Looks like all I needed to kick my ass into blogging gear was a new look here, hehe.

Not that I have much of anything of interest to write about. Today was a lazy day around our house. Apart from doing the laundry, the kid and I just watched Finding Nemo and hung out. We’re having a lovely thunderstorm atm which is nice to watch. It’s a little light on the thunder though. I do love a good storm. I don’t know what it is about them that makes me feel good. A lot of people think I’m odd because I don’t wish for bright sunny weather all the time.

We have an office cleaning lady that comes in every day around 1pm and she inevitably mentions the weather. I find it particularly cruel considering our offices are below ground and windowless 🙂 But she’s an older lady who prefers warm sunny days and gives me funny looks when I sort of cringe and wish for a bit of rain.

I think it comes from my time spent in Monterey. I really came to love it when the fog would roll in over PG and drape itself like a fuzzy blanket over the peninsula. If I happened to be on the beach at the time I took pleasure in being able to listen to the waves crashing on the beach, but not seeing them. I also enjoyed the year-round cooler weather we had there. I wish I could decently describe how… comforting I found gloomy days, and still do. I don’t get depressed when it’s cloudy and I don’t watch the weather channel like a hawk waiting for word of the sun peaking out.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some vampire-like weirdo who only thrives in gloom. I enjoy a beautiful clear day with a cool breeze and not a cloud in the sky. The colours seem more vivid and vibrant and the plethora of big beautiful trees around here look especially nice contrasted with a brilliant blue sky during the spring. It’s just that I don’t get that grey-weather scowl on my face when I wake up and see that it looks like rain. And I don’t grimace and flinch when the cleaning lady comes in lamenting the foul weather.

So she thinks I’m a freak. Ah well.

Forgive any typos in this entry. I seem to have sliced a good bit of my finger tonight. I was picking up the butcher’s knife to cut up some asparagus and it slipped and somehow as it fell, it managed to wedge itself nice and deep into my finger before dropping to the floor.

I’m such a weenie. But I’ve got some New Skin on it, which hurt like a bitch putting on, and the bleeding has stopped. Alas, my already deplorable typing skills have slipped even further because I’m afraid to bend my finger.

Other than that my week has improved. I forgave my daughter for forgetting my birthday and we spent today driving around town while I took photos of her in different parts of town. I have several of them up in my photo albums, in her directory, but here’s one of them:

That was taken in one of the alleys downtown. There’s a set of steps in one of them that go up to nowhere, so I thought she’d look cool atop them.

Anyway, I’m going to go watch a video. Gnighty.

I think today was the crappiest birthday I’ve ever had. And I think it’s my own fault really. Apart from just about everyone I know IRL, including my own daughter, seemed to forget or just not acknowledge the bday, I don’t want to go into much more detail and etch in stone (so to speak) everything that went wrong today. It just sucked much, and I let myself get sucked into wallowing in self-pity all day long and now I’m exhausted.

I’m babbling now. I’m going to bed. Glad today is over.

Soooo blogger had an upgrade when I wasn’t looking. I like it so far. I’ve been wanting to redo the look here for a while now but lacked the energy to actually do it myself. Good job they added some spiffy new templates eh? Thank you, whomever, for saving me the work. I like this layout.

Still though, I’ve been quite bad about posting here and everytime I DO post, I say I’ve been bad about posting and make a promise to be better but who am I kidding? No one reads this thing anyway 🙂 So to anyone stumbling onto this blog by accident, I’ll post when I can and that’s the best I can do.

What’s new? Well not much, hence the lack of posts. Nothing’s ever new around here. My grandparents bought a 2004 PT Cruiser the other day. It’s gorgeous and it was quite shocking that they bought one. They’ve often said that the Sable and Escort they had would be their last cars (how morbid eh?) and then they called up the other day and said, ‘Guess what, we bought a new car.’ Was very surreal.

What else… Oh the kidlet’s got a new domain. minimelia.com. Sweetiepete was a bit too childish for her these days 🙂 so a new site and domain for her. She’s got contacts now as well. *sniffle.* She’s all growed up 🙁

Well I’m keeping it short for now. It’s 24 day and I need to prepare 🙂 🙂

So I’m thinking I need to take a class or something and learn how to fix my own car. Last week my alternator belt broke so I took it to the dealership to have this simple little thing fixed. I can afford the cost of it, no big. A couple of days after I get my car back I notice my turn signals aren’t working so I whinge a little bit about it at work and one of my cowrokers tells me it could just be a fuse that shorted out. I go through my handbook for the car and find out where the proper fuses are only to find that the fuses are fine. So I decide I’m going to have to take the car back to the dealer, and see what’s going on. I get caught up in meetings and am not able to get the car in until today. Oh and over the weekend I discover that not only are my turn signals out, so are my brake lights, tail lights and cruise control. And of course dealership repairshop is not open on weekends and I can’t take it anywhere else in case the problem was something the dealership caused when they put the new belt on.

They call me not 20 minutes after I drop off the car to tell me it’s a switch that shorted out in the steering column and that the cost to repair it will be $220 for parts and labour. 220 fucking dollars to fix a shorted out switch. They told me it’s just a coincidence that it blew after they had my car as they didn’t perform any work on the steering column.

I don’t know whether to believe them or not because I don’t know any better. It occurred to me to ask them if perhaps in the course of working on the alternator whether it was a possibility for the alternator to surge with electricity and maybe cause the switch to short out. He put me on hold to go ask the mechanic if that could happen and of course the mechanic said no. But he probably figures I wouldn’t know any better so he could tell me anything and I’d still have to pay. I don’t want to feel like that next time I have to deal with the fucking mechanics.

What I really want to do is learn about all of this, then next time I have a repair I want to play dumb and catch them lying to me. I would simply adore seeing the look on their face when I catch them out. It would be like the time when I worked in the pub in Engerland and the french staff were talking about the rest of us in french, blissfully unaware that I understood every word they said. Ahhh that was sweet.

of course it’s entirely possible that the dealership is very honest and that everything they’ve told me is the absolute truth. My point is that I just don’t know if I’m being suckered or not because I’m fairly ignorant when it comes to car repair. I feel like I’ve been ripped off, but I just don’t know.

My kingdom for public transportation in this deadend town.

My local Fox affiliate ran an editorial piece the other day during a commercial break that irritated the hell out of me. They had some suit get in front of the camera and ask me to write my senators asking them to support the broadcast decency bill that’s making its way through congress right now in the wake of Janet Jackson’s boob-popping incident. They also wanted me to tell my senators to give the power back to local stations to decide which programs are suitable for family viewing.

Frankly, I believe I’m quite old enough to decide on my own what I or my daughter should or should not watch and I’m appalled that the gall the local stations have to want to step in and make those decisions for me. Fuck them. You hear that Fox guy in Kearney Nebraska? F-U-C-K you. I will NOT be asking my senator to support this bill, I will instead be asking them to oppose it. I know it won’t do any good because I’m a liberal lost in a sea of extreme conservatives.

*sigh*

Recently, my daughter and I were messing around with the soundboards over at ebaumsworld, one of which has a bunch of Simpsons wav files. We were particularly fond of Homer saying, “Mmmm…feet.” in that covetous manner he has. So now that phrase has become a bit of an injoke between us and we’ll hit each other with it at the oddest moments. Good fun.

So I’m at my department meeting yesterday with my boss and other coworkers and you know how you tend to bullshit for a little while? Well we do that a lot and we got to talking about that German guy convicted of cannibalism (can you see where I’m going with this?) and how he’d advertised on the Net for someone willing to be his victim.

Well… I am not the best at thinking before I speak and before I could stop myself, I said, “Mmmm…feet.” just as everyone was looking properly grossed out and horrified at mere thought of human consumption.

Well, I thought it was funny but no one else laughed. I never got a chance to explain why I said ‘Mmm…feet’ just then either. I realised after that it was totally one of those ‘you had to be there’ moments. Ah well. We’re all supposed to go out for dinner tomorrow night too. I hope they aren’t worried about what I’ll order 🙂