super want

holy shit am i ever a terrible blogger. nothing new for damned near a year. that's just sad.

so anyway. since i don't drive and have never managed to ride a bicycle more than about 4 feet without falling over, i decided a long time ago that it would be awesome if i had an adult tricycle. specifically a recumbent trike because a regular trike in adult size always makes me think of old men who ride around raiding the trash for soda cans to sell. the problem with this idea is that recumbent trikes are ridiculously expensive. if i had the balancing skills of your average kindergartner, i could pick up a bike at a yard sale for like 5 bucks, but a trike is a much harder thing to find, so this whole idea has been a someday sort of thing.

the other night, though, i had a serious dose of want on and decided to find out how feasible the idea of buying a trike would really be. it was pretty darned disheartening. even a used trike is way outside my price range, and no one is looking to get rid of one in my area anyway.

then i found this thing that is technically a recumbent trike, but the ultra dumbed down version. it's practically a big metal bigwheel. which honestly appeals to me because i wouldn't know what to do with a 28-speed racing trike anyway and less complicated means less maintenance. of course, it's still not cheap. the manufacturer sells them on their website for $500, which is less than half what a low priced recumbent trike like you would buy from a bicycle dealer goes for, but is still a chunk of change. i managed to find them for sale from a reputable online retailer (a csn store) for only a little more than i make in a pay period. of course, it would be $75 cheaper if i could get the slightly smaller version, and being 5'1" i totally would, except there's 30 lb. difference in the weight limit and the weight limit on the big one is about me and frank. technically it's me plus 2 franks, but since frank weighs less than a gallon of milk, a frank here or there hardly matters.

so while i still can't actually afford to buy a trike, i do now know that there is a trike that i could afford sooner than i could afford other things, like moving the hell out of my parents house. i honestly have no idea why i decided that was something i needed to blog about, except that i'm entirely too excited about it at the moment and felt like sharing.

good monday

so monday i had to go back to the orthopedist for another follow up on my foot. i'm still pretty sure the doctor is under the mistaken impression that i'm a minor. not only does he call my "kiddo" he tends to address a fair dose of my care instructions to my mother. i know this amuses me, but i can't decide if it bothers me. i know that i apparently don't look my age, but most people guess i'm in my early to mid 20s, not my late teens. i know i bring my mother with me to my appointments, but even if i could drive, i couldn't do it with a giant boot on, so i'd have to have someone there with me. being single, wouldn't my mother be a logical choice to con into it even at 27, or if you go by appearance 22-24? also, my birth date, including year, is clearly printed on the front of my file.

anyway, the good news is, i'm cleared to de-boot. he wants me to wear an air splint for a while, just to make sure i don't roll my ankle again while the bone is so freshly healed and vulnerable. i'm not actually doing that right now since the inside of the air splint is the kind of plastic that sticks to bare skin. until i get a chance to go buy a long sock to protect my leg, i'm wearing the boot to work and just my pull-on brace around the house.

after the doctor's visit, frank and took a nap on the love seat before i went grocery shopping and then to work. since someone decided to document that, i thought i'd share.

in case you give a crap

it's time for another reading update.

having reached the 6 month mark for 2009, it's time to recap. and the totals are: 59 manga (j-8, f-13, m-15,a-11, m-9, j-3) and 43 books (j-7, f-7, m-8, a-9, m-9, j-12). in comparison to the previous 6 month period, i'm down 14 books but up 38 manga, so i think that probably kind of evens out.

two in one day! it's a miracle

so i realized it had been forever since i checked my sitemeter. of course then i decided i should, and as it was marginally interesting, i thought i'd tell you all about it.

we've got one more person looking to cheat on a bmv eye exam, which i so do not get. i mean, really, if you can't handle the eye exam, please do not drive. get some glasses, take the bus, but don't drive.

also got a handful of hits about my great love, the empty firehouses of this town. this always makes me happy because i feel like maybe i helped somebody learn something about something awesome. which would be a great thing, since i know i'm not holding up to the real purpose of this blog most the time, which is being entertaining and informative to my friends. on a similar note i also had few hits related to the awesome book i got about the fire department from my equally awesome friends for my last birthday.

otherwise all of my interesting search hits were from the various quotes from the movie meme i did a while back. mostly these were for the one from blazing saddles about dimes, but i also had one each for o brother, where art thou?, delores claiborne, and the changeling.

reading update

yeah, i know, i suck because i don't post enough. anyway, here a quarterly update on my reading. so far this year i've read 36 manga (j-8, f-13, m-15) and 22 books (j-7, f-7, m-8).

in other news, i still really hate the dress code at work, mostly because i have to wear pants that i split last week and am holding together with a number of patches because my new pants are too long and i can't just wear some freaking jeans while i wait for them to get hemmed.

also, gratuitous cuteness:

the verdict

so, now that the year has ended, it's time for the final tally of my reading since the first of july. in the last 6 months i have read a grand total of 21 manga (july-7, august-7, september-1, october-3, november-1, december-2) and 57 books (j-14, a-11, s-13, o-6, n-7, d-6). the drop off toward the end of the year was caused by working a lot more and developing a habit of skimming books i'd already read when i didn't feel like digging up a new one, and of course it doesn't count if i only read parts of a book.

i've continued keeping track, and so far i'm a book and half into the new year, so if you find this concept even remotely interesting, you can look forward to maybe getting periodic updates. or maybe not, since i'm not so good about updates.

on the plus side, i recently got a good deal on a used digital camera, so once i get around to putting batteries in it and figuring out how to use it, there could theoretically be more activity on the blog.

look! a new post!

we all know i'm a really bad blogger. what you might not know is that quite often i have ideas for blog posts, but then i don't have time to blog when i think of them, and then i forget and they never happen. example, i never got around to telling all of you about being reunited with my mother's family back in august. i'm not going to get into it now, because it was a while ago, but if you're curious you can ask me about it in person and i can tell you about what my youngest cousin has in common with her mother and how big an ass my other cousin's ex-husband is.

so, what's new with me? with any luck i'll be starting my christmas shopping tomorrow. yes, i said starting, not finishing. you see, i've been working a lot. a whole hell of a lot. about two months ago one of the women who also does my job, the only one of us that is full time, had to take some time off to have surgery. that left a lot of hours to be covered. on top of my share of that, it turns out there's a little problem with the girl our manager decided to train to do the job while we were shorthanded. she seems to have a problems with showing up for work. out of the last 6 or 7 weeks, there has been one week that i didn't have to come in on one of my days off and work because she called in. it's not just me though. she's also part of our ad set team, or at least she was, but after she called in on that 4 weeks in a row, the manager decided to stop sheduling her for it, and gave those hours to the guy who kept having to work them anyway.

now that the head of our front end is back (as of monday), i should go back to actually having two days off a week and not having to worry about can i finish my shift on saturday without running over on hours. well, unless she kills the new girl on saturday night. there's this new hire at work who has not only managed to annoy the crap out of me and all the female managers (we are a cranky bunch of bitches), she's also seriously peeved off the other front end supervisor, who is widely know to be sweet as pie and get along with everybody. the beef i have with her is that i keep getting stuck with her by management because they don't want her on the floor. this should be great because when we're crazy busy like we are coming up to christmas, i need a cashier to keep up front so i can get off register long enough to straighten my front end. the problem is, while she has no problem staying up front, i can't seem to get her to stay on register. every chance she gets she's dusting something or sweeping the floor i'm going to have to sweep again anyway or something. and if no one is standing at a register when they come up to check out, where do customers go? to my register. so i have to stop what i'm doing (something that has to get done before we can leave) and wait on them, while she continues to do things that don't need to be done or that i will have to do again in an hour anyway. the problem that everyone else has with her is another matter entirely, and something i actually haven't had to deal with since her second day: backtalk. i gotta tell you, it's really stupid, but it proves the girl's got balls, big brass balls. you don't sass management anyway, but if you know my managers these are not women you want to sass even if you don't work for them. i've stood right there and heard her say some shit to the floral manager and the assistant store manager, and i've heard about some of what she's said to the craft manager and the other fes. enough of this has gotten back to the store manager that she's already getting shorted on hours and it's not even christmas yet. in fact the only day she works this week in saturday night, the only night that the head fes is closing. this could get damned interesting, because that woman doesn't take well to sass, and she seems a little frayed from being thrown into christmas in retail cold after two months off anyway.

in other work news, we got new music. the old music was this mind-numbing instrumental crap that i know we had three cds of despite the fact that it all sounded like the same song over and over and over again. now we have real music, real songs that you would recognize, with words and everything. the only down side is that there's this one christmas song that kind of annoys me anyway, the kind that sticks in your head even though you don't even like it, and i swear it played three time during my 7.5 hours shift tonight. other than that it's been pretty awesome. i even caught one of the managers singing along twice the other night, once when i was, too.

a lot of stuff

i'm going to get this started by saying "OMG my state is blue!!!" the last time my state was blue, neither of my parents were old enough to vote (dad had just turned 18, but voting age was 21 then). even with the damned electoral college, my vote counted, and that my friends is freaking awesome. a related very neat story? one of my cousins, who lives in kentucky, knowing that her state was hopelessly red, did volunteer work calling people in indiana to help us be blue.

speaking of cousins, one of mine is dead. tuesday morning, just about the time i was getting out of bed, a guy who grew up just around the corner called my dad because he read in the paper that my cousin died. we bought a paper to confirm and also called the uncle who did not spawn the dead cousin to see what he knew about it. c.o.d.: cirrhosis of the liver. thanks to the obit, we also found out that his little brother is dead. the younger one is not technically my cousin because they're half brothers (although there's speculation about that within my immediate family because dude looks way more like my uncle that he does his dad). checked the internet and his c.o.d. was a "contact gunshot wound to the head." don't know if it was suicide or murder or what, but still odd.

also, i owe you an update on the book project, and hope to get to that very soon.

i have a book problem

so, a bit ago i decided i wanted to keep track of how much i was reading. since it was sort of a 'how much i read in a year' thing and i didn't want to wait until the new year, i decided to start at the half way point. it's now been a month, and this is what i know: in the month of july i read 8 volumes of manga, 14 novels, and two novella. just thought i would share.

only 21 more shopping days

if anyone's wondering what i want for my birthday, i want a book. it's called Time served is not in vain : history of the Evansville Fire Department by Kenny Gest. you might remember it from the excersion posts. i have no idea where you can buy it or what it costs, but i want it. amazon has never heard of it and barnes and noble says it's out of stock on the website.

random quiz

You paid attention during 91% of high school!

85-100% You must be an autodidact, because American high schools don't get scores that high! Good show, old chap!

Do you deserve your high school diploma?
Create a Quiz

i went back and fiddled until i figured out which two questions i missed, so if you want to know all the right answers i can tell you.

since i was off work today, too

so, a few weeks ago my brother was complaining that he hasn't been able to afford to eat out recently, and i took pity on him and told him that the next time i had a tuesday off i'd take he and amy out for a burrito combo. it was ridiculously crowded and loud, and we sat at the very last empty table. because of the noise level i think it was an honest mistake that when the waitress asked him if he wanted another margarita and he said, "no, just a glass of water" she brought him another margarita and a glass of water. the sour cream and guacamole was a different story. i'm 99.98% sure that the reason they ask you every time you order something if you want sour cream or guacamole is that it's free. after all, she didn't charge me for the sour cream he said he didn't want but she brought him anyway. i'm pretty sure the reason i was charged for his guacamole, and double charged for amy's sour cream and guacamole is that the waitress entered it in the computer wrong when she logged the order. so, i'll admit that had a noticeable negative effect on her tip. not the full $3.25 i was charged for free condiments, but noticeable.

that's not the point of this post, though. the point is that after dinner, when i was going to buy them gas because they didn't think about the fact that they didn't have enough to drive here and back for free dinner, the idea was mentioned that i could go back with them and come back today. since i was off work today too, we did it (the other half of we being the fuzzy frank). so i got to see the large areas of dirt that will be the vegetable gardens once the teeny tiny green things grow into actual plants, and i got to meet sammy jenkins, the newest addition to their household. she's pretty darn cute, all white with a brown face. she does have this weird ocd thing about toys, so she spent the entire morning out in the yard by herself because she refused to stop playing ball until he practically dragged her inside when he was leaving to bring me home.

other highlight include: sleeping for shit because i move around a fair bit in my sleep which was prevented by the fact that monk was sleeping on my back, ass, legs, and so forth, depending the time in question. we also payed a visit to his friend who lives across town where i got a free bonsai pot that dusty was going to sell at a yard sale for 50 cents, and i got to see paco, reggie and louie (but not their new dog sammy, because he's shy and hid in the laundry room). plus, i got to pet the very cute stray kitty that they've been feeding which dusty has decided to call "boo boo kitty fuck".

speaking of random movie references, you know there's still one quote left. if you can guess what it is, you should do that, especially of you're one of the two people currently tied for most correct identifications, because the prize i bought was the last one, and any second prize i got wouldn't be as cool.