Multiply 365 Day 213 - Mr Postman look and see...........

 

I am going to credit the trek up Mt Washington the other morning for what's causing all of this. The thing is, there are times in my life where things get a little blah, not too good or too bad, just kind of there. Everything becomes almost too routine and with it a sense of ennui takes hold. It is at times like that I try to break out of it by doing something less ordinary, like taking a 3 to 4 mile walk in the middle of the night. And while at first it seemed that it didn't help, in fact it may have made things worse given how yesterday played out, there is always another day. And guess what? Today is that day.

Was in to work on time again, actually a little bit early but not so early that I took credit for it on my time sheet. And Sammy and I did what we do best, namely dominate. Coolers were pretty much done by 9am, my invoices were done shortly thereafter. I was so far ahead on my game that Dee asked me to help her with her work, mostly counting drops from the other stores to get them ready to be deposited in the bank. Not a problem, I got this as I am sometimes likely to say.

Ed has some projects for me that I bang out in incredible Matt-like efficiency. I mean like really efficient. He was looking for a phone number and I found it is less than a minute. I was that good.

And then the heavens rewarded me for all I had been doing. The mail came. And not just any mail, but the first letter back from the prison chick pen pal. I was ecstatic. Not because of anything she wrote, but because she wrote anything. It would seem that the website isn't a scam after all, though in an odd sort of way it is at least confusing, as Jennifer (our inmate's name) said she didn't do a profile, they wouldn't let her do that in jail, so apparently someone did a profile for her. And maybe that is how the who system works, someone on the outside does the legwork in setting it up for people on the inside, I don't know. But much of what she wrote corresponded with what was in the profile. For the record, Jennifer says she was locked up for burglary, but as Ed pointed out, she says it was from something her ex-husband had did. Damn if I didn't have to be the voice of reason for a moment and remind Ed that everyone in prison believes they are innocent.

But even that didn't matter to me. Ed was happy he got a letter, I was happy that the potential for comedy is alive and kicking and Dee was upset with both of us. Not that upset mind you, but I said, I'm sorry if you can't see the potential humor in this because to me it could be priceless. All she kept saying is she wasn't working with a felon. I almost want to take a copy of Johnny Cash's “Folsom Prison Blues” to work to celebrate. I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die and all that jazz.

Tomorrow I get the honor of writing the second letter to Jennifer, and my mind is racing with the possibilities. I have ideas piled on top of ideas. It will be fun.

Then I get home and visit my own mailbox and what should be in there but more free goodies. One was from Coke, the second of my free NCAA T shirts finally arrived, who would have thought an SMU shirt would be that popular that it would take three months to arrive and I also received a free dry erase marker from the fine people at Discount Office Items, a Facebook group that allows you to be a product tester and as long as you write reviews on the products they claim they will send you new stuff to test. I will test my first product tomorrow at work, since I use a few dry erase boards at work, I actually have use for this freebie. And after banging out a review hopefully they will send me something else equally useful.

And the best thing about today, I actually have blog ideas in the hopper for later on this week. I can think of a couple I want to do right now, including getting the change meter all back up to date, since it has been about a month since my last excursion into that realm and we are closing in on fantasy football season, I am signed up for three leagues so far, but I might also end up serving as a sounding board for Brian at work for his team as well. I am trying to get him out of “donation” status, that being the guy who you can bank on just giving his money away every year. But last year I didn't get to help him until after his draft, and you can only do so much after the initial damage has been done, though he did get into his league's playoffs, so there is hope for him yet. But before I go off on a potential blog tangent I am calling it a night. My belly is full of Cuban sandwich and a nap sounds real good right about now.

Multiply 365 Day 212 - Addle minded

 

So what time is it anyway? Well I guess that clock in the bottom right hand corner should be able to answer that question, perhaps a more appropriate question would be what day is it? I'll admit it took me a good 5 minutes of solid brain work before I figured out the answer to that little question, and I am still not completely sure I got the answer correct. And how did I get so stupid, well read on.

I mentioned something I wanted to do for the blog page yesterday (at least I think it was yesterday), but that I overslept and ended up missing my opportunity. Well as I was here in the apartment last night/early this morning I got to thinking, maybe I will just do it Monday morning instead. So I made the needed trip over to The Weather Channel's website, found out that the skies looked like they would be cooperating and checked the time for sunrise, which was to be a 5:41 am, plenty of time for me to get my photo before starting work at 7am.

So now I have a plan, but I realize that for this plan to work I will probably have to stay up all night. That is okay though, by the looks of the schedule at work it is panning out to be an easy day. We have two deliveries coming in but I have an extra person on my crew and neither of the deliveries is looking to be all that big. With all of my paperwork caught up in advance, it is looking to be a pretty easy day, at least on paper, so I convince myself that I can just pull an all niter and make it up to Mt Washington for some picture taking before work this morning.

Around 2:30am I go and climb into the shower, and then get everything I will need to get ready for a day at work (laptop, MP3 player, digital camera) and am out the door around 3:15am. I strat the walk in when I realize this would be a lot easier if I go to work first, drop off all of the things I don't need to take a picture and then just scoot across the Smithfield Street Bridge and go to Mt Washington from work, since it is just across the river and up from where I work anyway. I get into work a little after 4am (downtown is about an hour walk from where I live), so I go into the office, set up my laptop and drop off my bag, keeping only MP3 player and camera. I check online to see what the bus schedule is like for Mt Washington, but I don't see anything that is running early enough for me to take before sunrise, so I figure I am going to have to hoof that portion of the journey as well.

The trip involves a climb up Sycamore Street. This is not what one would consider an average climb. Not impossible, unless you are completely out of shape, but isn't your normal everyday jaunt either. Sycamore Street is one of the ways to get to the top of Mt Washington, it is road that has a climb of roughly 350 feet in a little over a half mile of actual distance, so the street has a grade of somewhere in the ballpark of 15% and I am sure it didn't help that prior to this I had already walked about 3 miles just to get into work, so by the time I had left work and made the climb up Sycamore Street, my foot was pretty much killing me. But I was geeked, I was up there with my camera, the sky in the distances was just starting to get a little reddish, so I just had to scope out the perfect spot, or at least a good enough spot and fire off a couple of pics and I would be on my way. Except this is where I learned just how old my camera is. My digital camera is at least 4 years old, probably older. In the land of digital cameras, while it was a good model in its day and still manages to take a good picture when needed, it isn't very well suited for taking a picture where it is sort of nighttime, yet starting to become daylight and getting all of the city lights in the distance without things getting all blurred out or being to dark to take a viewable picture. Basically it sucked. I will review the pics at a later time and see if something is usable, but I am not holding my breath on that one.

Rather than walk back into town, I took an incline off of the mountain and made it back into work about 6:30am. Things looked like they would be off to a flying start too when out first delivery arrived by 7:15am. We had it checked in and put away in about 20 minutes, I went into the office and broke down the invoice, as well as a dairy invoice that came in earlier in the morning. And all of a sudden my eyes didn't want to function. The lack of sleep was catching up with me, and I was doing that thing where, when you are reading, you find yourself rereading the same paragraph time and time again because no matter how much you try to focus you just can't get through it without your mind drifting off some place else. That was me and a list of numbers, I would start adding them up, my mind would drift and I would forget where I was in the invoice. What should have been a 5 minute task tops was turning into a journey, one that was thankfully broken up when I was told I needed to ,og someone into one of the registers with my account upstairs. Seems we had a call off and one of my crew was being asked to work behind the counter instead. So much for an extra guy, but it still wasn't that big a deal, with all we had left to do Sammy and I could certainly handle it. Except then a second person didn't show up, and the grocery order arrives, so now I am bouncing between trying to check in and put away an order, and also spending a decent portion of time on register.

It is at this point that I have to ask myself why we even employ some of the stupid motherfuckers we do. I mean sure, I helped create my situation by being up all night before coming in, but as I look around the room, my crew is there. As bad or as mean as I can sometimes be, at least my crew shows up for work. The people upstairs that get coddled by Ed, well if it fits into their schedule then maybe they will come in. Don't ever let me be in charge, I would have a field day firing people.

Somehow I managed to get through today, though by the end of the day my foot was absolutely killing me, and because I was on register a good portion of the day, I still had a bunch of paperwork to catch up on after I got done balancing my drawer and what not. I end up missing my first bus home, and instead catching the second one about 20 minutes later and end up falling asleep on the bus and missing my stop again, so it was off that bus and onto another one headed in the opposite direction to get back home. I ended up getting home somewhere close to 5pm, roughly a hour or so later than a typical day. I manage to get my laptop all set up and get online but it wasn't long before I was back into the land of the deep, dark sleep.

It was the waking up that brought about the first paragraph to this story. Usually I can benchmark what day of the week it is by what I did the day before, so figuring out it was Monday night wouldn't have been hard, I would have remembered that I didn't work the day before, except I did work the day before and being up the entire night Sunday night/Monday morning only further added to the confusion. My brain doesn't work that well when I first get up to begin with, it is one of the reasons my alarm, clock is set three hour ahead, I try to trick my head into doing math when I first get up, just to get the synapses firing, but with the way my schedule has been the last week, it literally took a good five minutes before I was able to figure out the date and time and realize that it was Monday night, I hadn't missed any days of work and that I had a blog entry yet to do before the day was complete. But I would like to think this qualifies as said blog entry, maybe tomorrow when I am on a more regularly scheduled programming kind of day I will take a couple of moments and see if anything from my attempt at pictures is even remotely salvageable, but for now I am just going to see if I can forage for food at call it a night.

Karaoke Friday - Songs that will not be serenades

Since a topic has come up recently about Guitar Hero and serenades and I was looking for something to do to kill some time this evening, I thought I would find a song that will not be a dinner serenade (though I don't know if it is available on Guitar Hero or not, I have never played)

 

Artist: King Missile
Song: Detatchable Penis

Lyrics:

I woke up this morning with a bad hangover
And my penis was missing again.
This happens all the time.
It's detachable.

[background singing begins: "detachable penis" over and over]

This comes in handy a lot of the time.
I can leave it home, when I think it's gonna get me in trouble,
or I can rent it out, when I don't need it.
But now and then I go to a party, get drunk,
and the next morning I can't for the life of me
remember what I did with it.
First I looked around my apartment, and I couldn't find it.
So I called up the place where the party was,
they hadn't seen it either.
I asked them to check the medicine cabinet
'cause for some reason I leave it there sometimes
But not this time.
So I told them if it pops up to let me know.
I called a few people who were at the party,
but they were no help either.
I was starting to get desperate.
I really don't like being without my penis for too long.
It makes me feel like less of a man,
and I really hate having to sit down every time I take a leak.
After a few hours of searching the house,
and calling everyone I could think of,
I was starting to get very depressed,
so I went to the Kiev, and ate breakfast.
Then, as I walked down Second Avenue towards St. Mark's Place,
where all those people sell used books and other junk on the street,
I saw my penis lying on a blanket
next to a broken toaster oven.
Some guy was selling it.
I had to buy it off him.
He wanted twenty-two bucks, but I talked him down to seventeen.
I took it home, washed it off,
and put it back on. I was happy again. Complete.
People sometimes tell me I should get it permanently attached,
but I don't know.
Even though sometimes it's a pain in the ass,
I like having a detachable penis.

[background voices continue to sing "detachable penis" for
a while, then out]