Holy Smokes!

A spider just dropped on me from the ceiling! Eek! A Brown Recluse? I hope not. But this is why I needed to create an “Express Posts” category. And this is the kind of stuff that could go on Twitter, too.

Bloggin’ from PHX

NOTE: Comments aren’t working for me right now. Having some technical difficulties…

So I’m in Phoenix right now. I feel kind of odd about jetting off like that, at this time, with the news going on, but here I am and that’s all there is to it. I’m going to enjoy these 10 days even if it kills me… well let’s hope that doesn’t happen.

Here’s what happened today, in a convenient NUMBERED LIST format:

1. Got a late start as I scrambled to pack and get set up
2. Discovered that my new debit card still hasn’t arrived. I’m in a bit of trouble as far as paying for things goes… hopefully this won’t last much longer.
3. I failed to pick up CNN schwag this year, so I settled for other small tokens instead. I feel kind of bad.
4. Play Doh! I’m giving it out somewhat liberally. Who doesn’t love Play Doh? I got a big bag of it just for laffs and gave some out at work. I have some more left over to hand out to myself or others.
5. On my way to the train station, I passed by a taxi stand where I saw that a crunched-up taxi was parked. It had one of those “How’s my driving?” thingies on the back I think. It was one of situations where I probably should have stopped to take a picture. (I’m a pretty big shutterbug, you know, although probably not the biggest one out there.) Oh well. There was a passenger in the vehicle, too.
6. I made it to check-in at 10:27, and the cutoff point was 10:28. If I hadn’t made it in at that point, I wouldn’t have gotten on the flight. (I had no trouble actually getting on the plane itself.) It seems as though they overbooked our flight and had coaxed a couple parents into having their babies sit on their laps.
7. Flight was pleasant enough, although it required sitting in the plane for a total of five hours. I got one of those older, nicer America West planes with the leather seats and boo-koo leg room (sorry, can’t spell boo-koo). Heck, they gave me TWO bags of pretzels.
8. One of the flight attendants was wearing a Santa apron. It was so cute — she looked like Ms. Claus. The movie was The Santa Clause, but I didn’t bother hooking up a headset to listen to it.
9. Back in the Valley — the weather is cooler than expected, and the sunset is beautiful as per usual.
10. I dressed in Sun Devil attire to get some Sun Devil mojo flowing, but alas, I failed to Austin Powerize the team. The Texans pretty much smashed ASU to bits.
11. We found “cherry passion” Tic Tacs at the store that look like they are ASU-themed with maroon & gold coloration.
12. I’m pulling hair out of Bob the cat’s coat. He is shedding an awful lot and it’s kind of freaky how much hair is coming out. He’s had issues with this in the past, but with cooler weather comes a thicker winter coat and worse shedding. Have to be careful though, or he might claw me.
13. My parents have a Christmas tree set up that threatens to give me an epileptic seizure, and I don’t even have epilepsy. It’s beautiful though.
14. They bought some lights that look like beer mugs. I got some and some others are going to some of my relatives. *cough* Wisconsin *cough*
15. Now I am bored. I need entertainment.

That is all. Cheerio!

Pumpkin spice and everything nice

I like to go to Starbuck’s every now and then, and I’m not even talking about the one roughly 50 feet from my Place of Employment. I would rather go to a locally owned coffee house (that serves quality coffee), but it’s tough to find indie businesses in my corner of the OTP without a bit of travel. Anyways so the last two times I went to the particular ‘Bucks that I always go to, I have been the “every 50th customer.” This means I am eligible for TWO entries in the October drawing to win $1,000. I’m gonna give it a shot, you know? I figure this isn’t going to happen every day.

And by the way, I’m kicking myself for repeatedly ordering the Pumpkin Spice Latte, which cost me more than purchasing an actual pumpkin. It’s not unpleasant, but it bears resemblance to neither pumpkins nor spice. It is a fine and enjoyable latte, however. It’s a different story when tasting pumpkin beer, however. That stuff doesn’t sit well with me. The last time I tried some I thought it tasted vaguely like, um, “upchuck,” and I didn’t make it beyond a few sips. I’m tempted to give it another shot, but of course, that’s what I always say about the Pumpkin Spice Latte. My picks at Starbucks are straight-up cappuccino, the cinnamon dolce latte and the chai latte. Even then I have to be careful to just drink a little at a time and spread it out over a few hours to avoid getting an uncomfortable stomach-irritating caffeine rush, and you know, to make it last. I’ve tried non-dairy and that helps a lot, but the soy milk doesn’t touch real milk. If I want something a little lighter I’ll go for a green tea lemonade, lightly sweetened. Delish.

[/whining]

So… beyond that, I endorse Stephen Colbert for president. To be quite honest, he’s the only candidate I have any sort of affection or affinity for.

I should also recap my recent journey to Stone Mountain Park for the pumpkin festival (featuring pumpkins that are probably NOT picked directly from a local patch, but I can pretend, right?). It was good times, and it was a lot easier to get there than I expected. Admission to the park itself is free (although attractions are not) so it’s a nice place to go and chill. I’m definitely going to go back and try out ALL the rides if I possibly can. I love the little touristy village inside the park. It reminds me of a Cracker Barrel on a massive scale. (And Stone Mountain Village itself has a charming little Main Street). What kind of weirds me out is the carving on the side, which is of course the main attraction of the whole thing. It’s a monument to the Old South, and you see a lot of, I dunno, characters going to see it. Then there was the kid who asked me if I was “from around here” and the lack of transit in the direct vicinity of the park. For these and other reasons, what I’m getting at here is that I sense that the crowd at this park is more representative of the population outside the city than the people inside it. If you catch my drift. And then there was a bunch of guys who drove by me and yelled “Hey!” to scare me. They laughed when I jumped. I don’t know, it was kind of a strange atmosphere over there peoplewise. Still, an enjoyable time, and I’ll definitely go back.

What I really miss is Young’s Farm in Dewey, Arizona, which used to have the most awesome pumpkin festivals featuring pumpkins grown right on the farm (if I understand correctly). I know I went at least once with my roommate at the time, and I’m glad. That place was totally awesome, but sadly, the owners had to sell it out for some reason or another, and now they can build a subdivision there for heat-weary Phoenician escapees. And by the way…

A CHALLENGE TO THOSE LOOKING AT THIS
Finally, I’m calling on all my readerses (I assume there’s at least a handful of you out there) to search for the term “adult balloon animals.” I’m currently the No. 5 result when you search for those words in Google, and the goal should be to become the No. 1 source of complete non-information on adult balloon animals. Together we can work together to make this happen.

Lengthy List of Observations

1. I’ve discovered one key issue with social networking sites: they require some form of socialization with a network of some sort, and we’re not necessarily talking about Cartoon Network. This can be a tricky affair, even for someone as super awesome as myself.

2. Stone Mountain Park = Piedmont Park + Mt. Mount Rushmore / Cracker Barrel

3. As mom points out, Stone Mountain is a lot like the Grand Canyon, albeit slightly less grandiose: It’s that one symbolic thing that you have to see, and yet many people have yet to see it. I finally saw it on Saturday, and it was, you know. Interesting.

4. A coworker attempted earlier today to explain the difference between a “block” and a “trap.” I still have no idea what he was talking about.

5. Then again, if we’re talking about any kind of subject matter relating to No. 4, you can bet for absolute sure that I have no idea what we’re talking about.

6. Everything closes so dang early on Sunday, man. It’s such a DRAG! I guess I might as well be working.

7. My phone gets so hot when I talk that I feel like I’m going to melt on one side of my head.

8. I’ve mentioned a few times that I have this issue with bees who slam into the front window, thinking they can pass right through it and then SMACK! Down they go with a little thump on the glass. I like to leave the blinds open and just watch this scene play out over and over again. OK, not really, but that’s what I see when I try to catch a little sunlight. It can be a little weird to hear that when the blinds are closed, but more often than not, they can tell that it’s an impassable surface.

9. I’ve also hinted before at a possible war of pests. The bees and the spiders are rising up now that the cockroaches have subsided and the rats are pretty much superfluous. Who will be next in this battle of bugs?

10. Doing laundry is like the worst thing ever. There’s a term for it: “Mount Wash More.” I prefer … there’s no play on Stone Mountain. Drat!

11. I’m gonna shoot up outta bed at 4 in the morning like “Aha! I must … go … to the … computer!” in my crappy Capt. Kirk At 4 a.m. voice.

12. I LOVE to slowly bite the heads off gummy bears before devouring their bodies whole.

13. ASU is ranked at No. 8 in the BCS poll and No. 12 in the AP poll. Why I care about this is beyond me.

14. I’ve been really getting into the whole standings race, because of all the incredible upsets this season. The drama! The excitement! The exasperated sports writers pulling puns out of their literary arses!

15. What a season it’s been … Stanford vs. USC was up there with the greatest upsets of all time, marking the point at which we could confirm our suspicions that there were Achilles’ heels afoot in Troy. LSU just got unexpectedly pawed… Clemson was stung by Georgia Tech… there’s really too many upsets to list. The one team I think is giving off that “unstoppable” aura this season is USF: University of South Florida. Those young whippersnappers seem like they can do no wrong. Whether that will last is anybody’s guess. They’re awfully new to this.

15. Anyway, go Sun Devils!

16. Seriously, I love reading all the crazy search terms that are bringing people to this site. It’s so awesome.

Smile

Wow, today was … pleasant! Imagine that. I walked out the door and birds were singing. It was sort of like “It’s a Small World” without the insano-dolls, annoying music and boat ride. I got on the train, and it was surprisingly devoid of craziness. And then I went to work and it was pleasant. Just very, very pleasant. Smile.

You won’t find me waiting in line to see Harry Potter at midnight. But I wish those that do so the best of luck, and I hope something crazy and nonviolent happens to make the evening more fun. Like what, I don’t know.

One thing I thought I would touch on, since it’s a quiet day, is the popularity of that “I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?” site, which is consistently trading top positions with more serious blogs in my top blogs list on my dashboard. This site features cats (“lolcats”) with amusing somesense/nonsense captions placed on the images. Look, I can’t just sit around and let this opportunity pass me by. I gotta get me some o’ deez hits…. thinking…. thinking…. ideas?

• I CAN HAS HAMMBURGER!
• I CAN’T HAS CHEEZBURGER?
• iCan have cheeseburgr?
• YOU CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER!
• I CAN SPELL CHEESEBURGER!
• I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER WITH EXTRA MAYO?
• I CAN GET HEART ATTACK FROM TOO MANY CHEEZBURGERS
• I CAN EXERCISE LIKE RONALD MCDONALD AND EAT CHEEZBURGER!

By the way, it sometimes amuses me that all the McDonalds food now has a picture of an exercising and fit Ronald McDonald on it. You gotta admit, he looks good. I mean *good* …. drool. Back to regularly scheduled programming.

• I CAN SPAZZ CHEEZBURGER?
• I CAN HAS VENTI NONFAT NO-WHIP MOCHA?

Wackiness timeline

So today was pretty wacky, man. Let’s go over the timeline here:

08:30 — awaken from slumber in the morning. As in por la manyana. Something ain’t right about this. Proceed to dink around on the Internet and read Canadian advice columns. That they are Canadian is merely coincidental, but it does hold my attention a bit longer.

09:30 — discover fairly large and apparently dead frog on steps to apartment. This is not a typical thing to see. I’m not sure if it was a pet or something that lives in one of the trees or what. We do have a lot of cats roaming around and they might have found some prey. It was a pretty sad sight, actually. As I’m looking at it, a maintenance man drives by and says, “It’s dead. We just found it there. It looks like a frog.” I can see that everyone else who walks by it is stopping to examine the body. I wasn’t sure whether I should call the frog police or what. I just left it there. It’s gone now.

12:30 — finally start doing laundry. Proceed to drop various items of clothing at inopportune times.

5:30 — finish laundry. Attempt to head downtown to complete errands. This proves futile.

17:00 — Mud pie at Dairy Queen and then a smoothie from Orange Julius. Odd conversation with the Julius guy, who announces to me and two other guys near me, “It’s getting hot in here! So buy a smoothie!” And I’m like, huh? And he’s like, “You know Nelly, who sings ‘It’s getting hot in here?’ You know that song? He wasn’t singing about girls, he was singing about smoothies!” And then he proceeds to sing the song. Meanwhile, there is a convention for the blind going on, and there are blind people EVERYWHERE. I almost trip over their guide polls, they almost trip over each other and the guide dogs make new friends. Look, I don’t want to make light of blind people and disability, but it was getting a little chaotic in there. So then I see this guy walk straight into a bench, which shifts position like two feet, and then he grabs his knee in pain. I thought it was a blind guy at first, but he was actually sighted, and I started to chuckle, but I quickly switched to an uber-fake cough. And he’s like, “You’re laughing at me, aren’t you?” And I’m like, “No, I’m not *giggle* I’m not laughing you *giggle*” And then I tried to pretend like I wasn’t laughing some more and finally I looked away and pretended to be laughing at something else, like the, uh, blind people over there… umm…. never mind.

18:30 — attempt to head down Ponce de Leon to a museum exhibit. Fail miserably and end up visiting some nice parks and bike paths and thinking to myself, “That would be a great place to stash a body.” Hitch a bus eastward to Avondale station (in/near Decatur, an eastern suburb) and ride the train westbound back into Atlanta proper.

21:00 — I am on a train and I see a clown. He is scary because he is only half of a clown really. He evokes the “uncanny valley” effect by being mostly human, but also being slightly “off.” (FYI for those who are not familiar: The uncanny valley is a theory that objects have certain thresholds for humanness in which they are more and less positively perceived. The chart shows neutral or even more positive reception when dealing with healthy humans and robots like R2-D2 that are obviously not human, but have positive human traits. Most negatively perceived are corpses and other things that are kind of human, but not quite. This “valley” of perception ratings is the “uncanny valley” if you draw it out as a line chart. Well sort of. You get the idea. Those faceless people in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and the zombies from “Silent Hill” video games come to mind…) So this clown has a greasy ponytail, smeared pink (grease?) makeup all over his face (it’s hard to take off such makeup without a concerted effort not to smear it into a mess, as I recall from my limited experience as a mime), white/red striped overalls and a plain T-shirt. He looks like a normal human dressed up in messed-up clown’s clothes. People were visibly creeped out on the train.

Sometime later in the evening: I’m on the train and a father is teasing his kids by making them guess what MARTA stands for. Winner gets a dollar. I want to yell out METROPOLITAN ATLANTA REGIONAL TRANSIT AUTHORITY, but alas, he warns the kids not to ask me or they’ll be disqualified. I start to laugh mainly out of tension and frustration. The kids were really struggling. “Main area!” “Is this Spanish?” “Main Atlanta!” And so on, so forth. They’re going to be in the funny farm by the end of the weeklong trip. They’re too young to figure this out without asking someone. My guess is they’ll find a way to ask somebody. They were trying the newspaper, which is a good start, what with MARTA being in the news for accidentally marking July as having 30 days instead of 31 (for monthly passes) — of course, it should be noted that cards will work for the 31st day anyway. But the bottom line is, even I almost was going insane, and I knew the answer. Maybe it’s because I knew the answer. One of the kids was like, “I’m going to go nuts if I don’t get the answer!” And then, while he was walking out of the train, the dad whispered to me, “I think my dollar is safe!”

Bullet points

Those of you who hang with me in other online locale(s) know that I used to have an occasional (friends-locked) entry known as the “bullet points” rundown. When I worked Monday through Friday, these would usually be done on Thursday nights as a sort of celebration of the end of the week. When I started working on a different schedule, the whole concept of writing an entry on Wednesday night didn’t really strike me. But you know, those were some tasty entries. I thought I would try a more populist version of that here. Here’s how it works: We sum up the events of the week in a vaguely humorous fashion. So… without further adieu…

* By now, it’s no secret that change is in the air at my workplace. Let’s just get that elephant out of the room…
* The thing about elephants is, they never forget. Especially Babar, the charming elephantine French storybook character from France.
* But wait… from Wikipedia comes a buzzkill out of the blue: “Underneath they could be seen as a justification for colonialism, with the benefits of French civilisation being visited on the rustic African elephant kingdom.”
* In the previous bullet, “they” refers either to the storybooks or to weasels.
* Anybody for a game of Mad Libs? I love that game. You know there’s certain words you can stick in there that are guaranteed to be goofy.
* I know what words of which YOU are thinking, but I’m thinking of words like “weasel.”
* I think my next entry will be done Mad Libs style… yes.
* Is Babar really a justification for colonialism? Let’s dissect this story: So this one king “accidentally” eats poisoned mushrooms, at which point Babar the France-Loving Elephant takes over as King and decides to impose his love of French culture on the people. He even throws out their Freedom Fries and renames them French Fries. Then, he brings some old lady to hang with him. Meanwhile, he’s established an autocratic rule over the populace that is TOTALLY INDEPENDENT OF ANY ELECTED BODY. The Wikepedia notes that, “Besides his Westernizing policies, Babar engages in warfare with the warlike rhinoceroses.” Uh oh.
* Well you know, he kinda did colonialize the joint, especially with the whole French Fries thing. On the other hand, we could be totally reading too much into this. Hard to say.
* By the way, I did mention that this would be a Populist entry. Therefore, I must decry the gold standard. Excuse me for a moment…
* S-I-L-V-E-R! Get some of this and be a star! S-I-L-V-E-R! This time, gold has gone too far!
* Along the lines of the whole Babar thing, remember how the Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz is William Jennings Bryan and the whole party of goofballs is taking a yellow brick road that represents treacherous gold so they can go ask the president, er, wizard, in the Emerald City, which is actually the White House, about how they can fix stuff? And then Dorothy’s silver slippers are the answer? Only they kind of got changed to ruby slippers, which kind of messes up the whole thing? Of course you don’t! So never mind!
* Enough of this nonsense. My point is, Babar is out of the room and we can stop worrying about work and let him get back to eating his French Fries.

Aargh, sidetracked again. Maybe some other time!