There’s a Sonic going in next to where I work.  No, not the hedgehog, but the drive-in.

Before this can happen, however, there is a building on the site that needs to come down.  I’ve only lived in the area for 2 years, and during this time it was Oregon’s Dollar Store - a cheesy sort of discount store.  Apparently it had been a twin cinemas before that - a sore subject around the house.  Seems that my roommate has fond memories of that theatre and the tearing down of the building bothers him somewhat.

To be honest, I have never been a person who gets too attached to locations or buildings.  I’ve moved to many times, starting too early.  I think that if/when my dad sells the house he lives in, I’ll be sad.  It was my grampa’s house.  But commercial buildings, no.  Not even any other house I’ve lived in.  They aren’t the important part.

Anyway…that’s sort of an aside to this post.  The real point is that I’m going to try to get pictures daily if I can.  I’m working M-F these days, walking right past it on the way from the bus, so I’ll be able to see it as it happens - morning and evening.

You’ll be able to see the pictures here: Sonic Gallery

Enjoy.  I will be pretty damn happy when it’s finally built.  Happy happy.

I think I mentioned previously that I don’t care for overly hot weather. Saturday was miserable - too hot to do anything, too hot to not do anything. Too hot for coffee. I ended up making a pot of coffee, dumping in sugar and cream, putting the whole thing in the fridge.

Sunday, on the other hand, was almost pleasant. Today was blissful. Thunder started Saturday night, on and off Sunday, Monday morning I was greeted with loud booms of thunder when I got up for work. The weather was polite enough not to rain on me during my comute, but for the first time in a while I didn’t feel like I had to rush to check the plants when I got home.

It was nice.

I’ve been doing Where’s George for a few years.  It’s fun.  So far, none of my dollars have made it very far though, and certainly not out of the country.  But this morning, I got a notice that someone had entered one of my dollars - in Thailand.

That’s pretty damn cool.  According to the site:

This bill has travelled 7,694 Miles in 322 Days, 14 Hrs, 36 Mins at an average of 24 Miles per day.
It is now 7,539 Miles from its starting location.

Ha! Now who’s the coolest? Huh??

but that doesn’t stop me from going, “eh?” sometimes when I see stupid things.

I’ve always said, the only people I don’t like are stupid people. I don’t even like myself when I’m being stupid. There was a comedian once who said that there should be a test before you leave the house every day to make sure - fail the test, Nope! Can’t leave the house. Of course, in the day of the internets, we’d have to just make it a test before communicating with the outside world in any way.

My point…um…oh yeah. Stupid things. Like keeping slow-as-molasses-in-winter employees working, while canning a good one for something done on his own time, not on the job in any way. Maybe drugs kill brain cells, but some people were just born with fewer to begin with. Unfortunately, we can’t discriminate against them, just against people who use “drugs”.

I’m not going to get into the whole debate about legalizing any drugs, I honestly don’t know enough about it to make a valid argument. There are some things I do know:

For some people, it doesn’t take drugs of any kind to make bad decisions. It just comes naturally.
I’ve seen people act stupider on legal drugs than illegal.
No test is perfect.
“It’s policy” is the worst reason for anything.
Fear is the mind-killer.

Ok, that last one is separate from the rest, but still…
At work right now, we’re missing out on one of the best employees we have - not because of anything he did or did not do at work. It kinda sucks, you know? Are they gonna start testing for porn soon? I mean, what if someone doesn’t do their work because they’re masturbating in the bathroom on company time? IT COULD HAPPEN. How about lemonade? Test for that! Too many bathroom trips means less time working! IT COULD HAPPEN! You get right down to it, anything that could conceivably be dangerous could be banned. You get hurt off the job, you can’t work on the job. Can’t have that. No more fun, either. You might think about having fun while you are on the job, and then what? Less productivity. IT COULD HAPPEN!

I know this is all a bit disjointed and silly, but I’m hot (and not in a good way) and I’m looking forward to a week ahead with one less co-worker that actually works. Usually my weekends are a getaway, a relief from work, but with the heat like it is I can’t seem to get into the weekend mindset enough.

A fortuitous series of events took place this evening, culminating in what I think may just be my ticket to fabulous riches.

But lets not get ahead of ourselves. It all started when I decided it was too damnably hot to make anything for dinner that required cooking. I looked in the fridge: tomato, cucumber, cheese. Add that to some nice oatnut bread with mayo to make it go down easier…yum. Dinner.

So I’m slicing the veggies. Then I’m…no, I won’t say it. Instead, I’ll say this: I was using a sharp utensil to transform a rectangular block of cheese into sandwich-thickness slices.

All of the sudden, a face appeared! No, I wasn’t being peeped on (although I’m sure there are those out there who are turned on by cheese-slicing, YES I MEAN YOU!) - it was far more disturbing than that.

Charles Manson was looking at me, staring, leering, from the slice of cheese.

See for yourself:

Now comes the difficult decision: do I take the high road and keep this to myself, possibly just feed the offending slice to Lola and Oscar (and Toast, for that matter)? Or should I follow in the grand new tradition of hawking my crap on Ebay to the highest paying sucker?

I’m thinking…Thank you, PT Barnum, for making me not feel so bad about choosing the later option.

Update: I did it. I’m going to hell.

I mostly dislike summer. It’s too hot, it’s too bright, it’s too dry.
I mostly dislike summer. It puts me in mind of a summer two years ago that was probably the worst time in my life.

The summer before last, I was pregnant with Nico. I was happy about it, he was no accident. It was planned. It was the only part of my summer that had gone anything close to the way I’d planned it. For those who aren’t in the know, that’s the year I went to New Zealand to live with a friend and her kid, only to have it go to shit for uncontrollable reasons. In the process, I went through all my money, got rid of 90% of my belongings, pulled my kid out of school early, let go of my wonderful princess kitty, and basically planned my whole future on this dream that died. I had to call in a lot of favors, which I still owe for, to get out of it and back to the US. I had to put out more people to get established here again. New town, no stuff, no money, no job.

But I still had my daughter, and I still had the unborn Nico. He was due at the end of August. Everything was going great - I found a midwife and there were no problems at all. I was healthy, he was healthy.

Then one day I was sitting with Mau kitty, he was comfy on top of my big ol’ stomach full of baby. I made a crack about not needing a baby, Mau was good enough. This made me concentrate a little more on the baby, and after a while I realized that I couldn’t feel any movement. Usually he was very active in the late afternoon, but he wasn’t moving. I nudged him a little, but there was no response.

Nico was already dead. I didn’t get confirmation until the next day. Two days later, I was in the hospital holding my dead baby. I held him until he started to get cold, then I made myself give him up. I didn’t want my last memory of him being cold, it was too hard to think of. They took him away, leaving me with nothing but hand and footprints, a tiny bit of hair. Pictures.

Days later, I picked up his ashes. That was it - no need for all the blankets and sockies and little tiny tshirts. I just needed a mason jar or a Tupperware container.

It’s been two years now, as of last week. I thought about writing on the day he died, or on the day I delivered him. I didn’t though. Now, a week later, I have been able to crystallize my thoughts more, I can elucidate my feelings.

It’s like this: I can’t imagine what it would have been like if he’d lived. I can’t say whether things are better or worse, or maybe just different. I don’t know where he is, or why he came, or why he left. I don’t know anything, pretty much. People tell me all the time, “there’s a reason for everything”, but really they don’t know any more than I do. Belief is not knowledge. I have neither - in a way I envy the people who have at least belief.

So now I will go back to what I’ve been doing all summer, trying to ignore that two years ago I was waddling around in the heat with a little human inside me, with great expectations and plans for the future. It helps that things are so different, that I live somewhere else and have work every day. It helps that I have my daughter still who never lets me forget that I still have responsibilities, and that there are still things going on that I can take part in.

And there ends my wailing and gnashing of teeth for this year. Tune in next time: Same time, same channel. Same big old pile of bitter.

I really have an obsessive personality.

It started with icons. Then it was fonts. Then desktop backgrounds. DesktopX. Opera themes.

Now, though, it’s brushes. Photoshop brushes. I have the DeviantArt new brushes page on speed dial (an Opera browser feature, if you don’t know). I use them for building textures for SL, but mostly I just have them because they are neat. Shiny.

So the point is…I really like brushes. It bothers me a bit that I am not the type who can make my own brushes. I don’t have the artistic ability to make anything original, only to take the efforts of others and tweak them until they look totally different. I do it with brushes, but also with any other neat image I can find. Some of you have seen my bones:

As you can see, it’s simply a good image of cat bones with a little tweaking, a stone sphere added for neat-o-ness.

Enter the dermestid beetles…someday. My own bone collection, my own camera. Maybe then I won’t feel so much like a simple copyright infringer.

Here’s my review of the show Fear Itself.

Itsucks.

I don’t like it.  I’ve watched three episodes now, and it’s like they’re trying to recapture the cheesy goodness of Monsters and Tales From the Darkside, but maybe they’re trying too hard.  There are too many, “oh please” moments, and too many, “Golly, who’d have thought that would happen?   Oh yeah, ANYONE.” moments.  Too many cliche characters and moments of disappointment from being right about how lame the next scene is going to be.

Too much dark.  Too many effects that have already been overused in better (and worse) movies.   In this episode alone,  we have the Mouth of Sauron, the hands of Dracula, the quickety-quick motions of about 10 other movies, I don’t even know what else.  It’s just sad.

Oh!  and I forgot to mention the fact that the theme song is kind of crappy, and the opening sequence is worse and incongruous to the music.

So we moved into this lovely home, with it’s huge maple tree in the front yard and nice undeveloped back yard.  Unfortunately, with it came ants.

I hate ants.  Of all the things I remember from my teenagerhood, ants is one of the worst.  In the time period between step-dads, ants where the bain of our existence.  For reals!  I mean they were everywhere.  Couldn’t even leave a jelly knife out on the counter, they’d be all over it.  Drip something on the floor?  Oh yeah.

So we have the same kinds of ants here.  Probably the same ants, waiting for their chance to make my life miserable again.

We started with diatomaceous earth.  Kills ants where you find them, but the white powder mess is annoying.  I then put Grant’s Kills Ants stakes around the perimeter of the house.  Then I got bug-killing shelf liner and some Grant’s inside baits.  And some Terro spray.

Have I mentioned how much I hate ants?  They are creepy and little and get into everything, get everywhere.  And after I’ve seen them crawling and creeping, I feel like some kind of tweaker, feeling bugs crawling on me.  When I was a kid, we would pour boiling water over them.  Now I use the D.E. to put miniscule holes in their carapaces so they dry out.  Take that!  Nasty little things.  And stop dying on my counters!  I don’t want to clean your filthy little bodies off my kitchen surfaces.  Waste of paper towels.

Next step is to buy some kind of small mammal or reptile whose life is dependant on consumption of ants. The landlord asked me how many cats and dogs we had - it’s not my fault that he never mentioned anything else!

So lately, some things have happened.

My brother got out of jail. He went in days after his son was born, causing a flurry of “is it my kid” and “oh shit, he’s got a bundle of birth defects” thoughts, which in turn led to drinking, driving, and getting caught doing it. He’s out. He says…well, he says all the things he’s supposed to say. He had an epiphany, all is now clear, he’s going to do better. I hope it’s real.

My nephew, son of the above brother, went home from the hospital. He’s had multiple surgeries, and from what I hear he still is eating through a tube and needs oxygen occasionally. But he’s home, for the first time. I have no idea what will happen as far as his connection to this side of the family, since above brother is not really connected to the mother of the child. Time will tell.

Mom cut her hair.

I think that’s it.