2007 In Review

Personally, 2007 couldn’t suck enough. I’m trying to be optimistic about 2008, but we’re looking at the same people in office, the same wars and maybe even some new ones, taxes... oh joy can’t wait, and generally another year of slogging through the job I hate, with people I can’t stand, among other things.

I remember as a kid that New Year stood for a year where anything could be possible. It was a fresh start and anything was up for grabs. Back then I couldn’t understand why adults partied hard, got trashed on alcohol and woke up feeling horrible the next day. To my undeveloped mind, I couldn’t fathom how being hung over would be a good way to get the jump on all things possible of the new year.

Yeah, now I know. I’m an adult now. I see how bleak and daunting a new year is after suffering through the old one. Knowing that life isn’t a fairy tale or a movie, a new year only means more of the same, except one more year of it, one more year of suffering. There will be no prince charming coming to sweep us up and plop us in a rent or mortgage free castle where we fritter the day away dancing and being waited on hand and foot in the lap of luxury. Nope, none of that. We won’t win the lottery, not unless we’re really old and have a house full of cats. We won’t get a last minute phone call that saves the house from foreclosure, pays off all the bills and gets gifts for all the kids who went without for christmas (mainly because we don’t have kids, the house isn’t about to be foreclosed, etc. but you know what I mean).

Nope, what we face in 2008 is the simplicity of life.

Tax time is right around the corner, that’s something to really look forward to.

Going back to work on 2 January 2008 and realizing that nothing has changed, it still sucks... when is the next holiday?

Cleaning house, paying bills, fixing dinner, doing laundry... same as it ever was.

As an adult, you realize that this is it. This is all that there is of life. Its a wonder there aren’t more suicides on New Year’s Eve.

Jonesing for some latte

I’m addicted, I admit it, the Starbucks empire has me.

I recently quit smoking, I’m using the Chantix pill and despite the horror warnings of people killing loved ones, or throwing themselves off buildings, the only side effect I’ve really had is bloating and horrible gas. Ok, I also have the vivid dreams and last night I was David Letterman’s only audience member because he was coming back from the strike and had no material, so we hung out for a while in some fancy apartment. He also offered me a job because apparently he also owns large government consulting firms. Hey, its much better than the dream where our neighbors stole our fence and I woke up totally pissed at the neighbors.

Having given up smoking (kicking and screaming) I now find that I have to get a new habit. Its common for recovering alcoholics to start smoking. I’m guessing that since alcohol would only increase the need to light up, most former smokers take to chugging vast amounts of coffee. Well, I can’t exactly say “most former smokers” because I haven’t paid some consulting firm a zillion dollars to actually prove that, but I’ll be generous and save the taxpayers some money and go out on a limb and say it. If a former smoker is not a coffee drinker and wants to sue me for misrepresenting them, then have fun with that. Don’t expect the mother lode of settlement pay-offs, as all of my money is going to Starbucks.

My dear husband is not only supplementing his former smoking bad habit by drinking vast amounts of latte with me, but he’s also hopelessly addicted to World of Warcraft (as apparently 9 million other people are to, so I can go out on a limb and say that the majority of people hate their lives and prefer to live in pretend-land). His addiction to WoW is what has me jonesing for latte at the moment. You see, he stays up all night on the weekends to play, then sleeps all day. He just got up around 3 p.m. today. I’ve been sitting here, patiently waiting for him to wake up, sipping unsatisfying coffee, all dressed, shoes on, sitting, tapping a foot, wanting a latte.

Ok fine, I’m an adult, I have a driver’s license and a real vehicle, I should have gone out hours ago and sucked down at least 2 lattes while he slept. I have no idea why that thought didn’t occur to me hours ago. Maybe I’ll go get some new bathroom rugs while I’m out.

The Most Complete Idiot

I was driving home today after an especially horrible day at work... lately every day at work is an especially horrible day, as I hate my current job, and to make my mood even more foul, I heard a radio commercial for the local tv station say that they brought their viewers “the most complete news”.

The dumbing down of america at its finest. Saying that you bring your viewers “the complete news” isn’t good enough, they have to bring their viewers “the most complete news”. If you don’t understand why this statement is the most stupid statement there is, here is dictionary.com’s definition of complete:

1.        having all parts or elements; lacking nothing; whole; entire; full: a complete set of Mark Twain's writings.
2.        finished; ended; concluded: a complete orbit.
3.        having all the required or customary characteristics, skills, or the like; consummate; perfect in kind or quality: a complete scholar.

Ok, so complete means: nothing is missing. If nothing is missing, then how can you possibly have the most complete? That’s like saying that you’ve completed a jigsaw puzzle, which means every piece is there. How can you have the most complete jigsaw puzzle?

New and improved. How can you improve on something that is new and why?

About a month ago, hubby and I happened to turn the channel and find a movie called: Idiocracy and we sat and watched it with eyes wide open. Sure, its a stupid movie, but its also genius, honest, and only a few years from actually being the way our society lives. Scarily enough, we found a lot of the behaviors in this movie to be present day. Sure it was a bit over the top, but after viewing it, then venturing out into the world we felt as though we were living it.

Hearing an ad proudly proclaim that they provide the most complete news... one step closer ... one step that much closer.

Black Friday

Last night hubby and I pondered whether we should get up early and camp out at the local mall to photograph the insane people pushing, screaming, and killing each other to buy cheap goods. It would make for a good photo, the blurred hoardes pushing inside for the bargains (that will be there later), but we decided that the risk of being killed in the rush and risking ruining a very expensive camera wasn’t worth it. We opted to sleep in and then later went out to shoot old abandoned homes.

Before that, I went out back and shot film of the dogs in their natural habitat: chasing each other willy nilly through the yard. This is where I found out that photography is a contact sport (depending on your subjects) and photography is painful. First off, I lost my balance and kneeled hard on some uneven concrete, which caused massive amounts of knee pain. I got up to rub my knee and Loki thought I was trying to get him to play, so he body slammed me and nearly knocked me over.

Then, as I was kneeling to get a cool pic of Sam sitting, Loki decided that I wanted him to run at me full force and push me with both his front feet, which knocked my into the deck support with my elbow. Yeah, the “Oh, I’m sorry, you didn’t want me to do that” kisses from Loki were nice, but it didn’t help much. Despite the pain, I got some good shots.

The abandoned building shoot was pretty cool. We had seen this abandoned fruit stand for a long time and decided to stop and take some pictures and only realized when we started walking into the back of it that there were about 6 abandoned houses back there. Its like a whole little community that died. Pretty sad when you think of the homeless situation and all, that here are 6 houses that at one time were someone’s homes (wonder what happened to the families that lived there) and now they were total wrecks and abandoned. We wondered why, most likely because of the big highway they threw up in their back yard, but still, its very strange how something like that can sit unnoticed and rot.

It was a pretty good shoot. I tend to take pictures of the strange things I find, not your normal shots, and was very interested in the designs of broken glass this outing. You can check out my latest shoot of the abandoned buildings and the dogs here.

Right now I’m very tired from being out in the wind and cold. We then went to Panera to get a soup bread bowl and after eating that and getting a latte, I’m ready for a nap. I’m also sitting here with the feeling that I should be doing something, but I don’t know what. I’m sure it’ll come to me, or it won’t. Either way, I’m too tired to do whatever it is anyway.

Thanksgiving (or: Night of the Living Bacteria)

I love Thanksgiving. Its about eating and getting together with family. In our case, its all about the eating, the family can just stay all the way across the states for all we care. Ok, fine, if they showed up we wouldn’t throw them out or not answer the door, but still.

For the two of us (five if you count the dogs) I got a 12 pound turkey (hey, shut up, its mostly bones) and a turkey breast for putting on the grill. I got the stuff for the usual side dishes:

Scalloped Corn
Sweet Potatoes (hate them, hubby doesn’t)
Mashed Potatoes (Yum)
Stuffing
Dinner Rolls
Deviled Eggs
Pumpkin Pie

Now this isn’t pre-made stuff, I make all of the side dishes except the mashed potatoes. The Bob Evans Mashed potatoes are actually pretty good stuff, and in a pinch I’ll do the Ore Ida frozen mashed potatoes too, but they had a good selection of the Bob Evans, so I went nuts.

For my job I get to watch a feed of CNN on my computer. Its the ONLY outside world resource that I have, so shut up, I’m actually working I just have to have noise on when I write complex stupid technical documents that nobody will ever read. I’m hoping they come in handy on a cold night and someone needs kindling for a fire.

About a week before thanksgiving CNN played over and over (and over and over and over and over, as CNN does) an interview with some “specialist” on the proper way to cook a turkey. You would think that cooking a turkey was as difficult as defusing a bomb the way this woman went on.

NEVER put the stuffing in the bird, good lord are you insane. All sorts of bad bacteria literally grow right in that stuffing, crawl out onto the bird and will kill your entire family. Um... what? Apparently the “new” thing is that you shouldn’t cook stuffing in a bird. My grandmother cooked stuffing in the bird, my mom cooks stuffing in the bird, I cook stuffing in the bird and nobody in the family has ever doubled over in pain or had to be rushed to the hospital.

Scrub everything the turkey touches or else YOU’LL DIE!!! This woman was obsessive compulsive about the whole cleanliness thing with the bird. She even shined one of those blue lights (most commonly used to identify pee spots as sold in pet stores) to show the reporter all of the gross things that turkey leaves once you set it on a surface. Um, it also picks up dog pee, so how do we know if the reporter lets her dog pee on the kitchen counter? Ok, bad example, but still if her family got sick it wouldn’t be from the turkey.

Wash your hands in really hot water and wash them long enough to sing happy birthday. Um, yeah, I’m not doing that. Oh sure I’m washing my hands, but not after I touch anything, and I’m not singing happy birthday while the flesh of my hands melt under a roasting hot tap. This “expert” had the reporter rubbing, buffing, and scouring every little surface and utensil after each touching of the innocent turkey. She spent more time cleaning than she did prepping the bird.

The last rule was not let anything sit on the counter for more than an hour. If so, throw it out. Ok, this “expert” has never been to my house where pizza boxes have been in the oven for hours on end and been tossed into the fridge, or we’ve left something in the microwave for hours (I do toss it if its been forgotten overnight, I do have some sense) and we’ve never suffered from a food-borne illness.

So, this morning I get up and start the typical prep of the turkey. I had thrown the breast into a vat of brine the day before and dragged out the oven turkey only to find that one of them had seeped into the fridge shelf at some time. I’m sure the “expert” would have run screaming to call a Hazmat team to come decontaminate her entire house and every bit of food in the fridge would be thrown out. I just sopped it up with a paper towel, then spritzed some simple green on there and wiped that up. On to the turkey prep.

Opened the bag in the sink (hey, those things seep in the fridge, wouldn’t want to get that poison on the counter), removed the plastic wrapped innards, rinsed out the bird and threw it in the roaster. Gleefully I spooned heaps of stuffing into it, laughing. Actually did a little dance too. Shoved bird with stuffing in the oven. Cleaned up with another paper towel and simple green and washed my hands in luke warm water for the first stanza of Happy.... done.

Same thing happened when we got the brined breast out and shoved it on the rotisserie stake. Juice and brine all over (the dogs cleaned up what fell on the floor), mopped up what I could with a paper towel.

Once the food was all done, we gorged ourselves silly, I made a pumpkin pie, gorged on that, and now we’re just sitting around waiting for e-coli or something else to kill us.

I tend to think that humans are being born with no immunity to anything. Kids don’t go out and play in the mud and muck anymore, so they don’t build up the tolerance to things that my generation (who dared each other to eat earth worms and bugs and never washed our hands) have built up over the years. We didn’t constantly scrub ourselves with anti-bacterial hand sanitizers, didn’t have anti-bacterial wipes, or soap, we used nasty, gooey sponges for months, used the same cloth kitchen towel to sop up messes of all kinds, and generally didn’t think about all of the horrible microbes that would infest our intestinal tracts. Our intestinal tracts laughed at bacteria and spit them out without a second thought.

So yes, my kitchen isn’t sterile enough to perform surgery in, and my fridge is probably a breeding ground of plague (there’s a can of dog food next to the milk... but its got a lid on it), and I can handle that. If you can’t, then I suggest you don’t eat at my house.

Mitt Romney Sucks

Mitt Romney Sucks
Originally uploaded by Shmoomeema

This just goes to show how he treats those he feels are below him. Once he's President... we're all "below" him.

The Price of Weight Loss

The Price of Weight Loss
Originally uploaded by Shmoomeema

When a diet drug suggests carrying around a spare pair of pants... wouldn't it just be easier to stop stuffing your face and move around a bit?

Help Me Save The World

Live Earth?

I thought it was a joke when I read something about Bob Geldof scoffing at Al Gore’s organizing of a global concert to save the earth... LIVE EARTH!

Apparently venues all over the world will be having a 24 hour concert that will raise money to save the earth. Who, exactly, is getting the money? Well, that’s not really clear on the official “Live Earth” Web site, but apparently Al Gore and some of his environmental cronies will be leading some kind of “task force” on saving the earth with the dough raised during this thing. Nothing too specific like “we’ll use the money to plant trees all over the place”, but something more vague like “we’ll study...”. Oh yeah, studies are great, you sit in a coffee shop and you chat about global warming and then accept your zillions of consulting fees, go home to your energy sucking mansion and laugh when you go to bed.

Their Web site also mentions that “Each venue will not only be designed to maintain a minimum environmental impact, but will showcase the latest state-of-the-art energy efficiency, on-site power generation, and sustainable facilities management practices.” So, they won’t be using massive lights that require gigawatts of power, or all of the band equipment that requires... electricity. They won’t expect anyone to drive their gas guzzling, choking the environment vehicles to this thing, I’m guessing the audience will be transported to the venue. I’m also pleased to say that instead of private jets to get to the venues, the bands will be walking to their venues, roadies pulling carts of their gear behind them.

Where is all of this money going, why are these people jetting across the country telling everyone else they can’t, and who are they to ask for our money to “solve” this problem without even telling us where the money is going to.

Here’s a thought! I’ll do anything to help save this earth, and the first place to start would be to give me a huge heap of cash so I don’t have to drive my car to work, drain the world of electricity on my computer and the lights in the building.

I’m starting a new fund-raiser and its “pay me to stay home so I can do my part to save the earth”. Send me some money, and once I get enough where I can pay my bills and mortgage, I’ll quit my job and make that ultimate sacrifice for the good of the earth. Start sending me your cash and I’ll keep everyone updated on all of the things I didn’t do that will end up saving the world my own little piece at a time.

Come on! Send me money because if you don’t, then you are responsible for the whole world DYING!

Serenity

Today was a total “me” day. After having minor hand surgery and being out of work for two glorious weeks, its time to go back to work. I decided to pamper myself with an expensive hair cut, as I had let the hair go long for almost a year and was sick and tired of dealing with it.

As usual, in my excitement, I left WAY too early for my appointment, so I stopped in for a delicious Iced Mocha (venti, 3 pumps), did some window shopping, and with more time to waste, found a lovely little pond with a fountain and sat on a bench soaking in the beautiful day.

This pond had ducks and geese. The ducks seemed convinced that I had something for them to eat and began to gather around me, looking somewhat menacing. I guarded my iced mocha and explained a few times that I normally didn’t walk around with tasty bread crumbs for ducks. They seemed mad but satisfied that I wasn’t holding out on them and went about their ducky ways.

The geese aren’t beggars and kept their distance. So majestic, so graceful. I watched a pair in the water swimming circles together and then noticed they seemed to be playing a funny game. One would dip their head in the water, then the other. Back and forth, faster and faster. I wondered if it was some goose game to see who would puke first or something. I chuckled at the thought until one goose jumped on top of the other goose, and I realized that the “game” was actually goose foreplay. I averted my eyes to give them some privacy, I mean I wouldn’t want geese watching me while I caught a piece of action, even though I don’t normally do that in a public pond or anything like that.

After they were done, the male did a kind of victory dance that included stretching his neck and flapping his wings while his water logged girlfriend looked a bit miffed. I guess geese have to do a victory dance, as just rolling over and falling asleep would result in drowning. He swam off, climbed ashore and plopped down under the shade of a tree and dozed instead, leaving his girlfriend to primp and preen herself after the dunking. I guess some things are the same no matter what the species.

The hair cut came out really cool, by the way.

Food Recall

Life after hand surgery

Fun with Verizon Part 395

Verizon came out as scheduled (unlike residential repair, the business version repair seems to be a bit more reliable), and the verdict is:

ADT jacked into our business line the last time they were out fixing our system, and for some reason the alarm has taken control of the business line. It will call out, but not allow any calls to come through. Lovely.

Sooo, ADT is scheduled to come out next friday and fix that little glitch.

If it ain’t one thing...

Fun with Verizon, Round Two

Tonight we tried to fax something on our business line. Hey, what a shock, as scheduled our business line is now dead.

You may recall the fun fest that was trying to get Verizon to our house to fix our residential line. 3 weeks of waiting, 4 missed appointments, and the premonition (since it happens every year) that within a few weeks either our business line or our T-1 line would go out, and amazingly enough!

I go online and go through the maddening process of trying to schedule a repair appointment. Even though all of the lines are dead, even though the main jack is dead, and even though the service port is dead, the online line tester says its our equipment. Yeah, here we go again.

Of course all of the appointments are for weekdays and I can’t take any more days off, mainly due to the residential Verizon fiasco appointments. They don’t list friday as an alternative, which is my day off. Lovely.

I call their repair line and go through the spiel of our life with Verizon, while laughing. The technician is very happy that I’m “taking this so well” and its obvious that he doesn’t know a “ha ha this is funny” laugh from a “oh my gawd I’m going to set myself on fire if one more thing breaks in this house” laugh.

I have a repair scheduled from 8-12 on Friday. I’ll let you all know how well that goes.