Life and Other Things I Don't Understand
Tuesday, March 30, 2004
Terminator 4: Rise of the Kitchen Appliances
I don't usually find my laughs in the evening news. But this just had me in stitches.
A woman in San Antonio was baking fish sticks and her oven started shooting at her. (I guess it's not a breaded seafood fan).
Seems her friend(?) stashed a .357 Magnum in the broiler at the bottom of the oven and forgot to take it back out again. The heat was enough to make the weapon discharge. She caught a slug in the hip, but she's expected to make a full recovery. See this story for what details there are.
This could start a whole new realm of baking...Preheat the Ovenator to 425. Wait for it to fire off the first round before placing the cookies inside. A second blast indicates they're done but still chewy. If you prefer your cookies crunchier, wait for it to pop off a third time.
Hmmm.... For now, I think I'll stick with my old-fashioned beeping oven timer.
Spring In New Mexico... Ahhh...
...ahhh... *chooo!*
'Scuse me. *sniffle*
Death to Junipers. All of 'em.
While that may mean no more gin for those who like it (*shudder* the stuff tastes like PineSol), it would also mean far less sneezing and nose-running for me. And maybe the roots of my teeth would stop feeling so damn itchy.
And my prescription for Allegra is all out of refills. Better write myself a note to call the doc for more. Where's the farggin' Post-its?
Oh, yeah... I wrote on the last one and stuck it here on the wall. Get more Post-its, it reads. I think there's room enough to add a line about calling the doctor for the 'scrip.
Now, if I can (a) remember to bring it with me; and (b) remember where I put it when I'm trying to recall what it was that I absolutely had to do today...
Monday, March 29, 2004
Psst... Hey, Buddy, Wanna Buy a...
The last day of my week-long vacation (okay, not really, as I'm normally off on Mondays anyway, but I have to go back to the ol' grind tomorrow) and I just picked up the freshly-delivered mail. All I got was junk. And a giggle.
Sears wants to sell me aluminum siding.
I have an adobe-stucco house.
I'd love to see them try to wrap aluminum siding around all those multifaceted arches and pillars.
The offer came with a toll-free number to have a consultant come out to the house and give me an estimate.
Should I? *snicker*
It'd be priceless to see the look on his face if I insisted that they cover the house with siding.
Nah. I'm not that cruel.
Mmm-mmm, Nothing Like Steak and...
... hair conditioner.
I've been using a new leave-in conditioner for my hair for a little over a week. Works great to turn my fine, wispy, volumeless locks into something that actually resembles a normal head of hair. Smelled wonderful in the bottle, too; a little fruity, a little shampoo-y, and overall really fresh.
So why, when I turn on the blowdrier, do I smell nothing but sauteeing mushrooms?
Don't get me wrong. I like sauteed mushrooms. I like the scent of sauteed mushrooms.
Just not on my head.
I checked the ingredients. There's no oleo or fungus listed there.
*sigh*
Sunday, March 28, 2004
Frustrated
Which ought to be more frustrating: Working with unfamiliar code on this blog, or getting stuck behind a really slow driver?
Well, for me, it was (amazingly!) less stressful to copy, paste and tinker with this template to add a link section (which wasn't in the template I borrowed to create this place). And my fingers are nearly numb (it's cold this morning in this little sunroom that is my own nearly-private space), so trying to manipulate a trackball mouse feels, well, weird.
But it's far easier than traveling behind someone who drives like she's (yes, they were mostly women) made of tissuepaper and her car's a house of cards. For some reason, there were an awful lot of that sort on the roads yesterday when I was out running errands.
FINISHING TOUCHES
Now that I'm sure the links are working the way I want them to, and my fingers have thawed out enough that I'm not typing gibberish... There's (ooh! working!) links to the blogs I've been reading on a somewhat semi-regular basis. And a big thanks for the link from yours to here, SouthernBelle!
Saturday, March 27, 2004
A Special Sort of Genius
Theives have always puzzled me. Why do they think they should be entitled to take what others have worked so hard to honestly obtain?
But it takes a unique style of thinking to think that you can steal from a store where people know you. Because your mother worked for the company for years and many of the staff have watched you grow up. She even chatted with some of us about how her mom was doing, now that she'd retired.
I still can't believe the girl would be this stupid. The not-quite-twenty year-old daughter of a former employee came into the store where I work and attempted to pass a $150+ check for all sorts of merchandise. She'd apparantly created the check on her computer, complete with a made-up bank routing number. Not just the account number, but a routing number that didn't exist.
When it was turned down by the check-scanning system, we attempted to call the bank that was identified on the check. Their customer service informed us that not only was the routing number not theirs, it had never been assigned by the Federal Reserve as belonging to any institution whatsoever.
We didn't tell her this, having already called the police to report the attempted theft. We simply told her that the funds were declined. She left the store (and the check with us), saying she'd be back with cash to purchase the goods.
Guess she thought she got away. But nope. We gave the police her mother's address (from our employee files, as ours was the store she'd retired from, so her file remained in our system) and they picked her up at her mother's house.
Duh.
Thursday, March 25, 2004
Is It A Concert or...
... a Broadway-style pop musical?
*sigh* Normally, I wouldn't give a bunny's butt that Britney Spears has waffled about putting on a... well, live-type whatever you want to call it here in Albuquerque. It was on, it was off, on again, off again, and now, apparently, it's been confirmed that she and her wardrobe will be visiting to give a performance.
But the media has made it such a big deal. The only ones who really care are pubescent girls and adolescent boys who hope she'll dance a little too fiercely in one direction or the other and her boobs will pop out of whatever strapless top she's wearing. Oh, and the parents who have to pony up the money for tix and then have to attend with said children who are too young to be unchaperoned at a large venue. I wonder how they decide whose parent is the unlucky one who has to take the vanful of kids? Draw straws? Drawing the lowest card in the deck? Flat-out bribery?
What rubs me about her, and the many other 'pop stars' out there, is that they are such media-grabbing honeys, and they really don't do much of anything at all. They don't write their own music or lyrics (I wonder if they even know how to read sheet music), they don't play an instrument... they just show up, dance around, change clothes a lot, and belt out (if we're lucky, anyhoo... mewonders how much their voices have been punched up and remixed in a studio before we ever get to hear one of their recordings) a bunch of somebody else's work.
Sounds more like a musical play sans plot than a concert.
Yet they get the airplay. Good music, real music written and performed by talented musicians, falls by the wayside for those of us with any semblance of taste to hunt down by ourselves. Just pisses me off sometimes.
God, I miss AOR.
Saturday, March 20, 2004
Still Have Most Of My Hair
Compaq - 0, Steph - 1.
Tracked down the pesky and elusive CD-rom driver, no thanks to Compaq's instructions on installing the OS on a new hard drive.
They gave the wrong driver name to look for (I needed the IDE driver, not the real-mode one, as they indicated) and the wrong place to look for it (it was in IDE-rom drives, not Real-mode support). And these were instructions specific to the laptop's model number. Sheesh.
To give them credit, it is a sixish-year-old laptop, and the online installation White Papers are about the same age, so I guess I should be grateful that they were still available at all. But to take away/move and otherwise make it hard to locate the correct drivers is just not cool. Neither is listing (on a recently updated support page), by laptop model number, all downloadable patches and drivers for the said laptop except for the critical one: the MS-DOS CD-rom driver so that when the floppy's in the swappable bay and the CD-rom isn't (which would be silly and useless, since the computer doesn't recognize it yet), you can force the new C-drive to accept the driver for it anyway.
It's also not cool to have errors, such as extra spaces in command lines the user has to type in, and to leave those errors for six years. Thankfully, I knew the spaces shouldn't be there. I pity those who didn't, and wondered why the commands wouldn't work. ("But I typed it in exactly like the instructions said to...")
Writing instructions in 'flashback' mode really isn't so great, either. "You should have done this other necessary step earlier, but we're only mentioning it now. For instructions on how to perform it, see Appendix Double-Z waaaay far at the back of this PDF file."
So ha-ha, Compaq. I fart in your general direction. I managed to load the new hard drive anyway. And I still have almost all the hair I started this endeavor with. And I didn't consume all the coffee in the house trying to enhance my calm and not just chuck the whole laptop out into the yard and start beating on it with whatever lawn implements were closest to the front of the shed. There's still just enough Starbucks left to make one more lifegiving potful tomorrow.
Just gotta figure out how to come down off today's overcaffeinated buzz now...
Friday, March 19, 2004
Grrrrr....
Ever try to read technical instructions with the soundtrack of Sonic the Hedgehog droning on and on and on and on and on in the background? Ugh. I'll reformat and setup the new laptop effin' hard drive tomorrow, when my brain isn't mush.
Then, if I have any patience or hair left, I'll install the OS.
Think I'll have nasty little dreams tonight of how much I am detesting Compaq at this very moment.
Tuesday, March 16, 2004
And This Person is Driving?
I run a one-hour photolab in a drugstore. Busy place, mostly brainless work after doing it for 8 years. But still...
A woman came in the other day and plopped down a throwaway-type camera and her receipt, complaining that it only took one picture and won't take any more.
Now, this is unusual, but not unheard-of. Sometimes the film isn't loaded properly at the factory and it jams. I picked it up and looked at the little window labeled 'Pictures Remaining.' It showed 27 (the original number of pictures in the pre-loaded camera). I tried the shutter release... it wouldn't depress. So I tried the winder... it moved along like it should, stopping after about two full turns. I clicked a picture of the counter and wound the film again.
"Seems fine to me," I told her.
The woman looked puzzled. "How'd you get it to do that?"
I managed to keep my 'flying eyebrow' in check and replied that you have to wind the little wheel after taking a photograph, to advance the film to a fresh spot for the next picture.
"Wow. I never knew that. So I guess it isn't broken." She took back the camera and went on her way.
Those things are preloaded with film and a battery, and most of them will charge the flash right up again after the little flash button has been pressed for the very first time, so that the flash is always on and ready. You just click, wind, click, wind, etc., until the film advance won't stop any more, then you turn the whole thing in for developing. Pretty idiot-proof design, right?
Guess not.
Sunday, March 07, 2004
Well, #$%&*!!! and Pass the Caffeine
I resolved when I started that this blog was not going to be a venting place nor a dumping spot. Well, lately, things haven't been all that amusing (hence the lack of posts) and I might as well just blow off my steam here. Nobody's actually reading this thing, anyway, so why not just gripe and get it out of my system?
This is generally a safe, quiet neighborhood. Some nights, I even forget to lock my doors. But recently, somebody tried to break into my car. Twice. Then came back and tried to unbolt the starter and steal that. Who in their right mind would want a fourteen-year-old Corsica? The stereo's not exactly kick-ass (although it does do 'loud' really well), almost all the CDs I keep in there are copies and personal mixes so I don't have to tote them in and out of the house (and, being the purist that I am, I keep the 'real' ones in the original jewelboxes and who wants to cart all that back and forth?)
So now the paint's all gouged up where they tried to pry off the lock cylinder the first time, the passenger door lock is nothing but a rounded-out hole (the second attempt) and I still need to locate a third bolt to make sure the starter stays firmly attached, as the would-be theives left one bolt still in place and I could find only one bolt that fits at the auto-parts store.
The car's back in the garage now. It never would have been parked in the driveway over a few nights to begin with, if the garage wasn't filled with a slightly-taken apart Harley with a sticking clutch cable. And that would have been fixed and put back into its place after just one night of being spread all over the garage if my dear, sweet husband on that same night hadn't detached a tendon in his right arm while at work. And he's right-handed.
I still don't understand how that happened. The man holds state powerlifting records, placed second in the state finals for the Strongest Man competition, and a tendon rips free while he was emptying a trash can. Now, to give him credit, it was one of those big green outside-your-house types and was filled with empty beer bottles, so it wasn't some light thing. Matter of fact, he was only emptying it because the person whose job it was to dump it couldn't lift it.
The wonderful surgeon who cemented the reluctant tendon back to the bone thinks it had something to do with the rotating motion of his arm under the load, since it was the short portion of bicep tendon which allows a 'twisting' motion that tore free.
So, now he's in a bright red cast from above the elbow down to the palm of his hand. And cursing it constantly, as the incisions are healing and itching like a motherfucker. And he's back at work, which has his district manager thrilled, as the rest of the management staff seem to be dropping like flies. One has the flu and another has some mystery ailment that they suspect was a mini-stroke. (It sounded more like Bell's Palsy to me, as only his face and eyesight in one eye was affected, but what do I know?) The guy's only thirty, kinda young for a stroke I think, unless he's got some sort of hidden aneurism that the MRI didn't pick up on.
Anyway, now I can finally stop living on lattes and cappucino and get some sleep. When I can find the time and when the arthritis in my knees isn't kicking my ass from not getting enough rest (God, how they ache!). I've been Ed's right arm for weeks now (finally got him a cheap laptop on Ebay so I can stop writing for him and he can type out his work notes) and even finding the time to do this entry was hard.
I don't know if I feel better (or not) for getting all of this out, but at least I've vented it somewhere. My friends and co-workers know what's been happening, but I refuse to dump on them and I'm not generally a whiner, so I've just been getting more and more frustrated. Hopefully tonight, when I finally manage to fall asleep, I won't have another night of dreams of being lost in hospital corridors.
