisis. Give me cruch time, give me deadlines, give me "I waited until the last minute and it's due tomorrow!" I can multitask a half dozen things easy. Howevere, my normal awesomeness was not to be found that day. Blah, talk about a downer.

I'm feeling better this weekend though. I'll be so glad to be moved in a month. Some of my neighbors are precipitating weird shit. When I came home today there was a hansel and gretel trail of peanuts leading up the stairs, which then ended at my door. Also, my building smells weird, all the time. Oh, and the maintence guys use a room in the basement as their workshop, and they smoke in there. The same tiny room they sand and paint cabinets and other shit in.

In good news, I bought a fantastically comfortable pair of sandals to replace the ones I had that wore out several years ago. They wore out after many years of loyal service, and I had yet to find a satisfactory replacement. I found the new pair at Target the other day. They were sitting on a shelf at eye level, in the middle of some completely different shoes, were the only pair of that kind I saw, and they were my size. It was like it was meant to be.

This is what comes of not watching the news

2008-06-29T00:49:00.002-05:00

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

2008-06-28T02:42:00.002-05:00

::::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

2008-06-14T23:52:00.003-05:00

::::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

2008-06-09T23:41:00.003-05:00

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.

Title...I've got nothing

2008-05-20T03:36:00.003-05:00

::::I seriously *heart* Firefox. Every time I use Explorer lately it just lags and lags, and then sometimes crashes. So I started using Firefox (I could even import my bookmarks, Woot!). I don't think I'm ever going back. Why didn't I get on this band wagon sooner?

::::With two and a half months left until moving day, I've started packing. Just a couple boxes of books. Trust me I have plenty more to go. I know that it's still a ways away, but I know myself and I'll get busy doing other stuff, and stressed out from work, and next thing you'll know it will be the end of July and I won't have anything packed. So little steps right now.

::::I'm having trouble with my sleep schedule. On a good night I'm asleep by 3am, but there have been plenty of instances lately where I've been awake past sun-up. Then, when I finally do fall asleep, I'll sleep all day until I have to go to work. Depending on when I fall asleep this can be as much as 12+ hours. I've gotten into bad sleep cycles before and I've tried all my usual tricks to break out of this one, but nothing has worked so far. I have vacation coming up in two weeks, so if I can't do it before I'll get myself sorted then.

::::If I can't get up to the lake on vacation I was thinking about going camping. I don't know if my car is up to the 3+ hour drive to Hocking Hills, though. I mean, sometimes it seems fine. Other times it starts acting weird. It's been a few years since I've been down that way, so I'd like to go. I just would like to not be stranded on the side of the road. And there are more and more bears down in that region. I would be staying in a campground, but still it's something to think about.
Something to think about when say, you're lying in your tent at night and there's something shuffling around your tent, and you're an idiot who decided to go camping by yourself, so you don't have anybody else in the tent to wake up and share your concerns with, but luckily whatever is out there in the dark sounds too small to be a bear, and when it passes between your tent and the light up the path you can see from it's silhouette it's just a raccoon which you then startle into running off into the underbrush and after all that you have to try and fall back asleep.

::::Apparently I have really good hearing. Like, superhuman hearing. At least, that's what my employees keep telling me.

::::Okay, I'm tired and out of ideas. Laters.

I just saw the most disturbing commercial I have ever seen in my life.

2008-05-06T00:27:00.004-05:00

And given the levels of creepiness that advertising has sunk to recently, that's pretty bad.

Two bipedal tongues with pink elephant-esque legs were arguing about coke zero with a bird legged eye ball.

JEESUS PLEEZUS COOKIES AND PUNCH!

I think I need therapy now.

UPDATE: It's worse than I thought. There is more than one of these commercials. And in my horrorstruck state upon viewing the first one, I apparently missed that the tongues have tails and redneck accents. As if it couldn't get any more horrifying.

I'm on fire!

2008-04-30T00:40:00.002-05:00

Okay, I'm not, but things at work were today. I was sitting in the office hastily slapping together a schedule for the crew since I was told I have to do it in only two hours instead of three meaning that this next schedule did not receive the level love and attention I usually lavish on the arranging of employee shifts when one of my fellow managers (no, not Steve) came flailing along in a panic.
"Hey, it'sonfireshouldIpullthething?" he spewed at me.
"What's on fire?" I asked.
"The fryer. Should I pull the thing*?"
"No. How big is it? You can't pull it unless it's big."
"It's huge**!"
I followed him up to the line. Smoke was rising from one of the fryer kettles and little tongues of orange flamer were peeking over the edge. I think I may have laughed.
"Jeez, just get the fire extinguisher and put it out."
He scuttled over and grabbed the thing. I thought for a moment we might have to get scissors to get the safety tag off, but in the end he got it. One quick burst of the fire extinguisher and everything was all settled with no mess to clean up except rinsing out that mostly empty fryer.

Some people do all the panicking.

*The "thing" in question is the fire suppression system. It sprays out a metric shit-ton of powdery crap that, obviously, puts out any fire that might be present. If activated the all of the food on the line has to be thrown away. The store has to be shut down for several days for clean-up, equipment replacement, inspection, etc. The system is expensive to recharge after an activation. It also should not be activated when there is anyone near because the powder can be hazardous to breathe in. Essentially, it should only be deployed as the last desperate measure as you evacuate the store screaming "run you fuckers, run!"

**I am imagining an entire wall engulfed in flames here. Although, the lack of shouting, or say, the sound of such a conflagration, was suspicious.

Current Reads

2008-04-26T18:17:00.002-05:00

The delightful and wonderful MissE has tagged me to do a book meme:

1. Pick up nearest book
2. Open to page 123
3. Find 5th sentence
4. Post next 3 sentences
5. Tag 5 people

I am currently reading several books, as usual, here's what I have in my stack:

Don't Know Much About Mythology by Kenneth C. Davis:

As they developed in wealth and size, these farming and herding communities eventually became "city-states," with merchants, skilled craftsmen, prostitutes, priests, and tax collectors, and armies of scribes who recorded everything from negotiations over the price of figs to real estate deals, law codes, epic poetry, and the military records and amorous adventures of conquering kings.

Unfortunately, the prosperity of these city-states also attracted attention. Unprotected by the vast stretches of desert that kept Egypt safe from most outsiders, the flat plains of Mesopotamia were like an open chessboard, across which armies moved freely.

Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen:

"Hmph!" said the nurse, turning to face the throng. "Relax, everybody."

A pair of orderlies clambered atop the bus and untied Brian Keyes.

I tag Julia, Mark, Steve, Lucy, and Shelley. Um, if you guys feel like it that is. I won't mind if you don't. :)

Today

2008-04-20T01:12:00.002-05:00

1:30 pm - Leave to pick up parking sticker for roommate who lost his. The landlord sent out a note yesterday saying they would be cracking down on people parking in out lot who didn't belong there. Woohoo, I thought. I didn't even have to complain. Apparently somebody else didn't like not having a place to park.

1:32 pm - Arrive at the landlord's. As I approach the building the crazy old patriarch of said establishment was coming down the stairs with a sign in tow. "Looks like *mumble, mumble*" he says to me. "What?" I say. "Looks like its gonna rain," he says, the air is heavy with the smell of rain, the sky is dark, and the first sprinkles are falling. "Um, yeah," I respond as he lets me pass. It's nice to know that in this world some things never change.

2:00 pm - Pick up friends to go shopping. First we stop at McD's for some much needed junk food. We were served by the predictable pimply teenager, except this one was special. When one of my friends told me to go first he called her a coward. Which was out of line, but whatever. But then, after I ordered, he made an encompassing gesture, perhaps indicating his register, perhaps the restaurant at large and said to me, "If you're worried about this giving you cancer. Everything will give you cancer. From the day you're born everything in the world is going to kill you. Everything will give you cancer." Holy crap.

2:30 pm - Day of shopping commences.

6:00 pm-ish - Day of shopping ends. I am disheartened. Normally after a day of shopping, especially when I'm on the hunt for clothes, I am depressed. Not so today. I was in a good mood to look for clothes. Me and my self confidence were a go for clothes shopping. However, I couldn't find anything. All I wanted was a new shirt to wear out to the bar, but all there was to behold were t-shirts and polo shirts and a few dressy shirts my grandma wouldn't wear. So I looked for shoes instead because we all know shoes are awesome and make everything better. There were no cute shoes to be had. We even went to the sMall here in BG. No luck with that either, but they did have lots of tractors on display. They had a fucking tractor display.

7 pm - Lewis Black's stand up is on comedy central. But it's censored and it's hard to watch with all that bleeping. Eff that noise, I'll listen to it on my ipod.

9 to 10 pm - Try on every semi-suitable shirt in my closet.

10:15 pm - Have perfectly applied eye make up. I will never be able to duplicate this feat.

11:30 pm - Our entourage departs for the bars. Hmmm...hip hop night at Uptown. Why do they even have 18 and over bars? If you're not 21 you can't drink, so why are you here. Oh wait, you can dance. How could I forget. Crowded and annoying.

12:40 am - Steve begins analyzing his tipsy-ness and providing me with a running update of the symptoms. Then...then, they decided to go to another bar. Another crowded and annoying bar.

1:00 am - Enroute to bar #2 the 25 and over portion of the adventuring party (Steve, Julia, and I) decided to go sit at the adults' table. We decided to go to Grumpy Dave's instead of annoying bar #2 and watch karaoke. Good times.

2:15 am - Arrive at home. Discard shoes. Turn on tv; Lewis Black is on again and this time uncensored. All is right in the world.

Cruising the Cerebral Galaxy

2008-04-17T01:18:00.006-05:00

I had to park on the street Sunday night. I can understand the parking lot being full on, say, a Friday evening, but Sunday at Midnight? No. I just got off work. All I wanted was to park and a shower and sleep. People had even parked in the spaces with the telephone pole in front of them that you can't park in. I have no idea how they got in or out of these spaces with out monster truckinig over the surrounding cars. Due to the lack of broken glass and police inquiries I assume they figured it out.

We started selling milkshakes at work today. We hand make them with ice cream and flavored syrup. They're good, but there's a knack to mixing them unmessily. I spent the day smelling like strawberry syrup.

I went to my dad's this past Saturday to visit (and do laundry. I'm not taking advantage. He yells at me if I don't bring any. Serious.). My car had a hiccup on the way up. Thankfully it was just in need of some coolant, and the out of control temperature was not due to some more expensive problem. While I was there we talked of many things. There was even a phone conference with my Grandma to confirm some genealogical info we were discussing. My dad, as his custom, offered me numerous items from his cupboards. "They had chocolate chips on sale for 92 cents or something for a bag. A two pound bag! Do you want to take some with you?" So I guess I'm making cookies now.

The company my dad works for makes machines for other companies (stretch-wrappers, conveyors, stacking robots, etc), so sometimes these companies give them test product to run on the machines. And sometimes they get to keep the product which my dad shares around. At Easter he was giving out boxes of Betty Crocker instant potatoes. This weekend he was offering me lemonade mix. He also holds up a box of grape kool-aid mix and says, "Vodka. Purple jesuses." I said, "I know what a purple jesus is, Dad."

I had some new info to add to my +1 Binder of Genealogy from my trip to my dad's. I ended up going over again some of the paper's my grandmother had given me a while back. I realized I had more info on a couple individuals than I thought. After a little more work I can now say my family tree now covers ten generations* and goes back about 330 years**.

I slept a lot last night, but the night before I only had about an hour and a half of sleep. I was having a really weird dream this morning. I don't remember all of it (and it feels like I forgot some important part), but I do remember there were these paintings. And I had painted them, and they had magical properties, or at least the Dream People believed they did. Then I had to kick the crap out of this leopard that was going to attack. This pissed off his tiger buddy, who did not believe I had magical properties***. Run-away! Run-away!

*Eleven generations now that I think about it; my cousin has had a kid.

**Oh, and I have to work on verifying a lot of the info, but it's exciting nonetheless.

***And this all wasn't even the weird part.

Headline News, or not

2008-04-11T11:35:00.004-05:00

:::::Before my day off yesterday I had to work six days in a row. Normally, I only work four, then have a day off, work a day, and another day off. I like the schedule. I don't get my days off together, but it's Thursday and Saturday. And Fridays at work usually aren't bad. However, after four days in a row I'm ready for a day off. They're ten hour days (minimum, most often more), so I'm not being a baby.
:::::Well due to some stuff my boss had going on I wound up working six days in a row. You can imagine by the sixth day I was kind of...twitchy. Especially since every single day had awesome weather. It's warmed up, the sun was shining, awesome. Of course, yesterday it rained, all day. Today I have to work again. There's a chance of a storm or two later, but it's warm and not doing anything now. Tomorrow I have off and it's supposed to rain all day long.
:::::Damn you, weather.

:::::My mother invited me to go to Chicago with her and my two sisters on Saturday to a quilt show. By the way, my mother makes quilts. Very nice quilts, she's won awards. Ask her, she'll tell you about it. Anyway, I do not make quilts. And while I enjoy the benefits of the quilts she's made me, I'm not really into quilts. I could only walk around and look at them or listen to people talk about them for so long before I'd become terminally bored and order my cadre of ninjas to attack.
:::::The other factor(s) that led to me declining the invitation (which I received with less than a week's notice) was the 4+ hour drive to get there. Normally I enjoy a good drive, but I would not have been the driver. I would have been trapped in a car, with my mother and two sisters. Don't get me wrong, one of my sisters, Youngest Sister, I am quite okay with. Middle Sister and I, however, suffer from irreconcilable differences. My mother and I have some history. I am willing to lay it aside and be civil for family functions and the occasional lunch date, but 8 hours in one car in one day is asking a lot.

::::Spring is here, and even I am a little glad. For many reasons really, not the least of which is that our hours at work will go back to their late night schedule. Sure my closing shifts will end two hours later, meaning I'll get home somewhere in the vicinity of 1:30 am, but I won't be going to bed much, if any, later. What it really means is that when I roll out of bed at noon...thirty...ish I'll have time to actually do stuff before I have to go to work since I get to go in two hours later. And that makes me a happy camper.

Civic Duties

2008-03-29T21:39:00.003-05:00

Today I attended my Skywarn weather spotter training class for this year. I was unable to attend last year due to management training. Since weather spotters are required to update their training ever 2 to 3 years I wanted to make sure I went this year. Plus it's always nice to get a refresher. I'm glad I went as the speaker discussed the National Weather Service's new Storm Based Warnings (threat based polygon warnings) and some features on the website. I had already read about the new warning system, but it was good to hear how local emergency management is handling the new system.

After the seminar I headed to Waterville where the Red Cross was having a blood drive. I've been meaning to go and donate for a while, but factors always seem to be against me. I lucked out today, they were having a blood drive just minutes from where my Skywarn class was. I haven't given blood since I was in highschool. I've felt guilty about that. I've even joked that since I'm O Neg that the next time I made it to a blood drive they were going to strap me down and take two pints instead of one. Which is funny because in the years since I've last been, they're actually able to do that now. Actually they take two units of red blood cells and give you your plasma back (along with extra saline). I'm a champ, so I gave double. And the best thing about giving two at once is, well obviously, I got two taken care of in one day. Now I just have to remember to go again in 112 days.

Of Green Beer and Suspicious Bites

2008-03-26T02:22:00.003-05:00

Hey, how's it going? I realized that it has been almost a month since I last blogged. What's been keeping me away? Well, honestly, there's been a lot of nothing going on lately. A lot of nothing really. I mean scads of nothing. Days like today where I spent an extra hour at work, but did not even start writing the crew schedule due to the fact that our entire computer systems decided to stop working properly. Now I'll have to go in on my day off to do it. *sigh*

**One of my friends and I went out on St. Patrick's Day to have a few green beers. I spent the day considering the adoption of all manner of holidays by Americans as opportunities to wear (or do) things and drink. St Patty's? We wear green and drink Halloween? Dress up in costumes and drink. Cinco de Mayo? Well we don't usually dress up (although there's probably some bro's wearing sombreros) but we eat mexican food (before we drink), and drink. 4th of July: blow things up, cook animals over open flame, and drink. Thanksgiving: Eat (A LOT) and drink.

Well, I honestly think that we need a few more of these types of days to fill out the year. I have a few suggestions:

President's day - wear powdered wig or top hat & beard, and drink.
Blockbuster day - this would be the Friday in May when the year's big summer blockbuster hits theaters and we dress up like characters from that movie, watch the movie, then drink. So this year we all dress like Indiana Jones.
First Day of Summer - Wear thongs (whichever type you like) and drink.
Columbus day - Wear period clothes, go to an established bar, claim that we got there first and discoverd it. ;) OH, and drink.

**I got bit by something last week, and it wasn't love. I was sitting at my desk when I felt a sharp pain in my arm. I thought maybe I burned my self at work, or cut myself, or whatever, and was just now noticing. That is until I got up the next morning and I had a deep purple welt about two inches across on my arm which the following day was even larger, but red instead of purple. The only explanation I could come up with was a spider bite (I think I've been bitten before and had a bit of welting, but never that bad). This leaves me with two thoughts. One, it's possible that I'm sensitive to spider bites. And two, there may be something legged and bite-y lurking in my bedroom.

Nothing really exciting going on.

Put that in your brain

2008-02-29T14:12:00.003-05:00

I wish myspace was a old sea salt with two peglegs and livejournal was a cantankerous toothless seal and we could watch them battle it out.

....

I am so weird. This is the kind of thoughts that sleet through my mind.

And I love it.

“Ray, when someone askes if you’re a god, you say, ‘YES!’”

2008-02-29T12:11:00.000-05:00

Has your boss’s boss ever randomly asked you where you see yourself going with the company? If you could see yourself in the position above you, or the one above that? Then made vague, hinting references to very specific possible future openings of “mucho positions” and said she asking. Did it totally give you that sneaking air-raid-siren/press-conference-on-every-channel suspicion that something is up?

Yeah, me too.

I've been busy

2008-02-24T23:57:00.002-05:00

And I hate that I haven't had time to blog. Work and sleep and sleep and work.

**Wednesday was an intense day. The company owner and both district managers (or as I like to call them, the honchos) were in my store because we got one of our two yearly inspections dropped on us by international. As the guy put it it's really a "snapshot" of how your store's doing. I think he was surprised when I said I wasn't nervous. I know Steve was freaking out, calling the honchos in, running around crazy. Personally, I feel that panic is a poor use of your energy. If I need to freak out I will do it later, preferably in the comfort of my own home. Oh, and we ridiculously busy that night and understaffed in general and definitely understaffed for that quantity of business. However, my employees did a fantastic job. If I was a hugger there would have been hugs aplenty. And I did pretty well on the inspection. If my district manager is happy, then I'm happy. I feel good because this is kind of big deal and I didn't screw it up, sort a validation of how I'm doing and what I'm capable of handling. Makes me all warm and fuzzy.

**As I've said, I have a problem with things. Specifically getting rid of things. However, I have made a rather large pile of stuff I'm parting with. I have a list of larger items I'm looking for homes for, like my old PC. All this sorting of my possessions has lead me to ponder some deep questions: "how many bath towels does one person need?" and "How did I end up with four and half sets of measuring cups and four and a half sets of measurings spoons anyway?" also "Why did I think a glass cutting board was a good idea?"

**MissE has challenged me to a game of Scramble on Facebook. Which is exactly like Boggle, which I've always loved. I now have a new addiction. It's a bit tricksy if you're a bit dyslexic though.

Ooops

2008-02-12T00:30:00.001-05:00

I accidently clicked "sort by name" in my favorites sidebar. Now my blog links are no longer in the order I read them. And it won't let me drag and drop them back the way I want. This is totally going to screw with my head.

....

UPDATE: Nevermind, I figured out how to fix it.

Unseasonably Thunderous

2008-02-06T00:15:00.000-05:00

I meant to go directly to bed when I came home last night. Instead I found myself making a trip to the store for some groceries, and then cooking a meal. As I was sitting, enjoying my piping hot ravioli my apartment was suddenly filled with the sound of thunder. I was surprised, it is February after all. I was unable to drag myself off to bed as the thunder proved not to be isolated, but a whole storm of lightning. It's disconcerting really, the rain and thunder is far more like April then February. There's a bit of thunder and lightning playing up tonight as well, though not as much as last night.

Speaking of shopping, why is it that you never seem to run out of just one thing? For example, I never need just toothpaste. It will be more like toothpaste, toothbrush, shampoo, conditioner, toleit paper all at once. I ask because I find myself needing to purchase more socks, t-shirts, underpants and maybe a pair of jeans. I've discovered this fact as I've been cleaning and clearing out my closets and such. I also have to ask, is 24 pairs of shoes too many? Five years ago I had probably a quarter as many, so I wonder if I might have gotten out of control since discovering the joys of cute shoes.

I've slowly been picking through my posessions trying to weed things out because of the moving this year. I'm trying to apply a critical eye to my hoard, but I think I may need to enlist someone as my personal sounding board/voice of reason. One of my major weaknesses is my books. I've managed to trim a few volumes (Grisham? I may read The Pelican Brief again, but the rest can go). I'm trying to pull out things I don't think I'll want to read again. Who will go? Who will stay? Your vote counts! Then, of course, there's the pile of stuff that I have yet to read...

Speaking of reading, I just mooched five Hiaasen books. I read Stormy Weather recently and liked it enough to come back for seconds. I think I should wait to start in on them until I finish a couple of the other books I'm reading. I try to keep it at no more than five at a time.

I know that a lot of people find talking about dreams boring. Still, I seem to be having really long dreams lately, like 2 or 3 hours long (I swear! They're very complicated!). Anybody else ever have this happen? Or am I just weird?

The Verizon Kiosk is Full of Douchebags

2008-01-31T16:37:00.000-05:00

About a week and a half ago my roommate asked me if I wanted to come with when he went to pick out a new phone. I agreed, and thought I might ask them about prices on a memory card for my phone seeing as how I find myself using it to take pictures often. We arrived at the kiosk in the sMall. Steve was talking to one of the guys about getting a new phone. I asked a differet guy how much a memory card would cost. Immediately I had both of them spewing details of a "music package" (memory card plus USB cable and software) at me. This irritated me beause I'm not one to be cowed into buying something just because two or three sales reps are shouting it's praises in my face. I said I would think about it. They turned away with much bad natured "limited time" "when they're gone they're gone" "cheaper than buying them separate" grumbling.

My roommate finished buying his new phone, chosen on the "it's shiny" merits (not kidding). I then cornered one of the guys and began asking more questions about this alleged deal. I even said I didn't care for all of them talking to me at once because I felt it needed to be said. I then asked price, size of the memory card, what else is included, etc. all the information I needed to make an informed decision as to whether or not I wanted to make this purchase. I decided I did because it included both a 2 gb memory card and a USB cable (so I could load music into my phone [mostly for my own ringtone amusement, I have an ipod and a rca mp3 player, thank you]). And the package was cheaper than the memory card alone. Okay, I said.

The guy fetches out the box with the crap I want to buy in it. The outer box show a picture of an LG chocolate phone and says "LG Chocolate" on it. I do not have this particular phone. So, being a bright egg, I said, "This says 'Chocolate' on it. That is not the phone I have. Will this work for my phone?" I hold up my phone for him to see. "Oh, yeah," he says in a most condescending manner. How dare I question the ways of the Verizon Kiosk Gurus? Now if I were the brightest egg in the bunch I would have opened the box and ascertained the truth of this claim right then and there, but I didn't. It didn't occur to me at the time. I just paid for my crap and we left.

It was several days before I had the chance to pull all the crap out of the box and start messing around with it. As soon as I pulled the USB cable out of the packaging I noticed it was not the right shape. Why? Because it's not compatible with my phone. Holy shit, that little fucker lied right to my face! I thought. I was suddenly infused with a righteous anger. I hate being lied to, I hate even more being lied to blatantly, right to my face, and most of all I hate being lied to in order that I might buy something. I felt the need to smite the hell out of them, rain fire down on their phoney island of kiosktopia, to make scathing phone calls to people's bosses. I was pretty pissed off.

It was several more days before I was able to go to the sMall to make the return. By that time I had calmed down. I began explaining the situation to one of the guys there (the manager in fact, I think). I wanted a memory card, they said they had a package with the card and the USB cable, music software etc., I said will this work for my phone, they said yes, it doesn't work for my phone, I don't want this then. The guy said, "Well, the memory card will work." I told him I realized that, but the rest of it wouldn't, so I didn't want stuff I couldn't use. He tried something about how this was cheaper than even the memory card by itself. I told him that was fine, I was more than willing to go elsewhere at this point for it, even it meant pay more.

In the middle of this, one of the other dudes ambushes our coversation with "But that has the headphones with built in mic." Said in an antagonistic manner. I was shocked and annoyed by this interruption, so much so that I looked right at him and said, "I don't care." It was if I had slapped him in the face. I have discovered the magic words for dealing with sales people. He sputtered and acutally said, "You don't say 'I don't care' to me when I'm trying to tell you... *grumble, grumble*" as he turned back to a more pliant customer.

First of all, don't try to fucking re-sell me something that I've brought back to you because it's the WRONG FUCKING PART. I don't care if it has orgasm inducing ringtones and cures cancer. It will not work with my phone, it does me no good. Second, don't interrupt me or the guy who is already helping me, nobody fucking asked you. I don't know where this ganging up on the customer thing comes from, it happened to me both times I was there. I've never had this problem at other Verizon locations. Third, do not mock me and argue with me! If I heard one of my employees say anything like this to a customer you can rest assured that I would fire the hell out of them. Where the fuck did this guy learn to deal with customers, or better yet, where on the gods's green earth is his common sense?

I decided not to make a scene. I took a breath, and said, "Well, I really don't." Then proceded to ignore his existance. The manager guy was very quiet after that. He told me that they had the music package and the memory card for my particular phone, but that they were sold separately and it would cost about thirty dollars more. I asked if I could get them for the same price, but of course that wasn't an option. I told him to just give me my money back then, which he did promptly and with no fuss.

I was still fuming when I left over that prick bitching at me. I was so ridiculously mad. I seriously considered making a complaint, but I think having had to take plenty of customer complaints at work has kind of put a damper on my appetite for dishing it out. Instead I calmed myself down and put it all in perspective. Just let it go, life moves on. It would be nice to think that dude's boss reamed him out after I left. I thought maybe I should have called that idiot out and engaged in a verbal battle, buy why, what point would that prove? And besides, who needs that stress.

Lighter Note

2008-01-25T00:54:00.000-05:00

A story from last week to keep you entertained whilst I answer all your wonderful comments.

Last Thursday I went up to my dad’s house to spend some time. He has recently separated from his live-in girlfriend of 5-ish years, so I felt some daughterly support was called for. Also, I can do laundry for free there (hey, my dad yells at me if I don’t bring any laundry, so it’s not like I’m taking advantage). I also brought my newly acquired ps2 game, Baldur’s Gate 2, in case the book I was reading failed to keep me busy while everyone was at work and school Friday. My (half)brother and I ended up playing the game when he got home from school. He’s ten, so we had a rather enjoyable time beating the hell out of some goblins and orcses. His character has a number of skills, which you can increase every time you gain a level. One of these is called “Cleave” as in “I cleaved him in twain!” We reached a point in the game where we leveled up. The following is the ensuing conversation:

Me: What skills do you want to spend your points on?
Bro: That cleavage one.
Me: Which one?!?
Bro: That one you told me about before, cleavage.
Me: It’s “cleave” not cleavage, that means something else.
Bro: Oh, cleave then.

Ugly Side

2008-01-21T01:13:00.000-05:00

I have to admit, I've been avoiding blogging for the past week. I have some things I want to write about, but I'm having trouble. It's hard for me to talk about my feelings. Normally I keep all of my emotions tucked away in a box special for that purpose because, well, they're not anybody's business but my own right? I see those people who's feelings are all sloppy and they are flinging them all over and I want to punch them in the face, a little. I'm not saying I expect everyone to be zombies or robots. I understand we all deal in different ways. Mine is just to deal with my shit in the privacy of my own head. The problem, as should become obvious, is that if you keep putting things in the box and not sorting it one day you'll knock it off the shelf (because I can be a klutz). Then it's like you have a big pile of tangled electrical cords and necklaces that all need to be straightened out.

Well, you get the idea of the metaphor. Why so emotionally independent? A number of reasons, but I've always been the calm one, the rational one. Do you ever find it easier to be brave when others are scared because they're scared? Not that you were even scared to begin with, but it gives your bravery an urgency because now you have to be strong for them as well as yourself. (Or patient when others are angry or calm when others are panicked?) Or is that just me? I never had anyone to be the strong one for me. My dad would have been the one if my mother hadn't made it as difficult as possible for him to see us after the divorce. By the time I was able to start spending more time with him I was past the point where I could be open with people. A person can't help you if they don't know there is a problem after all.

Hitting publish is going to be the hardest thing. It's so hard for me to say things, even if they're not surprising for other people to hear. Once it's out there, there is no taking it back. There's that part of me that will hate myself every time I read this and call me weak. That part of me is the most critical judge of myself. I'm harder on myself than anyone else ever would be. Or at least I pray to any merciful gods that I am. Because we all know they can't hurt you if you've already told yourself the same thing, right? And that voice in my head, well, she's the cruelest person I've ever met. I don't let any of her words touch anyone else, so you know who she talks about the most then. Even so, I've reached the point in my life where I'm happy enough I don't hear too much from that bitch anymore. But when she does show up, it sucks. It was after such a moment the other night when it occurred to me that I might actually be too hard on myself. (Let your guard up and they'll cut you down for it, the voice says to that.) I seriously thought about it though. I might actually be too hard on myself. So I'm going to post this because listening to that voice doesn't make me happy, and I know, deep down, that admitting your weaknesses is what makes you truly strong. I can take whatever is thrown at me, she's made sure of that, even if she doesn't think it first for me anymore.

So where does that leave us? The issues of being overweight and being single, I suppose. Do I have a realistic idea of how others perceive me? Probably not. I'm trying to lose weight because I want to be healthier. I think in the past I've mentally roadblocked myself on this one because being overweight is a "good reason" for why you're single. I'm partially scared of losing the fat because there's a line of thinking that says if I'm skinnier and still single than I'm either ugly and/or uninteresting. Neither of which I honestly believe, but that would leave us then with the "there's something wrong with me" thought, but who knows. Maybe I'm delusional. Fat makes you think crazy things* after all. It's maddening though, you'd think there would be more people willing to overlook a mild excess of subcutaneous fat in their search for a partner**.

Well, I actually feel better now. Hope you enjoyed your ride on the feelings coaster. Please keep hands and arms inside the car until the train has come to a complete stop. Enjoy the rest of your day here in Blogville.

~Winter

*Sealab 2021 anyone?

**Let's never mind the offer of a date I received last week. It was delivered by proxy and from a lad who's never actually met me, but has seen my myspace*** page. I haven't made a decision yet.

***Complete with obligatory picture of self taken in bathroom mirror.

Rundown

2008-01-09T00:44:00.000-05:00

::::The lease on my apartment is up in August, and my roommate and I have, for various reasons, decided not to renew it. We will most likely continue to be roommates, only at a different venue. My hope is that we will find something by the end of the month. The theme of the things I'm keeping in mind while looking is Less. Less stairs, less crazy landlord, less bro-y. Although, I have to say that there has been a definite lack of bro activity (brotivities, if you will) over the holidays.

::::The weather is being particularly strange lately. Last week it was cold. It was five degrees when I came home from work one night. Yesterday it was 70. I was forced to dig out my thongs and shorts to go to the store after work. In fucking January. Now, today it has been pouring buckets. This is really screwing with my head!

::::For New Years a couple of friends and I made plans to go out to the bars. Much to my surprise my normally t-shirt and jeans wearing friends told me they were dressing up. After trying a couple outfits I settled on a black dress and heels. When I called them to meet up they were already drinking and expressed disdain at walking to the bars and back since it was cold and raining. We decided to just have a night in, but seeing as how I was already dressed and done I thought "fuck it, I'm not going to change now." I rarely get opportunities to dress up and this was the first time I had worn the dress in question, so what if we were just going to sit around their living room all night.

Our decision to not walk proved well founded. It was just getting cold enough for the ground to start becoming slick when I left my place to head over. A fact that I discovered by slipping and falling right outside my building. My roommate came rushing over to help me up, but the damage was already done. I was damp and muddy and my pride was severely bruised. However, I did not break any of the liquor bottles I was carrying.

At my friend's apartment they complimented my dress and exclaimed over my shoes. I think K. may have been drooling over them. I made our group's drink, pineapple upside-down cake shots. The rest of the evening was a pleasant string of drinking, picture taking, dancing, and my theory that Dick Clarke is either a vampire or a robot.

::::I still haven't taken down my christmas decorations. For shame, I know! It's on my list. I like making lists. They help me organize my thoughts, and I tend to forget little things. Sometimes my lists take on delusions of task accomplishment grandeur.

::::I'm trying to break my soda habit. I have been able to stop drinking diet soda. It's my understanding that diet pop is actually not very conducive to weight loss. Now I'm slowing breaking myself off of all pop. It's hard though. Where else am I going to get my bit of caffeine in the morning since I don't drink coffee? And while pop doesn't have the addictive properties of, say, nicotine or crack, it's so crisp and refreshing, and you have to drink something. Every time I walk by the pop machine at work it calls to me. It beckons and mocks me with its cold tasty goodness. Excuse me, I have to go fill my water bottles for tomorrow. *sigh*

::::I was feeling good about myself. Maybe it was the new years compliments, or the pop banishing. I don't know, I'm leo so sometimes I just like me. At any rate, out of some self confidence inspired stupidity a few days ago I thought I should weigh myself. Big mistake. I had to stand there for a minute and just stare at the damn number. I had gained ten pounds since the last time I weighed myself (which I have just realized may have been as much as three months ago...). I was pissed. So pissed that I'm actually on a diet plan, something I've never tried before. Oh, I've tried losing weight before with exercise and half-assed attempts at eating healthy. This time I have a plan. If there's one, no, three things I like it's having a plan, a decisive direction, and taking action. I have to figure out if I can work going to the gym into my work schedule and if my membership has expired yet in order to fulfill the second part of my genius plan.

So we'll see how that works out.

Leftovers

2007-12-29T19:54:00.000-05:00

So another Christmas is done. The hosting of my first holiday went well. The family came, ate, opened presents, and all was well, if a tinsy bit cramped. And they left me food. Lots and lots of food. People brought stuff that we never even touched and just left it. One of my aunts left me a basket of cookies despite my protests. "Share it with your friends," she said. I took it to work and gave it to the kids there. Problem solved. Although, my fridge was still packed with stuff. As long as I don't get tired of ham and turkey sandwiches I won't have to go for groceries for a long time.

I got plenty of loot this year. A toaster oven, a nice trench coat, a desk, a set of bath towels, and a set of 300 thread count sheets. All very useful and much appreciated items, even if they're not "fun". I'll just have to use those gift cards for the bookstore to get some new reading material.

I was cleaning last week and I stumbled across my list of resolutions from last new years. Yeah, I think if I just change the '7' to an '8' I can just reuse the same list.

Merry [Holiday of Your Choice]!

2007-12-24T23:57:00.000-05:00

Ah, christmas eve. I've always enjoyed xmas eve as much, if not more, than the actual day of xmas itself. It's all about the anticipation. The baking, the wrapping, the shopping, the planning, the possibilities. That's where the magic lies.

Anyway, I'm spending christmas eve this year eating pizza and watching cartoons, by myself. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure this is the first christmas eve I'm spending alone. Usually I go up to my dad's house to spend the night, and open presents in the morning. However, seeing as how I'm hosting christmas dinner tomorrow it makes little sense to drive up there tonight, then go to my aunt's house for lunch then rush back here after. Really, I've been quite busy today, cooking and doing the last bit of cleaning. Oh, and nana-proofing the apartment. You know, taking down a poster here or there, stashing the porn, hiding the bodies, flushing the crack...

I'm not nervous about hosting my first holiday. After all it's going to be a laid back affair. I don't have to make a big meal or a turkey or whatnot. We're doing it buffet style, since my apartment can't accomodate enough tables for us to do a sit and pass meal.

So, my vacation is almost over. :( Part of me feels like I haven't accomplished anything. I like to take that part and punch in the face. I've been able to do get plenty done. I slept in everyday, took a whole carload of stuff to goodwill, and cleaned. Well, some cleaning, but mostly organizing.

Well, it's getting late. I probably should go to bed before Santa arrives. ;)

Merry Christmas

National Treasure 2

2007-12-19T21:12:00.000-05:00

Seriously?

Nicolar Cage as a smart guy?

I didn't buy it the first time.

Hellooo.

2007-12-18T01:20:00.000-05:00

So, in case you didn't know. I'm on vacation right now. Started Friday at 4pm and I don't have to be back until 4pm on the 26th. 11 and two halves days off. At the end of the third day I can say I've accomplished very little. I've done a bit of cleaning, caught up the laundry, watched a lot of tv, slept until I woke up (except Saturday, had to go to the post office), finished my xmas shopping and cards, and um, finished the notes from my outline for this story I'm working on.

I don't have plans to actually go anywhere. What with being the week before christmas, and winter weather, this is a terrible time to travel. Especially since winter has been quite punctual this year, exhibit A: the 4+ inches of snow and 20+mph winds we had going on this weekend. The one thing I plan on getting done is going through my stuff and weeding some out. I'll more than likely be moving again this year, and I don't want to have to move a bunch of junk. War on my packrat nature has been declared. There will be a reckoning. Etc.

Anyway, I'm going to try and blog a bit more too. Tackle a few things I had rattling about, although what they were escapes me at this point. So I guess I'll put out an open call for questions or whatever since I can't think of anything good to blog about right now.

Meme-ory

2007-12-08T02:06:00.000-05:00

I stole this from Nails who in turn stole it from someone else who stole it from an entirely different person.

1. Are you dating the last person you kissed?
I’m not dating anybody.

2. Pretend you've had 10 beers. What you would be doing right now?
Talking. A lot.

3. What do you want?
I think I’d like a boyfriend, nothing serious right now, just someone to go out and have fun with and, you know, make out with. I think that would be nice.

4. Who was the last person you shared a bed with?
I’ve never shared a bed with anyone.

5. Do you talk to yourself?
Yes, and I think that’s healthy.

6. Do you drink milk straight from the carton?
Not milk.

7. Who knows the latest secret about you?
Just me, I keep my cards close the vest.

8. How long is your hair?
Just past shoulder length, I’m thinking about growning it out again.

9. Do you like Batman?
I like Batman, but I don’t like-like batman.

10. Who was the last person who told you they loved you?
I don’t remember.

13. Do you like anyone now?
It doesn’t really matter, and I wouldn’t tell anyway.

14. When was the last time you lied?
Pfft, probably today at work.

16. Is your birthday on a holiday?
Kind of, it’s the day that Columbus embarked upon his famous journey, but they only celebrate the day he landed. Anybody can randomly stumble upon North America, it’s a freakin’ continent. I think undertaking the journey is the important part.

18.Last thing you cooked today?
I warmed up some breadsticks for myself in the microwave. I also did some cooking at work...

19. Did you have a nap today?
No, I don’t take naps.

20. Whose house did you go to last?
My friend Julia’s

21. What do you wear more, jeans or sweats?
I don’t own any sweats, so obviously jeans.

22. Why is the sky blue?
Do you know how badly fushia would have went with the oceans?

23. Do you like green beans?
No. I loathe them. I physically can not eat them. I can put them in my mouth (blech!) and chew, but if I try to swallow I’ll choke.

24. Do you swear a lot?
Does a bear shit in the woods?

25. Where did you get the shirt you're wearing?
Target

27. Do you use an alarm clock?I use the alarm on my phone.

29. Do you ever snort when you laugh?No, I’m more of an evil chuckle/manical cackle type.

30. What's the first thing you notice on the opposite sex?
It’s easiest to say “the eyes”, but it’s more complicated than that.

32. Do you want someone you can't have?
I’ve never wanted anyone I could have.

34. Do you wear underwear?
Yeah.

35. Do you wear a bra?
Of course.

36. What size?
Whatever fits.

37. Are you a social or an antisocial person?
I’m usually pretty social, but it depends on the company.

39. Do you have a tan?
I brown easily, but don’t get much sun, so I’m just tan from the elbows down.

45. Are you afraid of the dark?
No, but I have a healthy respect for things that may be lurking in the dark.

47. Do you miss someone today?
I wasn’t earlier, but I kind of am now.

Snow!

2007-12-07T13:59:00.000-05:00

Wednesday we had the first snow fall of any real accumulation this season. Which was rather nice as the last few Decembers have been rather on the global warming side. Warm Decembers make me somewhat crabby as I like winter (the season, not me, although I'm pretty awesome too), and I like winter to start promptly.

Anyway, we had about three inches of snow, nothing crazy, but enough to cover everything. Julia and I went for a walk in Wintergarden Park that afternoon. I had never been there before even though the park is only a couple minutes from home. It was very nice, and I will be making more trips in the future. The park is just big enough that you can get back in the woods and forget that you're still in town. The temperature was in the mid twenties, just right for a snowy walk. I put some of the pictures I took up on my flickr.

Family Tree

2007-11-27T04:14:00.000-05:00

So I haven't been around the blogosphereterweb much lately on account of some fevered activity on one of my many hobbies.

Let me back this story up to the beginning.

I love my grandparents (these would be my dad's parents). My grandfather is a total pack rat and my grandmother is not, so we all rib my grandpa about his stuff. However, I'm totally on to my grandmother's little secret. She's a pack rat too, but by proxy. They both go to garage sales, yard sales, flea markets, thrift shops, etc. My grandfather keeps what he buys, but my grandmother passes her ill gotten gains on to the rest of us. At every family gathering she has something for somebody. I think it's pretty funny actually.

For example, this Thanksgiving I was informed by two or three people that there was a bag of stuff for me by the door before I had my shoes off. When I got home later that evening I investigated. There were some table clothes, hot pot holders, a spice rack, and a file folder of papers that I assumed was the usual pile of newspaper clippings, inspirational hoohah, coupons, whatnot that my grandmother thinks will be of interest to the receiving party. What I got instead was a folder that said "Family History" and contained pages and pages of information on, what else, my family's history.

Score! I'm very excited. For a long time I've had absolutely no information on my father's family. I realized I know very little about even where his parents were born, grew up etc. Almost all the information is about my grandmother's family, but hey, it's a start. I now know for instance that my great-great-great grandfather, and his brothers, fought in the Civil War. (For the North, since that's the first thing everybody has asked me). A lot of work has already been put into the stuff she gave me. I was totally blown away. It's also given me a lot to work on, sorting and adding facts to my notes. Buys, busy, busy.

Thanks Grandma, You Rock!

Coming Down

2007-11-21T14:21:00.000-05:00

It is a gloomy, gloomy November day, and the rain is coming down.

Which is exactly as it ought to be.

A funny thing happened

2007-11-16T00:48:00.000-05:00

I needed to go to work today (on my day off *sigh*) to finish up the employees' schedule and print it out. They get cranky if they don't know what they're working next week, and believe me I understand. I felt the same way as crew, but with all the drama involved in writing the schedule I never get it all done on Tuesday. I meant to get there earlier, but with one thing and then another it was after 10pm by the time I left home. I don't like going in that late because the dining room is closed, although the pick up window stays open later.

I drove all the way to work before I realized I had left all the papers I needed at home. I went back and rounded up all my stuff. On the way back I decided to cut down a back road instead of taking the main road like I had on my first trip. As I pulled up to the stop light by work I noticed a guy loitering around and watching me approach. When I stopped the guy came over and tried to open my car door. *!!!* I yelled "What are you doing?" and the guy looked into my window. He was a young guy, but had a creepy spaced out stare. He stepped away from my car and turned his back to me and lifted up his shirt a bit. And I'm not a panic-mongerer, but it crossed my mind that he might be pulling a gun on me.

The light turned and I sped off. Well, my work is just across the road from where I had been stopped at the light. By the time I pulled into the lot this guy had crossed the street. He was knocking on the window of a customer's car and trying to get into the building. I had to walk up the same door. I asked if he needed something and he mumbled something along the lines of needing a phone. I told him he couldn't come in and to go to Walmart because they were open. He said, "I see a phone in there. Just let me in for a minute." I told him no and that he needed to leave and not bother people. He didn't seem like he was going to leave, so I let myself in and told the manager on duty we needed to call the police (he had seen the guy outside knocking on cars as well).

I was really impressed with their response. A minute or two later a cruiser pulled up to our building. I was standing outside talking to the officer when we noticed a figure walking across the street. The officer spun around and took off at a sprint, running across Main street without hesitating, it was pretty bad ass. He must have been calling on the radio because three or four other cops appeared out of no where and closed in on the guy. They brought the guy back over, patting him down, and asked me if it was the same guy. It was, and I said so. Then they arrested him. The dude said he was seventeen, but turns out he was nineteen, and wasted. The cops told me they could smell the alcohol on him when they were walking him over. The whole time this guy just kept staring at me all totally creepy.

I don't know if it was a slow night or what, but there were three cop cars and four or five guys. They were all super nice and friendly. I had to give a written statement and everything. They told me they were charging the guy with underage under the influence and inciting a panic. Which it wasn't like we were panicking, but the one cop said, "If some guy came up and tried to get in my car I'd be freaked out." Good point. When I thanked them for coming and responding so quickly they told me this is the kind of thing they take real seriously. Told me I did the right thing, etc.

One of my employees, M, told me she was glad I was there and I had been the one to deal with it because she knew I wouldn't freak out like "some college girl who would just start screaming." The other manager (a guy) said, "Yeah I totally would have started freaking out and yelling, they he'd be stabbing me or something." C'mon guys, sure the guy was super creepy and obviously on something, but it wasn't like he was beating people with rabid gophers or something.

Out of Context*

2007-11-14T19:04:00.000-05:00

"I find your knowledge of slimes and molds quite attractive."

"I really don't like having to carve up my friends with a hatchet."

*Things I've actually said aloud recently, whose explanations are long and not that interesting.

Things

2007-11-11T01:32:00.000-05:00

::::I'm engaged in some Fall cleaning. The usual domestic chores, of course. However, I'm also clearing out closets and trying to sort through some of my never ending clutter. I'm taking a crack at my CD's, movies and books as well. I feel like I need to trim everything down. Make it nice and neat, you know. Maybe the blog will get some sprucing up as well.

::::Historic accomplishments are afoot. I have so far completed about 60% of my xmas shopping. Normally I'm quite last minute. Instead, this year I've planned ahead, and have done some serious online shopping. Huzzah for teh interwebs. My new approach to xmas presents has made this year a lot easier. I've decided to dispense with the whole trying-to-figure-out-what-people-want/like-and-get-them-exactly-that mentality. I figure it's a present, I can get them whatever I damn well feel like. Screw material gratification. I've found shit that I think is cool and I'm sharing.

::::Oh yeah, I'm close to finishing writing out the notes for the outline I wrote for this story that the Story Gods crapped into my skull one unsuspecting evening. Once I'm happy that I've put down all my important ideas (so I don't for get them because I'm kind of an idiot like that, I mean, I've already read a couple of my notes in the outline and been like "wtf does that mean?")...what was I saying? Oh yeah, ideas...so once they're all down hopefully I can start the actual writing of the story.

::::P.S. It's Saturday night. Do you know where your bros are?

Stuff

2007-11-10T02:35:00.000-05:00

::::A couple weeks ago my mom emailed me about doing a "girls night out" with me and my two sisters. "I feel like we've lost something really special that we used to have," she said. Um, wtf is she talking about? Is she talking about me trying not to stab myself in the head with a pen? Anyway, she suggested going to see the Trans-Siberian Orchestra as one thing we could do. Sure, that would be great, but with xmas coming and all, I don't really have fifty bucks for a concert ticket. I told her as much on the phone yesterday. "Oh, no, I'm buying the tickets," she said. Well, that makes it a bit different, twist my arm. I can handle an evening with my mom, and sisters (I get on pretty well with the youngest, but the middle and I have always been at odds).

::::Hey! The temperature finally dropped down to normal this week. And it snowed! Okay, it was just flurries, but still. Awesome! *goes off and does an obscenely dorky happy dance* I even conceded and turned on the heat.

::::A while back I discovered this awesome website, BookMooch . The whole idea is that it allows the people on the site to trade books. You list the books you have (you get 1/10 pt. ea.) and then you can request books that other people have. All you have to do is pay the postage on the books you send out. You get a point for each book you send and each book you request is a point (unless you mooch outside your country). Oh and you get 1/10 point for leaving feedback when you receive your book. It's a pretty sweet idea, you can trade books you don't want anymore for new ones. I've sent and received about 10 books each. Sure you get the occasional annoying person who will send you a reminder less than a week after they request a book, but most of the people are really cool.

No way to live

2007-11-05T04:07:00.000-05:00

For only the third time in as many months I have met a guy I find attractive. Of course, he was a customer, bringing a matter that needed handling to my attention, and it wasn't the sort of thing you could build a conversation off of. I certainly hope that he didn't think I was blowing him off, or laughing at him, or not taking him seriously. I took care of the problem personally. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that I started getting a dorky grin on my face while he was talking to me. Most of my brain was listening and figuring out how I was going to deal with the problem, but a small part was like, "Hey, there's totally a cute guy talking to me right now. And he's not an idiot. And he doesn't seem like a T or D bag. And hey, he's totally talking to me. And he's rather attractive. ... Shit."

I need to find a way of meeting guys when the odds aren't stacked completely against me.