October 2006

Oh yes, I’m all about the historical record. Sweet Jebus. The last few days have been…educational. And interesting and dramatic and laugh-tastic. I met Elmer Fudd at a Halloween party. But he wasn’t dressed as Elmer Fudd. I have a screenplay all about my experience at the party ready in my mind. Wes describes it as Night of the Living Dead meets When Harry Met Sally on Titanic. You’d see it, right? Hell yeah!

This blog entry is dedicated to Shalon. Nyah.

Stop having it, my friends. STOP! While I’ve decided that I can heal people with the power of my mind (my mind, man), I’m going to be doing a lot of healing it seems. So rather than me exhaust my brain (which has been broken by certain gossip about certain people…which Sarah didn’t tell me), I request that you all take a deep breath, and chill out. Ahhhhhh.

There’s a new kid on the block. New kid on the blog? Six Apart publicly introduces the world to Vox, a quasi-blog-cum-file-sharing service. With a dash of social networking, a smidge of digg, and a cleaner more comprehensive interface than just about anyone, Vox is pretty slick.

Despite having more spaces online where I reside than is probably healthy, plus a looming foray into MySpace on the horizon…I now have a Vox blog just for shits and giggles.

Looking for sweet looking blog hosting with lots of space for photo and video uploads? Plus what I believe to be the easiest “this is what I’m reading” search engine ever, try out Vox. I’m suitably impressed.

Update: I think I’ll be using it to provide a daily photo. Stuff that doesn’t work in a gallery. So behold, a photo a day.

Erica is moving to Santa Barbara on Thursday. Boo! But also yay! It’s been so much fun having her here and hanging out, and we were able to go out and have a final night out last night. My evening started at 4pm at Ausiello’s with Shalon. You know you’re in for a good time when you start at the bar an hour before happy hour! We had a good assistant manager’s summit, then went out to dish the dirt (mostly on each other) and generally be ridiculous. I went from there to head out with Savannah and Erica, where we ended up at the bar, as usual. It was a long, goofy night, and so much fun. Miss you, Erica!

See the photographic madness!

That’s what we call it at work. So when a friend of mine from work decides to set goals that have nothing very little to do with work, I help her create a color-coded IDP with actionable items. And I offer a reward for successful completion aside from the…uh, joy of completion. I will join.

Sometime today Akismet caught the 5000th spam comment on my blog. Here’s to (thus far) 5019 comments snagged, no false-positives, and just a handful of comments even making it to moderation.

A friend posed an interesting question to me the other night. While long and complicated in the initial expression, it boiled down to a big, fat “why?” Having imbibed a few adult beverages, my brilliant response was essentially “because.” Our second-grade argument thus concluded, we moved on. She thinks she hurt my feelings. No ma’m. I have clarity on some things, though I may simultaneously be of two minds on the subject. It’s not just right, it’s good. It has, and will continue to be, incredibly good for me. Have no guilt and lay down your Catholic burdens. Real friends ask the difficult questions. Thank you. My friends love me. My friends are rad.

Anyone have any suggestions on where Bryan and I should go on our delayed honeymoon? I may be home doing nothing on Saturday night, but at least I’m making plans! Kidding! I’m not making plans. I’m soliciting plans.

One of the guys at work is suggesting that we go to the El Yunque Rainforest in Puerto Rico. It seems like a great idea, but we’ll be taking nearly 3 weeks (19 or 20 days is the plan) and I’m not sure we want to spend all that time in just one place. I’d like to be able to fill my passport before it expires, which means I have about two more years to fill the remaining four pages.

Suggestions or comments? We’re essentially gone from February 27 to March 19. (Planned this far in advance so my boss can go trek in Nepal and we don’t overlap by too many days.) It’s generally the off season for most tourism depending on the area, so it’s a good opportunity for us to see a lot of stuff with fewer people around. We’ve already been the following (international) places together: Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Australia. We’ll definitely take some cues from Rach and Dazza’s trip, but would love to hear about places you suggest.

An awesome, awesome loser! I figured out what was causing the idiocy between Adium and iTunes. All my fault. Bah. But now I can listen to Justin Timberlake in secret and no one on my buddy list will know! Oooh, and I make Lorilee sleepless, so maybe I am super awesome fantastico…

Today I had a summit on employment law in California. It was just as exciting as it sounds. I did actually learn a few things, and lost a game so that I have to email some info to our HR rep. Nothing that exciting. I car pooled with Amanda up to the city, and it is always so satisfying getting to drive in the car pool lane while everyone else sits around in traffic.

After the work thing, I had my now-usual mojito!Thursday at Nola, while actually having both mojitos and Sangria. None of the pictures can possibly tell you how ridiculous it got. Ridiculous doesn’t come across on camera very well. The night culminated with cleaning Lorilee’s purse out and reading her receipts out loud.

View the photos!

I can’t wait for work to “calm down.” It’s all relative, really, but we’re going to get an additional manager soon, which means a few extra minutes each day to work on the things I’ve been neglecting. I was the opening manager four days in a row, which meant that I was in the store for two hours before we open. Damn, but I’m productive at that time. I was able to get so much stuff done, including finally working out the logistics of purchasing a washer/dryer for our store. Also, we have toilet paper spindles in the employee bathroom. This is not exciting to anyone but me, but Kristen did put up a mobile built of non-functioning spindles above my desk. (Please understand that I was sent four different kinds of spindles, none of which fit. This from the company that provided the toilet paper dispensers and the spindles.)

These days, I’m trying to fit 10 hours of work into 8 hour days. I don’t like working overtime, but managed to rack up more than 5 hours of OT in the last few weeks. That’s way more than my limit. However, after yesterday, I’m feeling like I’m making progress. Hooray for doing something more than reacting. I much prefer being proactive.

In amazing news, I had the best experience at the DMV today. I will wait a moment for you to take that in. Need another? Go ahead…

My license expired on my birthday, which was eight and a half months ago. I went in five days before that and renewed my license in person. I took the vision test, took a new photo, and updated my address. Months and months of waiting, and after being sent 2 temporary papers, still no permanant license. I got around to calling the DMV again, and then the guy on the phone told me that I just needed to go in and take the vision test again. A wha? My license already says “corrective lenses.” I need to take another test so it can say “really corrective lenses?” I made an appointment (because I refuse to go to the DMV without one) and showed up a few minutes early. (Please note that the only appointment available was at 2pm, which ruins my whole day off.) By 2pm, they called my number, and I got this woman who was on a mission to get me a real license. She was on a rampage to fix this for me, and actually made it work for me in under 10 minutes. Props to her, whoever she is.

So this is what happens when Sarah, Kristen, and I have too much free mental time. We got off work at 4:30 on Friday, and planned to stay for a bit to create a cardboard office for Wes (our lovely boss). We’d been planning this for about a week, getting one of our shippers to save us really big cardboard boxes. To be perfectly honest, we didn’t make great measurements. Sarah literally scribbled a bunch of numbers down on the back of a business card, and we went down to the warehouse with a box cutter, our own personal knives (yay Benchmade!), some red painters tape, a pencil, a yardstick, and a 20-foot tape measure. Our motto, shamelessly stolen from The Onion, was “Measure once, cut immediately” and it seemed to work just fine for us. It went up remarkably quickly, and worked amazingly well. Wes came back from four days out of the store to this vision.

Check out the gallery!

I have no words. None. Ok, maybe a few. Battlestar Galactica is amazing. The season 3 premiere was “guh?” after “wha?” after “zomg!” Coherent thoughts later…if possible at all.

I’ve been half-heartedly searching for a good solution for displaying my photographs. Not having a camera definitely put a damper on the seach as not having a camera meant not having any new and awesome (or at least mildly interesting) photos to share with you all. But now that Sir Snappy is back, I actually looked into a good gallery solution and found one!

The Popup Image Gallery WordPress Plugin is just what I was looking for. It took me a while to figure out all the bells and whistles behind the plug-in, but it was definitely worth it. After some learning from the kind folks in the Tarski support forums, I’ve got it up and running to my satisfaction. Now all I need to do is take some photos worth posting. Next target? Mojito Thursdays at Nola!

While my part of California isn’t known for rapidly changing foliage in the fall, there is a certain quality about the air that changes. Starting this morning, the skies outside have had a particular grey quality, while the air feels different. Is it a smell? Does the atmosphere weigh more now that we’re into a different season? I’m not sure what the difference is, but it’s here and it’s palpable. It reminds me of something I can’t quite place, and experiences half-remembered…it’s basketball practice and rain and warm coats and sitting on Amanda’s air conditioning unit and drinking coffee outside. I love this time of year.

Bryan and I went to the pet store today to get the dog more food. While I was loitering around waiting for Bryan to take the food out to the car, I found a fun new toy for Chandler. He’s not really sure what to do with it, but it’s funny to watch him walk around with it. I couldn’t get a good photo of the walking around, but here’s some of the cute.

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