Multiply 365 Day 185 - Mind tricks

 

It looks like I am being issued a challenge again. Multiply (at least for me) has been down the better part of a day now, and this being a holiday weekend I can't be assured that it will be up again any time soon. Thankfully I got my daily entry out of the way early Sunday, and I was hoping to get a jump on the Monday entry as well, my schedule being what it is, I am unsure of whether or not I will be able to later on tonight.

By the way, happy 4^th of July for whatever that is worth, which in my own book is relatively nothing. Not that I have anything against the United States not being a colony of Great Britain, but lets be honest, what was at one time a holiday designed to celebrate our independence has instead turned into yet another reason to get get drunk and play with explosives. I know I get a certain amount of glee out of the post 4^th news stories where some dumb jackass has blown off his fingers because his diet that day was two parts Pabst Blue Ribbon and one part M 80. Or someone else decides this dry field that hasn't seen water in a couple of weeks would be a great place to launch his fireworks from and the results are like an actual reenactment of when Bambi lost his mother. And some where in that great deliberative body in the sky, the founding fathers look down on us and think to themselves, “We fought for this? For these assclowns?”

But my 4^th of July, well it is what it is. I am working, not my preferred shift and not my preferred job, but instead I am running the store from 3pm-11pm. This will either go really good or really bad. On one hand, there will be a lot of people in downtown Pittsburgh for the fireworks display, which usually kicks off somewhere around 9pm or so, right in the heart of my shift. But the main places people watch the fireworks from are a little ways away, so either we will be extremely busy just from the numbers of people downtown, or extremely slow because we are not within a block of some of the better viewing locations for the festivities.

Of course, whichever way that breaks, it still makes for a mess of a day for me, because I am supposed to be back at work at 7am on Tuesday, rejoining my regularly scheduled programming. And while the fireworks may last a half hour or so, there is no guarantee that the traffic fiasco that will ensue after the fact will be undone by 11pm. Since I am not real keen on the idea of getting stuck downtown and not getting home till well after midnight only to have to turn around and be right back at work 5 hours after getting to bed I am probably just going to camp out at the store, huddle up in the office with my laptop, a deli sandwich and the air conditioner and wait out the storm until the following morning.

I should note that there are pluses to me working on the 4^th, though even if there wasn't I doubt I could have said no a few days after learning I was getting a raise. But I do get some extra cash, I will be paid time and a half plus I get extra money on top of that for being the guy in charge. And since I am a full timer working a holiday I also get an extra paid vacation day to be used at a later date of my own choosing. We have 5 recognized company holidays on the calendar and each time anyone who is full time and has worked for us for at least a year opts to pull a shift on those days, they get an extra vacation day somewhere else. So far I have picked up two of those to go with my week's paid vacation that I already get. Sometimes I use them as add ons to my vacation time, sometimes they are just nice paid sick days.

Just checked, still getting the proxy error message when I try to get to Multiply. I have been having more issues with them recently. Maybe it is just because I am blogging more and therefore on the page on a daily basis so I am more inclined to notice them, or maybe the fuck ups are just coming more frequently now, but I hope this isn't a Yahoo 360 thing, where the increase in problems with the site were the first signs that the whole service was going down. I am not sure I am ready to start a third blog page. I know I wouldn't do it on facebook, and while I do have a few friends that work with blogspot, I am just not inclined to pick up and move yet again. At that point I could see where I am reaching the diminishing returns value of blogging in the first place, the work involved in setting up page after page just to have a platform isn't worth the hassle, regardless of how much I like to blog.

I can't say as I did much with my one day off this week. Just laid around, watched the Wimbledon men's final and turned it off before they started the mixed doubles nonsense and that was pretty much it for TV today. I did watch a little women's beach volleyball later in the evening on Universal Sports and after investigating the matter further I have come to the conclusion that April Ross is indeed hot. Maybe not Yvonne Strahovski hot, but if April were to suggest eating crackers in bed, I would be sure to run out and buy some Ritz. In the deep recesses of my mind I see Andy Griffith saying “Good cracker....good cracker.”

Well I was going to finish this up here, there was another thing or two I wanted to mention but since Multiply is still down there is no way for me to post it, so instead I will pause and come back to this at a later time.

Okay, so I went to bed and came back upon waking up and it seems like Multiply is working again. With that in mind I should probably bang out the last of this entry before it decides to once again become dysfunctional.

I just woke up about a half hour or so ago, long enough that I toasted a bagel and sat down and got caught up on Madden on Facebook. Managed to collect a couple of more cards, but no real significant advancements in the game for me. I then went to check the Post Gazette website, just to see if I missed any breaking news while I was asleep. The first cool thing that happened was, rather than use the address bar for the PG page, I instead used the Swagbucks tool bar, which I do for most places I visit on a regular basis. It is an added step to be sure, but a relatively quick one and I have the chance to win stuff for doing it, as was the case this morning when I got 17 Swagbucks for the effort. As an added bonus, the 17 Swagbuck bill was the last one I needed in the 4^th of July collection contest they are currently running, 5 different amounts, each on a specialized bill for the holiday and if you collect all 5 by the end of July 4^th you get an additional 13 Swagbucks. I need them too, I received another $5 Amazon gift card this weekend, but I have nothing pending. I am close to cashing out for another one and the bonus bucks will definitely help. I have been pawing through their $5 MP3 album downloads recently, not a lot there that strikes my fancy, but the do have Prince's “1999” album for $5 and a couple others that I like, so I may be forced to grab something with my next gift card.

I am thinking that I may go into work early today. Not because I have an overwhelming desire to be responsible, but because recently leaving me and my head alone with nothing else to concentrate on is usually a bad thing. Most recently it is still about that which some of you know and others not so much. And it isn't that I am having bad thoughts per se, just that the more I think about it, the more my mind feels the need to replace facts with things that aren't so. I think in my blog entry I did a pretty good job explaining our relationship prior to the bar incident, but as I pontificate further my mind wants to make it greater than it actually was. Heck a month ago I wouldn't even have considered the possibility, however so slight, and now my mind is acting like it is some great loss when in reality I didn't lose anything. Sometimes a little too much “me” time is a bad thing. Worse was some info that Ed gave me (unknowingly) on Friday that makes me reconsider whether this isn't one of those “moth to flame” moments I spoke about in those comments. Not that he said anything bad about her, he and I were just sitting in the office and once again I was being told how he wished he had a store full of me's and he proceeded to go on a drawn out conversation about how he believes he has to be at the store so much because of the shortcomings of other members of his family. One of those if he doesn't do it, it might not get done speeches, an attitude I am all too familiar with when it comes to working there. But then, as I tell him, we have set the bar relatively low in who we do and don't hire.

Oh well, I need not get into any more details than that, I am not getting all privatey on this post. Once was more than enough. But I should go hop in the shower and start packing up for the sojourn into work. The sooner I get there, the less likely I am to sit and her and have my mind try to recreate reality into something it is not.

Toodles.