Doing physical labor for money sucks, as an economical system.

I would much rather be paid for my "potential" than my actual output. Everyone's always telling me how much "potential" I have, but I'm only getting paid slightly more than minimum wage (and about $3/hr less than my last real job) to do the hardest work I've done since the last Christmas I worked gift-retail. And everyone keeps telling me it's going to get harder. Friday will be harder. October will be harder, the holidays will be immeasureably harder. At least 98% of the people I work with don't suck. Today.
In other news, do you automatically die when your feet melt and your legs fall off, because that's pretty much what I think is going to happen soon. Jesus. Working for a living. Totally overrated.

P.S. I ran into my manager about 10 minutes after I clocked out today, in the grocery store. She was buying groceries for tomorrow and I was buying 18 LoneStar tallboys in a big fucking hurry. Hurray for job security!

Guess who's gainfully employed as of today?

It wasn't George W., either. I start Wednesday. It's just a little throwaway convienence store/deli counter job, making shit wages, but the important part is, there are actual wages involved. You know, besides like, the wages of sin and everything. I'm so excited about and focused on getting my first paycheck, I think I'll be the best employee they've ever had. I went to the thrift this afternoon and bought a bunch of ugly polo shirts so I can meet the dress code and so if I get anything ucky on them I can just throw them away. It was bag sale day, so there's another big bonus!

I had to sign a confidentiality agreement today saying I wouldn't give away any proprietary information about their customers or vendors or procedures or organization, so I guess any work-related blogging will have to be maddeningly vague. Maddening to me, anyway. I've worked in retail a looooong time and I know how to bitch about work without telling tales out of school, but it's kind of funny to have this paper I signed hanging over my head.

It's like Girls Gone Wild in 1800's Japan!

When I first ran across these woodblock pictures that's what I thought, because they appeared all to have the same sort of "naughty maids on the master's day in town" ethos to the composition, sort of all rumpled satin and open-mouthed kissing. Then I surfed onto the first guy with a mister the size of his neck being fondled by a geisha. Or the "get into the most uncomfortable posture ever and I'll finger you" pictures. Whoo.

It's called Shunga! It even sounds dirty. Even really famous wonderful woodblock artists like Hiroshige who you thought only did well-respected seasonal landscapes did them, and upon further research I find they were common as, well, as Playboy magazines today!

Hooray for olden-days Japanese pornography! Hooray for skinny pale Japanese guys with funny hair cuts and ridiculously massive rods diddling skinny pale Japanese ladies holding odd household objects! Hooray for 37 disturbing shades of vulvas! Hooray for everyone's kimono being monstrously askew!

I have triumphed over my camera!

I have triumphed over my computer! I have triumphed over my stomach virus! I feel victorious, well, non-pukirific, and smart! Also, here are some photos:

Shapely Tank is vanquished!

    

Here are the promised pictures of the kid:

 
And here are some pictures of my lovely, even-tempered, angelic adorable cat, because this is, after all, a knitting blog:

     
  

More news later, I have to go put in a second job app for today!

I've been quite ill the last few days

and I'm not quite up to a full blog post yet but I'd like you all to know I'm not dead. Yet. Actually, I'm sure I won't die because I finally quit puking and having explosive toilet explosions. I'm lots better today and I'm sure I'll be completely cured tomorrow, perfectly capable of being amusing. Thanks for you patience. ;0)

Arrrrrrrrrrr!

Tomorrow be International Talk Like a Pirate Day! I keeps forgettin' an' then I remembers an' I'm happy all over again. I gets a tingly feeling inside like when I tortures someone or plunders somethin'.

Anyway, here's a survey you should go take, thanks to Addie:


You Are A Pirate!


What Type Of Swashbuckler Are You?
brought to you by Maddog Varuka & Dawg Brown

There's girl and boy pictures for each result! Yayyy, boobies. Oh, and go visit my pirate alter-ego on Myspace: The dastardly, deadly, devious (and drop-dead gorgeous--hey, this is a fantasyland pretend identity) Cap'n Musketball Miranda! Scourge of the Sea! Dog of the Deep! Raider of the Fridge!

Anyway, computer and camera are still not getting along and it's all I can do to not bash in the CPU with the camera and hang myself with the USB cord. Mom pointed out that the computer is actually hers, so if I did that she'd be quite upset. That helped.

So I drank a lot of whiskey last night, can you guess what happened this morning? That's right, the munchkin came over for about 30 minutes. April, the teenaged biological mom, was watching her today and got called in to sign some papers for her new job, and by the time she dropped the kid off here she had her throwing a fit. Which I hate. As soon as April left I put her in time out and explained to her that I understood she was unhappy and disappointed, but that if she continued to have a fit we would have NO FUN, while if she would calm down and play nice we would have LOTS of fun and when April came back she'd be jealous and miserable, and also that my poor dad was in the room too and couldn't watch tv until she quit being such a butt. Guess what happened. That's right, we had a blast. She wanted to watch part of a movie so I sent her over to the bookcase to pick one out and she picked Return of the Jedi in deference to my dad (and because she has a major bone for Yoda, who is on the box), and then proceeded to make dad play Barbie Slut Fight (a real game that any child under the age of 9 will spontaneously begin playing the moment you give them a Barbie, even Amish children instinctively know how to do it) until she decided to torment my cat (she's not mean to her, the cat just hates children of any stripe and Sierra looooooves her and follows her around and pets her the wrong way and wants to put her face on her and kiss her). Then April came back and was kind of dissapointed because the kiddo was calm and happy and likely to stay that way all day.

Anyway, go talk like a pirate. The website even has hilarious pirate pick-up lines which I guarantee will work on me.

Babysitting Drama plus Ebay News plus Software Drama =

So, I finished my Shapely Tank, and I managed to catch a photo of the kiddo with pants on her head, and I also got a pic of her (she's two, mind you, and can't read yet) fallen asleep for her nap with a book across her chest, and I can't post any of them here because my computer has decided not to recognize my camera. I've posted many a picture from this same camera before, mind you, but now the computer can't find it (even when I go to "settings" "control panel" "new hardware" and ascertain that the computer can indeed find my camera.)

Never mind, I already cried today over it, there are much better things to cry over, like the various Hurricanes and Tropical Storms that have and are still wreaking havoc across my part of the world. To which I say, come stay at my house, we know when to evacuate and will be going to Austin, not Houston. Really. E-mail me and I'll tell you where to call to get in touch with me. Really.

But my picture thing is still getting me down. I really want to post a picture of Panty-Head with Pants (not panties) on her Head. Just captured today, and totally useless as long as I'm having this problem. She was awesome today, btw. We walked 4 blocks to the hardware store, bought the wrong plunger (how can you buy the wrong plunger? Ask my mom), watched the huge earth-moving equipment building the parking lot for our new grocery store, and walked 4 blocks home, and she was as good as a two-year-old can be. Why would I undertake that kind of walk with a toddler, you ask? Because I asked her if she'd like to go with me or stay home with my mom (my mom is always her preference) and she said go with me, and I asked her if she'd like to walk or go in the car (we walk two blocks to the park every day she's with me because I said so, just like why she does the arm-over-arm monkey bars every day we go to the park--because I'm living my junior-high humiliations through her and obliterating them by the work she does with me to assure she'll never submit to them) and she goes, "I go wi' Ke'ye and WAK, no CAW!"

It took us approximately 1.5 hours to walk 4 blocks, buy the wrong plunger, watch the backhoe and bulldozer and dump truck and flattener and walk back, with all the usual stops at the lawn mower store and the boat store (on the way, we had to walk by them and she fricking loves any kind of specialized equipment) and I loved every minute. Fault me, go ahead. I'm the strictest child-raising-advocate you can find and I fricking LOVED it.

Until I got back and realized we got the wrong plunger. And then there was diarrhea. Yep. And she usually goes home around 4 o'clock, but she didn't go home till 8 tonite. I was ready to fall down. Yet I still knitted her baby doll a hat ("This ma babu, she gost no HAT!") and gave her a bath (After the squirts episode: mom loved spraying her with the movable shower head, I loved getting all the poop off her and we all hated being in proximity to the toilet that hadn't been PROPERLY plunged because I bought the wrong plunger. I wonder what distracted me?) and discussed the movie version of "Horton Hears a Who" with her. Anyway, I'm most proud of finishing my Shapely Tank last night and not putting the munchkin in a dog kennel (I've got one) at 5:30 this evening (shortly after the bath).

Oh, and by the way, my shoes got a bid today and 39 people have looked at them and I really appreciate anything y'all have done to get those stats for me.

New pandering capitalist content!

Hey, this isn't a real entry, I'm just letting everyone know that I've sold my soul to Ebay and am trying to get rid of some shoes, and if that goes well (or frankly, even if it doesn't) I'll be liquidating more stuff that's perfectly good, yet needs to get the hell out of my house so I don't have to move it when I move. And it wouldn't hurt if I made a couple cool bucks on it, either. Luckily everything I own came from a thrift store, swap meet or bulky garbage day (not entirely true, some stuff was given to me as gifts), so I can pretty much put anything on with no reserve and if it sells for any amount of money at all I'm making something off it.

Anyway, I have to go babysit now, the munchkin just got here and there's only so long I feel comfortable letting her eat breakfast in front of The Lion King and still getting paid for it.

New Job Search News; Depressing, Doleful Dreck

So I put in two job applications today, each one at a place where there were two openings I qualified for. And I came within an eyelash of putting in an app for a busboy job. But I haven't sunk quite that low, though. Then I went by my babysittee's mom's work to find out if I was working for her tomorrow and found out her idiot of a 19 year old daughter went in cold to an on-the-spot job fair yesterday and got a job as an assistant manager starting Monday. They called her back today to tell her. I could have died. I still might. Here I am, completely not an imbecilic moron, and she gets a job right out of the bag and I'm wandering around, mumbling and stranded, living in a house made out of copies of my resume begging for busboy jobs. Okay, okay, I've only been looking for two days, but come on, that's a little depressing, isn't it? Plus, she's totally square. I mean, she's shaped like a shoebox. There's her head, then her neck, then a shoebox going down longways with arms and legs at the corners. And these ridiculous blow-up-doll-style tits that an 11 year old would be ashamed of. Plus I might have mentioned that she's dumb enough that drooling retards at the state school pat her on the head and try to give her helpful advice.

Okay, okay, I'm done venting. Please ignore all that bile up there, I only meant it mostly. I'm good, I'm great, I'm getting a job. I feel really positive about three or four of the apps I've put in, I'm sure I'm getting called by Monday. All I have to do is wait it out and try hard. I can do this!

Job Search Sucks, Return to Alcoholic Haze Considered

I went on my first job interview in almost six years yesterday and I nearly crapped my pants. It was so weird. I'm not even used to talking to people who haven't bought me liquor. I'm guessing this means I maybe didn't do as well as I could have, but I've got some experience now, I'm not going in blind anymore. So that's good.

In other news, we're about to be creamed by a hurricane in about 12 hours and there isn't a weatherman in the world who will admit it. They're all, "It's going to come in between New Orleans and Jacksonville. (Hurricane Ivan moves westward at approximately 300 mph on the radar map behind him) This hurricane will definitely not go any more west at all, ever. (Hurrican Ivan zeroes in on Houston) It will especially not go anywhere near Texas, or Kellye Fry or her stuff. (Hurricane Ivan makes an obscene gesture directly into the camera)" Liars. Dirty liars. Ivan's coming to dinner, for sure. We haven't had one hit us in a while, it's totally time.

We went to get batteries and bottled water and candy and beer yesterday, and bread. For some reason whenever we have heavy weather around here the first thing everyone thinks of is buying bread. I'm not joking. If there's a severe thunderstorm warning on the 5 o'clock news, the bread isle at the supermarket will be completely denuded by 6:15. I know, I've been trying to figure it out since I was five. "So when Hurricane Ivan gets here, we'll just make him a sandwich and he'll spare our house."

And I was bad and didn't go get a job today, but it rained cats and dogs all morning and afternoon, and I woke up with a crick in my back from sleeping on my tummy in the bowl of my mattress. Plus I was a little hungover and I wanted to sit on the couch all day in my jammies and color. Shut up. You have a job. Anyway, it was a pretty good day. I made potato soup for dinner and it was really good. Plus if our house gets blown off this weekend I might not have to get a job at all! I can just live off Red Cross or something. Go live with Jimmy Carter. Yay! I love peanuts!

Oh, yeah

My free webstat thingie, their servers crashed and ate dirt and killed everything, so I have no more webstats. If they end up finding the data and reinstating their service, I might go back with them, but I'm too disheartened to try to start over with someone new. That was part of why I wasn't posting for a while, because when the site crashed the code in my template that let them read my visitor info went hooonutty and my blog could only publish from the top down to where the code was, and it reads down the template like: background, title, headline, sidebar top to bottom, posts top to bottom. And the webstat code was right below the "e-mail me!" part of the sidebar, so I had no blog for like two days and I knew what the general problem was but not which tags were actually causing it, and I didn't have the energy to find it, but then I tried to check my stats and got a huge "you've been buttfucked" error message and ran over to the template and fixed it. The other part of the problem was that Blogger wasn't always publishing my posts when I clicked "Publish Post," it was sometimes deleting them because of some problem, probably with my crappy internet provider.

In other news, I still need a job even though I applied for two jobs in two days. < sigh > This is so hard. But I really do have to get focused and do it. I have to cut the lawn tomorrow and do some sorting of boxes of crap, then Monday I'm applying for out of town jobs in the morning and driving around and applying for any job I see a sign for here in town. Send me good thoughts. You know, or a check. I'm not particular.

Readership!

I was going crazy with pride and joy when regualar and not-so-regular readers started commenting on my posts, and now it's only going to get worse.
I've had two (2) e-mails in the last week from people who read my blog and want me to post more. How fucking cool is that? I mean, I'm no Wil Wheaton, but actual people (one of which I don't know at all, one of which is my best friend) are actually reading and want to hear more! Next, I take over the WORLD!!! Mwwwwwaaahhhaaaaahhaaaa*choke*cough*hack

Anyhow, Hooray! for everyone who reads my demented ramblings and double Hooray! Hooray! for everyone who gives me feedback of any kind. (Comments still rock my world, and I actually do check for them pretty often and always respond with gratitude to the poster if they leave any way for me to.) Maybe once I get a job there can even be contests and prizes and fun things like that! Thanks a million to anyone and everyone who drops in and reads me, I appreciate it like crazy.

Oh. My. God.

I. Must. Knit. This.


Actually, many, many, many of them. You just wait, sister. Heee hee hee.

Panty-Head Saves the Day!

So, my mom just found out that the pain in her low back isn't a kidney infection, it's a herniated disk. So the doctor gave her 10 days of muscle relaxers to try to get it out of spasm so they can take some films for comparison to her other films from when the bones in her neck went all hooey. No, this story doesn't end with me taking several of them and feeling terrific.

So, the Dodge place in Wharton called to say a part she had ordered was in, and I had the munchkin for the day, so mom was going to drive over and pick it up herself. She's on day 6 of muscle relaxers, so I was "helping" her find her keys. Okay, she was pacing back and forth and getting in my way while I looked for her keys, then she'd bump into me and go, "What was I doing?" with this look on her face like she was trying to remember who I was. Then she found her keys, picked them up, dropped them and paced off to the other end of the house. Two seconds after the keys left her hand we had this conversation:

Me: "Mom, what are you doing now?!" (frustrated and shrill)

Her: "I'm LOOKING for my KEYS!!!" (more frustrated and more shrill)

Me: "THESE fucking keys that you just had in your FUCKING hand before you went to fucking PSYCHO PILL LAND!?!"

Her: "I guess so?"

So I put the bambino in the car seat and drove her, obviously. And she's halving the dosage because I told her if she loses her glasses one more time I'm putting her in the home with the lowest rating I can find, wherever will take her for only her SSI check.

Shut up, you didn't have to help her "find" her glasses 25 times yesterday. That's right, I fucking counted.

Anyway, that's not even what this story is about. That's just why I was driving 15 minutes down the highway with a highly irritable 2 year old and a cranky, drugged older person. And the kiddo was starting to have a serious fit strapped in back there and I was doing the quasar-fast eye back-and-forth thing you do with a kid throwing a fit when you're about to crash the godddam car because your mom won't STOP FUCKING SINGING.

And here is the point of my story: I threw the kid's daypack in the backseat and had her pull out her just-in-case pair of emergency panties and put them on her head like a hat, and we started calling her Panty-Head and telling stories (and yes, even singing songs) about Panty-Head and she was laughing and I was laughing and mom was laughing and no one had to die in a firey car crash of death.

The End! Maybe tomorrow I'll tell you about how this evening a Pineapple saved the lives of several young women who angered me...

Am I Political or Not?

The folks at hotornot.com have come up with a novel idea: to take their power over their particular demographic and use it for good, instead of evil. Specifically, they're encouraging people to vote by asking them to pledge to do it, then entering them in a sweepstakes for $100,000. Once you enter there's even a link to Rock the Vote where you can fill out and print a voter registration form if you need to register to vote or change any information. I changed my address, since I've moved since the last time I voted and would like to not drive to Austin on election day, and I added a political party affiliation. I wasn't going to because I've already missed the opportunity to participate in any primaries and stuff, but I decided to go ahead and do it in case it makes them "really" count your vote or something. If you want to choose a party but, like me are too lazy to figure out which one is appropriate, you can use this questionnaire to figure it out. Oh, c'mon. You're reading a blog, you obviously love questionnaires and surveys. Just do it!

I'm a bad girl...

I was supposed to put in three applications for work today and I only did one. Online. So even though I put on my interview clothes and sweated all over them, I might as well have filled it out in my undies. Which maybe wouldn't have gone over as well when I went to the grocery store later, but whatever.
And tomorrow, I'll be driving to Wharton (15 minutes away) to put in four more apps, so that might be cool. They are for mostly menial positions, a housekeeper at a motel and a receptionist at an old folk's home and such (today's was at a new truck stop here in town) but I'm hoping for some good solid work/pay for a few months.

I've been knitting a lot lately, too. I finished one armhole trim on the Shapely Tank and the one strip of my afgan. Whooot! Only nine more to go! I cast on two that are alike to knit at the same time. And I learned to cable! Yayyy! I knit this hat for my mom months ago:



But as you can see it makes a better yamulka than a hat, so I'm going to take the cable strip I've been knitting and make it long enough to attach on to the lower edge and maybe cast back on and do some ribbing and it will be a good winter hat, cover her ears and stay on and whatnot. I swear I'm going to post pictures of all this knitting stuff, tomorrow. Jeez I hope no prospective employers read this, I'm beginning to realize that the blog is many things, and among them a comprehensive record of my inability to follow through on a deadline. Every post is all, "I swear I'm going to post pictures soon," or a description or whatever, then I don't do it for two weeks. Anyway, I might soon work at Buc-ee's (yes, that is a beaver) or maybe HEB (they just built a new store in town and are having a job fair Friday at a church. Makes me kind of uneasy. But they have great benefits?) or one of my other prospects, so I'm happy.
Course, I'm drinkin' whiskey, so maybe that's why I'm happy. You can never tell with me. Hee!

And another thing...

Oh, and here's the photo of the bathroom floor about near done:



And here's a photo of the bathroom floor about near done with the toilet re-seated--I didn't do that part, the plumbers did, but I was kind of waiting on them before I did any more. Yayy! Near bathroom finishment! Hoorah!



And here's a photo of a silly little dog who doesn't like me to take her picture:

Blogging Bore Bears Brunt of Bestial Bonks

Sorry, I just wanted an alliterative headline. So, I took off another weekend to go loaf around Austin, but I swear it's the last time. This month. By which I mean August, because Ozzmodiar rocked the pants off Houston. Everything was exactly right, the sound was perfect and they were so on it hurt, such a good show I was mesmerized, but there was almost no one there. Including you, Matthew. You're in serious trouble, bro. Run. Hide. Weep.

And they're playing the Rhythm Room again September 30th, opening for Hairy Apes BMX, who are so well known around Austin that I've actually heard of them, and I'm really excited to see Ozzmodiar that good again with a decent crowd.