I need some of those chocolates. I have to be in to work at 8am next Friday for 15 minutes of training. My shift doesn’t usually start until 10.
I’ll toss some more chocolates into the mix.
(We occasionally get a random package from relatives in Japan. Sometimes it’s green tea edamame crackers; latest one had a bag of tiny bourbon layer cakes dipped in dark chocolate.) (Yum.)
Are you familiar with The Piccolo Player joke? 
(My fifth grade class was tasked with learning to play “When the Saints Come Marching In” on the recorder…my fingertips weren’t big enough to properly cover any of the holes. skrreeetweeeteeek)
Grr. Computer’s been in the shop for a week (5 of their days, last Thursday) and the technician called me today to give an update. Basically, it’s running ridiculously slow and he’s having difficulty reinstalling Win7 after he reformatted the HD. Um, yeah, that’s why I took it in.
I’m having withdrawal symptoms! And I’m having an ocular migraine right now. Grr. Gimme that chocolate!
As a musician, I know all the music jokes. 
Is there any chocolate left? I could use a piece or three.
It just suddenly hit me that tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of my father’s death. We all knew he was sick but we had no idea he would just not wake up one morning.
I’m still kicking myself that I didn’t take the time to say good-bye to him the last time I saw him. He was in the other room doing something and I was in a hurry to get home for some reason and I just said bye to Mom and left. Never in a million years did I think that would be the last time I’d see him.
Still miss you, Dad.
Why do so many of my emails and messages go unanswered. 
grabs more chocolate
Why does my mind keep doing these things? Now I’m wondering if bagpipers suffer progressive hearing loss. If so, does anyone make plaid earmuffs for bagpipe related hearing protection?
I’m being called all sorts of names right now because I think kids should be able to write a few coherent paragraphs to a stranger in order to graduate from high school. I grade some of these tests. Sometimes I want to weep because so many kids write so poorly. I have no idea how the hell some of these kids pass English. Literally.
But apparently forcing them to take a standardized test is an evil, evil, evil thing. Better to just hand them a passing grade and a high school diploma because they have less than idea childhoods. Because handing kids a piece of paper that no longer has any meaning will do wonders for them.
I mean what young adult isn’t excited by the prospect of taking five years to graduate from community college because no teacher dared tell him he couldn’t fucking write beyond a seventh grade standard? I mean the purpose of high school obviously isn’t to prepare you for an independent life after high school where you might even want to get a job. Oh no. That’s just turning us into capitalist drones. And it’s anti-gay! Because the purpose of high school isn’t to make sure those who graduate can actually read, write and do math at a 12th grade level. The purpose of high school is clearly compassion and indoctrination into the right values where we rescue kids from the big, bad racists surrounding them.
Dear god I swear I’m mostly liberal but there are times I want to beat my alleged fellow liberals over the fucking head with a copy of Al Gore’s book and some of Michelle Obama’s beloved organic food. And then force them to read of these damned papers a dozen times.
No…
Stuffs some double chocolate into my mouth and then hands some to LavenderBlue. Please keep trying. I can’t begin to tell you how many applications and resumes I’ve tossed into the circular file because I can’t read them.
I would give the high-school kids a lot of slack, but if they couldn’t remember how to spell their street or city name…off to the circular file they went. Pro-tip, kids: Its Valley, not Vally, Vallie or Valey.
Nowadays, I’m mostly looking at adults looking for more advanced jobs. I’ve seen better sentence structure and punctuation in chat rooms than most of the resumes I read.
Spell-check is a wonderful tool, but it needs to be used correctly. To start with, one needs to actually use it. Then the document needs to be reread because spell-check will often use an incorrect word because it was closer to the misspelled word than the word that was actually meant.
Grabs some more chocolate.
Wonders if I should save some for Laura, who really needs it. She had her final (we hope) surgery on Monday. The x-rays look good and she’s ready to go to a rehab facility.
Suddenly, her insurance is pitching a fit over the rehab facility her doctor picked. Not because there was anything wrong with it, or because of the cost…its because it is a couple of miles further than the insurance company wants to pay an ambulance to transport her.
We watched the not very good movie “The Faculty” yesterday, and one of the teachers had a sign in his classroom that said something like, “Maybe you didn’t get the grade you expected because I didn’t get the work I expected.” What a quaint, old-fashioned idea! :rolleyes:
Tell me about it. Soy lecithin in yoghurt, why? Soy lecithin in chorizo, why the fuck ever?
There’s a vegetarian restaurant nearby, I checked their posted dailies to see if it was a “real restaurant where every dish is meat-and-fish-free” or a “soy burguers place”. It’s the first, and that means it might be the most soy-free place in a ten-block radius!
Since it’s breakfast time, I’ll add some Real Chocolate and toast soldiers. Anybody who prefers churros, the baker at the corner sells 'em.
I very recently stopped talking to my parents. Well, I only stopped talking to my mom, really; my dad is merely collateral damage. My mom’s a nutcase. I just typed up a fairly bloggy IMHO thread detailing some of the things she’s done that make her seem crazy. I omitted the last 30 years of my life and only focused on the particularly heinous shit she’s done in the last two months. It felt good to type it all up, to see in black and white how truly toxic she is (I only recently threw her out of my life, remember; it’s still a little difficult) and how much better off I am and will be now. At the end of the thread I solicited opinions from our armchair shrinks as to the specific nature of her psychopathy.
And then I cut the whole thing, judging it to be way tl;dr, and saved it in a word file in case I change my mind about posting it later.
Two months of crazy, that’s all it was. Shit I’ve heard from my mother herself and various other resources for the last 60 days. It did not include accounts from my sister (who hasn’t really talked to my parents for years; she was wise before I was and, man, she has some doozies!), for example, nor did it include shit she’s done/said to me in the 30 years I didn’t talk about at all. In Word’s default 11 pt [whatever] font and normal, everyday spacing (I think the paste from here double spaced between paragraphs, but still), and only using the very worst examples of just TWO DAMN MONTHS, my mom’s crazy is 3 pages long.
I called my mom today just to talk and she mentioned in passing that she’s gotten a call from “technical support” saying her copy of “Microsoft” was unregistered and she needed to pay up.
Christ.
Bank reversed the charge and closed the credit cards. She’ll contact the authorities tomorrow. As being taken by criminal, amoral, worthless, dregs-of-society scum goes, all’s well that ends about as well as it could. Nobody’s going to be able to shut them down. There have always been thugs like this, although I hope some day they do get the guy who dreamt this up, and that he goes to prison for a long time. But I’m sure he can afford good lawyers.
I want to think that the guy on the phone who makes the calls is just an average person. I want to say “how do you sleep at night, knowing that your job is to go into the office, put on your cheap-ass headset, and try to defraud computer illiterate people who don’t know any better just because you can?” But what would be the point?
I’m trying to remind myself that the guy on the other end of the phone is just some schmuck half a paycheck away from not being able to make rent. Nobody works a phone line like that because they enjoy it.
I know that it’s pointlessly vindictive to hope that something bad happens. That he accidentally gives himself a paper cut opening his mail, and that the mail is from the IRS and he’s being audited and he carelessly threw away his old W2s and now he’s going to have to spend time on the phone with those stupid “to continue in Sindarin, press *1375821 now” menus and the stultifying bureaucracy is going to ruin his afternoon because he really wanted to go see a movie with his friends.
And that when he does, the movie’s going to suck anyway. And that in the drive-thru after work, they forget his french fries and he doesn’t notice until he gets home. And that he drops his cell phone and cracks the screen and he’s only two weeks into his contract.
I talked my mom down from feeling stupid. I sent her a picture of some puppies. Everything is sort-of-fixed. Adding more anger to the world doesn’t really help. There’s too much of that already. That’s not what we’re here on this planet for.
It’s silly for me to think he goes home and runs an hour-long shower, hating himself for what he has to do to make ends meet. That he lies about it to his girlfriend and says he’s working as a “sandwich artist” at a Subway and hates himself for having to lie. That every time he pays his bills, he hates himself for knowing where the money came from.
It’s silly because people can’t live like that. They come up with rationalizations. Excuses. Stories. So I’m sure he’s gotten over it by now. I’m sure he has something that he tells himself that makes it easier, makes it bearable.
Just wish I knew what it was.
It’s an emulsifier. It’s so nobody has to stir their separated yoghurt to reblend it. Lazy bastards.
The companies also like to add things like gelatin as a thickener, making it not only potentially non-kosher but also unacceptable to most vegetarians. 
It’s my understanding that with bagpipe players, the sense of taste is the first to go.
Damn. Now I can’t remember what I came in here to post so I guess I’ll just have to pit my memory. The one where you get up and go to the next room and then can’t remember what you were after.
Squirrel!
Another 6" - 10" of snow due in the next 24 hours.
Mother Nature?
STAHP!!
And the chorizo? Am I supposed to stir the yoghurt with it? Does the cheese in pepperoni pizzas taste cheesier if the sausage has soy?