The empire strikes back

Saturday, May 22, 2010

7:30:57 AM

Good morning and welcome to my weekend. I have come to cherish weekends recently, if only because it seems my job does a pretty good job beating me down through the course of the week.  Yet here it is, Saturday morning, and I am up all bright and early.  Well skip the bright part, it is raining out as I type this, though that is a relatively recent development and I am sure it is in no small part because I was outside.

My plan was a relatively simple one, I was going to walk to the corner store and grab a cup of coffee to help kick off the day, and maybe a sandwich for later so I am not in my kitchen foraging for lunch.  The problem with this relatively simple plan was that I didn't realize that because it was Saturday the store opened at 7am as opposed to 6 am during the week.  Having ventured forth around a quarter till 7am and given the proximity of the store I arrived well before they opened.  At this point I could either go home and come back in 15-20 minutes, stand there by the front of the store and wait or just take a quick stroll around the neighborhood.  I went with option three, figuring worst case scenario I get to stretch my legs, best case is I might find a Coke cap or two (I ended up finding one) and while the skies were gray, it was very comfortable out and a walk might do me good.  So I make this sort of looping walk, covering a couple blocks and approaching the store from a different direction as I get to the intersection I see the guy who runs the store in the mornings is on the opposite street corner, waiting to cross, so I know the store isn't open yet.  No problem, I am enjoying my morning stroll, and given how close he is I know the store will be open in another 5 minutes or so, as soon as he gets the newspapers inside and gets everything squared away cash wise.  So I tack a couple more blocks onto my walk when it happens, by it I mean rain.  Not torrential downpour rain, but just good old "I am going to soak your ass" rain.  I meander my way back to the store, and as I reach it I have to stop under the front overhang, to both wipe the rain from my glasses and from my face on my shirt, giving everyone a brief glimpse of my semi bloated stomach, not so much water weight as it is wait I can get another sandwich in there weight. 

Sunday, May 23, 2010

10:46:15 AM

Sorry, but after coming back from my trip to the store the plan was I was going to go out and do some laundry and work on this entry on my laptop while doing so, so I added what I had to my media locker and planned on expounding on it while there.  Of course that didn't happen, the rain that I mentioned fired up again, keeping me from lugging clothes out to be washed, unless I wanted them to get wet on the way back.  Plus the corner store hadn't made any coffee yet, which is a must have when it comes to me staying awake in the morning, so I came back and after a little typing and some putzing around on Facebook I went ahead and climbed back into bed for a quick nap. 

  By the time I actually got up, I had to make something for lunch and find some clothes for the baseball game later that night.  See, I am not the only one at work who gets glories as I call them.  Apparently Wayne was offered Ed's baseball tickets for Saturday night, a matchup against the Atlanta Braves.  There were 4 of them and Wayne asked if I would like to go.  Far be it from me to pass up a free game, especially when I had nothing else on the social calendar.  The only stipulation was that Wayne and two of his sons, who were also going, were going to wear super hero shirts, so I had to wear one as well.  Well, sort of.  I opted for a super villian shirt instead, one Doctor Doom, as seen below. 

 

 

So I eat some lunch, hop in the shower and, after watching the first period of the Montreal-Philadelphia hockey game on TV, headed out for the game, in hopes that it wouldn't be cancelled by rain.  Technically Wayne wanted me to meet him on the Clemente Bridge between 5 and 5:30 for the 7:05 game.  I left my apartment at 4pm, figuring that would give me time to run some errands, I needed a new bus pass and had to grab some cash for the game, and an hour should give me time enough to do that.  The first stop was the bus pass, which I usually pick up at a check cashing place here in Oakland.  The trick is that many times you get stuck in line there on Saturday, with one cashier working and a line of people.  Of course they don't just want to cash a check either, it ends up being cash a check, get three money orders, hey, how about I send a Western Union and while you are at it grab me some cigarettes, a process that gets repeated by just about everyone..  At least that is usually my luck there, so imagine my surprise when I go in the shop and lo and behold we have two cashiers, I am the very first person in line and one of the people at the window was just buying a pack of smokes.  Bing, bang, boom and I am in and out in relatively short order, so I get my pass and walk up to Fifth Avenue to catch a bus into town.  My bus arrives within a minute of me getting there, so I am off and running and from the time I left my apartment, 4pm, until I actually get downtown only about 20 minutes have passed. 

Knowing I am making good time I decide to stop over at work and grab some cigarettes for myself and talk to my coworkers while killing time until I am to meet up with Wayne.  I end up talking to Alex for a bit and then heading out, though I am still very much ahead of schedule, so I grab some cash from ye olde ATM and a coffee from 7-11 and keep holding out hope that it will not rain, though the skies remain threatening.  It didn't help that I was on the Weather.com website prior to leaving and the radar projections had scattered showers throughout the region up until game time, possibly beyond, but the radar projector only goes 3-4 hours into the future.  Still for the time being the rain was holding off, so I walk over to the bridge and sit and wait.  The Clemente Bridge is closed to traffic prior to games, open only to pedestrian traffic, so I sat on one of the railings and drank my coffee, had a couple of cigarettes and read some of my book (see the Neverending Thread, it is the most recently completed one) and broke out the camera to test fire a couple of pictures

 

 

 

 

After sitting on the bridge for about 20 minutes, I thought maybe Wayne was at the other end, so I walked down toward the stadium and as I was about to turn around and walk back I hear him calling me on the other side of the street, so we meet up and he sees that I brought my camera, as evidenced by you seeing the pictures above and wants to get a camera for himself before his sons come into town to meet us, so back across the bridge we go to Smithfield News (damn am I lucky downtown is small for the number of trips I made across it) and on the way back to the store it starts to rain, at first just a drizzle but eventually it starts coming down pretty good, forcing us to see shelter before continuing our journey.  After about a cigarette's worth of time the rain lets up and we make it back to the store, he gets a camera to put on his charge sheet and we leave to go meet up with his sons over by the Kaufmann's clock (Pittsburghers will recognize that landmark as a meeting place more so than the casual blog reader, but I digress).  The plan was to meet his sons, two of them anyway, and grab them something to eat from McDonald's then walk over to the game. 

All works according to plan, which in my life is becoming more the exception and not the rule, and we grab them some food and head over to the game.  Just as we are nearing the stadium the rains start again, and while we are a few minutes late getting to the ballpark, the game was scheduled at 7:05, we got there about 7:10, it was in a rain delay. 

 

 

Since we were in a delay I took the opportunity to bust out the camera and take more pics, such as those above as well as getting a picture of Wayne and his two sons

After a little more than an hour and a half wait the game does start, so we head to our seats where I find that our usher is Joe, one of the guys that hangs out in my local watering hole, Uncle Jimmy's, the establishment formerly run by James Regis Connors and now by his grandson Michael.  I knew Joe worked at PNC Park, but didn't know what section as usually when I went I was sitting on the other side of the field, on the first base side and the tickets we had were for section 125 (bonus to this link, you can get the view from the seats in any section of the park) on the third base side.  Turns out that Joe is the usher for section 125 so I got to talk to him for a bit as well.

The game gets underway, the Pirates pitcher of choice this evening is Chad Morton, the same Chad Morton that I berated in an earlier blog entry, when his record was 1-7 and his ERA near 10, so I didn't like the Pirates chances from the word go.  After three innings I still didn't like their chances, they were down 3-0 and Morton had served up two homeruns, one to Melky Cabrera and one to Eric Hinske.  I posited the notion that maybe Kennywood Park could have as a new attraction the Chad Morton experience, where people could come in off the street and see if they too could get a hit off of him.  Then an odd thing happened, he settled down and picthed well for the rest of his outing, and the Pirates scored twice in the fourth inning to make it a 3-2 game, where it stayed through the 7th inning.  At that point Wayne had to leave, with two young sons with him and it being after 11pm due to the rain delay and still needing to catch a trolley to get back home, I understood why he couldn't stay for the whole game.  So he left and after another half inning I got up from my seat and went to the top of the section and talked to Joe for another half inning.  He was waiting for the game to end as well, with an afternmoon game the following day he had to be back at the ballpark at 11am and here we were approaching midnight.  No scoring in the eighth inning either and I decided I too had seen enough.  After almost two games against the Braves, the Pirates had managed to score runs in exactly one inning (of the 17 played, the previous night they lost 7-0) and figured that while they only needed one run, chances were against that happening, so I exited stage right.  Turns out it was a smart move, the Braves scored again in the top of the 9th, the Pirates did not score (as I expected) and the final was Braves 4 Pirates 2.

After a quick stop by work because I had to pee and peeing on the bus is not cool for two reasons, 1) you end up soaked in urine and 2) they kick you off of the bus and make you walk to your destination, I did manage to catch a bus and make it back home around 12:30am.

And you know what, none of this has anything to do with the title of this blog.  How's that for long winded?  That, of course, means there is more to come, and more ye shall have.

Saturday, May 29, 2010

10:49:26 AM

Damn, if I don't finish this entry soon it is going to get lost in the land of irrelevance. But time has been most uncooperative recently, and yes that is due in large part to the very title I had posted to start this whole blog off.  You see, I often joke when at work that I am "serving the empire" a turn of phrase that I have used at many of my jobs in the past and that I continue to use today from time to time. In my last entry I had mentioned some of the goodies I had gotten at work for basically busting my ass. And even the baseball game that I had mentioned above was at least an indirect work benefit, Wayne was given the tickets from Ed and he had an extra seat which he offered to me, so if it wasn't for my job I wouldn't have had the opportunity to go.

All of that being said, it has not been all about gimme, gimme, gimme for me at work. If anything, I am finding that there just aren't enough hours in the day anymore for all of the things that I have to do. As well as all of my normal duties that I have, more crap has fallen on my lap. As I mentioned before, as well as the location that I currently work for, we own three other locations, two more in downtown Pittsburgh and one in Oakland. One of the stores downtown, Weissmart, recently sent us a bunch of cigarettes that they couldn't sell. The problem is that many of them are not what you would call major sellers, that is, they are almost niche cigarettes versus our more popular brands, like say Newport, Marlboro or Camel. Instead they are cartons of things like More Light 120s, Virginia Superslims, L&Ms and the like. Cigarettes that when I place an order for us, I don't even bother with because I know that they have absolutely no chance of selling. Nonetheless Weissmart had purchased some of them, to the tune of 20+ cartons of these off name brands, and when they couldn't sell them, they sent them to us. This irked Ed to no end, with smokes running in the ballpark of $50-$60 a carton, this was a couple thousand dollar screwup, so now I am nominated to go to Weissmart for a few hours each week and try to get their cigarette ordering under control, complete with coming up with inventory sheets and the whole nine yards. Even if that were the only thing that has fallen on my plate I suppose I could have found time here and there to get that project done, but while I mentioned that we have other locations in downtown Pittsburgh, one of the things I never understood when they first opened Weissmart (the other location is Universal News) is that the stores are literally maybe 4 doors apart on 5th Avenue. Universal is more just your typical news stand, mostly cigarettes, lottery and newpapers were the major sellers there, whereas Weissmart was a little more like us, offering a larger variety in the food/snack department and they have the room to add some things that we already have, like a coffee bar and fresh pizza, which we just added but it is space that for the most part has went unused to this point. Well the decision has been made that we are going to combine the two stores, closing Universal and hoping those customers will walk the extra few feet to go to Weissmart instead, and go about the business of getting Weissmart to look and act like our location. I don't know if it will work or not, some of the advantages we have are that we are open 24 hours and are located betwen the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and Point Park University, so we have become the defacto grocery store for many college kids who stay in the residence halls for both schools, whereas Weissmart closes each night around 6pm and relies more on commuter traffic than those that reside downtown. Still, if we were going to close one location, that meant all of the product that was currently in that store had to be moved, and you can guess who drew that short straw. I spent the better part of a week emptying shelves of candy and cigarettes, and coolers of soda to be sold at our other two remaining locations. Some of it wasn't bad, because it just meant I had to drop it off at Weissmart a couple of doors down, but other things that don't move as well at Weissmart had to be lugged four or five blocks to our store in hopes that we might be able to sell it. It was a project, that on top of my other responsibilities, took a large portion of this week and technically I am still not done, I still have a Red Bull cooler to empty, but the rest of the coolers and shelves are either empty or just need to be taken to Weissmart after they get their dollar section up and running. So suffice it to say, work had more than filled my plate recently, so much so that by the time I was done Friday I didn't even bother with the employee trip to the 110, I was just too tired and more than content to come home and relax rather than spend time drinking.

It doesn't help from a time perspective for this blog that as well as work I find that I am back into reading again. While I knocked off two books recently and should probably have continued to cut into the pile of books I have started, instead while I was out the other day after work I stopped by a little outlet type dollar store downtown that I like, they usually have things like loaves of bread on sale and some recently out of date magazines that are marked down to $1, I figured I needed some bread for my apartment and I know they have potato chips on sale too (large bags go for like $1.49) I thought maybe I would get a few cheap things and maybe a cheapie mag to read on the bus to and from work for a few days. While I was able to get some things (bread, chips, pasta) they were out of magazines, at least ones I would read. They had a few gossip rags and some comic books, but nothing for me per se, so instead I checked out their incredibly small selection of books and found something there that looked interesting and was only $1.99 so I grabbed it and have been engrossed in it ever since.

Saturday, May 29, 2010

5:57:28 PM

Okay, time for a marathon like sprint in order to get this done. I say marathon because I know my proclivity to get all wordy and stuff and while I could say this will be short (as if what was above wasn't enough) I can no more realistically make that promise than I can believe I will be sleeping with a supermodel this evening. But I would like to get this done just to show that I can and because I don't want this looming over me when the Stanley Cup Final begins this evening.

I did duck out for a bit but dare I say I was semi-productive. I needed to get my bus pass for next week, and groceries are always a good option, so I put that on the agenda as well. I had earlier in the morning took some scratch off tickets over to my corner store and cashed them in and got myself a cup of coffee and some smokes. Well, I really didn't cash them in so much as trade them in, I had $14 in winnings and I just bought 7 more $2 tickets and it turned out one was a $50 winner, all told I won $52, which I figured I would cash in for real money while I was out. Plus I still had my coupon from the baseball game on my desk, $3 off my next visit to Eat n Park, so I thought I might put lunch on the docket as well.

Lunch was first, a turkey sandwich with fries and gravy over the whole thing, iced tea and an Oreo sundae for dessert. Ice cream is always a good call when it is warm outside, and for the most part it has been unseasonably warm recently. Here we are, technically still in spring, and when I first got to the bus stop the temperature was already 82 and it was barely noon outside, still plenty of time for that to go up even further. Then I ran into Giant Eagle, first I cashed in the tickets, then went to the next window and bought my bus pass and then I grabbed a basket and did some light grocery shopping. I say light because I probably spent less that $20, but still managed to grab some hot dogs and hot dog chili, some steaks, pasta, pasta sauce, bread and hot dog buns, and french fries. Just enough to get me through a couple of days. I aslo took my book to lunch with me and got some more reading done, I have had my book less than a week now and have plowed through 300 pages. Mind you, even when I finish this one I still have two more to finish, plus I picked up another one from Amazon the other day that I got for free with my gift cards. It has been a good month in that regard, $20 so far from Swagbucks with an additional $5 pending that should be approved within the next couple of days (rewards are issued approx. the 16th and last day of every month) and I picked up another $10 from my Mysurvey account, which recently added gift cards to their prize selection. So $35 free dollars in a thirty one day span, not too shabby if I do say so myself. I also tacked on another $1.22 to my change meter total, now sitting at $166.97. Even the Coke rewards are bumping up ever so slightly. While I haven't had any killer weeks, I have managed to get my current total over 1200 points, meaning less than 800 more until we have a blog giveaway. I haven't talked to Phil recently either, I am sure he will have more Coke caps for me if I run into him, but free time is something that is proving more and more elusive these days, and on those days where I am off I am all but content to do nothing at all, or at least as little as is humanly possible.

Technically I am off on weekends, though that is more because of my job requirements than me having a preference for being off on Saturday and Sunday. Nobody delivers on weekends, so there is no need for me to be there catching trucks, though I have had to go in twice now on Saturday and place the order for Monday just because I have too much on my plate to get done in my normal Monday through Friday routine, meaning some of my weeks are now turning into 6 day ones. And we can forget about holidays as well. While Monday is technically a holiday, Memorial Day as it were, I am scheduled to work, and better still, run the place as a couple of people have requested off, meaning I get to do the one job I dispise there the most. Ed asked if I minded working on Monday, which I said I didn't but then asked why I looked so disappointed and I said that, being a holiday and all, I was hoping that I could get some of my workload knocked down, but instead I am going in to be a glorified babysitter instead and none of the work that he wants me to get done will have a snowball's chance in getting done. It is just a missed opportunity for me, and I know the week is just going to spiral downhill from there. Already on Tuesday I have two trucks I have to catch, put an order in, and go to the other store to monitor their tobacco order, plus my normal work that goes with my job.

I know, I gripe too much, but I am just not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel right now, just lots and lots of more tunnel. But for the time being I am going to wrap this up and settle in for the hockey game coming up in about an hour, maybe try spell checking all of this junk and make sure all of the i s are dotted and t s crossed.