February 2007 Archives

...and I haven't even gotten to the meeting yet. I forgot to take my vitamins this morning, but there is no time like the present. At least they will be feeding me tonight. I feel so unprepared. Possibly because I AM unprepared. It's about time to shower and get changed into the shirt and tie.

Oh well, it will only last a couple of hours, then I have to show back up at work at 9 PM for shift change. I have a couple of waitresses to scream at tonight. They decided to have a mustard and ketchup fight last night, which we spent most of the day cleaning. They managed to get the obvious stuff cleaned up before I got there, so in my foggy head first thing in the morning, I didn't notice for an hour or two. They are not going to be having fun tonight. I have a huge cleaning list waiting for them.

Why is it when someone comes in and takes a dump; leaves the thick viscous nasties that stick to the side and don't go down with one flush, they don't give a courtesy second flush to get rid of the rest. You might as well just shit on my floor, I don't want to go in and see your poop at all. Nothing an extra flush can't fix. It's not just guys either. I check the restrooms several times during the day and it's a common occurrence to walk in and see fresh tar laid down the side of my toilet.

If you come in and eat and I see you go in and realize in time that you have left me a gift to clean up, I will make sure NOT to wash my hands before I prepare your wonderful hot breakfast.

It's a pretty crappy picture, but as I mentioned last night when I posted those pics of the girls working on my hair, my batteries crapped out in my camera and I haven't had the chance to replace them yet. Cell phone pics.

Nothing like a pair of shiny new shoes. Just ask Eric. Now I may not be a flaming metrosexual, but I can recognize the value of a nice pair of shoes. Normally I will wait to buy new work shoes until the current pair have all but fallen apart. When I can feel the ground with the bottom of my feet, it's time for new ones. The pair I have now are probably good for a month or two, but they look like hell. Waffle batter, plenty of water, grease, and plenty of other unmentionables have touched those shoes, and there's only so much spit shining that you can do to fix them up. I decided Sunday that I needed to go ahead and get a new pair, so I got on shoesforcrews.com and ordered me up a pair. As Dax will tell you, these are the best damn shoes you can get working in the restaurant industry.

The thing is, I only wear Wingtips. I don't like Oxfords, and I hate any type of slip ons ad sneakers. Sneakers look like shit when you are trying to look professional. Wal-Mart quit carrying Wingtips. Sears, K-Mart, and all of the shoe stores in my area quit selling them. I guess they are going out of style or something. God forbid something a man wears going out of style. We wear the same clothes for fifty years and they are always in style. Apparently not anymore. Anyhow, Shoes For Crews is the only place I have been able to find them, plus they are non slip, water resistant, and are pretty comfortable.

For something that I just felt like posting, they should be paying my butt for this one.

I ended up running to Villa Rica tonight. Apparently the LDS meeting is professional (suit) dress only. No uniforms. Most of my nice clothes are no longer nice or the must have shrunk. Can't get them on anymore. I know I haven't gotten any bigger. You believe me dontcha? Anyway, I picked up a pair of slacks, a shirt and tie. I will forgo the suit jacket. Not happening. Send my ass home if you need to.

That's about it I think. It's almost 11 PM and I have to get up at 4:30 as usual.

I am attempting to help someone out, but if I don't put this stuff someplace permanent, I won't remember what I did. It has to do with setting up archives and sidebars in movabletype. I am using 3.3?? so your results may differ (as may some of the screenshots). Click on the extended entry if you are actually interested in reading any of this, or if you are just plain bored.

What a major PITA. For the LDS Seminar tomorrow I have to bring several things. Two of them are my 30 day goals for people, profits, and sales and a copy of my 30 day personal and professional calender. Those two are easy. I keep that stuff in Outlook, as well as my daytimers, so it's a matter of adding a couple of minor items and printing. I also have to do a write-up covering the four key areas of recruiting on how I will recruit a quality management candidate during the next quarter. This one is a bit more difficult as my views on this differ than company policy over the last few years.

We have had our major focus on recruiting outside of the company. In particular we look for people with at least four year degrees or a good bit of experience in the business world. It doesn't necessarily have to be in the restaurant industry, just some sort of experience. It is a very difficult job, occasionally with long hours, ALL holidays, most weekends, and occasionally strange hours. Just because the shift ends at a certain time, as manager I still don't get to leave. In general I average 50 hours a week. A short day is eight or ten hours. The longest day I have ever had with them lasted about 36 hours. That was about 18 years ago, so it is not something that happens all the time, but it does happen. My former trainee that worked a triple Sunday is proof of that. It is a job of preparation, and constantly putting out fires.

In the 20 years that I have been there, I believe that the best qualified people for my job are the hourly associates that work for me. Currently they only allow 20% of the stores to be hourly to management types, and we need to increase that number. That's why I'm just a manager though, and not CEO I suppose.

...finally. I have managed to get it down to 15 categories with two sub-categories. I still have to go through a lot of the early junk and put things where they belong. This seems kind of anal. I've made a big old mess over the last couple of years and now I am trying to get it cleaned up.

I think I am pretty much done for the day. I still have not even cracked open the Word documents that our recruiter emailed me about the seminar I have to attend Wednesday evening. Last time they had barbecue, wonder what dinner will be this time. Right now that is more important than what I have to do for the presentation.

I suppose I will print everything out tomorrow evening and take a look. Less time to get nervous about doing presentations that way :)

There are some things that you always remember about your kids, no matter how much time goes by. When the boy was small, we had these little blue airplane looking things that we put over his shoelaces in order to keep them tied. Eventually they went the way of all things that belong to little kids, they disappeared. We started tyeing his shoes in double knots, but somehow HE heard "devil knots". Devil knots they have been, through all three kids.

With Pete, it was the red man. On her walker there was a bar that we could put on (I think it was on her walker) and it had three little guys on it that would spin. She would invariably go after Red Man every time.

I actually feel pretty good today. The wife bought me some vitamins yesterday. I have taken them for two days now and I am not quite as exhausted as I have felt for the last couple of weeks. It's a nice feeling to be at work and actually accomplish something besides wanting to rush out the door the entire day. Of course I could still find better things to be doing, but at least I was able to get some stuff done.

The boy has apparently hurt his wrist, the dumbass. Not for hurting himself, but for the fact that he did it at least a couple of weeks ago. He hasn't been working out, but didn't bother to say anything to us. The wife made him an appointment for Friday since I am off. They may need to X-Ray his wrist. Hopefully all will be well.

One of my old manager trainees called me this morning at work asking if I could send her a cook. As I generally cook by myself I don't have any extras to send, but when I asked her why she told me that she had worked a triple shift and was working on her fourth and just needed some help. Shit. That's not the way we do things, so I asked her what her boss had said or done last night when she called him with her staffing. She said, "well, he didn't answer the phone. At that point I would have started working my way up the chain of command until I found some help, but she is new. That is exactly what I did. I called her bosses boss, and when he didn't answer the damn phone, I called the Area Vice President. She had some help shortly after that and was told to take the day off. Sucks to be her, but she should have picked up the phone yesterday, rather than waiting until 7:15 this morning after she had been there for 25 hours.

I had initially planned on getting up and going in to work a bit early to get some stuff done, but just didn't want to. I suppose I will get there at the regular time today. I should be able to squeeze everything in that I want to get finished today. I am cooking but generally I can get everything done as long as I don't fool around.

I do have to sit down and go over my presentation for Wednesday's meeting at some point this evening though. That is one thing I am NOT looking forward to this week. My division manager says I did very well at the last one though. As long as I can keep from bopping my head around while I talk, it will be OK. I never realized it until I started video taping stuff that I do that. It looks really stupid.

When Pete was born in October of 1997 it was a real shocker. Not that she was born, but all that we had to go through.

We had gone in to the doctor's office to get the wife an ultrasound, and they noticed some weird stuff on it, so wanted us to go down to Northside and have one there. Originally we had planned on birthing with a midwife in Carrollton rather than being in a big hospital.

We got down there and they wanted to do an internal ultrasound. Apparently there was way too much fluid. Long story short, it broke her water. The wife ended up giving birth the Pete at Northside hospital, and apparently things weren't looking too good. For awhile they weren't even sure that she was going to live or not. It was all pretty damned scary.

Some of the details are pretty fuzzy now, but that could be that I just woke up too. I may add to this when I get home from work this evening. My wife has posted about tthis before and probably remembers much more.

Anyway, They decided that the thing to do was move her to Scottish Rite, which is across the street from Northside. Had the wife's water not broken at Northside Hospital and given birth to my daughter there, if they had moved her at all, it would have been to send her down to Columbus. It is extremely unlikely that she would have lived at all.

If I remember correctly, the surgery itself too somewhere around eight hours. We were on pins and needles all day. I don't remember ever having been so scared or worried at any point prior or since then.

A portion of her small intestine had never opened up, so everything was trying to go back the other way. She was full of myconium. They ended up taking out about ten centimeters of it, and they moved some stuff around that was in the wrong place.

She ended up being in Scottish rite in the ICU for 40 days or so. When we brought her home, it was still on monitors. We had to feed her every couple of hours, as the amounts she was getting were so small. She still had tubes and whatnot hanging out of her when we brought her home as well. It is just amazing to me that she is living a normal healthy life.

In 1998

This is her at one or so.

With her NEW little sister (at that time)

Halloween 2002

2006 Softball Season. She is playing again this year. Practice has already started but I think we have a couple of weeks before the first game.

The Scurvy Dogs!

...but not physically. I have been in a horrible mood all day long, as my waitresses figured out pretty quickly. I generally treat everyone the same way no matter the mood, but I am always much quieter, and at one point I snapped at one of them after she had done something stupid.

The wife went to pick up new shoes for the girls, so I asked her to pick up some vitamins for me. I have been just plain exhausted at work for the last couple of weeks, and I think that attributed to my mood a bit. It might just be that I am about a month overdue for a vacation, and opening this new store back in October has worn me out.

Either way, I need to seriously get some time off and R&R very soon. I don't particularly care what's happening at the store, and am only interested in getting the hell out as soon as I can in the afternoon. I go on vacation at the end of March, and can't wait. I don't think I am going to end up going anywhere on this one, so I will be getting my yard right and getting my garden planted. Believe it or not, that is just as relaxing as being at the beach. Maybe not as relaxing as being there with beer, but it's close.

...One can only wish. I don't know what it is but I have had the hardest time getting out of bed the last two mornings. I feel like I just went to bed a couple of hours ago, which is far from the truth. I suppose it could be worse. I could actually have had to work all night. They called at 10:30 PM. One of the waitresses was sick. I think I pissed her off. I told her that if she had to go, then go, but that there was nobody else to call in, and I couldn't work 1st shift, and 3rd, and then 1st again, unless she was going to cook in my place this morning. Then I went back to sleep. It means that the place is going to look like shit this morning. We've got to be there this morning anyway, so we have seven hours to get it cleaned up.

I have done a couple of advertisements for the Nutz that you hang off the back of your truck. Well, apparently Maryland delegate Leroy E Myers Jr. has filed legislation to get them banned there. I could really care less about the things, but it's just one more case of someone in the government thinking that they know more about morals than the rest of us. I call bullshit.

What's up with the spam? It goes through periods of time where I am receiving one thing, and then another. I just deleted about 50 emails that were "returned" from other servers for contain 'viruses'. I have seen these before. Usually it will last for a week or so, then go to something else. I hate email spam.

I ran across this on someone's blog first thing this morning, and I cannot remember where. If you had it posted, leave me a comment and I will put your link here. What can I say, sometimes I'm a dumbass. Memory's the second thing to go, so they say. I can't remember what the first one is though.

The point.

Oh yeah. The point is Shutdown Day is March 24th. Can you do it? Can I do it? I am certainly going to try. I think that is right smack in the middle of my vacation, so I can spend the day doing yard work. Or sleeping. Maybe sleeping a 24 hour drug induced sleep is the answer. That's about the only way I can do without my computer for a 24 hour period. Even hanging on the beach down at the Redneck Riviera I carry my camera, cell phone, and iPaq so that I can blog. No blogging. No gaming. No posting ads. No nothing. Living life because I can.

Damn, it really sounds sucky. I'll be on the computer until 12 AM the night before and back online at 12 AM the next morning probably.

It could be worse. I could be in China receiving electric shock therapy to 'cure' me.

Updated 3:47 PM - Now I remember. I saw it over at Michelle Malkin's site.

Technorati : Shutdown Day

Just got home from work. I ended up having a little bit of help today, so it was a short one for me, which is always nice. The boy is going to play paint-ball and the wife is napping, with Pete at the ballfields, so it is just RePete and myself. Once I have posted a bit and checked my email I think we are going out to plant a tree.

It's about time to start cleaning my yard up and decide how big of a garden I want this year. I meant to bring some Jabanero peppers with me to the Helen blogmeet last year for Yabu, but I left them sitting on the counter. I have a couple of them in the ground that I am hoping come back this year. It was the first year that I have tried to grow them, so I don't know how well the roots survive the winter. If not I will probably grow some in containers.

I had a huge crop of tomatoes, and peppers (bells, bananas, chili's, jabaneros, hell even some I don't remember) last year. I am thinking about a small area with corn this year. I have a pretty small yard, but I think I could manage a couple of rows of eight or ten plants.

I am also expanding the area around the goldfish pond again. I really need a tiller, but I will do most of it by hand. The soil sucks so bad here that I end up tilling it and then mixing with potting soil and top soil before I plant. Probably I will put in some more of the really big elephant ears. They look great later in the summer when they are really huge. There's some pictures here somewhere if you want to see.

One thing I set up when the Boy was first starting to get online was a watchdog program so that I could monitor his Internet usage. There are just too many pedophiles and other bad folks out there not to, not to mention the fact that just going to his game sites he can pretty much access any type of porn he wants.

It is particularly important for me to watch what the girls are doing. RePete is still young enough that the only thing even remotely close to computers she gets is playing on my iPaq, but Pete is online quite a bit, at least an hour a day and I want to be able to track what she is doing, but not be intrusive about it.

One way for me to take care of the internet monitoring is with SpectorSoft computer monitoring. It allows me to know every single thing that they do on the computer. Spector Pro records emails, chats, MySpace activity recording, even key logging. That way if they join a site without my permission, I have the passwords and can get in and see what is going on.

My children's safety is just too important for me to leave to chance, and if I have to feel like I am spying on them to make sure that they are safe, so be it.

Just woke up from my nap. I managed to get about an hour between phone calls and Pete getting home and asking if she could go out and play. My wife calls the girls Pete and RePete, and I am tired of calling them "the oldest girl" so am adopting it. RePete is still sleep, but I will be getting her up shortly so that she will sleep tonight.

I fixed the code at the bottom of each entry that shows the time of my posts. It is supposed to say "Posted xx minutes/days ago by Richard". Half the time it works, half the time it says 31 days ago, and in the case of the one that I have dated for 11:59 PM tonight it says 30 days ago. It's a big pain in the butt is what it is. I just used the code from the default movabletype template for that.

One of my cooks didn't show up for work tonight. Fairly tense because for a little while there I thought I was going to have to go in and cook it myself. I ended up getting a waitress who can cook as well to do it. Actually it was two cooks, since the one that was scheduled is sick, so he traded with my other cook and then she didn't show up. As far as I am concerned they both hung me, and they both know my policies on this, so someone else that just transferred to my store is going to end up with some unexpected hours this week and the two others can enjoy a nice small paycheck.

Asshats.

Right in the middle of Grey's Anatomy too. Why did I allow myself to get sucked into this show anyway?

For awhile there it looked like there was going to be a blog meet in Las Vegas, but that sort of didn't pan out. I would have loved to go, but really can't afford it right now anyway. I have only been to Las Vegas once, 22 years ago. My friend Chris that passed away last years was in Construction Battalion in the Navy. He was based just north of Los Angeles for the last year that he was in, and at the end of one leave, he wanted to get his car back there from Atlanta, so I helped him drive out there, and then he flew me back. It took a few days and along the way we basically made three stops. We stopped to sleep in Texas once, we stopped at the Grand Canyon, and we also stopped in Las Vegas. It was the first time either of us had been there, so we spent a little extra time. We got a room at the Holiday Inn on the strip, and hung out at some of the casinos, checked out some of the sites, and looked at some of the Vegas homes.

It was about three months before my 18th birthday, but we didn't have too many problems. I did manage to get carded at Caesars Palace, and they threw us out, but otherwise it was a pretty good trip.

I enjoyed the trip out there, and like most places I go to on vacation I wanted to move there for awhile. If I did, I think I would have to move into one of the high rise condos rather than a home. There are some pretty good deals on Las Vegas homes, but if I were to move somewhere like that, I think I would want it to be pretty low maintenance for me.

I don't know what it is, but once you have been in ANY kind of tech job, you are the free tech support person EVERYONE wants to be friends with. I actually did tech support for a few months in between running restaurants and working in our corporate office for a provider that contracted out to about 35 different ISPs. I also spent three and a half years in support for about 300 desktop users and about 850 remote locations. Four of us worked in the IT department. Every once in a while that could really become a headache.

Last week one of my waitresses that has worked with me for several years was asking me a question about her computer, one of the others was in there with her husband. They quickly asked "Do you work on computers?". "Yes, but I charge $50 an hour". They quickly shut up. Hell, $50 an hour is CHEAP. A couple of minutes later the husband asked if I could look at his TV. Now how the hell would I know anything about televisions. Mine quits working, I buy a new one. There's the fix for that little problem.

Anyway, one of the other managers called me up a few minutes ago. He is an end user with no clue. That's OK, sometimes they are easier to deal with than the guy that THINKS he has a clue and doesn't want to listen to you. His Internet connection to Bellsouth is down, so I walked him through checking a couple of sites, then pinging a couple, as well as himself just to make sure TCP/IP was installed then ended up telling him to reset his modem, router, and computer and if it didn't work to call Bellsouth since that's what he is paying them for. I don't mind helping out, but once that ten minute mark hits I start getting frustrated and they need to deal with someone else that they are paying, not me.

This splitting up my days off is weird. I went back to work today and didn't feel like doing a damn thing. I managed to get everything done that needed doing prior to 2 PM, shot off to my meeting, and actually made it home by 5 PM. That's great for a Thursday. So here I am. The wife and girls have gone to softball practice, so I figured that would give me the opportunity to catch up on some email and posting. I am also off tomorrow, that will be REALLY nice. I am keeping the four year old home with me tomorrow, so I won't be spending the entire day blogging, but I am sure I will be able to squeeze some time in there somewhere.

I am in the middle of downloading and installing Windowblinds 5.5 from Object Desktop. It has been updated to be compatible with the 32bit version of Windows Vista. I mentioned the other day about Dreamscapes and Stardock Deskscapes. I made my own animated background the other day. I had the girls beating on the window shouting let me out, let me out, pulled that in from my camera, and converted the digital video to an mpeg that I am now using as my desktop background. Now it looks like the girls are beating on the inside of my monitor trying to get out. Pretty cool actually, and THEY loved it. I will try and get a capture of it tomorrow and upload it to youtube so you guys can see what Vista is capable of.

Anyway, it's off to read email and click some links. I will post more later this evening I am sure. Not going back in for drawer change (for a change) so I will be around all evening if anyone wants to shoot the shit.

...I need to get off my butt and get ready for work. I am feeling really lazy today which sort of sucks as I will be cooking all day, and then have meetings all afternoon.

...my computer just rebooted in the middle of doing the last post. Luckily Zoundry auto saves the posts, at least through the last complete sentence or something. When the system came back up I got one of those "Microsoft Windows has recovered from an unexpected shutdown" messages. The details were:

Problem signature:

Problem Event Name: BlueScreen

OS Version: 6.0.6000.2.0.0.256.1

Locale ID: 1033

Which I though was funny. No BSOD, just a message that tells me that I got one. I will have to run a scan of my hard drives while I am at work. That hasn't happened before, so I am not really sure what is up.

Don't forget, submit some questions today and I will do the webcast tomorrow. I have split my off days up, have to work this morning and evening, but I will be home again tomorrow.

This is just awful. From Michelle Malkin:

I don't care what religion you are or what you believe, but kiiling people just because they don't believe in it as strongly as you do is just awful, or as Michelle puts it, monstrous. Oh, but this must not be one of the run of the mill muslims, he must be one of those rare birds known as an extremist, of which most muslims don't belong. Yeah, right. Islam is all about converting the rest of the world, and those that aren't converted end up as slaves, or dead. There are moderate muslims out there, and they need to take a long hard look at what their religion is promoting.

Countdown to Extinction

Technorati : Islam, Muslims, Terrorists

I've been sucked in to another damn TV show. The wife has been watching it since last year, and I have caught bits and pieces of it over the last two weeks. The third part of three is on tonight tomorrow and I will probably get sucked into watching it as well.

Dinner is just about done. I'm just making a simple chicken and rice thing, the oldest girl has softball practice tonight, so we don't want to wait too terribly long to eat. They have to leave in about 40 minutes.

I hate that my BeyondTV box is not connected to the TV now. It means that I have to record to my computer, but if it is over channel 100 I don't get it and have to watch it in real time or miss it. The Sopranos should be starting again soon and I am a fan.

I am trying to decide if I want to use this on my sidebar or not. It's kind of cool, but it is limited in that I actually have to upload the files or music to a server and access it from there. It's a flash widget from Box.net. It is actually kind of cool. It is a little big but I may be able to mess with the code to see if I can resize it. I did add some good thrashing tunes to listen to either way. If you want, you can get your own Box.net Widget at their web site.

Let me know what you think about it. I may stick it on the sidebar somewhere. Like I said, I can't configure it for a bunch of music or anything. That would be pretty cool it it would serve up the stuff in my files directory. This was originally posted a couple of days ago, but I was able to take it as a paid opp today, so here it is again <g>.

...at 2:30 AM. 22 Hours after I got out of bed last.

Good question and one which doesn't have a real clear answer other than the fact that sometimes I am a dumb ass of the third degree. Actually I have a black belt in dumbassery.

I got up at the usual time yesterday, about 4:30 AM or so. Surfed the web, posted a little bullshit, a couple of paid ads, drank coffee. Normally I will hit the shower between 5:30 and 6:00. Since I work so much closer to home now it has more often than not been closer to 6 AM. Then I go to work, getting there by 6:30. I was pretty worn out by the time the first shift was over so I locked everything up, picked up the four year old and came home. I attempted to nap for awhile, but was only partially successful.

I had to go back to work at 8:30 to oversee the next shift change and finish the paperwork that I had locked in the office earlier in the day. Count all of the food in the restaurant, count the money, make up my bank deposit so I could drop it at the bank on the way home. Deal with 100 stupid things that needed to be dealt with. It was around midnight when I finally got home. Very rarely can I just come home from work and go to bed. I have to have a bit of wind down time. Normally that's spent on the computer. I posted some more, and surfed for a few minutes.

Unfortunately the four year old is developing a pretty nasty cough. I took her to the doctor late last week and they said she was coming down with a cold, so we have been fighting that. I am letting her sleep on the couch tonight, she is pretty congested and will sleep better reclining than being flat on her back. That I guess is the main reason I am still up listening to her cough. She's had some medicine now though, hopefully she will start sleeping a little better, because I am getting pretty droopy here. Nodding off and making all sorts of typing errors. Thank god for spell check. Now if it could just check my grammar and post for me too, all would be well in my world.

I was going to keep her home Friday and spend tomorrow sleeping in, but I may reverse that and keep her here tomorrow. I have someone's laptop to fix, and taxes to do for one of my waitresses, as well as a couple of netflix DVDs that I still need to copy and send back, so that I can watch them later. I don't guess I will be getting much in the way of rest tomorrow. One can only hope that they let me sleep in for at least a little while. Since the girl is sick, if she stays home she may sleep in as well. I damn sure am keeping my fingers crossed.

I have agreed to split my two days off over a three day period since my boss will have her son that lives in a different part of the state so I am taking tomorrow and Friday off. Unfortunately that means that I have to go back in tonight. Audits, inventories, a bit of cleaning as well. Don't know what time I will be back, but since I can sleep late tomorrow I may be back online.

I haven't had the opportunity to visit many blogs this evening since I have been working, so perhaps I will do that as well.

Right on the heels of this last investigation where I was accused of being a racist, I had another yesterday. Not discrimination, just stupidity. Remember when I fired those two people that I think were smoking post in the van in my parking lot before they came to work? That was back at the beginning of December.

Apparently the guy's mother made good on her threat and complained to our office and they investigated me for abusive behavior. Considering that I was very polite to them the entire time, AND her on the phone afterward, there was nothing abusive there. The investigation is pretty much closed. I was just told that next time, not to give anyone any information (including parents) about why I fire them. Legally I don't have to and in Georgia I don't even have to have a reason. I just felt that since the guy was 16 his mother should know what's going on.

What I didn't tell her and I am not going to get involved in, is the fact that he (16yo) and the other ex-employee (28yo) are still dating. The guy that did the investigating said that the mother was very worried about this being a small town and it getting out why he was fired, and accusing me of slander, as well as threatening further legal action. Whatever. They don't want to mess with the slander thing. I don't generally talk about why I fired people, except here, and of course no names. If she wants to keep it up, this whole pedophile thing is going to blow up and I will make sure that I am the one that starts the fire. They do not need to be fucking with me.

I was reading a bit more about the food poisoning outbreak that the FDA thinks is caused by some peanut butter (and I can tell you it damn sure is) and ran across this line over at CNN Health:

Well, for starters where else would the shit come from? Birds and Animals. That pretty much includes everything that needs to take a dump doesn't it? I mean, I guess we can exclude fish from this, I don't know if you can get salmonella from fish shit. There is an assignment for someone. Can you get salmonella from fish shit?

Secondly, I think it's pretty clear how the germ got in there. Someone burned 'em one before work and after getting some munchies was in dire need of dropping a load and that big old vat of brown creamy was just waiting for one to be dropped. It's just a matter of time before they find the retard that shit in the peanut butter and if the fucker ever comes near me I will be sorely tempted to run their ass over.

Technorati : Food Poisoning, Peanut Butter, Salmonella

...as I have one in the nut house, one in the hospital, another called in because she has the sniffles, and my night shift cook left at 2 AM becuase her belly hurts. If there is something really wrong that is cool, but she has been with me three weeks and already missed four days of work. She's not long for the unemployment line. I made the waitresses cook the shift rather than going in at 2 AM considering that I cooked 15 hours yesterday and I am the only cook this morning.

I think right off the bat I am going to cover all of the above people for the rest of the week and if they show up they can just take an extended couple of days off. I hate fucking drama at work and this doesn't fit into my nice little plan, so I will make it fit.

My afternoon cook may still be in Savannah. Hopefully not, I worked in his place this weekend so that he could move his mother and I really don't feel like doing any more doubles.

I suppose I should get going, but there was ice all over my car and I wanted to let it warm up for a few minutes before I go, thus the last minute post this morning.

Apparently NIN is coming out with a new album. I don't really pay much attention, so don't find these things out until they happen, but this is great. Trent Reznor kicks ass.

Apparently at least one of the new tracks is up on his Myspace page if you want to check it out. I will hunt it down later this week and post it along with a bit more. For now you can find it at My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings.

Technorati : NIN, Nine Inch Nails, Tent Reznor

I ended up working about 15 hours today, so I am pretty beat. I think I will answer some comments, don't know how much more posting I will manage today though. It's just going to have to be a light day.

I am still cramping, hopefully this will get better as the day goes along. I have to work again until shift change tonight although I may be able to get out of there slightly early. My boss would probably come work for me, but she has one manager off and another on vacation this week, so things are pretty much locked in for her. If I tried hard I could probably get myself covered, but I had to pay three cooks yesterday just to replace me, so i can't really afford it. Almost 21 hours of pay that I had not planned on hitting my payroll this week. I really need to save some money there somewhere but just don't see any way right now. That's the biggest issue for me, and why I almost never call in sick. I get paid off my profits, and that was over $150 that I had to spend just because I have the shits.

I may be able to borrow one of the manager trainees this morning though, which would be nice as that wouldn't cost me anything. I'll know in an hour or so if I have any extra help. I'm crossing my fingers.

...a couple of posts ago I gave a link to Dreamscapes or whatever it's called. It lets you use ANY mpeg as your desktop background. Right now I have it set to use the one where my daughter is chasing me with an ax at Wal-Mart. Pretty shitty video for that big of a screen since it came from my cell phone, but that gives an idea of what it's capable of. I will have to fool around a little bit more with this. I have some video that I imported from my Sony video player that I might want to use as my background. Very cool, but it is fairly distracting too.

Technorati : Windows Vista

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Microsoft just released the Windows Dreamscene Preview as part of the Windows Ultimate Extras that you get if you are running ultimate. In conjunction, Stardock released Dreamscapes. If you have a decent video card (and you pretty much have to if you are running Vista Ultimate) then you can have animated wallpaper, and all the work is done by the video card, so it's not using much of your cpu resources. I am running it here, and was going to take a video and upload it to youtube, but it looks like Brad Wardell, the CEO of Stardock, already has. Here is the video, it kind of gives you an idea of what it does.

It's a very cool program You can download it at stardock.com and find some cool free backgrounds over at wincustomize.com

Technorati : Brad Wardell, Stardock, Wincustomize, Windows Vista

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Of course, one thing I neglected to mention when writing about my disease infected PB&J sandwich last night is that I went in and fixed it, walked back out into the living room and ate it in front of my wife, who a few minutes later looks at me and says profoundly "Is that the peanut butter with E-Coli?" What the fuck is up with that anyway?

Technorati : WTF?

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I will give it a few days to make sure that I am not going to die from the peanut butter and them perhaps we will have to see how to make peanut butter explode. On film of course. I only live 20 miles from Alabama, so a few well placed M-80's might just be in order.

Technorati : Food Poisoning

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...because here's something to do while your in there. NO, NOT THAT you damn pigs. It's like a Karaoke site, except you get to record your singing and upload it. In my case I will have to clear the house of all the animals when I start singing so as not to start the damn dog howling but I wanted to post on this so I would have a link to check out later. When the house is empty.

P.S. Time to actually go shower and get ready for work. I promise I won't be singing this morning.

P.P.S. Don't forget the KY

Technorati : Karaoke, Singshot

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Well, hell with it. Happy Valentine's Day to all of you suckers out there who are spending their hard earned money on crap that isn't needed. I suppose there are worse things that you could be doing with it. At least you aren't like some of the people that have worked for me in the past. A good valentine might be some crack, or a bag of pills. Actually a good muscle relaxer might do me some good right now. My back has been killing me for a few days now. Not real sure why, I haven't over done it this week. It was a somewhat long week, but nothing too strenuous.

Just received a call from the recruiter that works in my area. I have to go to one of those leadership development seminars on the 26th. Damn. Well, at the very least I will get a free dinner out of it. The last one of these that I had to go to was the one where I won a Smoky Bones gift certificate for my presentation. That's one of the reasons I have done those stupid porncast videos so enthusiastically. It's all fun and games, but it helps me to be a bit more comfortable with public speaking as well.

The oldest girls just got home from school, now she is off to play with a friend again. I really need to work on my taxes but I think I will put it off at least until this evening. I'm getting faster with it every year, so it shouldn't take me too long. I think I am only doing them for one of my waitresses this year as well, so that will be a piece of cake, as well as a quick $50. Now if only we could get the damn Fair Tax passed...

Technorati : Leadership, Taxes, Valentines

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The wife just sent me a text message "C the Snow?"

Oh fuck.

Cell phone going off now.

I am not about to have my boss cancel my day off because of a few fucking snow flurries. Idiots down here freak out every time we get a dusting on a few leaves, and generally we lose our days off. Now if it were to get bad (and it won't, I checked the weather) I would always go in, but I will be the one to make that decision, not them.

Time to eat some eggs.

I know how hard Zonker has been working to get his refrigerator cleaned out, I think maybe he wants to impress someone. I found the perfect ad opp on one of the sites I post for and I just couldn't turn the damn thing down. I will post it later, and will update this with a link for him. ]:|

Updated. Hey zonk, here's your link. Hey, I know I'm an asshole, but I just couldn't resist. I'll buy you a beer next time.

Technorati : Russian Mail Order Brides, Shadowscope, Snow, Weather

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This has got to be one of my all time favorites though. I think I have posted the mp3 here somewhere as well.

Technorati : Megadeth, Music Videos, Youtube

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Phantom Lord, filmed in 1983, while Dave Mustaine was still with the band.

Technorati : Dave Mustaine, Megadeth, Metallica, Music Videos, Phantom Lord, Youtube

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I don't listen to this crap, but my wife has it for her ringback tone. I figured I would post it for her. I think perhaps it is about nap thirty, so I had to leave you with something useless.

Technorati : Crap, Justin Timberlake, Music Videos, Sexyback, Youtube

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Becky has just what you need. Found it via Lisa W. I think I'll go pick up a case when I stop to get my duct tape and BB gun.

Technorati : Astronaut, Diapers, Huggies, Just don't Shit Yourself, Lisa Nowak

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I came across this over at Post Secret, where you can send in your most secret things anonymously on a post card and they will post them for your perusal. Damn.

Technorati : Creepy, pedophiles

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So I have to get up early on my day off. I have been shorthanded all week, so one of my former employees agreed to work four nights for me, provided I supply transportation. I am not a damn taxi driver, but I figure if given a choice between working 3rd shifts all week and picking his ass up it's a no-brainer. The girls are home sick with me today, one with pink eye and the other with a cold, so the three of us picked him up and took him home.

I had to go by the bank and make a quick deposit. I am used to filling out the deposit slip before I leave the house, then sticking everything in an envelope. Not anymore. When I got to the bank (which is closed at this time of day) I went around to the ATM and discovered it had slightly changed. You put in your card and tell it what you want, but then you insert your bills and checks and it scans them, totals the deposit, and then spits back a receipt with the scanned image of the check right on it. Very cool.

This doesn't seem like a very big deal, but gadgets excite me. That was just too damn cool.

We are back home now. The girls are messing around with Valentine cards because you have to start them off early to turn them into good little consumers, right? Either way it gives me the opportunity to blog for a little while and maybe surf some of the sites that I haven't had the chance to over the weekend.

Technorati : ATM, Banks, Blog, Computers, Technology, Valentines Day, Vasrious and Sundry Stupid Ass Shit

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So as not to confuse anyone :)

Willie and The Poor Boys - These Arms of Mine

Technorati : MP3, Music, These Arms of Mine, Willie and the Poor Boys

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...just for you.

Technorati : Guns N Roses, MP3, Music

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The edited version...

[I originally posted this last night and my good buddy yabu commented to me this morning that perhaps I had put a little too much information. He's right, and as I like getting my paycheck every two weeks, I have cut some out. I was pretty highly stressed out and pissed off last night when I posted it.]

Just woke up from a nap. Damn, I was sleeping hard. It was a pretty hard day at work, so shortly after I got home at 4:30 I passed out on the couch. The wife just woke me up with coffee.

[Deleted for content]

Doesn't leave a whole hell of a lot does it? hehe. Basically I have a situation at work where there is some sexual harassment going on that I have stopped, but our legal department is going to have to get involved. I hate this crap. It would be nice if everyone would just come to work, do their damn job, get paid, and go home. Too fucking much to ask I suppose.

Long meaningless post [it was before I got rid of the juicy details anyway], but I needed to vent for a few.

I forgot to do an open trackback post this morning (Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays) so this would be it.

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Wake Up America, Perri Nelson's Website, Rightlinx, Right Celebrity, Faultline USA, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, Maggie's Notebook, Blue Star Chronicles, The Pink Flamingo, Stuck On Stupid, Renaissance Blogger, Dumb Ox Daily News, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Technorati : OTA, Sexual Harassment

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I managed to get finished with work and out the door by 2:30 or so, which is great time. Picked up the youngest, went to the bank and stopped at the store for smokes and I was still home by 3PM. Damn I like working so close to the house.

Not going back in for shift change tonight, I am going to have to do it for the next four nights straight, including my day off, so i am taking the evening off, except for the fact that I have to make sure I am staffed and handle the shift change over the phone. Almost an evening off anyway.

The boy still has not called either of us. It kind of pisses me off that he has been so inconsiderate about this. Hopefully we will hear from him soon. He is supposed to be back at school for wrestling practice, so perhaps the wife will see him before she leaves work. Hope so, because his ass is going to be wanting a ride at some point and I damn sure am not going to get out of bed to go pick him up tonight if he has not checked in by then.

Found this parody over here after doing a quick search. I love google.

900 Miles

Wait for the page to load completely and you can let it play here.

Technorati : Lisa Marie Novak, Parody

The astronaut you loved went crazy
And that's a good thing
For the confines of your mind

The chiming of atonal ocean birds
The cliffs are falling
For the moment you'll be fine

He was never going to love you
And I was always going to try
Give me things I can grab on to
Anything
Tonight

The way I want to crawl inside your head
And watch the movies
That happen in your mind

They tell me that the astronaut is dead
And I'm so sorry
For the stupid things I say

Now your going to have to love me
Now your going to have to try
There's all these things you can grab on to
Anything
Tonight

And how can you behave
When nothing ever goes your way

What a day. I write this with just a glimmer of a tear in my eye.

I've gone through most of the day just as normal, not really thinking about anything other than work and trying to make sure that my level of patience stays at a decent level. After my meeting tonight I was talking to my boss about the Boy joining the Marine Corps and hell, I wanted to start crying. Don't know what's up with that, but it's like trying to be two different people at once.

He is in Atlanta right now, took the Asvab this afternoon and will stay overnight. Tomorrow he takes his physical and will get the initial swearing in. From that point on it is only a few months until he goes to boot camp, most likely in June. Hopefully he will be going to Parris Island, it will be a damn site easier to get up there than to go visit the Hollywood Marines out in San Diego.

Sometimes this parenting stuff just isn't all it's cracked up to be. I feel as if my heart is breaking at the same time that it's busting with pride.

Semper Fi little buddy, I love you.

Don't shit where you sleep. Useful advice for the workplace. That's one of the first things that I tell new managers. Don't sleep with the help. Apparently the trainee that is finishing up his time here is dating one of my waitresses. Bad mistake.

The last time that I had a trainee that did that, he made the mistake of banging someone that had a boyfriend who also worked for me. He ended up with broken ribs as a result of that encounter.

Luckily this girl has no boyfriend, but it is against our policy to date direct line associates. He only has two days left here so I don't guess it is going to be a big deal.

Thursday is my long meeting day, I have been at work for five hours now and have at least nine more hours. I should be a nice drooling mess by the time I get home tonight.

Hat tip to Lisa for this one.

I'm off to work, so i will leave you with this that I ran across at a now-defunct blog.

Technorati : Humor, work

1. They can't show up on time and don't know the meaning of the word alarm clock. It just doesn't matter to them. I have sent people home, and even fired the worst offenders, and yet I always seem to have one or two that think "on time" means dragging their asses in at the last minute, clocking in, and then spending another 20 minutes to get dressed. Come to work in uniform, clock in on your way out to the floor. It's very simple. Just do it.

2. They don't care about the business as much as I do, even when it affects their paycheck. Some of my folks have been with the company for over 20 years. It is obvious that this is the only career they will ever have. Help take care of things and you will make more money.

3. Stealing is not a problem, to them it's just another way to get a paycheck. There is always a bit of theft in the restaurant business, but I shouldn't have to question the integrity of the great majority of my employees.

4. They are not here for the customer, the customer is here for their paycheck. This is mainly the attitude of the younger people that have started jobs within the last couple of years. Customer service means just that, not that they are here to serve you.

5. If they clean at home the way they do here, they must live in a pig pen. I have seen some of their houses. It's true.

Technorati : Careers, Employees, Jobs, Work

Just testing out a new blog posting I found via giveawayoftheday. I stuck the widget for it down in the bottom left of the sidebar. So far it seems pretty cool. It’s called post2blog. It’s a bit different than Zoundry, which is what I have been using, but offers support for flickr, as well as some other stuff.

I can’t find a setting for it to automatically ping sites for me, not sure if I like that or not. There are a shitload of places to ping from this, plus it lets you add more, which is something Zoundry doesn’t let you do. It also includes a firefox extension and a plugin for IE. I went back to Firefox today since I have had so many problems with IE and a memory leak. I tend to leave my browser window open overnight with several tabs open, and Internet Exploder was just sucking up all of my resources.

I will have to remember this one. I have several of them working for me.

1. A person who acts foolishly
2. A person who is extremely annoying
3. Used to describe an event that is very unfavorable

1. "James is acting like a Goat Chode."
2. "I hate goat chodes like that guy."
3. "This sucks goat chode, I have to sit through a two hour ethics improvement meeting."

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Here are this morning's web searches. I just woke up a short while ago, so just overlook any typos.

#1 youtube for porn, youtube porn, porn on you tube, youtube of porn. Repeated several times.

I did a search on my site for the same thing just now, and found seven posts that had this. Only one for porno tube, and the great majority of the others are the porncast. Maybe I will change the name of them. I can just imagine what's going through a person's mind as they are looking for youtube porn. Can afford to actually go to a porn site? Damn.

#2 I love living in the city.

From the Fear song. I Love Livin' in the City

#3 Web Fuckers.

Don't know about this one. It's not like I use profanity or anything. Perhaps they were trying to find the NIN song Star Fuckers.

#4 Kindergarter Graduation.

I don't know if I ever posted the video of my daughter's graduation or not. I think it was before youtube but I know I did post about it.

#5 Meedio download.

I used to have Meedio (an HTPC front end) up for download here, but took it down. It's dead software folks, replaced by Yahoo Go! for TV which sucks oh by the way.

#6 2fastlane.

There are a couple of searches for this. I don't have a clue what they are searching for or what the reference is to.

#7 naked goat.

No naked goats here. Try Erin O'Brien's site.

#8 naked amsterdam women.

Now we are stretching things a bit thin here.

#9 Video Detective.

I did an advertisement for this awhile back.

#10 (all in caps) THERE'S A SINISTER FEELING BREWING

Fucking indeed.

Technorati : Searches, Shadowscope, Tags

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4. pink button

A cat's anus, usually one that is obvious, such as on a black short haired cat.

Technorati : anus, bung, butthole, cornhole, poop chute

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1. goat fuck

That is a pretty apt description of my weekend. Thanks to Urban Dictionary. I may post a few more common phrases from my daily stream of invective.

My normal routine (work days) is to get up by 4:30, make coffee and blog, surf the web, whatever for about an hour. I shower and get dressed between 5:30 and 6 and head to work, arriving there by 6:30 at the latest. It's my quiet time, and it lets me wake up. I am by no means a morning person. Some of the worst fights that I have ever been involved in my marriage were because we chose to talk to each other in the morning. Bad mistake. I maker her a cup of coffee, give her a kiss, and fucking leave.

Today I woke up sometime around or just after 6AM. I made coffee and had a quick smoke and discovered we were out of sugar. Fuck. The only thing I could find was a box of Splenda. Isn't that the stuff that makes your ass leak? I had about a half cup of coffee, threw my clothes on and went to work. No shower, no coffee, no quiet time. I've been checking for ass leakage throughout the day and so far so good.

I was short help at work today, so even though it started rough, it got worse quickly, finally evolving into a what one might nicely call a goatfuck. Actually I have had worse days. Working in Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina was worse. Working the couple of days after Hurricane Opal came up the Georgia/Alabama line back in the '90s was worse. It was just that kind of day.

One of my waitresses chose today to pick a fight with me and came real close to getting shitcanned. Like most restaurants we have specials or "featured items". It's simple, if you want the featured item, it's a certain price, usually slightly lower than what it would normally be. No substitutions, no changing for shit that isn't on the featured items. If you want fucking country ham with your waffle and eggs, FINE. You pay full price because it isn't a featured item. 99% of the population could give a fuck, except for that waitress that just has to fucking argue that it isn't fair. If you DON'T FUCKING LIKE IT, GO TO WORK SOMEWHERE ELSE WHERE THEY LET YOU MAKE THE RULE UP FOR YOURSELF cause it ain't gonna happen working for me. Open your own fucking restaurant.

Just as soon as I give in to ONE person and do this, someone else is going to get charged correctly, and complain to our corporate office (or god forbid an attorney) that we discriminated against them because the white guy got to substitute, while they paid full price. It will happen. It HAS happened, just not to me, nor will it if I can help it.

I think my ass may be leaking. Not sure. Maybe that's sweat from getting so worked up.

I finally got out of there at 4:30 this afternoon and have to be back at 8:30 for drawer change. That sucks. All of the managers in my area of the state have to go back in EVERY night for at least this week due to high food costs. No big deal I suppose. When I started 20 years ago, it was business as usual to do every single shift change. Part of the job description. It just gets old after awhile and contributes to burnout.

Maybe if I stuck a couple of pieces of toilet paper in there it'll be alright.

I finally found the solution this afternoon to the question I had about HIDING my smilies. Using javascript they are hidden on load but when you click on "Show Smilies" in the comments, they are there. Very cool. It was a pain in the ass to figure this out (at least for me). I used to really enjoy figuring that kind of stuff out, but now I just want shit to work the way I want it to work. Dammit.

Now I just need to figure out how to get my extended entries to show up on the main page when I click the link (like over at Eric's place). I am sure it is basically the same thing. I suppose I can look over at the movabletype forums, perhaps there will be an answer there.

Damn, it's sort of squishy down there.

Technorati : Ass Leakage, Javascript, Movabletype, SWG, Sleeping Late, Splenda, Work

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I'm sorry but there are just a few things that I don't want to see, and that is a bunch of naked men (and quite a few women) that might be hanging out at Fitworld Gym in Amsterdam on naked Sunday. Good thing that you won't go to jail for smoking weed there because I would have to have an awful lot to show up there. Hell, you might see something that looks like this...

Well, I got the investigation out of the way. She interviewed several of my employees, the main question being whether I treat everyone the same, regardless of race.
My interview lasted about 20 minutes, and at one point she almost asked if I am a racist. Damn.
It went as I thought it would, the investigation is closed and I think she figured out that the discrimination complaint is groundless.
I am at a meeting right now trying to stay awake, so I have to go.