January 2009 Archives

So the girls and I made a video last year and put it up on youtube. The had a blast doing it and thought it was cool. Not a very professional editing job but what the fuck do you expect from an amateur anyway? Back when Shadowscope was my personal blog I posted it there but just in case you haven't seen it yet, here's the vid.

We doubled up the duct tape so that there was no sticky parts on Pete. She had a hard time trying to keep from laughing from behind the tape. RePete thought all was great fun when she got to run over and say "do it to me" but when I pulled the tape open boy that mouth dropped open and she backed up a few steps. Had to cut that part out.

Anyway, what got me to thinking about it was this email i got over at my youtube account a couple of days ago. It was from sha159159. Here's the email:

eeew. Just reading that email made me cringe thinking about it. I am seriously considering just deleting the fucking video now thinking about some sick fuck beating his flaccid meat watching the video. Fucking douchebag. Then again maybe he's just making a joke but it certainly didn't come across that way.

I thought my grammar and spelling skill set left you all wanting until I read this one. Tell you what there guy, send me a picture and I'll make a video of me pissing all over it and setting it on fire in lieu of bashing your fucking head in.

Gives new meaning to the word 'creepy'

Tuesday was just another normal day for me. No TV, no radio, nothing but fucking scattered smothered covered. It's not a bad thing really, being removed from American media consciousness for seven to twelve hours at a time. It's actually a nice reprieve from the bullshit I get in abundance when I am in front of the computer or TV. Not that I am without some news of course. I do have my crackberry with me all the time. You should try it sometime. It's like being out in the fucking woods. I've even taking to locking my phone up in the office while I'm out on the floor. You actually have to call me on the landline at one of my stores if you want to speak with me.

How fucking twentieth century...

When I picked up the girls Tuesday afternoon and arrived home it was to find out that 90% of what they did was to watch the events surrounding the inauguration all day. Basically there were no lessons, no education. At first it kind of pissed me off and still does to a smaller degree. Sure, it was a momentous occasion. A black man in the Presidency indeed. My great-grandparents are rolling over in their southern graves right now. I think it's a great thing but for different reasons than others.

President Obama's historic election of a Negro into the office of the chief executive of the United States may just spell doom for the great lie of entitlement that a large majority of black people have. Like many young men I was told I could be anything when I grew up, even President. I'm sure a young Barack Obama was told the same thing as well. We all are at one point or another, even if the teller doesn't believe it himself. The election shows people everywhere that we are all created equal and shouldn't need racial quotas and other bullshit government programs to get ahead. Just get off your lazy fucking asses and pull yourself up by the bootstraps. Before you call me some dumbass uneducated cracker I offer the same advice to my brethren fucking lazy-assed white trash trailer dwellers, some of whom have relatives that work for me. Quit taking my fucking paycheck by gunpoint in order to satisfy your food stamp addiction to Little Debbie Snack Cakes while you collect your fucking unemployment check, or welfare check, or disability check. I work my fucking ass off 70+ hours a week and pay out 30% of my income so you can sit around surfing the internet and watching television. Sorry motherfuckers.

While I am fairly conservative in my tastes of representation I'm not a rabid right-winger and think that a bit of change is a good thing. You have to shake things up every once in a while, particularly at the top of the heap. Obama's got some good ideas but I am concerned with how much will actually come to fruition and how much is actually just smoke and mirrors, a veritable vaudevillian show on CNN. Take some of the stuff being posted at the White House web site for instance. I'm not talking about the jab about President Bush's handling of Katrina. I'll get to that in a minute. I'm talking more about the healing of the country and fixing the economic "woes" we are facing. How much good can he actually do when it's more the fault of his brothers in Congress and their predecessors in the first place. It's not Bush's fault or even Clinton for that matter. It's the lying sacks of shit that we keep re-electing to the United States Senate and the House of representatives that are the problem and I didn't see much change there, that's for damn sure. That big dog turd Barney Frank is still in office. If we as Americans really wanted change and magic and unicorns his sorry sack of shit self would be standing in the unemployment line right now.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...

Same Shit Different Day...

Velociman always posts something that will either make me think really hard or laugh until I shit my pants. This time he did both. This brings me to the Katrina deal. It's haunted President Bush's administration for the last three years and well it should. I agree with V-man in that it was a complete lack of class and panache that this was put up on the White House site in the first place. It shoes the utter lack of disregard most of the liberal establishment has for anyone that disagrees with them. For the last two months George Bush has been very gracious in trying to make sure that this was as smooth a transition as possible. I certainly didn't hear any reports of people scurrying out of the White House crying "the niggers are coming, the niggers are coming!" No, what I heard was "we need to cooperate and get this done". No keyboards missing the "O" either after the old guard left.

The part I am not seeing on too many sites that belong to non-left-wing liberals is the fact that although it was distasteful, it was the truth. Obviously now, Katrina was a natural disaster and there is nothing that the government could have done. The way things were handled after the fact was fucking deplorable. President Bush couldn't have done what he did much different but he does share in the blame simply because he was the sitting president at the time. The blame should be shared pretty evenly from FEMA all the way down to Mayor Nagin. The way things were handled and the pissing contests between different jurisdictions and levels of government was just awful but guess what you stupid fucks. YOU REAP WHAT YOU SOW. That goes for the elected criminal representing Louisiana all the way up to the Department of Homeland Security. You reap what you sow and you get what you pay for (and oftentimes ASKED for).

You want to live in a bureaucratic boondoggle where the nanny state takes care of every problem? That's exactly what you fuckers asked for and it is exactly what you got and their response to Katrina was par for the course for bureaucrats everywhere and it's because of the attitude. They have the same attitude we all do. Entitlement. Everything should belong to me and fuck everyone else.

I spent a few minutes cleaning up the blogs a little more today. I've moved my blogrolls over here from Shadowscope. Most of them are personal links and don't have anything whatsoever to do with crime blogging anyway. It allowed me to clean up my main page over there a little and makes it a little easier to identify this site, as if my shitty prose weren't enough to do that.

Managed to get a day off this week, which is always welcome. I went ahead and got out of bed this morning to help the wife get ready and see the curtain climbers off to school, then puttered around the house a bit so it wouldn't look so nasty. My oven was delivered late last week and the handy-man dude is coming over later to help me haul it upstairs and hook it up for me. I could probably manage hooking it up myself but he's got to make a living too. When I ordered the new oven I saved somewhere around $100 by just having them drop it in my driveway, figuring I would rather pay him to come do it. He's got to make a living too.

Speaking of the handy-man, I'm going to get a quote from him on extending the back porch as well. Not in the next month but at least prior to our get-together at the end of May. I want to run it to the end of the house, probably adding on at least another ten feet. More if I have him run it to the other end as well. It really just depends on how much he's going to charge me. It would be nice to have the space on the deck for parties. It's still a bit early to start planning the party but it is coming, so have your asses here. We always have a blast and there is plenty of food and alcohol as well as stuff for kids to do too if you so happen to have rugrats tagging along. Normally there are enough sober people to keep an eye on them as well :)

...nope, not the Priest version nor is it the original singer, Joan Baez. This is Blackmore's Night with Ritchie Blackmore and Candice Night. While I love the Priest version for some reason this is much more haunting.

Blackmore's Night performs some sort of Renaissance/medieval themed music which is really just a return to what he was doing with Blackmore's Rainbow anyway (only not nearly as good). This is the first thing I've heard from them and it's not terrible. I ran across some of the videos on Youtube (obviously) including some of Blackmore's Night doing Deep Purple covers. Don't bother listening. It blows rat chunks. I love old Deep Purple with Ian Gillan and this girl trying to channel Gillan just doesn't get it.

Speaking of Ian Gillan he also did a short stint as vocalist for Black Sabbath replacing Ronnie James Dio back in the '80s. While Born Again was not well received I actually liked the album. I saw them on tour which was hilarious. They had the stage set up like Stonehenge, which was parodied in the Spinal Tap movie. This video was from the Born Again album...

Enough of that stuff I guess. Have to run to the grocery ctore and pick up some steaks for supper...

It's amazing how things change. I don't remember what got me onto this topic last night with the wife, but I showed her this old video of Judas Priest. Actually I showed her Rocka Rolla but I like Dreamer Deceiver much better, which is why I've posted it here.

Back in 1975 they hadn't yet made the move into leather and chains. That would come shortly after. Interesting how they look now.

While the look has changed immensely their music still kicks ass. I love everything from Rocka Rolla all the way up to Nostradamus except for the period of time when Ripper Owens took Rob Halford's place. It just wasn't the same band without the old goober smoocher. I didn't like the Turbo era much either but it's still better than the crap they put out during Rob's absence.

Here's one of the latest...

...and out the other.

Even now after having been gainfully employed for the last 26 years I still enjoy payday. I get paid every other Friday. It's been that way for the last two decades and I plan everything around it. All of my bills are paid online automatically the Wednesday following payday in case of lag or bank holidays. This is actually a pretty recent development. I used to have everything set to be paid on that Friday but due to my slackness in transferring the money from my deposit account into checking as well as the bank paying folks too early I decided that the following week would be best. It's not a huge deal but I'm very anal about when I want stuff to be paid. I generally balance everything in Quicken a couple of weeks ahead so I know what's going out on my next paycheck vs what I can set back.

My vacation is coming up the first week of April and I have been wanting to go to Key West for a couple of years now. The big problem with that is that actually staying there is pretty much out of the question with my two girls along. Key West is more of an adult-oriented trip and even if we were to take the girls camping somewhere in the lower Keys and just visit Key West one day they would be bored shitless and I would be resentful that the wife and I got to go to Key West and not get to let loose for a couple of days. Therefore I've decided to put that trip off one more time until the fall or maybe 2010. I think that we need to ditch the girls and just fly down for a long weekend of debauchery on that one.

Instead, we are going with the old fallback again. Disney World! This time however, we are camping. We've stayed in a couple of different Disney resorts on the property but being as how I'm just a cheap bastard I wanted to get off a little easier. When we took all three kids in '05 it ran somewhere around $5k and the trip with just the two girls this past summer cost $6k. That's a chunk of change to spend on a fucking vacation so we are doing it on the cheap. We'll drive straight through on March 31st and check into the Fort Wilderness Campground and stay for four nights. I made sure to only get three days of park tickets though. Kind of pointless to have tickets for the fourth day when I have a ten hour drive home at the end of the day. Fuck that noise.

The wife doesn't particularly like camping but since it's Disney she's decided to acquiesce on this one. I did make sure to order an air mattress this morning when I bought the tents and shit. Orlando at the end of March/beginning of April isn't too overbearing and the bugs haven't gotten really bad yet so even she should be somewhat comfortable. We will do very little cooking there other than making Coffee so that's no big issue either. I had thought about not getting the dining plan this time as it adds around $600 to the trip but when you figure the prices they charge...four people for four nights ends up being about $150 per person for eight meals/four snacks. That's at least half what we would spend out of pocket and I'm sure we'll end up dropping a serious dime anyway. With everything together (including spending there) I should be able to get out at right around $3 grand. Half what I spent on the last trip. Sweet.

My very first trip to Disney was in 1976. My mom and dad saved and scrimped for months on that trip. We left my little brother, who was five at the time, with my great-aunt and spent a week camping down there. It was a fucking blast. I was ten years old on for that one and still remember it. We did a lot of camping when I was young and I've always loved it. Back in '76 there was just the Magic Kingdom and even with being there for a week there was plenty of stuff to do. I don't really remember how many days we actually went to the park vs. how many we stayed in the campground though. Too many drugs and too much alcohol as a teenager I guess. It's like one long day in my memory now but I do have pictures, which helps. Eventually I'll scan some and maybe post them. That was another exciting thing about the trip. I got to use the camera most of the time we were there.

A ten-year-old with a camera means lots of pictures of legs and hats and bushes. Surprisingly enough there are actually a couple of good photographs in the bunch as well. I just remember how cool it was to be able to use the camera. TEN was the year I remember most fondly from my childhood...

So I've booked our vacation and bought camping equipment. Hell, I'm not even out of my bathrobe yet and I'm already fucking exhausted. Of course when you've made plans and are spending money something has to fuck up the process. Fuck it up it has. Our oven has been acting funny lately. It came with the house and so it's not the most expensive model on the market in the first place. It's lasted a little over eight years which isn't bad I suppose. I hear that generally appliances last around ten years, maybe more for quality stuff and since home builders aren't particularly interested in high quality anymore I guess we did alright.

I priced several different models and was pretty shocked to see some of the prices. Fuck, I think I would rather cook over a campfire. Out comes the Consumer Reports book. I ended up staying on the low end this time. I figure in the next ten years one of two things is going to happen. Either I will get promoted again which might entail moving, or when the wife finishes her Specialist degree in a couple more years I will either retire and just work online or may step back as a single store manager. Either way I don't see us living here fifteen years from now and if we are going to eventually move I'm damn sure not going to put high end equipment into the house. When/if we grow up and decide where we are going to be for good, then we can start getting really nice things. I think I ended up spending between five and six hundred bucks on the oven. I did manage to find it from one of the companies listed at Consumer Reports for about a $30 less with shipping than Home Depot charges before their shipping charges. That was a fucking no-brainer. Of course we'll have to put it in ourselves or call the handy-man we've been using the last couple of months. He's the one that we initially had come look at the oven in the first place.

He cleaned some contacts and stuff off and got it temporarily working but unfortunately it is most like the thermostat rather than the igniter so rather than spending $70 for a replacement thermostat (with no guarantee it would fix the problem) plus a couple of hours labor taking the bastard apart we both figured I would be better off getting a new oven. Of course he was thinking in the $200-300 price range for a new oven, which I could probably find locally if I wanted to look really hard, but even so I got a decent deal. I'm just not interested in getting some piece of shit used equipment from one of the local rental stores.

I finally managed to get a couple of days off in a row from the job. It's almost like a damn vacation in itself. Here we are, a third of the way through January. My last two days off in a row was December 12th and 13th. Hell, my last day off at all was December 30th. By the time I finished out that 17 day stretch I was worthless. I spent the last six days at work with a cold or the flu and it was fucking miserable. I was miserable. I guess getting sick was my body's way of telling me I was overdoing it. While the holidays are my favorite time of the year (like the fucking song) I enjoy a love/hate relationship with Christmas. Luckily it only comes once a year and except for having to cover nine vacations (my three managers) over the next year, stretches like that don't come too often. I have two of them on vacation between now and when I go at the end of March but unless things drastically change I now have use of one of the manager trainees so it shouldn't stretch me too much.

Kind of a long update but I haven't posted here in a couple of weeks. It's about time I suppose. I'll have to go find some scumbags to post about over at Shadowscope and then it's off to do a bit of grocery shopping. I also have a couple hundred emails to go through as well as cleaning my desk and paying some bills but that shit's just going to have to wait for this afternoon. Nothing like a little procrastination to brighten the day...

Today was awful.

It was one of the most god-awful ugly days at work that I have had in a long time.

It was so fucking ugly it actually started yesterday. I could just stop there but then my post would be four sentences. I feel like ranting anyway...

One of my store managers has been around for awhile now and has the experience and the potential to do a really good job and make a lot of money out of the store. The problem is that he's only interested in hitting the door as quickly as possible and doesn't seem to care about the long-term effects of putting crappy people to work. Just as long as he gets to go home as quickly as possible...

Unfortunately I got to come behind and work with the same crappy people today. Add in the fact that I have flu-like symptoms to the point where I feel like death warmed over and it just kept getting worse.

On a normal day my waitresses will keep an eye on the grill for me for the first 20-30 minutes of each shift, unless it is particularly busy. This is because I have to get my daily sales numbers from all three stores, make sure they are staffed and pass on any messages or words of wisdom to the managers. Then I call the numbers upline to my boss who does the same thing after speaking with his other two district managers. This means that if I'm not paying particular attention to the grill area when I first walk in the door at 6:30am I'll miss it if things are nasty. I can't even see my dick to pee straight at 6:30 in the morning. The graveyard shift is pretty slow and most of the cooks spend the time cleaning. Not so Friday morning. The girl who cooked Thursday night must have spent her time fucking sleeping and by the time I rolled out on the grill area at 7:30 and realized just how fucking nasty it had been left it was too late. I spent the first hour of the shift just cleaning the mess up.

Other than the fact that I got to work with a dumb-assed cook it really wasn't all that bad of a day. I felt somewhat rough, which made things bad but we all have bad days.

Not so today...

Along with my daily regimen of Protonix and Vytorin I am also back on Chantix again in order to try and quit smoking (more on that later). I also downed one of those old-fucker vitamins I've been taking recently and about 1000 mg of Vitamin C to try and counteract the effects of the creeping crud that's been getting me down since I woke up Thursday morning. A cup of coffee, shit and shower and I headed off to work. One of my four waitresses for this morning had called in on me last night with the same shit I have and since I hadn't any luck replacing her last night I spent the first fifteen minutes of my day sitting in the parking lot trying to get covered. By the time I made it inside it was about a quarter till seven and about time for me to do the drawer change. One of the waitresses had shown up and my cook wasn't there yet either. I made it to the office and realized that in my light-headedness I had left my keys on my desk.

At home.

Fuck.

25-minutes later and I'm back at work with said keys and had three waitresses and my cook. I managed to get the drawer changed and this started to get ugly. One of the girls came back and told me the cook was fucked up. Sure enough the stupid pill-popping bitch had come in stoned. She was cooking (if you can call it that) with no apron or hat, no gloves and had fucking grey sweat pants on.

Jesus jumping christ.

I told her that she couldn't work out of uniform, figuring that I was going to get stuck cooking the day by myself but apparently she had her damned pants in her car. WTF? She claimed to have overslept and was just having a hard time getting her act together but would be fine shortly. Rather than doing the right thing and send her ass home for the day I just said "OK" figuring that maybe she really had just gotten up and was trying to come down from whatever it was she had done last night.
I was so fucking wrong.

Normally on a Saturday as slow as today was I can get all of my paperwork finished, get the daily food pull and prep work finished, banking and then spend the rest of the time cooking until it's time to go home. Not so today. Except for a couple of much-needed smoke breaks I spent the entire day on the grill with the dumb bitch. I don't have a problem with you if you are slow but combine slow, stupid and stoned and it's a combination I have no fucking patience with.

Up until about 10:30 or 11 it was extremely irritating but the food was coming out and I managed to keep my mouth shut. Then it started getting busy and things got ugly fast. No, not ugly. It was a bloody goatfuck it was so bad. I was pretty much operating everything and just running around the girl. Food wasn't coming out too much slower than normal but I was in a hurry and making a huge mess. I didn't have time for niceties like wiping shit down when I was having to work around someone. Luckily one of my dedicated employees came in around that time and offered to help out for a while. We moved the other girl down to the end where all she had to do was cook some waffles and drop toast. How fucking hard could that be? Apparently it was still too much because then I wasn't getting toast and waffles.

About that time I must have said something that set her off. I was waiting for toast for several plates and asked her where it was. Her comment was "I know I made it, somebody must have stolen it" to which I answered in an extremely snarky voice "I guess the shit must have jumped back in the bread bag". I can be extremely sarcastic most of the time, it helps to have a bit of humor but I must have said it in a pretty mean manner because after that she spent the rest of the time outside crying. Fuck her and the pills she rode in on. The day went much better after that. Still didn't manage to get out of there until about 5:30 this evening. I wasn't particularly happy about that but it comes with the territory I suppose.

I did send the manager of that particular store a text message this afternoon before I left though. He's got next weekend off which means I'll be spending Saturday and Sunday in his store. I told him not to bother scheduling one of his fucking crack-heads, that I would bring my own help next weekend...

Just wanted to take a brief moment to wish everyone a Happy New Year! One more time 'round the sun. I probably won't be posting much later today (possibly this evening) as I am getting ready to go in to work and don't get off until 1pm this afternoon. Ugh. Not much fun.