Happy Halloween!

All day I've been wondering if I like Halloween.

Cons:

- Zombies walking into the store asking me if I can help them find something

- Loud (drunk) trick-or-treaters

- Egging

- People who get their clever pun costumes ideas from new episodes of The Office.

Pros:

- Candy

- It's fall

- Available parking in my lot (something unknown at 10:00 at night)

- The HILARIOUS exchange I heard when I got home tonight:

Late trick-or-treater: "What are you doing here?"

Neighbor (dude wearing blond wig and a baby carrier with doll -- Kate Gosselin?): "Just hanging out."

Trick-or-treater: "Is that a BABY? What are you doing with a BABY? That's why you don't do drugs you know."

Neighbor: Stunned silence

Trick-or-treater: "I mean...I mean...do you have any candy?"

Neighbor: Still stunned

I guess all I have to say is Happy Halloween!

Disappointed

So. One of the things in life I find most disappointing is when recipes don't turn out as well as they look. Just made pork chops with sweet potato chutney. Sounded delicious, since I love pork chops and I love sweet potatoes.

Unfortunately, maybe I cooked the pork chops poorly or something (stupid broiler), but it didn't turn out as well as I had hoped. I think I'll stick to my standard pork chops recipe with baked sweet potatoes from now on. Except I am a little proud that I tried something new and got out of the rut. Not being beaten down by the man every day leaves me room to get creative with the cooking.

Tomorrow's menu: beef stew in the slow cooker. Hopefully I'll have more success with it than with the pork chips.

Newsweek Being Stupid (Again)

I was reading Newsweek the other day and something caught my eye. In their weekly "Indignity Index" of all the stupid things people have done over the week, they had some politician in New Jersey who has, according to Newsweek, been attacking his rival's weight by running ads claiming that he "threw his weight around" to get out of a parking ticket. (Sorry about the run-on sentence).

And after talking to one friend who's a writer and another who's a grammar-cop, I determined that, yes, indeed, Newsweek is stupid. Any well-read person knows that "to throw one's weight around" merely means that you're trying to impress people with how influential, important, or well-known you are. But no editor at Newsweek could even run a Google search on that particular idiom. I mean, for real?

It's one thing to pretty much lie about being a non-partisan publication, but it's another to just let editing and writing go out the window. Completely.

The End.

Hiatus

So I've been on hiatus for a rather long time. But I have excuses. Like that I got a job. Sure, I'm only working retail, but a job's a job. Money coming in and all that. And even thought it isn't full time, I'm working hard and have such weird hours that I'm so tired. And once I get out of the habit of doing something, it's hard to get back into it. Like flossing my teeth. Or going to bed on time.

So, anyway, in the month or so since I last posted, I got the job, I watched the entire series of Kings (awesome), I've read some good books, and I've gotten myself an ear infection. Woot.

But I'm back.

Cameras

If you know me, you know I like to take pictures. A lot. If you don't know me, you might have gathered that from all the pictures on this blog. I have two cameras -- a point and shoot and a digital SLR. And while I don't know how to use all the features on either of those cameras, I can at least take some decent pictures.

That's all to establish that I can operate a camera. Last night at the Keith Urban concert, though, I wanted to take a picture with my camera phone to send a mocking picture to my brother. (He believes that if you actually sell records, you aren't a real artist or something.) But I couldn't figure out how to make the thing zoom. I could take a sepia picture. Or a picture with a different f-stop. I could change the lighting. And the flash. But I couldn't make the stupid phone zoom. I finally figured it out this morning when I played with it more.

My point is, though, that I hate how cell phone companies want everything to be so complicated. It matters more to them that you be able to say that you can take a picture in sepia than it does to actually be able to figure out how to zoom in on something. And that's a problem.

However, the zoom function is now working well and my friend took a picture with her phone so that I could send that mocking text to my brother. Whew.

Concert

Last night my friend and I went to an awesome concert: Keith Urban with Sugarland. And in order to satisfy you music snobs out there, we left halfway through Keith Urban. He was too loud. And all his songs sound alike. And my friend was getting a headache from the bass.

However, Sugarland rocked the house. And Jennifer Nettles (the singer) will blow your head off with her talent. That woman can sing.

But they sang a song that I'd forgotten about: "Gotta Be Something More." I used to belt it out on my way to work. Which I haven't done in awhile because I haven't exactly been commuting recently.

But during the song while my friend and I were dancing and being generally joyful and happy, the words hit home again. And I realized that now I get to find something more. So while I would love to have any job, I hope that when I finally find something it won't just be another paycheck. And that it will give me time to find something more to do with my life than simply breathing in exhaust and staring at a computer screen.

Don't Worry, the Government's Here

I'm sorry it's been so long since my last post, but I have a decent excuse: crazy and insane sunburn.

See, last weekend I went tubing and even though I put lots of sunscreen on my pasty body, I got horribly sunburned and I think even got some sun poisoning. Good times.

But I love tubing. It's so fun and relaxing. And we even got to jump into the river off a rock. I blame my mountain upbringing for my love of swimming in rivers. I just wish there had been a rope swing. I love rope swings. Bust that's a relatively small complaint in the big picture of floating down a river with a bottle of wine and nothing to do but try to avoid the rocks.

But onto the title of this post: the incident of the school bus.

In order to get the multitudes of people who want to get on the river when it's nine hundred thousand degrees outside, Butt's Tubes uses school buses. And our bus driver got all hung up on a guardrail. It was marginally hilarious. Especially when the park ranger who was hanging around the put-in spot pulled out a sledgehammer to try to get the bus off the guardrail. And as he walked up to the bus with it he yelled: "Don't worry folks, the Government's here!" Hilarious.

But the bus got off the guardrail and we got in the river. And if the whole back of my body hadn't gotten sunburned, it would have been a perfect day.