The Amazing Philly Trip, Part 1

I'm really kinda too tired to type this right now, but I'm doing it to keep my mind off of the general crappyness that happened at work today (if you have no idea what I'm talking about e-mail/text/call me and I'll fill you in with all the shitty details). That is why I'm not fooling myself by pretending I'm going to type this whole day's events in one post. I also apologize if this post is lackluster/completely nonsensical.

Danielle and I have been planning this trip for months. It turned out to be a very weird/fun day. We arrived around noon and so decided to find something to eat before visiting our first stop. We walked in about a three block square until finally finding an Irish pub about a half block from where we had parked. We entered and had lunch with some locals who all appeared to be "regulars." I had a cheese steak (because I was in Philly after all), but it left me rather underwhelmed.

After lunch, we headed to the Mutter museum, which Danielle has wanted to visit for a long time. I'm not sure why. For those of you that haven't seen the Mutter museum on the travel channel, it is a place that displays medical oddities. After Danielle got in for the student rate (because she still carries her Penn State id in her wallet...loser), the ticket guy let me in for the student rate as well after I flashed my driver's license "in case, the security cameras were watching."

The museum didn't nearly gross me out as much as I expected it to. It houses a large collection of skulls, items removed from people's throats, a growth from John Wilkes Booth, a malignant tumor from President Garfield, a petrified "soap lady" and various other hands, feet, tongues and babies preserved in glass jars. I think the thing that amazed me the most was the 9 foot long human colon that during autopsy had been discovered to house 40 pounds of poop.

After Mutter, we decided to walk the 6-10 blocks to Eastern State Penitentiary (picture above). Again, a place that Danielle wanted to visit for some unknown reason. The walk did not take us through the ghetto as I had feared, but it was rainy and cold out and stupid me had forgotten to bring my coat to Philly (thank goodness, I don't have kids), so I froze my ass off the whole way...which sure as hell seemed like more than 6-10 blocks. It's weird because it looks like a castle in the middle of the city. We got the guided audio tour and it was actually more interesting than I thought it would be, but also significantly colder. We listened to every possibly interesting entry in order to waste extra time, but eventually were too cold to continue further.

Well, I think that's all for now...stayed tuned for the best part of the day! NKOTB!!

I Hate My Pants

I'm not really sure what the major problem was today, but my pants really bothered me. It was a little weird because I had worn them before, but they didn't piss me off as much as they did today. I think the biggest problem was that Victoria's Secret and I have different concepts of "low rise" and "short".

In my foolishness, I thought that "low rise" were meant to sit low and snug on the hips. Apparently, Victoria thinks low rise means that the crack must make an appearance. And "short," at 5'4", I thought I would qualify as short, but apparently, I'm midget. "Short" is around 5'7". My pants ticked me off so much that I was in a bitter, angry mood the whole day (just ask the people I work with). Even though Terry is still on vacation, we went to the candy store, and I got a free latte at McDonald's (all good things), I was still miserable. Now I'm torn as to whether I give the pants a second chance.

The Pink Lunch

This past week we had lunch bunch at work which is like a potluck with a theme. The theme was pink food in honor of breast cancer awareness month. This seems like a really great idea at first until you try to come up with pink foods. But all turned out good. We had ham and cheese stromboli (I didn't dye the dough pink though and this was apparently very disappointing for some people), mini salmon cakes, seafood salad, shrimp, salad with raspberry vinaigrette dressing, strawberry banana smoothies, pink cookies and this awesome strawberry ice cream pie.
It came with red raspberry drizzle which I kinda glopped on rather than drizzled. But my favorite was Stefanie's pink pasta salad.

That is normal pasta in there. She just dyed the water she boiled it in and tinted the mayonnaise. How cool is that!!

Phillies Win!!

I was all set to blog about the pink lunch that we had today at work, but since the Phillies won the World Series that will have to wait. My family is longtime Philly fans. My grandfather loved the Phillies and my mom used to get in trouble when she was little for listening to their baseball games on the radio in her room after bedtime. I remember when my parents took me to a game when I was around 7. We had gloves to catch foul balls and everything. One foul ball hit the ralling two rows in front of us and skipped off to the right or we would've had it! Anyways, this is a big deal and I have some random thoughts from last night's game. (Which was the result of a conspiracy by MLB to make the World Series go longer, but I won't rant on that because I've already done it enough to random people in the grocery store and such.)

1). I like that Philly fans booed Bud Selig. That's just typical Philly, and Bud probably deserves it.
2). Ryan Howard running to the pitchers mound after the game...that I think, was the fastest he'd run the entire World Series.

3). Brad Lidge. I'm not just saying this because he's a Notre Dame guy, but I still can't wrap my head around what he's done. 48 for 48. I just hope to make a week at my job without screwing something up. There's no way I could go to work 48 times and not make a debacle of something.

4) Did it bother anyone else that the announcer's kept referring to things that happened "tonight" even though it was two days ago? Like (I'm just making this up), Upton is 0 for 2 so far tonight...no, he's not. He was 0 for 2 a couple days ago. They could've said "in the game", but they didn't. The first time I thought they just made a mistake and I was ok with that because it was a weird circumstance, but then they did it OVER AND OVER AND OVER.

It's been a really great sports week for me: Notre Dame won, Penn State beat Ohio State, the Eagles won, Philly won the World Series, Washington fired Ty Willingham (which sucks for him, but makes Notre Dame not look racist anymore), and Notre Dame basketball is ranked #9 in the preseason rankings. Wow! That only sets up for complete misery this weekend.

Thank you, Blackberry!

Since my dad has now discovered how to take pictures and e-mail them with his blackberry. I'm hopefully going to get a lot more of random pictures from him. Like this:

Yes, that's a statue of Bruce Lee. And this:

I'm not sure why he felt the need to send these to me, but he did. He e-mailed these pictures to his secretary as well...isn't she lucky! He's in Hong Kong...I think.

I Need A Halloween Costume

We just received an e-mail from our HR department giving us permission to dress up on Friday. But I don't have a costume and really don't want to go buy one. I want to dress up because they area allowing us to. FREEDOM YEAH!! The costume cannot be anything that is risque or deals with political or religious statement (or may otherwise offend people)...so basically dominatrix, Sarah Palin and the Pope are out for costumes. Anyone have any good/cheap/creative ideas for a costume that I would mostly already have around my house.

Pumpkin Carving

I got invited to join in lunch and pumpkin carving at my uncle's house Saturday. Since I'm somehow still in the "kid" category (I guess since I don't have kids myself yet) I got to carve a pumpkin too. Pumpkin carving had to be moved indoors because of the much publicized rain here in Pennsylvania, which other than being a mess for my uncle was not that big of a deal. I didn't realize how long it had been since I had carved a pumpkin.

I free handed an old school Jack-O-Lantern face (with Spongebob-esque teeth). I also have to say that the new pumpkin carving little saw tools work much better than a carving knife that I was forced to use when I was young. Oh, how pumpkin carving technology has improved! My cousins were a lot more creative than I was. We did have a few faces (though admittedly less traditional than mine), there was also a Nittany Lion logo, a house, and a cat which needed dowel rod support so as not to fall in. I'm now trying to decide whether I dare to put it out by my front door and risk that it be smashed by some riff raff...I just like saying riff raff.

This is an actual picture of my pumpkin (on my purple sofa), so you'll be happy to realize that I now have access to a digital camera again, so that should mean more pictures. When my dad gave me his camera and I finally got it charged, I discovered about 70 pictures from our family's trip to Hawaii a year and a half ago. When I asked if they wanted me to print them out or save them to a disk or anything, I was told to just go ahead and delete them. And why did they have a digital camera?

15 Thoughts from the 3-day

Well, the walk is finally over, so here's some deep (and not so deep thoughts) from the Philadelphia 3-day. (Side note: That fountain was in downtown Philly...can you believe how ridiculously pink it is? and how cool! It looks like a giant pond of Pepto.)

1). Blue, Red, and Purple Gatorade pretty much all taste the same. At all the pit stops, they had either Gatorade or water that you could fill your water bottle with. By the end I was just taking whatever the person closest to me had even if my bottle was already partially full of a different color.

2). Just because something is sponsored by Pepperidge Farms does not necessarily mean that there will be Goldfish available...though it should.

3). The smell of Bengay permeates EVERYTHING. My dad used pretty much an entire tube of Bengay after the first day. It was like living in a senior citizens' aromatherapy room. We were downstairs in the lobby and some lady was like "it smells like Bengay down here." I lost it. We came back to the hotel room 12 hours later and it still smelled.

4). The 3-day people are big LIARS. Every morning we would get a card that would have the mileage for all the stops on it. So you'd get to a pit sto,p be like "oh, there's only 1.3 miles till the next pit stop." Then we'd walk for like 20 minutes and hit the "1 mile till pit stop" sign. That's BULL SHIT! Just because they put "all mileage is approximate" on the card, should not give them the right to dick around with us. Also, someone had an extremely accurate pedometer that measured 25 miles on the day we only were supposed to walk 20.

5). Boobs are funny. There were funny boob related signs, shirts, team names and cheers all over. So here are my favorites: Team Hakuna Ma Ta-tas, the old guys that wore the "boobs make me smile" and "I'm here for the boobies" shirts, the little 4 year old and 6 year old chanting "breasts yes, cancer no," the girl dressed as a pirate with the "treasure your chest" sign, and finally the "save a life, grope your wife" sign.

6). I am a big sap. There was a woman walking that had a sign on her back that said "I walk...because I miss my mom" and it had a picture of her with her mom and the date her mom died in 2005...cried like a baby...little kids with a homemade sign that said "walk, mommy, walk"...cried...no reason at all when I was walking in some random park...cried.

7). Gay guys dancing with pink boas make everyone smile. We had three "support team members" that didn't walk, but just drove us around and cheered us on and brought us changes of shoes and stuff. The one guy every time we saw him cheering, he was dancing with a pink feather boa to Abba songs. It brought a smile to everyone's face.

8) Anyone who says home field advantage does not exist is a LIAR. We had these cheering sections where people would clap and high five and give you candy and cookies and whatever and no matter how tired I was after hitting one of them, I could go on forever even if it was straight up hill. My dad was also wearing a Notre Dame sweatshirt, so we got a lot of "Go Irish"'s too.

9) And speaking of hills. HILLS SUCK! Even downhills suck and when the hill is at mile 19.8 of a 20 mile walk. They suck more. If I were to do this again, I'd pick a nice flat city...like Chicago.

10) Sometimes straight guys look good in pink. It was amazing how many guys that participated actually wore pink. And along this same note, there are about 20 billion shades of pink.

11) No matter what is sore if you ignore it, it will eventually go numb. Things hurt that I didn't know existed, but if I ignored it, it would eventually go numb. Along these same lines, just because you look like you are going to die, feel like you are going to die, and think you are going to die, does not necessarily mean you will die.

12) It is possible to gain weight after walking 60 miles...I did it. Gained 5 pounds this weekend. How does this happen? Possibly because I ate pretty much anything I wanted because I was walking 60 miles.

13) It is possible to have a blister bigger than the toe it is on. My friend Becky took off her shoe and her pinkie toe was bigger than her big toe, which was weird until we realized that the entire top portion of it was a blister. She held it up to the sun and you could see through the top 2/3 of her toe. Gross! It is also possible to have a blister with a blister on it.

14). Even when it's not a race, it's a race. They had a counter at each pit stop and finish line, so every chance people would ask what number they were. At the end of the day 1 we were like 1320, which isn't bad out of 3900 people. At the end of day three, my dad and I were 508 and 509. Which was great, except it could've been better had we not waited 45 minutes at lunch for the rest of our team to catch up...GRRR...they also count all the people that were bussed back, so that's not really fair.

15) It is absolutely impossible for my dad and I to have a sentimental moment. Because he's a jerk. So we're walking down the finish line aisle thing. People cheering, his arm around my shoulders, having just walked 60 miles together and you know what he does? Hip checks me so that I fall over sideways. Ass.

The Top 10 Anti-Smoking Lyrics

Today Kate was forced to go to some anti-tobacco conference or whatever, which sucked for her, but rocked for me when she brought back the goldmine "The Prevention" which is an anti-smoking hip hop album put out by the Dauphin County Executive Commission on Drugs and Alcohol, Inc. (DCECDA). Actually in their album notes it says Alchohol, but I'm assuming they meant alcohol. We listened to it in my office and it features 6 songs: "I Cut That Smoking Out," "Blow It Up Yaw," "Think About It," "Unaddicted," "Ashes to Ashes Puff to Puff," and the ever popular "Nicotine Fit/Butt Ugly." I can't make this stuff up folks. So here are my top ten lyrics from the album.

10) "So stay away from nicotine; Before it stunts your growth"
9) "Plus your breath smellin funny; and your teeth turning brown"
8) "And what you'll have to show fo ryour life; Are tar filled lung sacs."
7) "But you got more folks coughing; than an outbreak of SARS"
6) "No help wit the candles; better scramble like Randle"
5) "The advanced aging wrinkles; and how they came to be."
4) "You got more air in your lungs; Than these rafts out there floating."
3) "Lungs collapse; Cancer attacks your body; Rigor mortis sets in hospital lobbies"
2) "Breathing kind of hard, kicking; Teeth looking sickening; No way you getting a chicken; Unless you mean finger licking."
1) "Couldn't stay on top of the log; You fell off like them frogs; Trying to kick the habit; Cause Trix are for the rabbit."

Thanks Kate!

The Field Trip

My cousin, Aubrey, asked that I chaperone her 7th grade field trip to the PA Renaissance Faire last Thursday. Being a naive, childless, 27-year-old, I agreed. I walked into the LGI room and noticed the eyes of all the parents turn towards me and whispering begin. (Obviously the "how young was she when she had this kid?" chatter.) A teacher walked over to me and asked who my child was. In a voice loud enough for most to hear I answered "I'm going with my COUSIN, Aubrey." She hands me an envelope that has 5 names on it (2 girls and 3 boys) and scribbles about a bee sting allergy and someone having to meet the team for football early. Don't they know I'm a field trip rookie?

I find that the three boys were supposed to be in another group, but their chaperone's son was sick and didn't come to school, so neither did that chaperone. I also find out that my cousin doesn't even know who they are but her friend says they are "assholes." Great! The bus ride is full of immature giggle fests (like fart jokes and just general obnoxiousness) and I'm already wondering what I had gotten myself into and wondering if somehow I can run away.

We arrive and I get the group to go to the "Mud Pit" first. For those of you that have never been to a mud pit, picture a Shakesperean play (dumbed down for 7th graders) but with a giant pit of mud in the middle. (I really wish my digital camera was working.) Anyway, we get there a little late and the only real seats available are in the first couple rows, which the kids start to head for. I stop them short (being the Ren Faire veteran that I am) and explain that the reason those seats are still open is because you will get slung with mud. We opt instead for standing positions on the side. In the middle of Antony and Cleo (ala mud), mud flies all over the first row of prissy girls that had taken the empty seats. They jump up and are shrieking "Oh My God...look at my Abercrombie jeans. I just got them last night." Everyone is laughing hysterically and then the girls start yelling "It's not funny. These clothes are ruined." Which of course makes everyone laugh even more. And if you still can't picture, the mud pit...lucky for you, that's why they invented You Tube.



(It was the alligator's death roll that got them.)

The rest of the trip went really well. The boys and girls actually managed to get along well. They were very considerate of taking turns letting each other pick what to do next. I found out that the highlight for them, though, was the sword swallower that stuck the handle of a spoon up his nose, which was both impressive and disturbing. I turned to my group and said "that's why you need to stay in school." I was hoping to find this on You Tube as well, but unfortunately all the clips they had of him was actually swallowing swords. Bummer!

I Was Almost a Fall Person

Spring had always been my favorite season (well, for at least as long as I can remember having a favorite season.) I like how the sun is warm, but the breeze is cool. I like the chirping birds and new spring flowers blooming. I like wearing short sleeves and flip flops when its actually probably too cold to, but because you've been in an Arctic hell the past three months, you don't care.

That almost changed though. Autumn came on this year very abruptly. One day it was summer and then all of the sudden it was cold and the leaves were orange and it left people wondering "when did that happen?" But I kinda liked it. I got to put my flannel sheets on my bed and drink hot chocolate (I swear by Hershey's Goodnight Kisses) and watch football all weekend. Plus all the houses are going all out for Halloween which is nice. So I thought to myself "Self, I really kinda like fall. Maybe it should be my favorite holiday now." (Because I always have to debate the status of my favorites.) "I wonder why I didn't like it before." Then yesterday I woke up and there was frost on my windshield and I remembered.

What Happened to My HR Department?

I'm sure that all of you remember my rant about how my company's employee handbook requires the wearing of hosiery. Well, last week we received an e-mail with a few changes to our dress code. Starting today (October 1st) Mondays are now "blues Mondays" so we are allowed to wear jeans and sneakers and play blues music...CRAZY TIMES! Thursdays are "team Thursdays" we can wear jeans, sneakers, and a shirt, T-shirt or sweatshirt of our favorite team. It is also recommended that we bring food to share on Thursdays. It's kind of weird that we can dress down on Mondays and Thursdays and then have to dress back up for Fridays, but I guess I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth. Guess what else? The hosiery law has been lifted. WOOHOO. So of course today I wore my cutest, open toed heels and painted my toe nails red. My department is already trying to push the envelope...no KISS is not a team.

Bad Car-ma

Yes, I know that's not how you spell kharma. It's a play on words. Anyway, ever since I had my fender bender and then the guy died, my car has been a nightmare. One randomly annoying, but not life threatening thing after the other. I think the dead guy cursed my car for his "probably unrelated" death.

First, my cd player broke. I'd hit the CD button and nothing would happen. Nothing at all. It doesn't bother me as much that I can't use the CD player as that I have 6 cds stuck in there that I can't use. (And, yes, it's a 6 disc changer. I didn't just shove 6 cds in there because that obviously would be the problem.) I called my garage just to feel out how much it would cost to get fixed because for all I know it could just be a cd jammed in there. And the garage guy says "Uh...we don't do that...I'd just buy a new cd player at Circuit City." What the hell do you mean you don't do that? You're a garage and its in my car. Fix it! So I'm not going to have a cd player for a while because I don't have the money to fix it right now.

Then my heat/air conditioning stopped working. I'd turn the fan dial and nothing would blow at all. I took that in to be fixed and $250 later got it back fully functional. I also had the windshield wiper motor that was recalled replaced for free. I'm driving back to the office after picking my car up and notice a small crack on the bottom of my windshield. It was a very inconspicuous location, and normally I would've doubted whether it had been there before and I just didn't notice it. Luckily, my friendly state representative had fliered my apartment complex that morning, so I knew there had not been a crack on my windshield when I removed the flyer.

I looked at my receipt and on the bottom was typed "small crack driver's side windshield" and thought they were going to try to say it was already there. I called the garage, and they said I had to take the car back. Drove back on my lunch break. The guy looks at it and says "yeah, we probably did that. I guess we owe you a new windshield. We'll send people over to your office tomorrow to fix it."

The next day, I'm on my way to work and the crack begins to grow as I'm driving so now it reaches the majority of the way across the windshield. I was paranoid that the windshield somehow going to implode on me. They come and fix my windshield and say "just take it by the garage to have new inspection stickers placed on." So what's the point of you coming to my office, if I have to go to the garage for new stickers anyway? "I put your old sticker on the middle console in case you get pulled over by the cops before you get to the garage." I don't know what I was expecting but it was not a rectangular piece of glass cut out with my inspection stickers on it. (i'd have posted a picture except that my camera is broken and my dad sent his that he never uses but no charger for the battery, which is dead.)

This morning I take it to have new inspection stickers put on and it takes AN HOUR! I used to do a lot of stickering when I was little and NEVER did it take an hour to put on two stickers. So Mr. Deadguy that hit my car, if your ghost happens to read my blog, please leave my car along.

Holy Crap! The 3-Day is like a month away.

Ok, it just really hit me how completely crazy this is. In less than a month, I'm supposed to walk 60 miles? Um...wait. what? (Note to close friends: why didn't any of you smack me upside the head?) Yes, I watched the safety video. I've found shoes and socks that don't give me blisters. My feet are sufficiently calloused (I'm scheduling a pedi for the week after the walk). We've reserved our hotel rooms (because there is no way that I'm staying in a tent after walking 26 miles.) i've been doing practice walks, but I'm a little nervous because I haven't really responded that well to any of my longer practice walks. One time (before the new shoes) I got blisters all over my heels. One time I became extremely sick the following day. One time I woke up the next day and my left foot felt all crunchy and weird inside of it. Not good. Granted, I was probably walking faster and not taking as many breaks/stretching/eating/drinking enough because walking bores me and I just wanted to get them over. However, I feel I'm better off than some of my teammates. My dad, for one, is running a marathon the weekend before the 3-day and has yet to do actually any walking. Many of my other teammates have less that $10 of their $2200 minimum raised. This could be a disaster. AHHHH!!

I still also have yet to meet my $2200 minimum, so if you are one of those people that have been planning to sponsor me, please do so soon so that I'm assured the donation can be registered in time for the walk. There's a couple ways to give. 1) Go to this link and give online using a credit card. 2) Go to the same link, print off a form and mail it in (this is the slowest way, so if you're planning on doing this. Do it soon.) 3) if you see me on a regular basis and want to just pass me some cash, I've been taking up a collection, which I will then turn in right before the walk. Thanks again for all your support!!

10 Fun Facts About Poop

Yes, you read that correctly. I never claimed to have a classy blog. In our office we had a "library" with various weird/interesting books. When someone gets really pissed off at something, we pull out a book and have an inspirational reading. Our favorite book had been "Is It Time to Make a Change?" because we can normally find a poem in this book that is sarcastically appropriate. Today Stefanie brought her own book in "The Truth About Poop." So I'm going to enlighten you with my top ten list of fun poop facts direct from the book, with of course my snide remarks in parenthesis because what would this blog be without snide remarks.

10. The poop produced while people are fasting has little to no smell. (Who actually smelled a fasting person's poop to discover this?)
9. English King Henry the Eighth had a toileting stool covered with black velvet and studded with 2000 gold nails. (The nails on my velvet toileting stool are platinum! Why haven't I seen this on the Tudors?)
8. When they are upset, chimps who have been taught sign language indicate their frustration by making the sign for poop. (Kinda like when I express my frustrations by yelling "this is crap!")
7. Eating red meat will make your poop turn darker. Eating beets will make it red. Milk gives it a yellowish tinge, and blackberries can turn it green. (A virtual rainbow of poop)
6. The navy suggests that people who are stranded at sea should store their poop in the life raft. Sharks can smell their prey's poop over a mile away. (If you are ever stranded in a life raft and don't get eaten by a shark, I expect some thanks.)
5. Geese poop, on average, once every 12 minutes. Sloths poop only once a week. (No wonder there's always geese poop and not sloth poop everywhere!)
4. While their hibernating, bears don't poop at all. (There's more detail into the how and why of this, but it's better that I don't get into it.)
3. When wolverines are done feeding on a dead animal, they save the rest for later by pooping all over it. (Insert your own University of Michigan joke here.)
2. There is a Moose Dropping Festival in Talkeetna, Alaska. There people buy numbered moose nuggets that are carried up 1000 feet by weather balloon. A cord is pulled and it rains moose poop. The owner of the nugget that falls closest to the X drawn on the ground wins $1000. (Because what else is there to do in Alaska.)
1. Pooping in a space toiled it complicated. Astronauts must swing bars across their legs to stay put. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. (You know you've always wondered!)

The Check Out Nightmare

Here's how traumatic my grocery experience just was. I got home and poured myself a glass of wine. Never before have groceries driven me to drink.

So tonight, I had a meeting and afterwards I had planned to stop at the grocery store. I needed some milk and a few other things. The meeting got down a little later than expected, I was tired, and the Eagles were on, but I convinced myself to stop. "It's practically on the way home, and I'll be really pissed when I don't have milk for on my cereal tomorrow, so I'll just run in real quick and I'll probably just miss the first couple of plays."

I got all the stuff I wanted and then went to check out. I didn't do the self check out because I had coupons and they usually don't work so well at the self check out. I saw a lane that had one girl with a small cart and all her stuff was already on the conveyor belt so I chose that one. The first problem thing I noticed was that she hadn't weighed any of her produce (which was most of what she had), but also none of it was bagged, so I figured that she was trying to help the environment, and I can respect that. The cashier rings up her cucumber.

Customer: That's supposed to be $1.89.
Cashier: Well, it rang up at 99 cents.
Customer: But the sign said they were supposed to be $1.89.
Cashier: But 99 cents is cheaper...so is that ok?
Customer: Oh yeah...I guess so

Then she rings up her apples.
Customer: Those were 99 cents a pound
Cashier: You have the organic apples. Those are more expensive.
Customer: No, I don't. There's a sign. Come, I'll show you.

Both the cashier and the customer walk over to the produce department. I'm standing there with all my groceries on the belt trying to decide whether I should try to move to another line. Guess what...they were organic apples. They were more expensive.

Cashier: Your total is $35.89.
Customer swipes her card. It doesn't go through. She swipes it again. Doesn't go through again. At this point I'm trying to figure out if I can gouge my eyes out with a twix bar.
Customer: That's ok I have cash
She digs around in her purse and comes up empty handed.
Customer: Is there a phone I can use?

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!!
Cashier: I think they'll let you use the one over at customer service.
Customer walks over to customer service and calls someone. Cashier is trying to figure out what to do with all her groceries and stuff. Finally, she calls over her manager who suspends the transaction, moves all the other girl's groceries and FINALLY (about a half hour later) they can begin to ring me up. I pay and leave and the other girl is still on the phone trying to figure out how to pay for her groceries. AHHHHHH!

I Demand the Return of My Video

Today I wanted to watch the movie The Fugitive because I haven't seen it in a while (longer than I realized apparently). I pop the tape in without really looking at it and am shocked when I see some Fox reality show when I hit play. I get really pissed thinking that myself or someone else inadvertantly tape over my movie. I eject the tape and on it is a blue label with a gold monogram ND and the words "QB's Weekly Scouting Tape Holiday".

Explanation of what happened. When I was in college, we had a LOT of videos. So many that we created a sign out sheet for people to check them out like a library, and then they would mark them when they were returned. We didn't really check the videos though, obviously. Apparently my friend Aileen had borrow The Fugitive and got it mixed up with her boyfriend's QB tape that they had been using to tape various TV shows. Like I said, I haven't watched the movie in a LONG time.

The Last Post

I figure I better post tonight since this may be the last post. In case you haven't heard some scientists tomorrow are doing an experiment which may cause the earth to be swallowed in a black hole. Though considering the meeting I have tomorrow, being swallowed by a black hole might be preferable. Unfortunately nothing really happened today, so I'll just give you a random synopsis of my day.

1) I wake up and have cereal.
2) I go to work and spend most of the morning answering e-mail and voice mails.
3) I got to a meeting regarding our new health insurance which means I will have switched health insurances 6 times since graduating college 5 years ago. Luckily, I don't have to switch doctors (seems doctor #4 is the charm!). I also got to bitch to the head insurance chick about how I think my optometrist's office is ripping me off by not submitting my claim correctly to the insurance. She seemed to agree, but will "check on it."
4) At lunch, we discussed how obnoxious some vegans can be. (this was spawned by my comment that I had eaten vegetarian the past two days without realizing it.) Although I didn't mention that Moby is a vegan and is probably a cool vegan. They also doubted that I made the yummy chocolate pecan biscotti that was on the table. (It's a recipe out of my "Friend's" cookbook). I made sure to label the biscotti so that they wouldn't be confused with really dry, crunchy, horrible brownies.
5) I made myself a cup of Tazo Passion Tea which is bright red and like to secretly pretend I'm a vampire drinking blood tea. Then I was slightly fearful that it had turned my lips bright red or given me a Kool-aid mustache, but it didn't.
6) During the afternoon, I cleaned my office, so that Charlene would get off my case (it's not done yet though) and then Kate and I spent the afternoon exploring the helpful sections in the back of my new 2009 calendar including "Helpful tips for going through customs."
7) I go to the gym and two morons go the wrong way down the parking lot which has slanted spaces and is barely wide enough for one car going the correct way let alone a car also going the wrong way. I actually scream, in my enclosed car, at the top of my lungs, "you are going the wrong f***ing way you j***a**" out of frustration. Then I felt better.
8) I went to yoga and didn't realize until I was changing that i had brought a black shirt and black pants. I looked like a yoga villain (like becoming super flexible is part of my secret plot to take over the world). I also discovered that my knee fits perfect above the bridge of my nose. AND after 6 months of no-show, yoga boy made and appearance.

So that was my not so exciting possibly last day of Earth not being in a black hole. I think now I'll go eat some ice cream and watch Murder She Wrote episodes, cause that's really how I'd like to spend my last day on Earth.

So Many Questions

When I opened the internet today and saw the story on my homepage "Elephant Cured of Heroin Addiction" I had to read it. Just how does an elephant get addicted to heroin in the first place. Apparently through bananas that his trainers laced with the stuff. I would really love to see what an elephant on heroin looks like or an elephant on heroin withdrawal looks like.

Doesn't That Look Appetizing?

My boss went around with a little basket today putting Mallow Pizza's on everyone's desk. They had little notes on them saying "Please have lunch on me. --Terry." Looking at this makes me want to vomit and the texture...ick. Yet, I'm strangely curious. It seems like the type of thing that would survive a nuclear blast. She's so weird.