-----Original message -----

From: me
To: boss
Date: November 29, 2004 4:37 pm
Subject: Request for vacation day

[Boss],Would it be possible for me to take December 27 as a vacation day?
Please let me know.
Thanks!

[me]

-----Original message -------
From: my boss
To: me
Date: November 30, 2004 12:49 pm
Subject: re:Request for vacation day

Yes. Have fun. God knows I'll have to work that day to cover your ass.

Respectfully

[boss]

.... Aaaaaand we're back
Well, one of the things I'm thankful for this Thanksgiving weekend was that there was not too much blog activity, so I didn't have to spend hours catching up with everyone. Thank you for not posting!!!!

I'm also thankful that Thanksgiving was free of family drama. That's always a plus.

I saw way too many James Bond movies this weekend, that's thanks to my in-laws, who are 007 freaks. They can quote the movies. They have favorite Bond girls, and favorite Bonds. Favorite villains, even. I had never seen a 007 movie prior to marrying into this family. I had, however, seen all three Austin Powers movies several times, so this helps me to appreciate the spoof even more.

I did not brave the shopping mall extravaganza. There's nothing that skeeves me out more than bargain hungry, tryptophan-addled Christmas shoppers on Black Friday. I don't care much for crowds in the first place, but if someone is additionally going to elbow me for the last Playstation 2, I'll pass. I plan on doing all my shopping this year online, thank you very much.

I was not pleased to see the first snowfall of the season, even though it melted the next day. It's only a sign of what is to come. One of these years, I will move my ass south or west, to a climate that agrees more with me. I'm thinking Hawaii.

B.L.T.
My office today is operating on B.L.T. (Bad Lady Time). We're all allowed to leave early today! Hooray! Too bad Bad Lady isn't here today to take part in the celebrations.

Have a happy Turkey Day, everybody!

Damn, she's smooth
Well, here's another one to file in the "just when you think Bad Lady has tried every trick in the book, she comes up with this doozy" folder:

Sure, around the holidays, it's always slow around here. The workload is diminished, or in some cases, non-existent.

But we all suffer through it. We put in our time, enjoy a cake day, and go home on time. We take a long lunch, we surf the Internet more than usual.

But we DON'T decide, at 3:30, to call it a day.

Unless you are Bad Lady, and then you can declare that you're bored, pack up your shit, and leave, much to the shock and awe of all those around you.

News
Between the basket brawl, hunters shooting each other, the woman who cut off her baby's arms, and the $28k grilled cheese sandwich, it's no wonder Dan Rather has had enough.

My next-door neighbor, Jim, has expressed interest in 007 role
MY BACKYARD (AP): My next door neighbor, Jim, has expressed interest in auditioning for the role of James Bond.

Several Hollywood actors' names have been thrown around in association with the role, left vacant by Pierce Brosnan. So far, my next door neighbor, Jim, has not been approached about the role.

"It's something I've always wanted," Jim said. "If they asked me, I'd probably do it."

In a related story, my other next door neighbor, Chet, has not expressed interest in the role. "It's not something I can see myself doing," he said, while cutting his grass.

Sources say that my across the street neighbor, whose name I do not know, may be asked to read for the part of 007. My across the street neighbor could not be reached for comment.

Related links:
Colin Farrell doesn't want to do Bond
Colin Firth wants to do Bond
Gold Bond

Survivor NC-17
OK, so was I the only one cringing and simultaneously giggling like Beavis when Twila, with her legs straddled around a pole, kept chanting, "Go down Chad! Go down! Please, for the love of God, go down, Chad!"

Yeah.

Incidentally, is this the same season that Dolly was on? Because that seems like it was forever ago.

Shush!
Here is my petty office bullshit of the day:

The woman in the cube next to mine... we can't see each other (no, my cube opens to face Bad Lady, thank you very much). We share a cube wall. And her phone is right next to the shared wall.

So what does she do? She sets up a conference call, IN HER CUBE. And then shushes me when someone comes over and asks me a question.

Hello? Not fifty feet away, we have THREE, count 'em, THREE conference rooms. Each is eqipped with that lovely invention by Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone. (Or did Thomas Edison invent the phone? Oh, who gives a shit.)

*huge eye roll*

Don't shush me. If you choose to set up a call in your cubicle, then you should EXPECT typical office noise. And please don't think about how you are inconveniencing others around you, who have to LISTEN to your entire conversation!

Sorry. I'm not fired up about this, I swear.

P.S. I apologize for excessive use of capital letters in this post.

Off the hizzle, fo' drizzle
Nothing like coming in only to discover you have a 10 a.m. deadline to get the adrenaline pumping. I am the type of person who despises deadlines. They are my enemy. I am an anti-crastinator, in that I don't care for doing things at the last minute. Can't stand it. It makes me too frazzled. I'd rather be done with a project with time to spare than to be panicking about it at the last hour. This made me sort of a weirdo in college, but I didn't care, I was getting a good nights' sleep while my friends all were pulling all-nighters. Sleep trumps all.

I'm meeting a friend for lunch today, so I will actually get a chance to leave the office for a change.

It is drizzling out. I have decided that "drizzle" is one of my favorite words. It sounds like a word Snoop Dogg made up.

Annoying song lyric of the day
Currently playing on Bad Lady's radio:

I want you
I need you
There ain't no way
I'm ever gonna love you
Now don't be sad
Coz two outa three ain't bad...

-Meat Loaf

Ugh. The Loaf.

A mother of a miracle
And lo, the Virgin Mary appeared in a grilled cheese sandwich. And it was good.
Then, the sandwich appeared on Ebay, and it was good.
Then, I ate it, and it was good.
Could have done with some chips, also though.

The Law of Conservation of Energy states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but can change its form.
The total quantity of matter and energy available in the universe is a fixed amount and never any more or less.

-taken from some scientific website

I am not scientifically-minded. It was never one of my favorite subjects. In fact, I always wondered how I managed to eke through science classes in high school.

But I think I have discovered a scientific principle that needs to be documented. I’m talking potential Nobel Prize-winning stuff, here.

Based upon the Law of Conservation of Energy, which states that there is always a fixed quantity of matter and energy in existence, I have noted a curious phenomenon.

I’ll call it the Law of Conservation of Paper Clips.

How it works is: no human being who works in an office ever has to buy paper clips. You can use all the paper clips you want, but they always come back to you. I send some out in the mail attached to documents, I get them back attached to other documents. Never once in my life have I run out of paper clips. It’s scientifically impossible.

So I’m thinking that there must be a fixed amount of paper clips in the universe. Come on. Have you ever heard of a paper clip factory? No! Because they’re in such abundance, the paper clips that one could buy in a retail store are just repackaged paper clips that have been in circulation since the invention of the paper clip. And if you buy them, you are a sucker.

Does anyone have any corroborating evidence that I may use to support my thesis? Have any other office supplies displayed such behavior?

My research continues…

In the know
Here's what you need to know this week in the "human interest" category of the news:

O.D.B. Dead.
Star Jones. Married.
Colin Powell. Gone with the wind.
Scott Peterson. Dead man walking.
59 year old great grandmother. Pregnant.
Barry Bonds. Yawn.

R.I.P.
*pours a 40-oz. of Magnum on the sidewalk in honor of Old Dirty Bastard*

Deja vu all over again
Fifteen more minutes. That is all that is left in this slow-ass moving Friday.

A few of us just watched the live Scott Peterson verdict. I am actually surprised that they found him guilty. Surprised, but pleased.

Standing there, huddled around the computer screen, reminded me of nearly 10 years ago, waiting for the O.J. criminal verdict to come out. I was a sophomore at OU, and I, along with many students, watched the live verdict on television at our student center. I can't remember what the reaction was when they said he was not guilty. But I do remember, when I left, walking across the college green, only to hear Nakeia*, one of my dorm-mates from freshman year, about two football fields away, screaming at the top of her lungs, "OJ's INNOCENT, Y'ALL!"

Oh my. That girl was a piece of work. I could tell so many stories about her. Like about how she and her friends regularly took a cab to class because they didn't want to walk up the hill from the dorms, or how she and her roommate would go to sleep listening to a CD with one song on repeat, all night long, loud enough for the bass to vibrate everyone's room walls, or how our R.A. knocked on their door and a huge pot smoke cloud wafted out, and the R.A. asked if they were smoking pot, and she said it was incense, and the R.A. believed it. Or how she randomly showed up in one of my econ classes that she wasn't enrolled in, and sat there the entire duration of class wearing headphones and occasionally doing a slight gyration in her seat.

Yeah, I'd tell you all those stories, but they just wouldn't be funny unless you knew her.

Five minutes.

Bad HTML
Apologies to anyone who visited the site in the past 10 minutes. I found some quiz thing called "How Sketchy Are You" and I was 41% sketchy, but the HTML code to copy in the quiz was 100% sketchy and overtook my entire blog. So it's gone. Sayonara.

See the light
For nearly 29 years, I have been under the (false! false! false!) impression that Arby's was gross. I had no evidence to back this up, but I've always felt that fast food roast beef was frankly, kind of icky. Maybe I had it when I was younger and disliked it. I can't really recall.

Anyway, that's all changed. I have now realized that Arby's is delicious. I embrace the oven mitt. I high-five it. And I now have a lifetime of Arby-avoiding to make up for.

Believe me, I will make up for it.

The house Beezlebub built
Well, to lighten the mood a little... we just had a woman call in, she talked to a co-worker of mine, and this woman informed her that she had seen the devil, and that the devil told her that my company owed it to her to build her a house in (an affluent west-of-Cleveland suburb).

I'll have to remember that one the next time I want something. We'll go out to dinner, and when the bill comes, I'll say, "That's OK, I talked to Satan, and he said you'd give us this meal for free."

Rage
On most days, I can contain my utter disdain and loathing for the useless co-worker I like to call Bad Lady. But today I cannot.

Today she crossed the line from just being a waste of a good salary and into the realm of Someone Who I Wish Would Fall Into a Snake Pit and Be Strangled By a Boa Constrictor.

Here's the deal. I was working with a client, with whom I have had a decent rapport. Bad Lady was working with a client who was partnering up with my client. So both needed new business cards. I had designed a logo for my client, which then Bad Lady's client wanted on her cards, so I gave B.L. the artwork.

B.L.'s client wanted a slight change to the logo. B.L. didn't feel like making the change, so she told the client that it couldn't be done because I didn't have time to do it.

Thanks. Way to make me the bad guy.

So her client responded that she would just wait until I had time to do it. So I did it -- in about five minutes, which, if B.L. had just asked me to make the change, I would have done it right then and there. She is just a lazy, worthless, piece of...

Yeah. So I'm in a mood today.

D'oh
So I'm scrolling down and looking at all of the headlines on MSN and I see a story that says "Twain treats fans to block party."

And I think to myself, "Wow, that's nice of him. Wait, didn't he die a hundred years ago or something?"

See, I was thinking it was MARK Twain, aka Samuel Clemens, author of such novels as "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Hound". Instead, it's actually what's-her-name, the Canadian country singer.

My bad.

P.S. You know I was joking about the "Huckleberry Hound", right? I know that it's really called "Sharkelberry Finn."

Argh
We're going to be a little grouchy today. "We" meaning me and my stomach.

We indulged in too many chicken wings last night. Mmmm, wings.

Ugh, just the thought of them now makes me want to hurl. I also didn't sleep so good. But I did have a disturbing dream last night -- I have this dream all the time actually -- where I have a major role in a play that is about to open, and I realize that not only do I not know my lines, but I have never known them, and it is too late to learn them, and I am going to make a total and utter fool of myself. Also curiously, I seem to always be in some kind of Shakespearian play. Hmm. What does it all mean?

It probably just means, don't eat wings before you go to bed.

NaNo Update
I do this with much trepidation, but I am posting the beginning of my NaNoWriMo novel. It can be found here, on my auxiliary blog. Please feel free to offer any wisdom. It's going to be a weird, kinda creepy story. Not Stephen King creepy, but maybe a little bit.

UPDATE: The first two chapters are up. You'll have to start at the bottom and work your way up...

No one will notice
I've spent much of the afternoon trying to touch up a photo of a curly-haired woman. I'm trying to remove the background between her curls so I can put a different-colored background behind her. Tra-la.

Over the years that I have worked here, I've seen my fair share of odd requests for photo touch-ups. Here are my favorites, the Hall of Fame of touch-ups, so to speak:

1. A woman had one of those eyes that doesn't quite look at you dead on, so that when you're talking to her, you don't know which eye is actually looking at you. She requested that we give her a new eye. This was easier said than done. And it's not like when anyone met her, they wouldn't notice that in her picture she had two normal eyes, and in person, she had one normal eye and one freakish fucked up eye, right?

2. Several requests for removal of something called "turkey neck."

3. The alternative to the Atkins diet: we'll just shear a little bit off your hips and sides.

4. Extreme makeover: tummy tuck, facelift, wrinkle zap, turkey neck removal, hair tame, teeth whitening, boob enhancement.

It's pretty amazing what Photoshop can do sometimes. It's even more amazing what people will ask us to do.

I don't give a puck
Did anyone know that the NHL (National Hockey League) was on strike?

Moreover, did anyone care?

Just checkin'.

LeBron James for President
It's all good... at least the Cavs haven't traveled down the Spiral of Suckage yet.

YET.

Tonight is their home opener, and I'll be there.

I'm sure their season will end up like every Cleveland sports team's season ends... Cleveland is the new Boston.

Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck
Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck

Yeah Ohio.

Rock da Vote
I voted today. Did you?
Well, as P-Daddy or Puff Diddy or whatever Sean Combs is calling himself these days says, "Vote, or DIE!!!!!!!"

I don't know if P-Diddy will go door to door to kill you if you don't vote or what, but I wouldn't take that chance. Cause he bad boy for life.

And for the love of god people, check for chads. CHECK FOR CHADS!!!

Gimme some sugar
It's not bad enough that throughout October, we've had a jack-o-lantern in on top of our file cabinet that was constantly filled with candy.

Now, everyone has brought their leftover candy into the office and it has overflowed the jack-o-lantern.

I've eaten so much sugar in the past week I think I can be declared legally dead.