In the wee hours

I guess this is either a late night blog or an early morning blog, depending on your perspective, but it is 3am here in the Burgh, once again I can't sleep, or rather I can't get back to sleep so I figure I would pontificate a bit and see if I couldn't bore myself back to bed, though that might be a pretty stupid idea in and of itself, since I have to be at work in 4 hours. I might be better off just staying up at this point.

It has been a week of frustrations of many sorts. On the good obviously was the fact the Steelers won the Super Bowl. Tuesday was parade day for the team in town, and thankfully I was off work. Not that I wanted to go to the parade, but since it was running right in front of the newsstand, I knew it was going to be a mad house down there, one of which I just didn't want to be part of. It is just a bunch of drunken idiots and people needing but yet another reason to not go to work or school for a day. Consider this, as of the last census numbers taken, the population of the city of Pittsburgh was tabbed at 311,218 persons, making it the 59th largest city in the United States. Now consider this, the crowd estimate of the parade was 350,000. That is right, more people showed up for the Steelers parade than actually live in the city itself. And knowing that these people were going to be right outside my place of employment, well at least some of them, the sidewalk is only so big after all, the further away from work I was, the happier I was.

Mind you work is frustrating as well. Well not the work part, how hard is it to sell newspapers after all, though business did go up this week with the parade, the Super Bowl copies of the local papers and today we received our magazines, including the sports mags with their Super Bowl coverage (including the Sports Illustrated with the very sweet cover photo), so people have been coming in buying multiple copies of everything, either for keepsakes or to send to friends and relatives who had the common sense to get out of town while the getting was good. That is not the frustrating part however, what is frustrating is that we have a nice sized high def TV hanging on the back wall of the store, and during the day it is usually tuned into one of those cable news networks, using the term news in its loosest possible interpretation, as they rarely focus on news, and more on sensationalism, but that is neither here nor there. I am just tired of seeing Barack Obama on the TV every damn day. Even today he was railing on about greener cars, fuels and blah blah blah when at one point he said "The time for talking has come to an end, now it is time for action." If life ever were like professional wrestling, this is where they would have cued my entrance music, as I fired back at the TV, "Well then, stop talking!". It would be one thing if he came out once in a while, but it is every damn day. The day before he was out with Treasury Secretary Timothy Gaitner talking about the economic stimulus plan. For the record, the process still holds, just as with Bush in office, every time these guys start talking about economic stimulus, the market takes a dive because nobody trusts them any further than they can throw them. Still I am listening to Gaitner talk about executive pay caps and what not, and it is an idea I could get behind, after all these execs are asking to live on the public dole, a welfare plan for the super rich so to speak, but why is Gaitner giving us this message? His claim to fame is that he failed to pay his taxes while employed by the World Bank, so just where does he get the credibility to cap anything? And just how the hell was he confirmed by the Senate to begin with? How is the man that is going to be partly responsible to see to it that you and I pay are taxes able to get away with not paying taxes himself? Shit like that just boggles the mind.

Not that that was the only thing that was irking me about the TV, the Asshat of the Week also comes from TV and this week gets handed out to FOX News. Seems last week the economic stimulus plan was making its way through the House of Representatives. Don't get me wrong, I am not defending the plan whatsoever, but the bill managed to pass the House and was on its way to the Senate. That being said, the day after the bill passed, there was Fox and Friends telling us that it was a victory for the Republicans, because no Republican voted for it. Mind you, the bill passed the House along the lines of 244-188 or some near approximation of those numbers. Now I am not a math major, nor do I play one on the blog, but when you get you ass kicked by 50+ votes, that my Fox and Friends, is not a win. But it is Fox, and they do report and I do decide, I just decided that something that stupid was worth an Asshat, so congrats.

My sleeping schedule continues to be all fucked up, as if you couldn't tell by me being up at 3am blogging wasn't a pretty big clue. Obviously Sunday's football game didn't help, but Monday after work I do some stuff then come home and when I did try to sleep I couldn't because I had a toothache that every time I would start to nod off a little the pain would wake me up again. It wouldn't be till late Tuesday morning (11am ish) that I would even get my head onto a pillow and grab enough slumber that I could consider it actual sleeping. The problem was that I slept right through a phone call from Fred, my uncle, who called to see if I wanted to go to the Penguins game Wednesday night as he had an extra ticket. Well, having missed the first call ( I didn't even hear the phone ring, which shows how exhausted I must have been), he called again on Wednesday, but I was at work, so I am now two for two in missed calls. After work I ran some errands and didn't get in until about 7pm, at which point I check my phone messages to find that rather than dropping my stuff down and just settling in for an evening on non entertainment, I could at that point be at a hockey game. I called to apologize for not getting back to him sooner, but still I felt like such an idiot for missing the calls to begin with. Luckily he found someone to use the extra ticket, but as it turns out it was quite a game (see the Pittsburgh Tampa Bay video for what I missed, located in your updates and my video section, as are all Pens games), with Pittsburgh coming back from 3 goals down to win in overtime.

About the only thing that has gone relatively well is the change meter just continues to blossom this year. If this is what happens when we have an economic downturn, the change meter wishes we would have them more often, even if my wallet doesn't. The new total stands at a robust $49.39, as I have almost pulled $10 since the start of the year. Part of that comes from tips at work, which I allocate to the change meter, since I am in a job that I don't deem tippable, therefore it is still money that people are throwing away, and therefore addable to the change meter total. If I were in the service industry and part of my income was based on tips, that would be one thing, but I am not, so if you are just leaving me money, then you are throwing it away, which was the meters job to come up with in the first place.

Okay, I have rambled on enough, and nearly killed an hour to boot, so I am going to try to grab a quick two hour nap and then get back at it for the morning grind. We will see what happens on that front.