Posted in Uncategorized

Sad State of Affairs

Over on the Fox news website, they have a list of the “most popular” stories. I found the juxtaposition of these two headlines rather jarring.

I don’t really have anything else to say about this that you probably aren’t already thinking to yourself.

Share
Posted in Uncategorized

Unintentional Downtime

I didn’t realize you guys were bigdumptruck-less for a chunk of the weekend until I got my daily traffic report email and it said that my hits were about a third of what they normally are, making me think there was some sort of problem. Apparently, there was some sort of problem. Luckily, it appears the hosting company found their plunger and released my website, and it is now available again.

I just got paid four days ago and I’m already counting the minutes until next payday. For those of you keeping track, I only get paid once a month. It SUCKS OUT LOUD. I hate it. I’m no good with getting paid once a month. I had to set aside a chunk of change for getting the furnace fixed out of this one and there’s just no cheese money left. I suppose I shouldn’t be complaining about a lack of cheese money when some people can’t buy groceries or pay rent, but dang it, I strongly dislike not being able to spend $10 on myself without feeling very guilty.

And on that topic, we were going to look for a nice rubbish container for the kitchen, and we were at Lowe’s and the cheapest one was $79. The one we liked was $99. Hello?! A hundred bucks for a trash bin? And it isn’t even one of the “survives a nuclear blast” kind that you want to buy for putting out at the curb. This is just a bin with a foot pedal for the kitchen. I could buy a grill for less money than the trash can!

Needless to say, we do not have a hundred dollar trash bin this morning.

Share
Posted in humor, video

Mortified: Angst Written

Ask anyone who wrote a journal (or letters) when they were a pre-teen or a teenager and they will tell you it was deep and meaningful and captured the deep and important moments of one’s life. Okay, so fast forward and read some of those journal entries and cringe, baby. Wait, you didn’t write one? Well you have to go share the love at Mortified: Angst Written.

This site is a multi-media journal karaoke for the ages. Real people (some celebs, some not) read from their original journals. The real words. The real feelings. It is as funny as you might imagine.

I doubled over with laughter watching this month’s featured video. Real Live Actors perform a script written back when the author was 15. Kevin McDonald’s part made me weep with laughter (I love his work, but the lines he was given were the real star here.)

So that’s my fun link for the weekend. And don’t even tell me that it doesn’t make you want to go look for your old notebooks and journals!

Share
Posted in humor, lists, writing

Today’s Book Titles

Here is today’s list. You can’t have the first one, that one is mine.

The Adventures of Keychain and Neil
40 Ways to Prepare Cold Cereal
The Rat in the Hat
Helmet Hair: Spending Too Much Time Playing Halo
Even More Ways to Prepare Cold Cereal

p.s. I think I successfully removed the snippet of code that was automatically adding links to key words in the blog to Amazon products. Some of the links were too odd. So from now on, if there’s a link to an Amazon Product in an entry, I added it there myself.

Share
Posted in writing

What’s that Smell?

I am odd. Or maybe not. Or maybe I’m odd for reasons entirely unrelated to what I am writing about today. I’ll leave that discussion for others to have.

As you all know, I’m a writer. I write. I don’t claim to be a Writer (capital W) like some heavily paid novelist. But from age 24 to about age 41, I was a professional technical writer. Got paid to show up every day and put words into a computer. People all over the world read those words – some of them, to not be hurt or killed on the job. Others, to figure out how to get started with their new laptop computers. It’s not glamorous work, but it pays well.

I’ve also written freelance stuff for a newspaper that no longer exists, and I consider myself some kind of humorist, at least at times, with this 11+ year old website. It isn’t a paying gig, but I like it. (Don’t you think I’d be writing more often if it were paying? I do.)

So with that background in mind, I can tell you that over the years, I have purchased probably every kind of notebook ever made. I’m kind of an addict. And the ones I like the best are the ones with thin-ish paper that makes a rustling kind of noise after you’ve written on it. Not exactly like the old air mail paper (does anyone but me remember that? It was super-thin so that it wouldn’t weigh down the envelope and cost more to mail) but not far off. I like thin paper.

So I got a new notebook out of the supply closet at work when I started a new project (because the notebook I’d bought at Staples was really nice, except for the thick paper). I love it. Perfect paper thickness. The ink from my fountain pen doesn’t bleed all over the place.

It smells like it came from my grandmother’s barn. (She didn’t own the barn, she rented an apartment in a multi-family house that happened to have a big (HUGE) barn behind it.) The house no longer exists as it did when she lived there, and the barn is long gone. But when I was about 10 I went in there with older boy cousins I had never met before (because they lived in Mississippi and had come up for my grandfather’s funeral) because you cannot keep a teenage boy out of a giant old mysterious barn. We found some glorious old stuff – in one workroom the calendar on the wall was literally from the 1950s. It was as if the owner had turned off the lights one night and had just never gone back in. To be honest, I’m surprised none of us fell through a floor or needed a tetanus shot after that experience. Knowing me, I probably spent the entire time saying “We shouldn’t be in here! This is dangerous!” whether it was or not.

Anyway, the one thing I still remember from that day (other than the funeral) was the smell. An old abandoned barn can really get quite a stink up. God knows anyone with a dust, mold or mildew allergy would have had to be hospitalized.

My new notebook with the perfect paper smells like it was stored in that barn. I’m so incredibly torn – I want to keep using it, but it stinks! I guess I’ll just keep using it until I can’t stand it any more. Or until I notice people wrinkling their noses when I walk into a meeting. Darn you, notebook supply company! Why did you do this to me?

Share