You will never believe what I did!

I got a call from one of the schools telling me that they were having an event, can I cover it. I was like, sure I love getting kids and the schools in the paper. Parents love seeing their kids in the paper, kids love seeing themselves so it’s win win, hey it could boost circulation!

So, I talk with the teacher and she tells me about the event… Career Day… CAN I SPEAK…. *blink*

Let me explain, I’m really a shy person, I was ready to quit a phone marketing job, three days in, because I couldn’t get past talking to so many people I don’t know. .  .

Yes I know, I’m now a reporter how do I talk to the people in the stories (A whole lot of working up to it and a whole lot of coffee)

So with the teacher talking, I agreed to talk to the 3-5th graders, and as soon as I hung up I was asking myself “WHAT KIND OF IDIOT ARE YOU!”

For four days my mind went nuts thinking about all the ways I could crash and burn, and trust me I have a very vivid imagination. Friday came, I get to work hoping that they called to cancel it, a major earthquake would happen, I even thought I could get out of it if I crashed in the rain (But I wouldn’t risk my pickup so I drove right) I got there about an hour early, oops, I guess I was nervous…

When I was leaving the office I got several pep-talks, the office manager decided to tell me about how she had to talk to the Police Explorers AND HOW SHE PUKED BEFORE.  Learning this, helps me how?  It just gave me one more worry… will I puke in front of the classes?

I walk in and I’m put in a room, given coffee a plus, and I have to wait for the other speakers. A group of kids walks in, the leadership class, I felt so happy that I had met a couple of them when doing other stories in the community. So I get a personal escort to the first class and so it begins.

Now, I sorta fell into being a reporter, no training, no creative writing, heck I can hardly blog (as you can see). I had to Google how to be a reporter when I started, I had to Google how to become a reporter to know what to tell the kids. With that info and what I gleaned from my best friend, who actually was a reporter for a paper in Florida and is a reporter for Firefox on-line news, I was mostly armed for the kids attack.

I have to say I was surprised, it actually went well. The kids, I had met quite a few from YMCA and other events, had great questions I explained what I did, how we put the paper together and I think we all had a great time all capped off with pictures of each class I talked to and a promise they would be in the paper.

So it went well, no fainting, no puking, no kids shooting spit-wads.  Will I do it again?

ummmm…..

I live in a small farming town in California, I don’t know everyone in town but I know a fair few.  there is the sweetest couple, been together for a while. They are great together, people would kill to have a relationship like theirs. Nice house, perfect yard, everything going for them, is like a damn Norman Rockwell picture.

Driving by the house I see this in the yard.

Prop 8’s wrath has hit this family.  

It’s sad when people are classed as second class citizens, they are not allowed to live and love as they choose. 

Just Unmarried

Can you imagine how they feel, something they finally get, yanked away by half informed people who believed commercials about the schools and their kids being taken over. Are you the same people who think it is okay to protest at funerals for fallen soldiers?

Prop 8, has done nothing but bring on hurt, prejudice and pain. The pro commercials were funded to SCARE people, how many of you were really taught about marriage in school?  I wasn’t and I went to California schools where they were trying to save the students.

We need to let the legislature know we wont stand for this. Why can’t we, as a people, let others be happy, live their lives as they wish? It may not be the way you live, but it isn’t as though they are knocking on your door trying to change your lives. I can pretty much guarantee they don’t have a version of the Watchtower for you to read.

Maybe they should stop worrying about gay marriage, and like they can keep all BOYS out of school…. that will cut down on teen pregnancy and protect the kids in school.. OR how about they keep ALL the kids out of school, and then there will be no guns in school…..yep all kids are protected, think of all the money that the schools will save, Cha-ching!

Oh wow, I’m on a roll now.  Maybe I should get someone to fund some commercials about protecting kids?

Snagged from livejournal.com

  I have to admit, I drink my fair share of coffee, I love the stuff.  Columbian, Costa Rican, Kenyan, Kona, Chocolate Truffle, Hazelnut…  the list goes on and on.  You can get Expresso, Lattes, Macchiatos, Breves, Eye Openers, my favorite is the Wake Up Call from a little place in my town (triple expresso latte with a couple shots of peppermint),  If they started a cult, I think I’d join .  I love it, totally love this stuff.  Coffee, Coffee, Coffee!!!  Heaven in a cup!

  Dark roast, Medium, Light (which is suppose to have the most caffine), you have your blends of beans.  You buy them ground, whole, in bags, tins and sacks.  In stores, in coffee shops, I have even bought them online.  Long live Google and E-bay! 

I personally prefer the smaller coffee shops over the larger marketed coffee shops though I have been to my share of Starbucks (but I have found for iced coffees, Dunkin Donuts and McD’s are great).  But I have found a place I won’t go for coffee, no way, no how!  They are selling a special blend,  SPECIAL BLEND. 

Cafe’ Raro….   This blend is a combination of Jamaican Blue Mountain and Kupi Luwak.  Peter Jones department store in London selling coffee shots for $100 each, you would think, OMG the beans, they must be “SPECIAL”!

Oh they are my friend…..   They Are.

They are Specially processed!  

With SPECIAL machinery! 

Kupi Luwak coffee beans are harvested from the dung of Indonesian jungle cat

They say it adds a Special flavor to it…  Yeah, I bet!

Bleh!!!!  You can market it any way you want.. Cute tins, whatever… 

I still know it came from…..

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/04/10/coffee.dung/index.html#cnnSTCVideo

It must be an acquired taste…  I’ll pass.

So you enjoy your $100 dollar shot,  pass me the Folgers and with the rest of the money I’ll try to fill the tank of my car…

Yay, season four of Battlestar Galactica starts finally, they have has us waiting forever!  Yes, fellow Geeks, Nerds, Cylons and Colonials, rejoice and give praise to the Gods and all the Lords of Kobol.  I really have been waiting on this, left us in a lurch, Starbuck is back, four of the five were revealed, they has a really great cover of All Along the Watchtower, what more can you ask for in a season finally?

This ain’t your Momma’s BSG!  Okay, so I’m old enough to have watched you’re Momma’s BSG so I know for sure it isn’t!

So, over all this time we have set back and tried to figure out who the fifth is. 

I came up with a great story line pinning Roslin as the fifth, She has cancer anyway, she dies, imagine her surprise waking up in that icky goo and finding out she’s a Cylon.  But a friend pointed out there was this list of people who aren’t Cylons, and she’s on the list. Frak, foiled again!  So, then I was thinking OH… It could be someone who is dead already, imagine the people on Galactica’s surprise if Billy or even Ellen Tigh walk up… but shot that down because the Cylons would know who the last one of the five were then. 

So who is it? 

Cally? humm?  Helo?  No, he has to be human because he fathered Hera the first Human/Cylon child.  But then again Cally had a baby with the chief who’s one of the four…  This is confusing! Maybe it’s Hotdog?  Naaa, a Cylon called Hotdog, I don’t think so.  Tom Zarak?  Dualla?  What do you think?

So tomorrow, I get off work, drive as fast as I can (without getting a ticket) and giving thanks the Lords of Kobol for the invention of Tivo, I will grab a soda and some pizza and settle down to watch this first episode of the final season.  And I’m warning you now, if someone tells me what happens before I get to see it, I’m smacking them in the head!

Thanks to FrakkingToasters.com for the great comics as seen above. 

When I was growing up I remember my mother harping about wearing clean socks and chones (underwear), you don’t want to get in a crash wearing dirty or ripped chones, lord forbid at the hospital after some accident they see a hole.  When you went some where, you got in your good clothes, got to be clean, even ironed. No rips, modest and everything in it’s place. As kids we had good clothes and play clothes, and yes when we left the house we had clothes on. No running around in just a diaper, at the house was one thing but up town…  she had standards.

We wont mention the decades I grew up in.  But there was a a flair to the clothes, flashy at times.  I missed the whole 60’s-70’s bohemian thing, I think I would have loved that, but I grew up in a small farming town so I would have never had access to it anyway.  I did have some ripped up jeans, I loved them, mom hated them.  It was a close to rebel as I could get.

But these days, people are proud to show anyone their underwear, I have guys come in and then walk back out to their cars and I’m standing there laying odds on them walking out of the pants that are 5 sizes to large for them.  Do you think the stores ran out of their size?  Couldn’t they get pants only 3 sizes to big? 

HAS ANYONE GOT A BELT THEY CAN LOAN HIM??

And how do they get sweats which have elastic to hang off their ass like that? But hey who knew boxers came in all colors of the rainbow and in plaid, I really like the Sponge Bob ones.  But you know what, why are you showing them to me any way?

And the new big thing is flannel pants, I have a couple pairs, they are great!  But people seem to wear them everywhere, do everything in them. I even know someone that had a baby in, yes.. I said in, a pair of the Walmart ones while she waited to be admitted.   I’m not that adventurous, I can wear them in my backyard, gone out to the front yard to get something out of my truck, I even wear them to go through a drive through for breakfast praying the cops don’t stop me for something.  I can’t bring myself to go into a store in them, it’s my pajamas, but people do it all the time.  I have seen people four-wheeling in them, yeah they will be great protection if they crash.

BUT here is where I think the line has been crossed, stomped and painted over in dayglo green.  Since when is it fashionable to wear regular pajamas for everyday? 

Do you want to be like Mike?  

Does his court wear give you a happy?  It’s not just women it’s men too.  WTF Mate?  Did you roll out of bed and say screw it, I’m not getting dressed? Let me tell you, most of the people that I see in PJ’s I’m damn happy they don’t sleep in the buff and do the whole roll out of bed thing. YIKES! 

And okay, I can see kids doing it on a lark, hey I buzzed my hair and had it all spiky at one time, but when grandpa comes in in this pajamas, I think we need to get a new line, maybe two or three and maybe grandpa needs to be put in a home.  I prefer my men in Jeans, Chinos, Cargo, Khakis.  Hey Wrangler butts….

 I guess what I’m saying is…

GET FRIGGEN DRESSED!

The best job I ever had was running a comic and card store.  It was owned by some close friends and they talked me into quitting Home Depot and going to work there.  Part of the sales pitch was I was driving an hour to work and an hour home and paying for the gas to commute, “How much is your time worth to you?”  Sure they couldn’t pay as much but I didn’t have the commute and or the gas bill, and hell it was fun to be there and get paid since I was there most of my off time.

I know what you’re thinking, girls aren’t suppose to like baseball cards or comics, but you’re wrong!  They are just marketed to the male market and we girls put up with it… but back to my story.

So here I am having fun till one day one of the owners, Bonnie, was out walking on the ranch with Dave and she was hit by an aneurysm, they almost lost her but she fought pretty hard and for several months I ended up running the shop with only what was in the drawer.  Kept it going for a couple months but with Bonnie’s health and other problems they decided to close up.  Over those months I did not collect a wage,  I had money from a profit sharing set back so I used it. The night Dave came in to tell me of their decision until he knocked me over with one question. “Have you ever thought about opening your own shop?”  I told him I’d love to, he waved to the stuff in the store and said Merry Christmas.

So that was it.  I now had my own store.  How many times in your life will you be handed that opportunity?  Like never..!  I literally fell into owning my own store.

First thing I had to find a different place to rent, I found a shop front on Main Street at half the rent they were paying, it was bigger, just a couple blocks from all the schools, AND IT WAS MINE!!
We had everything, Video Games including Pinball, Magic The Gathering tournaments, Pogs, Collector Coins, if you could collect it I wanted to get it in. 

Constellation Comix is the name I chose for it, what a great name. Comix with a “X”, Oh I thought it was so clever and I named it after a ship from Star Trek, (yep, you already know, I’m a geek) maybe I shouldn’t have named it after a ship that was destroyed in the TOS episode “The Doomsday Machine”, but you have to say it was a great name. 

I had so much fun, and I was pulling a profit as long as I didn’t expect it to pay my house bills, maybe I could live in the back room?  Nope, it leaked like a sieve and it was cold, so… I had to get a real job, and let my brother, who wasn’t doing anything any way, run it for me. 

Then came the day when he said he wanted to get a real job that actually paid, and I couldn’t afford to quit where I was.  So I had to close up.

As the years have gone by, I have found I still love comics and cards and I miss the store, a lot! I thought it was just me, but I have people come in all the time and mention it, it makes you feel good.

But the other day out of the blue I had one of “my kids”, who is now all grown up, came in where I work, and he thanked me. He thanked me for having the store, it was his place to go, have fun, he said it kept him out of trouble when he could have been doing other things he probably shouldn’t have.  He told me about the fun he had, even asked if I was ever going to open another one.  He made my day, heck decade… Something I had done and had fun doing had made an ,impression on him.   I almost cried… Almost,  I can’t get weepy at work. 

Yep, that was the best job I ever had, the job I have now, not so much…..  but who knows what I will “fall” into next. 

Life IS an adventure after all.

I am a pet lover, so is my family.  We have had rabbits, ducks, dogs, cats, hamsters, parakeets, turtles, fish…. Yikes… and all in town. 

 I have one dog at this time, she’s a mutt, a mix of different cattle dogs, Queensland, Aussie & McNabb.  Bane of cats, the neighbor’s dog and any birds that decide to eat from the bird-feeder in the backyard.  She also thinks she is a soccer player, great dog all around.  Did I mention she is afraid of everything?  She acts tough but she’s not.  But, let me get where I’m going with this… 

CATS…..

We now have four….  I was happy with two…  they were both stray kittens found over where I work, one even rode home in the engine compartment of the family van, after something like that you just have to keep her.  I named the both for Star Trek.  One after Data’s cat SPOT and the other I named TRIBBLE.  What can I say, I’m a geek. So we are set. Two cats and a dog that chases them, perfect….  till one day my brave dog is in the backyard and starts barking which becomes a panicked mass of sound, it sounded like she was in pain and dying. I run out of the house thinking I’m going to find her bleeding to death or something like that.  Nope… She has spotted a cat in our yard, and it wouldn’t run away so it scared her.  This cat was half dead, half starved really, I tried to shoo it away, just the look of it scared me.  I finally broke down and fed it, had my brother get the dog kennel out and I put it in there,  I wanted to keep it away from my cats and I wanted to make sure it didn’t kill me in my sleep, like I said she scared me.  My father was to take the cat to the vet’s office and drop her off.  Bye-bye, see you later, two cats are enough!  I get home from work and surprise guess who is at the house.  By then the cat was dubbed “Lucky”, I didn’t want it, but everyone else did.  Even the dog likes her, okay I like her too now. Did I say like?  I love her now, she is my cat. But three cats are to many!  Four cats is nutz!  But guess what, My brother has dragged this cat home.  “Pickles”, I didn’t want her, still don’t, but I was over ruled.  I swear, the next person that brings home a stray, is going to the vets with the cat, and staying there with the cat.

Hopefully she stops hating the dog, the other cats.

Anybody want a cat?  We have one to many, again,

I have this friend, known her for years and years, I don’t even want to admit how many.  She has been through two terrible  marriages the only good thing out of them are the kids, seven of them, Five from her first, all boys and two girls from the second.  The second, Dean was a total bastard, abusive, mentally and physically.  He used to use the kids as a way to control her.  She got through, got away from him, survived.

Over the years she has had computer romances, didn’t find Mister Right but she did find some friends and in the last two years she has moved past all of it, become secure, it was her and the two girls (the boys are all grown up) against the world.  Didn’t need any man, and like the freedoms she gained.

In the last couple months, she met a guy, even as she was falling for him she would say she liked the independent her, she thinks he is the one.  But this guy runs hot and cold..  Bipolar?  I think so.  I know he has a major past with drugs and alcohol, but he has moved past that.  All I know is she would go over and see him for the weekend and she’d be in heaven, then during the week he would call and it would be hell on her, accusations of cheating and other things, then the call to apologize.  They would break up and make up.  Finally she couldn’t take the stress and was going to tell him they couldn’t even be friends, and was going to call him only to find he had shut off the cell phone.

She decided to write him a letter, get her chance to say her piece.  Later in the week she received a call from a number she didn’t know.  It was him, they talked, made friends, again…  then about a week he calls, blames here for everything bad about the relationship calls her a selfish bitch and hangs up. 

I hate the word bitch, I always have.  I think that men should never use it…  It’s never a good thing when a man uses it to a woman, not even as a joke.  My brothers learned of my sensitivity to it the hard way, as I said before Nards are a great target.  I use it sometimes, but it’s different, I can’t explain why but it is. 

So this guy, called her a selfish bitch and made her cry.  I literally told her to make sure I don’t get his phone number.  Because I hate him, she doesn’t deserve this, the bastard, I hope he rots!

*sigh*

Guess who’s back,  she didn’t even what to tell me because she didn’t want to upset me…  ME, she was worried about ME and what I would think.  So I told her I would support her in what ever she does, I even help talk to her girls who hate the guy because he made their mom cry.  Well, this weekend he moved in.  I still haven’t met him, I’m worried about that first meeting, I don’t want to hurt her and I don’t want to do anything to make the girls hate him more.

Today, she asked me to lunch, made up and excuse about my brother, all because I though he would be there and I’m not ready to meet him.  I know I have to, who knows I may even get to like him.  I don’t know, maybe…  and then maybe Monkey will fly out of my bodily orifices too…

 Well Karma just kicked my brother in the ass because of me, he just had a seizure, so that I’m not a total liar, I am busy now, that sucks.

I really don’t like protests, I think they gain nothing.  I know it sounds jaded but it’s true.   I tend to ignore them because I have always tried to see both sides of the situation.  I live in a small farming town so I have seen protest for and against rights for illegals, the war, heck even in support of teachers.

You see protests all the time on the news, and they always show the worst of them.  KKK, that crazy pack that that claims that everything bad that happens is god punishing the world because of gays, the group that protests at funerals.  Let me tell you, some of these wackos should be locked up because they are nucking futz!!!  I figure some higher power will judge them in the end, and if there is a next life I figure the dung be etle population is going to grow!

I was reading a friends blog and couldn’t believe what I was reading.  http://awalkabout.wordpress.com/2008/02/29/oh-where-oh-where-has-america-gone/   .   When you go to a Peace rally just to disrupt it you need to be kicked in the ass, I would have made a play for the nards.   Ask my brothers that was always my target of choice.

When this jackass, got out of his car all he wanted to do was impress people, he didn’t give a damn about letting these people exercise the rights that were given to all of us when our forefathers fought and died for them.  He could have set down across the street and protested too, but he didn’t, so he got a kick in the ass…  and the cops arrested an 82 y.o. woman.  Hopefully he has a limp.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that he made it back from Iraq is wonderful and that he was proud enough to serve in the army of my country is  a great thing.  I just don’t think that that gives him the right to take away the rights he himself fought for.