anecdotes

Restrooms

The first floor women’s restroom at my work has three stalls. This is not usually a problem, as we don’t all have to go at the same time, so three stalls are sufficient.

However, the middle stall has been out of order this week.

Incidentally, the middle stall is everyone’s favorite. The stall closest to the door is the handicapped stall, which our resident wheelchair-bound employee mocked openly as being entirely too small to fit a wheelchair into. (Another single-person restroom was constructed for her use.) The stall farthest from the door is awkward, as the toilet is slightly off-center, so the user has to check between her knees before sitting to ensure that the target is, in fact, locked-on.

The broken middle stall caused a minor traffic-flow problem around lunchtime, when a group of women attending some sort of training session at our building swarmed the restroom. This required me to wait in a five-person-deep line for my turn to pee. Five minutes of my life wasted; not that big of a deal, I guess.

The broken stall caused a problem of a wholly different sort later this afternoon, as the toilet-choking load of shit still in the bowl began to smell. Bad. I dislike spending a short amount of time in a wretched-smelling bathroom considerably more than I dislike spending a lengthy amount of time in a normal-smelling one.

The odor wasn’t bad enough to induce gagging, but it was very unpleasant. Just knowing that someone’s shit was festering and fermenting behind that closed door was disturbing enough.

Update, 4:15pm: Someone finally made the stinky load go down the hole, but the john is still faintly redolent of shit, and the middle stall is still marked out of order.

genealogy 2 Comments

Happy Halloween

In other cultures and in various world religions, what we Americans call “Halloween” is celebrated as a remembrance of departed loved ones. For example, the Japanese celebrate the autumn equinox as a time to remember and honor their ancestors. The Mexican Day of the Dead is a party to eclipse all parties (from what I can tell, anyway — I didn’t take Spanish, so I’m not well-versed in the culture). Samhain, the Wiccan observance, focuses on the thin veil between this world and the next. This is, of course, a gross overview of these holidays, and there are many more besides these.

In recent years, I’ve taken to celebrating Halloween in a unique way that’s meaningful to me. I consider myself an agnostic, so observing Samhain or any other faith-based or religious rituals would be hypocritical and almost rude. I also have no social life, and very few local friends, so costume parties are out. 🙂

Seriously, though. What I do is genealogy.
Continue reading →

randomness

Podcasts That Should Be Created

I wanted to find a podcast about low-carb eating, but the only one I could find hadn’t released a new episode for months. So, I decided to produce one myself. However… there are still some topics I’m not qualified to podcast about myself, yet I wish there were a podcast out there for them. These topics include:

  • Gardening, esp. in the Midwest
  • Tai Chi / Qi Gong
  • Genealogy [found one!]

…and, um, I had an entire list in my head of podcasts I wanted to hear, but I can’t think of any of them now. D’oh! This just turned into a really pointless entry, but I’ll go with it anyway.

I think it’s time to go to bed.

drumcorps, food, the ongoing saga of my job

Massive Update on Stuff In General

I took my final half-day off of work today so I could go to lunch with two women I used to work with. We caught up on each other’s lives (mainly work-related), reminisced about the Bad Old Days…

24 September 2002: Just Another Day…

Hey, for once I worked an 8-hour day! Yeah, we were doing so well that we actually took a one-hour lunch and everything. Just for reference, yesterday I worked a 14-hour day. Seriously. My co-worker and almost-supervisor, Loni, worked an hour and a half more than me, since she came in at 6am. Damn, that sucked. Makes the normal 8-hour day seem like a luxury instead of a burden.

…and ate some yummy Mexican food. And despite my lack of a lunchtime walk, I still got my podcast-listening time in, since a.) our lunch meeting was a half hour south of where I work, and b.) I bought a Kensington FM transmitter for the iPod(s).

When I got home, I had intended to work on the LSM site, as it needs some stuff added and updated (like audition info). Instead, I ended up finishing off the cosplay skirt. Yes, indeed, the skirt is complete! Well, except for possibly adding some velcro for good measure, and the final ironing before we leave for Youmacon in two weeks.

Don’t worry, I’ll definitely post pictures of me and Aaron in costume. 🙂

What else…? Oh, yeah, tonight’s dinner. I know, blogging about what I made for dinner is certifiably lame, but this was really good. Ten-Minute Szechuan Chicken. It’s really easy (even I can do it), and really good… but, now that I think about it, I think I’m going to put the recipe on my next Low Carb Lifestyle podcast, so I’m not going to publish it here yet. If you download this old-school DOS recipe filing program, though, I could be convinced to e-mail you the database file that this fantastic recipe came from. (Thanks, Uncle Pete!)

Yesterday, I told the Acting Executive Director of LSM that I’ve decided not to march next year. He was understandably disappointed, but he completely understood, which is cool.

I’m sure there’s other stuff I should write about, but that’s the overall rundown of everything I wanted to mention. Now I’m going to go work on the LSM page. Yay for contact info and audition info and pictures? w00t.

randomness

Funk, Again.

Feeling all *meh* this evening. Don’t know what my problem is.

I went back through my blog archives, though, and saw that the last time I felt all *meh* like this, a couple months ago, I played Civ III to ease my non-existent woes. That sounds like a plan.

I can’t wait until my Civ IV Presell Edition arrives.