There's One, Only!

Half-truths

I tell people all the time that I walk to work in all weather, all year round.

What I often don't tell them is that I live next door. On the other side of a shared driveway.

Pronouns

Around here at work, we have an unusual way of using pronouns. (And by we, I mean everyone else…)
Let me give you a couple examples…

Said to me: - What it means:
“We have to get this done.” - I have to get something done.
“I need to do something.” - We need to do something.
“You need to do this.” - OK. That one means what it says…

It’s not too confusing once you learn the rules.

Cartoon?

I've got this great idea for a comic strip. It's all about the life of a guy running a store/gas station/car wash, and all the crazy/stupid things that happen there. As well as the occasional mathmatic/science type joke. (Hey, go with what you know, right?)

Only one problem. I'm not sure if I can draw at all...

Of course, from what I've seen around the internet, artistic talent isn't necessarily a requirment for a web-comic.

'Tis merely a flesh wound...

Just as with any wild animal, once a power-tool has tasted human blood, it must be put down to prevent it from attacking another person.

On the other hand, there's an even chance that on the next full moon I'll transform into some sort of rotary-saw were-beast...

The hidden cost of wind power

For the last several months, we’ve been seeing bits of windmills go by our place. The 40’ long propellers usually go by in sets of three trucks (two propellers per truck).

The towers appear to be made up of three sections. At least that’s what we think from seeing three different sized tubes go by every couple of days. The narrowest is about 10’ wide, with the widest looking about 20’ wide.

Which is where the problem today came from. One of the base sections for these windmills took down a Time-Warner cable line running across the street. Snagged it and tore it clean off the telephone poles.

Right now, the transportation crew for the windmill tower is sitting there, blocking half the road, waiting for a Time-Warner crew to come and fix the cable. (I can only guess what kind of trouble they’d get into if they left the scene before they were allowed to.)

So when you see that maintenance fee on your Time-Warner bill, remember, it’s all part of the cost of wind power.

Update: From reports in the paper, I think the same crew knocked down a power line and put the lights out for an entire side-street last night.

Shouldn't they know this stuff?

I heard the funniest thing on The Science Channel the other day. During a show about comets, (the Deep Impact mission, mostly) the narrator mentioned a few possible methods of diverting an impending comet strike.

The plan involving a nuclear explosion to bump the comet into a different orbit he labeled “controversial.” Because, "No one knows the harmful effects of radiation in space."

Radiation. In. Space.

Yeah, sure hope that giant thermonuclear ball of fire we call the sun isn’t kicking too much radiation out… It could be harmful, don’t ya know?

Back from the wedding

Everything went well. No surprises or problems. But it's been a reeeeally long weekend.

Maybe someday I'll tell y'all about the trip to Whitey's the night before...

Off to Cleveland

I gotta go be in my brother's wedding in Cleveland. Be back Sunday. Sooner if the hotel's got free WiFi.

(Think they'll let me live-blog the service?)

Oh yes they call him...

Harvey, they're gonna catch you eventually.

Primapapyrophobia

(Fear of taking the top paper. I couldn't find the real word for it, so I made this one up.)

I know that there are many of you out there who are afraid of taking the top newspaper off the rack. I don't know if you think that the words are worn from other people skimming the headlines, or if you think that the top paper's got germs. (For all I know, it could be the remnant of some kind of paper training trauma.)

But please, if you feel compelled to take the second Buffalo News down. Just pull it out from under the top one. Don't pick the top paper up and set it on the USA Todays next to them. I make a tiny bit more money from the USA Today, so I'd appreciate it if customers could find them.

Thank You.

(Oh, and we touch all the papers before you get to them, so no matter which one you take, it's got OUR germs on it. Bwahahahahahahahaha!)

NO SHOES, NO SHIRT - NO SERVICE

 Means you have to be wearing your shirt. Simply draping it over your shoulder is not good enough. No, this is not open to interpretation.

 These are not arbitrary rules made up simply because I don’t like seeing Moobs and funky toenails. Shoes are required for YOUR protection. And we serve food here, so the health department won’t allow us to let customers walk around shirtless.

 And the reason you don’t see NO PANTS on the sign is because it’s an issue that’s never come up. If you’re not wearing pants, you’re going to get stopped way before you get to my store.

Someday...

Someday, I'd like to get something delivered in a crate.

Like this.

I hate trash-day

Here at the GEBIV Family Boutique, we collect garbage. No, not in the organized, drive a truck down the street picking up trash-cans way. But rather in the manner that we have several trash-cans available for customer use. And they use them. Boy do they use them. The six outside 30 gallon trash-cans need to be emptied twice a week, on average.

And this is on top of the two to three bags of trash the bakery, store, and car-wash generate themselves each day.

So by Wednesday – garbage day each week, we’ve got quite a few bags of trash. All of them put together usually fill six 55-gal drums (with large, heavy boards on top – to keep the raccoons out). It's a large smelly mess of trashbags that has to be taken out to the street every Wednesday.

In the words of Ron White, “I told you that, so that I could tell you this story.”

Last week, we got new cell-phones at work. I’m not trying to disparage Sprint, but their cell coverage right where I live and work, and also at my parent’s house, is horrible. You could drop a call just by walking from one side of the property to the other. And on top of this, both my Dad and I had done some damage to our phones... Not enough to prevent them from working at all, but enough to prevent them from working properly.

We’d have gone with Verizon, they do have the best coverage in our area. Great coverage in fact. But they wanted to play hard-ball and wouldn’t give us any deals on signing up with them.

Which lead to AT&T-Cingular. Their coverage is almost as good as Verizon’s, much better than Sprint’s. But most importantly, they had a few deals going. Free phones with sign up. (Of course they weren’t the top-line phones, but we don’t need Razors or Blackberries. Or iPhones.) And even better, they had a $100 mail-in rebate for each phone.

The phones arrived last Thursday and we promptly passed them out, tested them and tried to figure out the features. (And called Sprint to cancel our old phones).

Life was good.

On Monday, after testing the phones over the weekend and determining that they were acceptable, we started to get everything together for the rebate forms.

Copy of the invoice. Check.

Copy of one month’s bill. Ok. Don’t have that. But it makes sense that they want to make sure you’re not just getting the rebate and canceling the phones.

Bar code off the box the phone came in. Che - Uh oh. One of the boxes is missing…

No problem. I must have just left it at home when I took the charger and instructions.

Not there. After two days of looking. Still not there. I must have left it lying around at work, where someone must have thrown it out.

Which leads us back to Wednesday, and the six 55 gallon cans of trash. And me digging through them off and on, for about three hours. In 90° plus heat.

…(we make a lot of apple pies at the little bakery tucked into the corner of our store. Fresh apple pies. Which means a lot of peels. Fortunately, the fermenting apples covered up most of the other smells. And there were a lot of other smells)…

Not there.

Oh well. I mentally resigned myself to losing the $100 rebate. I wasn’t happy. But I figured I had done all that was humanely possible in respect to finding the box. I scrubbed off and went back to work.

And after I closed the wash for the day, and stopped in to say goodnight to my grandparents, (who live on the first floor of my house.) Guess what we found sitting on the counter? Go ahead. Guess.

That’s right. THE BOX! I hadn’t taken it home. My grandmother did! And what was worse, she knew where it was all along, but didn’t understand what I had been out in the trash looking for.

Miscommunication. Gotta love it.