Actually, no.  Sometimes the lead singer had a hat on.

We went to see The Slants and Men Without Hats the other night.   It was an eventful day – I went to work, went home, picked up a couple kids, got stuck in traffic, got there in plenty of time, had the guy in line give us his spare ticket (score!  we were short one), got seats behind the sound guys, watched a great show, got pictures of my daughter with The Slants, got autographs, left, got stuck in traffic, got home at 2:18ayem.   Then got up at 7ayem to go to work.

But it was fun.  And worth it.  The kids had an awesome time, the traffic accident didn’t involve us, and all is well.  I have video of The Slants portion of the concert, but you can’t really see anything.  But you can hear it, by god, yes indeed.

Overall, it was a great concert.  It was put together by a band called Massive Moth…but I have to say, sandwiched in between The Slants and Mw/oH, they kind of got lost.  The kids wanted to dance, and they weren’t very dance-able.  The Slants opened strong and put on a great show.  Men w/o Hats…well, I couldn’t see much, but I what I could hear was impressive.  They’ve changed over the years, but not for the worse.  They did not disappoint.  And they were smart – they saved “the song” for last.  Well, second to last – there was an encore song.
Oh – and the played SOS by Abba.  HA!  It was great.

Well, I sort of got away from that job I hated. I moved to the same job at another location. Well, at least I’ll be working alone and my commute was shorted by more than half.

But that’s not what today is about. Today is about Echo Bazaar.

Echo Bazaar is like a card game/choose your own adventure game, only they never run out of cards. I’ve never played a card-based RPG before, so I don’t know how it compares, but this is pretty fun. and not a little addicting.

It’s sort of steampunk themed, but maybe actually gaslight is more the proper term.

Here is an example of what happens. I drew a card, and it gave me two options.

I’m going to take the easy route and just take the cat.

What can I do with a boxed cat? No idea, but I’m sure it will be…interesting.

Oh, awesome. I was given the option of freeing the cat or passing it on. Being the crazy cat lady that I am, I decide to free it, with mixed results.

Ah well, maybe the cat will do me a good turn later. You know…cats do that…(yeah, right).

At the moment, I only have one associate on there, but who knows? Maybe I’ll convince some of my SL friends to hop on. It’s not very time consuming, can be played in spurts lasting a few minutes at a time. It’s turned-based, so there’s no worry about anything going wrong while you’re gone. I won’t lie – it does have its unsavory moments. This morning, I lost a coin flip and had to eat a live rat. I wonder if it was the same rat I mugged yesterday, in order to steal his tools and escape my cell? Hmm…that’d be some kind of odd poetic justice.

I figure most of us wonder at some point or another what our purpose is, what our place is.  Where do we stand, in the grand scheme of things – as well as in the smaller picture.

I was thinking about this today, just idly considering other people’s reactions to me, and I think that my position is pretty firmly in “peripheral whackadoo”.

Now, let me explain what this means.

When I’m part of a group, be it a workplace team or family gathering, a message board, whatever…I’m not the glue.  I’m not the leader, not a person who would keep anyone coming back for more.  That’s just not me.

I don’t think I’d want it to be me – too much pressure.  I’m not an entertainer.  Ask anyone who comes to my house – I’m a crappy host.  If I remember to tell you which hall door leads to the bathroom, I’m doing good.

What I am, well, I’m the one off to the side with the one-liners or odd story.  If I leave the party, or the chat,  or whatever, everything will continue on.  At some point later, someone might say, Hey, remember whatsername?  She was a whackadoo.

It won’t be malicious or mean-spirited or condescending, just a fact.  I’m not “weird”, not shocking on purpose, but it seems like the things that I like and do aren’t usually in line with the people in my immediate vicinity.  What’s more, the people in the world who do like some of the same things I do…well, I usually don’t enjoy hanging around with them.  Maybe because I like unique stories?  I don’t need to hear your chicken stories, I have my own.  But you have cow stories, or husband stories or car stories, those will interest me.  Same thing with cats.  Don’t tell me about your cats, I have plenty and they are cuter.

But put me in a group of people in the usual course of things, and they don’t have chickens or 800 cats, so my stories are just…a little…off.

So I guess it’s true what they say, Location Location Location.  It’s all about where you are when you say it.  I say “G7″ in front of people who are thinking “coffee”, and it’s a little off.  I say “Lad Nah” in front of people who are thinking “pizza” and it’s a little off.  I say “Zojirushi” when they are thinking “Black & Decker”.

So I’m a little off – but only compared to the people around me.  And with any luck, someone might remember what I said, not just that it was “off”, and learn something they might not have otherwise.  That would be cool.

I just got off the phone with customer service at Net10.  Say what you will about pre-paid, but I’ve had pretty good luck with them.  I never have gotten a “native” English speaker when calling them, but it’s never been a problem.  They’ve always been very helpful, efficient, and, most importantly, patient.

Today was a perfect example of this.

I called because…it’s complicated.  I decided to get a new phone.  A phone I thought I would like more, that would be shinier and neater.  I got the phone, did the online transfer of numbers, everything was fine.

Except that I didn’t like the phone.  I went from an LG600 to a Motorola W375g.  Turns out, the Moto added steps to most things compared to the LG, especially when texting.  The ring tones were actually worse, instead of sounding like cheap midi they sounded like someone has their gameboy up too loud.  And no good ones.  bleah.  The menu buttons were funky for me, it was too easy to the center menu button when pushing a directional button, and vice-versa.  I don’t like the way it closes, opening it isn’t as easy.  On the LG, I could see who was calling before opening the phone (as well as the time and date), on the Moto you just get cute light-up icons showing that it is, indeed, ringing.  Duh.

Anyway – this isn’t supposed to be about the phones, but the customer service.  So I had transfered the phone number to the new phone.  Used it for a couple weeks, didn’t like it.  Went back online to change it back, but something went wrong at the last second and it didn’t finalize.  It put the Moto as inactive, but didn’t activate the LG.  So I called customer service, and tried explaining that.

And he laughed – with me.  It took a good 10 minutes to get everything sorted out, mostly because of how flexible the terms “new phone” and “old phone” were in this case, but the guy never lost his sense of humor and even said at the end of the call that he’d enjoyed our talk.  Heh.

I wish I’d gotten his name, now that I think about it.  I’d send his boss a note saying how cool he was to work with.  I really was dreading the call, because it made me look like an indecisive dork, but I didn’t get that from him.  Nice man, humoring the silly white lady.  Ugh – I already know I’m a dork, it’s nice when people don’t feel the need to point it out to me.

So, never let a fear of bad customer service stop you from getting a Net10 – that’s a place you likely won’t have a problem.

First time ever, a review of a movie. Or rather, a couple movies. Which can be interpolated to represent all of the movies which are SyFy Original Movies.
(posted previously on Tribe)

I’m just unbelievably disappointed in them. The name change…well, you try not to pre-judge, right? But it’s just shite.

Today when I got home, Djin had the tv tuned to the last half hour or so of the SyFy Original Movie about ice twisters. It was such a blatant ripoff of Twister, it wasn’t even funny. What *was* funny is that I’d tried to watch it before, and about 4 minutes into it I realized what a ripoff it was and changed it. Then today when I came in, it took 5 seconds to recognize it because the scene was another direct ripoff of Twister. And sadly, I’ve only seen Twister once, years ago, and wasn’t really paying much attention to it. I just wanted to see the flying cow. Anyway, they plugged in some questionable technology and last minute saving of my the city I was born in, and it was over. I must say that I L O L d big time when the one guy died of hail. I mean, ever hear of running when the hailballs hit your damn head? dur? Instead it was like a scene from Godzilla or something, standing with his hands up over his face, screaming like a ninny. I’m glad you died, idiot.

Ok so after ice twister got over, it was a movie about colliders colliding or something. It was a mess of magical energy-producing colliders, terrorists, computery hacking, bad accents and vague locations. I should have stopped at the beginning when Marina Sirtis was trying to have a southern-bitch accent and half the rest of them couldn’t decide which accent they were supposed to have. Then they were in france, then…um, don’t remember. anyway. stupid. stupid stupid stupid.

stupid.

oh and a black hole. That’s what happens when you turn off all the other colliders and they can’t contain the bad colliders anymore.

The good news: The world did end, and with a bang, not a whimper. Whole damn planet exploded because dumbass listened to the faux-belle instead of his friend who he’d trusted for eons.

Urgh. Not even in the “greasy fried noodle” category. More like in the “mom put the stale off-brand cheezits into a used zip loc that I think used to hold grandpa’s suppositories”.

Bad.