Two and a half weeks ago I finally agreed with my husband that it was time to stop waiting on other people to tell us what to do with our lives and start looking for our next house. Tackling a large purchase such as this I expected to run into problems. I base this expectation on my experience apartment shopping. For instance...
I lived for a few years with three friends. There being four of us, we looked for a four bedroom apartment. Four bedroom apartments are extremely scarce in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, I'm quite certain we visited all three apartment complexes that advertised four bedrooms in one apartment.
The first apartment complex we visited seemed lovely. It was nicely wooded and situated by a lake. I was imagining all the lake fun we could have until we actually saw the apartment, the first problem being... we couldn't. While the landlord swore up and down that he would have a four bedroom apartment available when we needed it, he couldn't show us one. He couldn't even show us a drawing of one. He could show us a three bedroom apartment.
As we walked through he pointed out how there would be an opening here, another hall here, the room down there, and as I looked about the example apartment he showed us I realized something. He was going to construct a four bedroom apartment out of one or more smaller apartments. He was going to punch holes in the walls. And the apartment that I was in showed the signs of his workmanship, uneven walls, crooked electrical outlets, rattlely doors. I'm looking at this apartment thinking, "If I sneeze the temporary wall between me and the next bathroom over is going to come crashing down, and I'm going to see more of my neighbors than I ever wanted do."
NO THANK YOU!
We extracated ourselves from that apartment complex as gracefully as we could without signing any paperwork.
Another complex advertized brand new four bedroom townhomes. "A townhome," we thought, "wouldn't the cats have such a wonderful time tearing up and down the steps of a townhome!" So excitedly we set off to visit this lovely four bedroom townhome. The complex was immaculate, the buildings brand new. With great anticipation we wandered around the place we hoped would be our new home. The top floor held three bedrooms and two baths. Beautiful! The second floor encompased the living dining and kitchen areas with a half bath for guests. Fantastic! The bottom floor included the garage, laundry area, and the fourth bedroom.
"Where's the bathroom?" we asked. That's right. The poor fool who inhabited this bedroom would have to climb two flights of stairs to take a shower. I liken this 'marketing only' bedroom to the 'insurance only' backseat of many moderately priced sports cars. It looks good on paperwork but in practice it might be a good place to store your packages, but it's certainly not somewhere to sleep (or sit).
This led me to form a new definition of bedroom. A room can only be defined as a bedroom if it has a) a closet and b) a place to bathe on the same level.
So when my husband and I set out to look for our new (to us) home I expected a few chalenges. I expected I would need to keep an eye out for shoddy workmanship. I expected that in a search for 4 bedrooms and 3 baths I might come upon questionable definitions of 'bedroom'. But I expected I could handle these chalenges and that there would be few surprises as we set out to look at houses the first day.
BOY WAS I WRONG!!!
It took only one house to open my eyes to the world of real estate, and what we had in store. The very first house we saw was a departure from anything we could have expected. I should have known something was wrong just from the pictures in the listing. Oh, there was nothing wrong with the pictures, they were lovely, it's just that there were only two of them. We saw a nice style in front and a large yard in back, and from the description we thought it could be just what we were looking for.
Arriving at the front it looked just like the picture, stately placed in a natural yard beautifully flanked by trees. But as we walked up the driveway we noticed the broken pane in the garage door window.
"A pane," I thought, "That's easily fixed. No problem here." And I kept walking when I should have turned around.
The first thing we saw in the foyer was the dated white tile. "They must have dropped a few bowling balls in here," appologized our agent as he pointed out the broken places.
"That's alright, it's dated and would need to be replaced anyway," but then my eyes slid up the stained carpet on the stairs, and my husband commented on the hardwoods in the adjoining room, and we realized all the floors in the house would need replacing. As we wandered through there were stacks of magazines on every table. We tripped over a vacume cleaner left in the middle of a doorway. The dated tile, broken in many places, extended through to the kitchen. Bits of breakfast in the kitchen with a half full glass of... something. I wondered what this family was thinking.
Let me clarify a bit first. It's not like our visit was unexpected. We had not randomly stopped at a house just to knock on the door and see if we could walk through. No, we had an appointment scheduled several days in advance. If they had wanted to tidy up even a bit you would think they would have put away the vacume, put the breakfast dishes in the sink, or put the panties in the hamper. It was obvious that this family either didn't want to sell the house, or hadn't a clue how to go about it.
My tolerance was high for the decor of this house, the beaded curtain in one of the doorways, the pink tile backsplash in the kitchen which tied in with the pink marble surround on the fireplace; for when we went down the stairs the the basement I commented with sarcasm the lovely teal shade of the capet. I chalked it up as one more flooring to be replaced in this house of horrid floors. We looked into an obviously un-air conditioned long, large room that could be used as... a playroom? Home theatre maybe? Another small room could be an office, and a half bath for convenience.
And finally the last room of the house. An unfinished work-shop/storage room with large double doors leading outside. I stepped in, heard a sound, and could not figure out it's source. A couple more steps and I was fairly certain it was comming from the other side of those large doors leading outside. My orriginal intention which had been to open the doors and see the yard was replaced with an uncomfortable nerviousness about what could be causing these strange scraping sounds. I stopped still, and turning to my husband my eyes passes over something in the middle of the floor that I couldn't at first process. Turning back and pointing I finally realized.
"They have a goat."
The thing I had failed at first to notice was a large bag standing up in the middle of the floor, clearly labled Goat Food. I didn't even know goat food came great bags just like the largest bag of dog food I've ever seen in a warehouse wholesale club.
I hear it now. Just like that lean in Fellowship of the Ring where Boromir looks at the horde of goblins and nasties decending on his little group and calmly observes, "They have a cave troll." I felt as he must, overwhelmed by the situation to the point of numbness.
Well that eradicated my desire to see that lovely, large back yard. Climbing back up the stairs to the main level I felt two things. The first was an overwhelming desire to wash my hands which I'd been feeling within minutes of entering the house. The second was a confused feeling. Perhaps I was dreaming that I had entered a bizare Orwellian world where people live in up-scale suburban comunities, and yet they choose to live with farm animals.
But I haven't read Animal Farm lately. sigh Perhaps I've been watching to much Whose Line.
Or perhaps real life is crazier than anything I could ever dream.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
I think my smoke detectors are posessed, or sentient
It's taken me a few days to get around to posting this. To be honest, I kinda wanted to make sure the adventure was over before telling the story, but it's been a couple of days and the cats don't appear to be traumatized so I guess it's time to share.
Sunday afternoon Steve and I were having a wonderfully relaxing time playing the wii together. He received two new games for his birthday, the day before, so we wanted to give them a try. So we're relaxing on the floor having a good'ol time, and suddenly there's a horrendous noise. The cats scatter and I turned to Steve and said (yelled maybe, it was hard to be heard), "What's on fire?" Out in the hallway there was no sign of smoke, and my first instinct was to check the stove. But it wasn't on and there was no sign of smoke in the air and by the time I was upstairs again Steve (It's wonderful to be married to a tall man) had the batteries out of one of the detectors and the shriek had been tamed to a soft chirp.
After checking the other smoke detectors (we have four) and seeing no sign of what set them off, my wonderfully tall husband replaced the batteries, we calmed the cats as best we could, and got on with our afternoon.
So we have time to settle down again, this time in separate rooms. Steve playing tennis (on the wii) and I'm in the process of re-watching Babylon 5. I'd coaxed a nervous cat to sit beside me, and less than an hour after the last alarm we startled by another three LOUD beeps. So I meet Steve on the stairs and we check all the smoke detectors again. They all have green lights and after the three beeps are silent, so after some discussion we think maybe we should change the batteries. Of course no one actually keeps 9 volts in the house, so out we go to buy batteries at Publix. What a lovely Sunday afternoon escape. After debating the relative merits of Energizer vs. Duracell (Energizer won for being twenty cents cheaper) we return and swap out all the batteries in all four smoke detectors and settle back down again.
Less than two hours after the previous beeping we have yet another three loud beeps, followed by a thorough checking that all batteries are thoroughly connected and none have the polarity backwards. Then we get the model numbers and I start a search for a user manual online. Wonder of wonders, I actually found one. It explains with detailed diagrams where to place smoke detectors, where NOT to place smoke detectors (apparently putting them in the kitchen like I do with my Sims is a bad idea), warn against electrocution, installation, maintenance, EVERYTHING you need to know to make them go off, nothing about how to shut them up.
After a couple of hours of silence we thought the worst was over and grew complacent. I even commented that they hadn't gone off in a while and Steve cautioned, "Don't jinx it." And of course he was right. Shortly after 5:00 again we have the three long beeps, which sets off a flurry of checking batteries and to see if any lights were blinking. We start discussing contingency plans like, what would happen if we took all the batteries out? Can we disable just one to shut the others up? And, well, I think that's all we discussed, but I was wondering what local hotels accept pets, and if an animal that sleeps 20 hours a day can't recover from occasional interruption without having to go to a hotel with us.
But once more time passed. We grew complacent and the smoke detectors knew it. Five ours later they jolted us again and we responded with defeated resignation and went to bed. This time it was actually a bit entertaining. With one cat near the top of the stairs and the other at the bottom the blaring startled them so they ran in opposite directions, PAST each other in order to escape.
This next part I know only from Steve's description, but he explains that shortly after 1:00 AM the alarm went off! Not the three loud beeps as before, but several seconds of blaring siren followed by beeps and cat footsteps, then silence. AND I SLEPT THROUGH IT!
This gets me wondering, both Steve and I travel for business occasionally, and what happens if the house catches fire when he's away and I'm asleep? And if I can sleep through that then there's NO alarm clock that could ever do it's job effectively. I need something to attach to the bed to shake me awake, or better yet a Wallace and Grommet type setup that will unceremoniously dump me into cloths and out on the lawn to safety from the fire (Or for regular mornings maybe it can dump me in the shower). Somehow I don't think I can depend on the cats, who spent a significant portion of Sunday night and Monday hiding under the bed. They can really only be depended on to tell me when it's time to feed them. It goes something like this.
Me: Mrmph, Get Off!
Cat: I am really surprisingly heavy as I stand on you. I have ninja powers to focus all my weight on the tips of my paws and dig them into your ribs.
Me: Steve, did you feed the cats?
Steve: (no response)
Cat: (Cold nose in a sensitive area, if no obviously sensitive area present itself just keep trying any bits of exposed skin)
Me: ALRIGHT! I'll feed you! (stumbles into the bathroom, gets out the food and the scoop and tries to focus eyes to aim the food in the bowl) hey! You have plenty of food!
Cat: Mrrrmp?
Me: It's right there! I don't care if you ate a hole down to the center of the dish, it's got plenty of food in it! Didn't your mom ever teach you to clean your plate?
They never seem to understand that there are starving kitties in Africa that don't get low-cal indoor kitty food.
Now what was I talking about? Oh right, sentient smoke detectors. So the next morning Steve, wonderful lovely Steve, who's GLAD I slept through the freakin' alarm because he knows that if I'm woken up in the middle of the night I have a terrible time trying to get back to sleep (did I mention how wonderful he is?), tells me of his adventures at one in the morning and how he didn't get back to sleep until after two, which I can totally sympathize with, so I decided then and there that this has to stop! I will not allow my husband to suffer sleepless nights on less than four hours of sleep because of faulty electronics. I will take a sledge hammer to them a'la Phoebe Buffay (friends) before I allow him to suffer, and I don't care if they are clearly labeled with "Do Not Tamper."
It's my house and I'll make it unsafe by disabling the smoke detectors if I like!
If only I knew how to disable the smoke detectors. I don't want to be left like Phoebe was with an incessantly beeping thing. So I called the manufacturer, and apparently they're not in the office until normal hours like 9:00 so I left a message about how completely imperative it was that they call me back as soon as possible and tell me how to stop the beeping. And amazingly, they called back! If you're ever looking for a smoke alarm company that calls back with real people when you have a problem, call USI (http://www.usielectric.com/ they didn't pay me for this plug), but they don't do it on weekends.
So this nice lady explains how to disable the smoke alarms and silence them, and how to diagnose which one is faulty (by process of elimination) and so I settle down to wait for them to make horrendous noises again. And Nuthin'! All day I waited and didn't hear a peep out of them, and this is where their sentience comes in. I think they heard me talking on the phone with the manufacturer and figured out we were discussing how to kill smoke detectors, and I scared the beep out of them!
Steve stayed home yesterday and they didn't make a sound, and the cats don't seem traumatized today, so I assume they weren't going off all day today either.
So the moral of this story is, if your electronics are bothering you, call the manufacturer. Be sure you're in the same room with the offending device and discuss loudly all ways to completely disable it's power source.
Don't coddle it. Buying it batteries will only make it think it can demand more of you. You want to make sure it knows who's boss. If you keep buying it batteries it will demand more and bigger batteries, and pretty soon you'll be trying to figure out how to hang a car battery from the ceiling.
Also, sledge hammers are not the answer, but really I learned this from Phoebe.
Sunday afternoon Steve and I were having a wonderfully relaxing time playing the wii together. He received two new games for his birthday, the day before, so we wanted to give them a try. So we're relaxing on the floor having a good'ol time, and suddenly there's a horrendous noise. The cats scatter and I turned to Steve and said (yelled maybe, it was hard to be heard), "What's on fire?" Out in the hallway there was no sign of smoke, and my first instinct was to check the stove. But it wasn't on and there was no sign of smoke in the air and by the time I was upstairs again Steve (It's wonderful to be married to a tall man) had the batteries out of one of the detectors and the shriek had been tamed to a soft chirp.
After checking the other smoke detectors (we have four) and seeing no sign of what set them off, my wonderfully tall husband replaced the batteries, we calmed the cats as best we could, and got on with our afternoon.
So we have time to settle down again, this time in separate rooms. Steve playing tennis (on the wii) and I'm in the process of re-watching Babylon 5. I'd coaxed a nervous cat to sit beside me, and less than an hour after the last alarm we startled by another three LOUD beeps. So I meet Steve on the stairs and we check all the smoke detectors again. They all have green lights and after the three beeps are silent, so after some discussion we think maybe we should change the batteries. Of course no one actually keeps 9 volts in the house, so out we go to buy batteries at Publix. What a lovely Sunday afternoon escape. After debating the relative merits of Energizer vs. Duracell (Energizer won for being twenty cents cheaper) we return and swap out all the batteries in all four smoke detectors and settle back down again.
Less than two hours after the previous beeping we have yet another three loud beeps, followed by a thorough checking that all batteries are thoroughly connected and none have the polarity backwards. Then we get the model numbers and I start a search for a user manual online. Wonder of wonders, I actually found one. It explains with detailed diagrams where to place smoke detectors, where NOT to place smoke detectors (apparently putting them in the kitchen like I do with my Sims is a bad idea), warn against electrocution, installation, maintenance, EVERYTHING you need to know to make them go off, nothing about how to shut them up.
After a couple of hours of silence we thought the worst was over and grew complacent. I even commented that they hadn't gone off in a while and Steve cautioned, "Don't jinx it." And of course he was right. Shortly after 5:00 again we have the three long beeps, which sets off a flurry of checking batteries and to see if any lights were blinking. We start discussing contingency plans like, what would happen if we took all the batteries out? Can we disable just one to shut the others up? And, well, I think that's all we discussed, but I was wondering what local hotels accept pets, and if an animal that sleeps 20 hours a day can't recover from occasional interruption without having to go to a hotel with us.
But once more time passed. We grew complacent and the smoke detectors knew it. Five ours later they jolted us again and we responded with defeated resignation and went to bed. This time it was actually a bit entertaining. With one cat near the top of the stairs and the other at the bottom the blaring startled them so they ran in opposite directions, PAST each other in order to escape.
This next part I know only from Steve's description, but he explains that shortly after 1:00 AM the alarm went off! Not the three loud beeps as before, but several seconds of blaring siren followed by beeps and cat footsteps, then silence. AND I SLEPT THROUGH IT!
This gets me wondering, both Steve and I travel for business occasionally, and what happens if the house catches fire when he's away and I'm asleep? And if I can sleep through that then there's NO alarm clock that could ever do it's job effectively. I need something to attach to the bed to shake me awake, or better yet a Wallace and Grommet type setup that will unceremoniously dump me into cloths and out on the lawn to safety from the fire (Or for regular mornings maybe it can dump me in the shower). Somehow I don't think I can depend on the cats, who spent a significant portion of Sunday night and Monday hiding under the bed. They can really only be depended on to tell me when it's time to feed them. It goes something like this.
Me: Mrmph, Get Off!
Cat: I am really surprisingly heavy as I stand on you. I have ninja powers to focus all my weight on the tips of my paws and dig them into your ribs.
Me: Steve, did you feed the cats?
Steve: (no response)
Cat: (Cold nose in a sensitive area, if no obviously sensitive area present itself just keep trying any bits of exposed skin)
Me: ALRIGHT! I'll feed you! (stumbles into the bathroom, gets out the food and the scoop and tries to focus eyes to aim the food in the bowl) hey! You have plenty of food!
Cat: Mrrrmp?
Me: It's right there! I don't care if you ate a hole down to the center of the dish, it's got plenty of food in it! Didn't your mom ever teach you to clean your plate?
They never seem to understand that there are starving kitties in Africa that don't get low-cal indoor kitty food.
Now what was I talking about? Oh right, sentient smoke detectors. So the next morning Steve, wonderful lovely Steve, who's GLAD I slept through the freakin' alarm because he knows that if I'm woken up in the middle of the night I have a terrible time trying to get back to sleep (did I mention how wonderful he is?), tells me of his adventures at one in the morning and how he didn't get back to sleep until after two, which I can totally sympathize with, so I decided then and there that this has to stop! I will not allow my husband to suffer sleepless nights on less than four hours of sleep because of faulty electronics. I will take a sledge hammer to them a'la Phoebe Buffay (friends) before I allow him to suffer, and I don't care if they are clearly labeled with "Do Not Tamper."
It's my house and I'll make it unsafe by disabling the smoke detectors if I like!
If only I knew how to disable the smoke detectors. I don't want to be left like Phoebe was with an incessantly beeping thing. So I called the manufacturer, and apparently they're not in the office until normal hours like 9:00 so I left a message about how completely imperative it was that they call me back as soon as possible and tell me how to stop the beeping. And amazingly, they called back! If you're ever looking for a smoke alarm company that calls back with real people when you have a problem, call USI (http://www.usielectric.com/ they didn't pay me for this plug), but they don't do it on weekends.
So this nice lady explains how to disable the smoke alarms and silence them, and how to diagnose which one is faulty (by process of elimination) and so I settle down to wait for them to make horrendous noises again. And Nuthin'! All day I waited and didn't hear a peep out of them, and this is where their sentience comes in. I think they heard me talking on the phone with the manufacturer and figured out we were discussing how to kill smoke detectors, and I scared the beep out of them!
Steve stayed home yesterday and they didn't make a sound, and the cats don't seem traumatized today, so I assume they weren't going off all day today either.
So the moral of this story is, if your electronics are bothering you, call the manufacturer. Be sure you're in the same room with the offending device and discuss loudly all ways to completely disable it's power source.
Don't coddle it. Buying it batteries will only make it think it can demand more of you. You want to make sure it knows who's boss. If you keep buying it batteries it will demand more and bigger batteries, and pretty soon you'll be trying to figure out how to hang a car battery from the ceiling.
Also, sledge hammers are not the answer, but really I learned this from Phoebe.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Why Having ADD makes me Fantastic Support at a High Energy Software Company
ADD affects my life in so many ways, mostly negative, like when I go grocery shopping with my husband and completely zone out starring at the magazines in the check out line. My husband is ofter flabbergasted at how gnat like my attention can be. It's rare, very rare, EXTREMELY rare for ADD to affect my life in any positive way. But lately I've found that in the software industry, and especially in the world of support, it can be an asset.
My life is a series of interruptions, one after the other, and most of support is one person asking how to do this, followed by a problem with that, with someone in sales asking for a demo of something else. So as the job jumps from one thing to the next my attention is easily moved on to the next thing. You jump and I'm already there.
That's the good part, but I suppose there's a down side to flitting from crisis to crisis. There's rarely enough buffer between interruptions. I'll get off the phone and start writing up a support case when the phone rings again, and while I'm explaining to that customer how to do whatever they're asking about I'll have three other e-mails come in that need a response or few so I trade e-mails for a while, and by the time that's done I've forgotten what I was doing with that window looking at that support case or more often it's hidden behind those e-mail windows and I don't find it again until I'm cleaning up my desktop at the end of the day. Each day is one run on sentence after another. By the end of the day I can forget about reporting on what I've done, I've probably forgotten more than half of what I've done that day, so I'm looking at my e-mail log just so I can figure out what I was doing six hours ago.
And then there are those dreaded slow days. They happen, usually in pieces, an afternoon here, a couple hours there. I get caught up, having told everybody what they need to know to do what they want to do for the time being, written up any support issues, waiting on logs or responses or whatever, and I'm supposed to be doing REAL work, probably writing documentation which really means I'm trying to take some bit of documentation and developing training documentation, usually a PowerPoint presentation. This is where my ADD really hurts me, when I'm starring at a sentence on the screen and wondering how I can make this visual, really how can I keep folks from falling asleep starring at this slide.
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE PowerPoint. I love visual learning, and I love diagrams and tables and charts that get the point across. But sometimes you don't want to show something. Sometimes information can't broken down into pretty pictures, or graphs, or lists. Sometimes you want to SAY something and PowerPoint doesn't lend itself to paragraphs or explanations. So I find myself lost in thought as I stare at a paragraph wondering how I can break this down into something interesting.
And now I'm already distracted from writing this post cause I'm watching Babylon 5 and want to go read the biography of Melissa Gilbert on IMDB. Hey! You're reading a blog about how ADD I am! What did you expect, a conclusion?
My life is a series of interruptions, one after the other, and most of support is one person asking how to do this, followed by a problem with that, with someone in sales asking for a demo of something else. So as the job jumps from one thing to the next my attention is easily moved on to the next thing. You jump and I'm already there.
That's the good part, but I suppose there's a down side to flitting from crisis to crisis. There's rarely enough buffer between interruptions. I'll get off the phone and start writing up a support case when the phone rings again, and while I'm explaining to that customer how to do whatever they're asking about I'll have three other e-mails come in that need a response or few so I trade e-mails for a while, and by the time that's done I've forgotten what I was doing with that window looking at that support case or more often it's hidden behind those e-mail windows and I don't find it again until I'm cleaning up my desktop at the end of the day. Each day is one run on sentence after another. By the end of the day I can forget about reporting on what I've done, I've probably forgotten more than half of what I've done that day, so I'm looking at my e-mail log just so I can figure out what I was doing six hours ago.
And then there are those dreaded slow days. They happen, usually in pieces, an afternoon here, a couple hours there. I get caught up, having told everybody what they need to know to do what they want to do for the time being, written up any support issues, waiting on logs or responses or whatever, and I'm supposed to be doing REAL work, probably writing documentation which really means I'm trying to take some bit of documentation and developing training documentation, usually a PowerPoint presentation. This is where my ADD really hurts me, when I'm starring at a sentence on the screen and wondering how I can make this visual, really how can I keep folks from falling asleep starring at this slide.
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE PowerPoint. I love visual learning, and I love diagrams and tables and charts that get the point across. But sometimes you don't want to show something. Sometimes information can't broken down into pretty pictures, or graphs, or lists. Sometimes you want to SAY something and PowerPoint doesn't lend itself to paragraphs or explanations. So I find myself lost in thought as I stare at a paragraph wondering how I can break this down into something interesting.
And now I'm already distracted from writing this post cause I'm watching Babylon 5 and want to go read the biography of Melissa Gilbert on IMDB. Hey! You're reading a blog about how ADD I am! What did you expect, a conclusion?
Thursday, May 27, 2010
How Crystal Bowersox lost American Idol
My husband is surprised by the outcome of American Idol last night. I am not. Let's break is down in an analysis of their final performances so that we might understand where things went wrong.
Tuesday they each sang three songs, two bad and one good. Each of their first two songs were awful and then they saved the best song for last so at first appearance it looks pretty even. But when we look closer we find the fatal flaw in Cristal Bowersox's plan. While Lee's first two songs were downright boring, Crystal actually accrues negative points with the song Black Velvet.
Her failure with this song is two fold, including errors in both wardrobe and song choice. We're talking about an attractive woman here, with curves, and she comes out in this figure forming black dress that hugs every curve right down to her thighs where it explodes into ruffles that chop her off just below the knees. And as if that isn't enough the ruffles are higher in the front than in the back where they curve down below her behind. So as the camera pans behind her all I could think was "Butt Frame!" In this dress even the thinnest of waifs would look hippy. I don't know who designed that dress, but whoever it was didn't understand a woman's tukus AT ALL!.
And then we get to the song. There's no doubt about it, Crystal Bowersox has a fantastic voice. But why does she have to sing a song that is designed to be career stopping. This one hit wonder from the '80's is one of the most over-wailed songs on the planet, and most of the wailers aren't that good at it. I can't hear the song without being reminded of the countless times it's been murdered, in American Idol auditions and karaoke alike. This song even stopped the career of the original singer, Alannah Myles, who unbeknownst to most actually sings other stuff, and I bet you've never heard any of it before. She recently came out with another album called... Wait for it... That's right, "Black Velvet," you can't make an entire career out of one song.
So maybe Lee won the cute guy vote, or maybe the Crystal fans just got complacent, but I think Crystal could have been much, MUCH better and hopefully her first album will be more current.
Tuesday they each sang three songs, two bad and one good. Each of their first two songs were awful and then they saved the best song for last so at first appearance it looks pretty even. But when we look closer we find the fatal flaw in Cristal Bowersox's plan. While Lee's first two songs were downright boring, Crystal actually accrues negative points with the song Black Velvet.
Her failure with this song is two fold, including errors in both wardrobe and song choice. We're talking about an attractive woman here, with curves, and she comes out in this figure forming black dress that hugs every curve right down to her thighs where it explodes into ruffles that chop her off just below the knees. And as if that isn't enough the ruffles are higher in the front than in the back where they curve down below her behind. So as the camera pans behind her all I could think was "Butt Frame!" In this dress even the thinnest of waifs would look hippy. I don't know who designed that dress, but whoever it was didn't understand a woman's tukus AT ALL!.
And then we get to the song. There's no doubt about it, Crystal Bowersox has a fantastic voice. But why does she have to sing a song that is designed to be career stopping. This one hit wonder from the '80's is one of the most over-wailed songs on the planet, and most of the wailers aren't that good at it. I can't hear the song without being reminded of the countless times it's been murdered, in American Idol auditions and karaoke alike. This song even stopped the career of the original singer, Alannah Myles, who unbeknownst to most actually sings other stuff, and I bet you've never heard any of it before. She recently came out with another album called... Wait for it... That's right, "Black Velvet," you can't make an entire career out of one song.
So maybe Lee won the cute guy vote, or maybe the Crystal fans just got complacent, but I think Crystal could have been much, MUCH better and hopefully her first album will be more current.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Coke and Korea
So let's be honest. The most annoying occurrence of my day was whatever idiot left a coke in the freezer at work overnight so it exploded all over the York Peppermint Patties. Yes, I keep Yorks in the freezer. That's the way they should be eaten. But they're very hard to get to when they're frozen to the bottom of the freezer by a sticky brown mess. And while inhibition of my snacking habits is obviously the greatest annoyance of my day, let's face it. I've pretty much covered that topic in less than a paragraph and that makes for a really lame blog posting so in an effort to be more globally interesting let's move on to something of more... um... global interest.
Korea. No not the war that was way back in the 50's though I did love watching MASH reruns with my college roommates, especially Alan Alda, but I digress. I mentioned Korea to one of my friends today and he said, "What are you, some old fart? Talk about something freakin' relevant!" or something along those lines. And while I would like to thank him for his wonderful support, I would also like to point out that Korea is new and relevant and stuff is happening there, and I learned new things about Korea just yesterday.
For instance, just yesterday North Korea announced they were cutting all ties with South Korea and no longer considered them their Korean brothers. Okay, lets get this straight. For the last sixty years you've been acting... brotherly? With the barbed wire and the guys with the guns? I don't know how your parents raised you, but mine sure didn't raise me to treat my brother like that!
So anyway, yesterday I was reading about the whole North Korea getting mad at South Korea because South Korea actually believed the international committee that studied the... No wait. This is not going in the right order. Okay, this may be a little stream of conscious, but we're going to have to go in the order I read it.
North Korea is cutting off contact with the south because South Korea set up loud speakers along the border blaring whatever kind of pro-South Korea messages they wanted to blare. They blared these messages because this international committee found that a ship that was sunk a couple of months ago was sunk by a torpedo from a North Korean submarine. And where did South Korea get the idea of setting up these speakers blaring propaganda? Why from the North Koreans of course.
In the 1950's North Korea built the "village" of Kijŏng-dong in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. They set up loud speakers in this "village" that blared pro-North Korean messages loud enough to be heard in South Korea. They blared these messages up to 20 hours a day until 2004 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kijong-dong, and you can believe everything you read on the Wiki). That's right, noise pollution intentionally generated for YEARS. Now whats worse about this village? It is ostensibly a nice little farming village with an unusually prosperous educational system, hospital, and an exceptionally high number if electrically wired buildings for a small rural town in North Korea. There's only one problem here. There are no farmers. There's no glass in the windows of the buildings, and there are no interior rooms. In fact this whole town was built just to show the prosperity of the north and to entice South Koreans to defect to the north. Um, yeah, I see that happening.
So let me get this straight. In a country that is industrially depressed and the difference is visible at night (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Korean_peninsula_at_night.jpg) here is a government that is willing to waste resources building a shell of a village, wiring it, putting up loud speakers, but they're not going to actually let people live there. Believe what you will about Democracy vs. Communism, but I hate waste.
If you're going to build a town to impress your neighbors, at least make it a working town, let people live there. If it's such a nice town that it's supposed to show how advanced you are, don't you think the folks one town over with their telephoto lenses are going to notice that there are no people in your town, that they can see through your buildings out the other side, that in a town of 200 farmers you're going to see people out and about working not just a skeleton crew that comes out and sweeps the streets. You're missing shops, and animals, and families with children.
And think about it, if you really care one whit about your citizens are you going to build a bunch of crap to show off in turn robbing your people of the good those same resources could have been put to use building roads and schools and bringing power to people who could actually use it? Of course not! A good government, especially a good communist government (if you believe such a thing exists) is going to work to improve efficiency, eliminate waste, and bring resources to the people who need them. North Korea in it's desire to show progressiveness, displays the exact opposite. And they're putting their idiocy on display exactly where it is most easily observed by the south, in the DMZ.
My resources are random articles I've read on MSN and the Wikipedia, so you should probably take everything I say with a grain of salt, cause my facts could be off. Still it seem to me it would be really hard to be people ruled by such idiots.
Oh, and if that was your Coke in the freezer it better be cleaned up before I get back to work tomorrow. If it's not, well, I'll probably end up cleaning it up anyway. But you better watch out, cause I'll be bitchy about it.
Korea. No not the war that was way back in the 50's though I did love watching MASH reruns with my college roommates, especially Alan Alda, but I digress. I mentioned Korea to one of my friends today and he said, "What are you, some old fart? Talk about something freakin' relevant!" or something along those lines. And while I would like to thank him for his wonderful support, I would also like to point out that Korea is new and relevant and stuff is happening there, and I learned new things about Korea just yesterday.
For instance, just yesterday North Korea announced they were cutting all ties with South Korea and no longer considered them their Korean brothers. Okay, lets get this straight. For the last sixty years you've been acting... brotherly? With the barbed wire and the guys with the guns? I don't know how your parents raised you, but mine sure didn't raise me to treat my brother like that!
So anyway, yesterday I was reading about the whole North Korea getting mad at South Korea because South Korea actually believed the international committee that studied the... No wait. This is not going in the right order. Okay, this may be a little stream of conscious, but we're going to have to go in the order I read it.
North Korea is cutting off contact with the south because South Korea set up loud speakers along the border blaring whatever kind of pro-South Korea messages they wanted to blare. They blared these messages because this international committee found that a ship that was sunk a couple of months ago was sunk by a torpedo from a North Korean submarine. And where did South Korea get the idea of setting up these speakers blaring propaganda? Why from the North Koreans of course.
In the 1950's North Korea built the "village" of Kijŏng-dong in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. They set up loud speakers in this "village" that blared pro-North Korean messages loud enough to be heard in South Korea. They blared these messages up to 20 hours a day until 2004 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kijong-dong, and you can believe everything you read on the Wiki). That's right, noise pollution intentionally generated for YEARS. Now whats worse about this village? It is ostensibly a nice little farming village with an unusually prosperous educational system, hospital, and an exceptionally high number if electrically wired buildings for a small rural town in North Korea. There's only one problem here. There are no farmers. There's no glass in the windows of the buildings, and there are no interior rooms. In fact this whole town was built just to show the prosperity of the north and to entice South Koreans to defect to the north. Um, yeah, I see that happening.
So let me get this straight. In a country that is industrially depressed and the difference is visible at night (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Korean_peninsula_at_night.jpg) here is a government that is willing to waste resources building a shell of a village, wiring it, putting up loud speakers, but they're not going to actually let people live there. Believe what you will about Democracy vs. Communism, but I hate waste.
If you're going to build a town to impress your neighbors, at least make it a working town, let people live there. If it's such a nice town that it's supposed to show how advanced you are, don't you think the folks one town over with their telephoto lenses are going to notice that there are no people in your town, that they can see through your buildings out the other side, that in a town of 200 farmers you're going to see people out and about working not just a skeleton crew that comes out and sweeps the streets. You're missing shops, and animals, and families with children.
And think about it, if you really care one whit about your citizens are you going to build a bunch of crap to show off in turn robbing your people of the good those same resources could have been put to use building roads and schools and bringing power to people who could actually use it? Of course not! A good government, especially a good communist government (if you believe such a thing exists) is going to work to improve efficiency, eliminate waste, and bring resources to the people who need them. North Korea in it's desire to show progressiveness, displays the exact opposite. And they're putting their idiocy on display exactly where it is most easily observed by the south, in the DMZ.
My resources are random articles I've read on MSN and the Wikipedia, so you should probably take everything I say with a grain of salt, cause my facts could be off. Still it seem to me it would be really hard to be people ruled by such idiots.
Oh, and if that was your Coke in the freezer it better be cleaned up before I get back to work tomorrow. If it's not, well, I'll probably end up cleaning it up anyway. But you better watch out, cause I'll be bitchy about it.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Hit and Run
Those of you who read the ORIGINAL Complaint of the Month know something about how I feel about foul language. To summarize, I think that people cuss because they are ignorant and don't know how to use the English language. That's not to say I NEVER use curse words, but it's very rare, and when I do use them it's a conscious choice. Suffice it to say that using curse words in excess is not the way to get on my good side.
This was really brought home to me Friday as I was headed back to work after lunch. I was stopped at a stop light in my nearly ten year old Honda Accord and this woman (I won't call her lady) in a white SUV barely tapped me in the rear bumper. That's a long light, and it had turned red just in front of me so I had plenty of time, and got out to take a quick look, just to see if there was any damage. I made it maybe a step and a half out of the care and she started yelling that she didn't hit my F'ing car, and to get back in my F'ing car and F this and F that. I tried to calm here, by saying I was just checking, and she continued screaming. I have never had anyone scream at me like that in my life.
She was so close to my car that I couldn't tell if there was damage and so I said I'd just let the police handle it and got back in my car. I pulled out my cell phone and tried to dial but my hands were shaking so badly that I mis-dialed 911. When the light changed I didn't move and and she decided to go around me backing up and tapped me 2-3 more times in the process because there wasn't room for her to back up. Instead she leaned on the horn until other cars (there were two lanes plus turn lanes) cleared out on either side and she had room to back up. So, as she drove around me, I had the cell phone in my hand dialing the police, and I snapped a couple of pictures with my cell in the hopes that something would come out clearly.
So I went on to work, and met the police in the parking lot at work. There was white paint on my bumper, it really didn't do any damage but to the paint, plastic bumpers and all. And the picture? It couldn't have been better; it had her license plate front and center clear as day.
What gets me is this. If she'd been nice and gotten out to look with me and said, "Hmm that doesn't look like much but here's my number in case you find something," I would have let it go. But if you have a foul mouth and curse me up one side and down the other I will prosecute yo' back side!
This was really brought home to me Friday as I was headed back to work after lunch. I was stopped at a stop light in my nearly ten year old Honda Accord and this woman (I won't call her lady) in a white SUV barely tapped me in the rear bumper. That's a long light, and it had turned red just in front of me so I had plenty of time, and got out to take a quick look, just to see if there was any damage. I made it maybe a step and a half out of the care and she started yelling that she didn't hit my F'ing car, and to get back in my F'ing car and F this and F that. I tried to calm here, by saying I was just checking, and she continued screaming. I have never had anyone scream at me like that in my life.
She was so close to my car that I couldn't tell if there was damage and so I said I'd just let the police handle it and got back in my car. I pulled out my cell phone and tried to dial but my hands were shaking so badly that I mis-dialed 911. When the light changed I didn't move and and she decided to go around me backing up and tapped me 2-3 more times in the process because there wasn't room for her to back up. Instead she leaned on the horn until other cars (there were two lanes plus turn lanes) cleared out on either side and she had room to back up. So, as she drove around me, I had the cell phone in my hand dialing the police, and I snapped a couple of pictures with my cell in the hopes that something would come out clearly.
So I went on to work, and met the police in the parking lot at work. There was white paint on my bumper, it really didn't do any damage but to the paint, plastic bumpers and all. And the picture? It couldn't have been better; it had her license plate front and center clear as day.
What gets me is this. If she'd been nice and gotten out to look with me and said, "Hmm that doesn't look like much but here's my number in case you find something," I would have let it go. But if you have a foul mouth and curse me up one side and down the other I will prosecute yo' back side!
Why you so Whiny?
Those of you who knew me when I lived in Baltimore are familiar with the newsletter that started out "The Complaint of the Month" and became "The Complaint of... Whenever." For those of you NOT familiar with my "Complaints" they were a forum through which I could express my satisfaction, or more often dissatisfaction, with life, the universe and everything.
That being said, a blog is not a place to post monthly, heck if I do that y'all will wander off and never return. Don't worry, with age comes a whole new level of corochityness. I may not post daily, but I'm sure I'll post plenty often enough. So I guess I better get on with it.
That being said, a blog is not a place to post monthly, heck if I do that y'all will wander off and never return. Don't worry, with age comes a whole new level of corochityness. I may not post daily, but I'm sure I'll post plenty often enough. So I guess I better get on with it.
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