Recently in Erin Category

Beavis and Butthead   are often underestimated in terms of being a fountain  wisdom but   since the subject of this post involves, poops,pukes and other toilet related humor  their inclusion is quite appropriate.

How else will most of you have heard about the god that I angered and the terrible revenge  suffered at his hands?  I'm talking about Sterculious the god of manure , or as you city folks like to call it. Shit.     Back to Thursday.  I ate lunch at work and  about 20 minutes later felt the need to lie down under the desk,  not the most useful job saving strategy I know but   it's better than redecorating  3 monitors.  After that wave passed wandered to bathroom where  part 1   of the hurling started.  Left for home. Got in door and then for the next hew hours the curious dance of not knowing which end should be pointed at the toilet began.   It's at this point I think I pissed off Sterculious.  The day prior Dobhran had decided that flushing the  middle of the toilet roll holder would be a hoot. I decided to let it go that night and see what would happen.

Shit happens.

The next days load totally jammed up the works, so  now I am ill,  violently on both ends and the  once source of happiness  is taken out from under me.   Had to fix it in my weakened state the last thing one needs is to  revisit  day old , steeped and happily fermenting, puke.  Could not remove the obstruction it's  totally stuck , inaccessible from the top, and on the bottom it can't make it round the last bend.   Toilet was not cheap and I will be trying to save it later.  So I pulled a spare toilet from the garage, what doesn't everyone have one?  and we're back to being functional   but ugly.

It's Erin and my anniversary today too which  kinda went down the drain.

Erin with Teller. ( I love his voice, his writing's rather good too) I've been a fan of Penn and Teller since being exposed to them in the mid 80's and one of the life goals, as far as I have plans, was to see them perform live. That's another collective 40 years experience up on stage and if they were great in the 80's they are now fucking amazing. During the intervening time I didn't turn out to be an atheist as I always was one, as are all newborns it's only the prevailing culture that tells a three year old that he's a Christian child and sadly he's doomed to burn in hell unless he thanks the zombie jew for his gift of ever lasting life, feeling sick yet?

At the Coverville party Aug 2008 Erin poses with the amusing and more talented than you'd think Dick Cheese and lounge against the machine

Nice scenery , customer service taught by Klingons. The drinks where really nicely thought out, kicked like an arcturian megadonkey and were,surprisingly, priced ,fairly. Shame the bar has to go as it was one of the better "imagineering" that's functional E.g it looks more real than many things in Vegas that try to emulate the real world. Oh damn it sucks that this place is closing . They mix some strong ass drinks.. Nice decor.

I have realized that a good exercise for any political philosophy  would be to see  how well it works on the camping scale.  I've just been through that this weekend with Creddy.   

Simple Idea.    People say in advance what they are going to do , what they will bring.

We had the Sat AM breakfast which meant that Friday night we'd not have to do anything other than eat.   I wish.  You see just because someone makes an offer to do a meal  you shouldn't expect them to have the pots, pans and ,er , oh  the  goddamn stove available to do it.   Luckily we brought two, why? let's just say we have a  pretty good handle on  this kind of thing and spent more money on a stove and gas to accommodate a shortfall that came up earlier. I doubt it will be repeated unless we're doing all the food / cooking since buying at the last minute is way too costly on a few people. 

Additionally we  ended up doing extra cooking that negated the entire point of organizing it. E.g we rest on the meals we're not doing, ha!  

Next.

A disappointing  trip to J G guns in Prescott.  We used to love driving up there for food at one of the local eateries, buy ye olde  gun, come back happy.

Over the last year though it ceased being fun and the counter on a Saturday seemed to be more competition than commerce. 

Creddy has a full post over here and while we thought that she was being ignored at the show in Phoenix a year back this one was far more obvious. I can't think of a single person with a passing interest in guns that  we've not told about the store, e.g it being worth the drive, but those days have come to an end.

I don't know a lot about the older 9mm Smith / Wesson autos  so her asking what differences in the  model numbers they had was perfectly valid since, er that's their job to know. DA?  DAO?   Mag disconnect?   Sorry but you only get to pull off a "œsuperior"  we know more about guns than you attitude when you back it up with something.Anyway see her post for the rest of this it's quite annoying.

next Up Wanted! 

Ok I think I really dislike the new way to add images in Wordpress 2.5. Flow is crap and the tweaking still needed a jump to HTML which I should just have bloody done in the first place. Ok onto the news. I spent a lot of time shopping for a ring for Creddy and have to say that SEO is being done so well by three companies that without some interesting search techniques I would have only been able to shop at three credible sites:) I am glad I persevered since the winner came from www.furthers.com which suffers from possibly the worst check out system ever the still functions:) . I messed up the price since I thought I could count, oh I can, just a shitty 10 key operator and stiffed them $10 , paid them of course but the carts appearance made me go check out the cert / co etc just to be sure. On a funny note one of the "hacker safe " sites, the kind that's meant to be so rigorously checked to ensure all their shit is above board. E.g they are meant to check the site daily and if it's not in compliance the logo isn't displayed. Well one of the sites on my travel had an expired cert on it, over 2 weeks old, and still had that stupid logo. Oh the logo works do a search on the goog for it and you can see real A:B comparisons of more sales because people believe what they see. Kudos for the people that market the variants of these it's the best idea since bottled water from a city source:D Anyway tried to buy the ring locally. Fat chance. In the end I got a price from a local store that was way over the net price and had a 4 week waiting period. I'll pay premium in my hand today.. four weeks is taking the piss though. Just Metal has a good selection, Edward Mirell I couldn't get close to finding locally and had the long lead times and  sadly the true tension settings , a la Kretchmer ,  were out of price this time round but also it's too big to get under a bike glove.  Take time to read about the man it's a severe annoyance that he died so young. This site , Titanium Era I really liked, and that seems to have the SEO part nailed, and I'll be going there soon as I work out what size I am:) . Their timascus rings are awewome and I want a matching knife to go with that:D

While sitting in ER for oh say; six hours I have come up with several ways to improve the process and nearly all of it is to do with data. and one to do with the kind of service that makes me want to put people in ER , sadly they are already there.

In a nutshell.; If you have to have a sign up saying; that your company cares it's already too late for you.

Erin was carted from the workplace today  after chest pain; with all the accompanying symptoms that suggest something is having a hearty old attack on the main pump. She's stable and hopefully resting after a long time to get from waiting room to a waiting room to a bed  in the corridor to one in the ward to having the room usurped

Early indications are that nothing immediately serious is present but  we'll know more in the morning.

Today was my second real day back at work after the new year. It was to last  oh about 2 hours before I had to head out to meet Erin at the ER.  Dobhran had began shaking in distress and was having considerable pain issues while running  a fever.    Looks like he had very early pneumonia and was taking an adverse reaction ,   drugs,  breathing treatment and some antibiotics to take home. He sacked out, letting me get some work done.  

Which is great since I couldn't get up the "important" story about Facebook taking action against screen scraping and could have spent all day shouting at the screen.  Really  on days like this it's hard to get the Golgafrincham B Ark out of my head.

 Iz affy  crew ell  this but He's nae  Scottish, ergo crap an aws fair in love an wahr:) Ms Erin over at  otterpupdesigns.com knocked this one out.

 Over the last couple of weeks my parents have been in town.  Since I have a massive amount of vacation time , and Erin's recovering from her bike 2.0 mashup, I took all of it off +1 day to get Erin to an appointment tomorrow morning.   On the whole we had a sedate  type of vacation with much of the usual touristy stuff  bypassed in favour of the practical nature of finding another vehicle, making sure  kids trip to ER was the only one  ( he's taken a real shine to climbing and falling) and working our way through casual diner attitudes.  I've  barely touched computers,  read only a few deserving blogs and kept my email to  under 5 pieces  and don't feel the worse for it.

Purely anecdotal but since the last visit it seems like wait staff, retail clerks and most service industries we interacted with are staffed by  humorless, cookie cutter clones that seem to have totally bought into their commerce cog role.Anything that's not in the line of being an expert at detecting false currency  or fake id's is usually not going to interest them.  Why am I being asked if I could  find everything?

Will someone go get me one? put it on back order and call me when it gets here?  ( I'm old enough to remember that being a possibility @36)  no I didn't think so. I'd rather we dropped the pretense offer of a service that will never be rendered.



While we're talking about crappy CS let's  go a car shopping.

Special shout outs to the car dealers that failed to secure our business.

Bell Road Scion

Aziz you truly suck as a salesman for anybody that gives a rats ass about what their wife thinks.Your insulting manner, refusal to acknowledge what we wanted to buy over what you wanted to sell and general ineptitude with the truth has done your franchise proud.

Bell Road Ford

Josh,  It doesn't matter that your bosses want you to call up and keep reminding us about their great offers. If you don't have the car we want , an Escape Hybrid, we're not going to buy it. Tell those assholes that you're losing ANY future chance that  we'll ever buy from their dealership. 

Bill Luke Dodge

Ah Heather  really so SO  very close. We'd agreed on a price after the usual bullshit of having our direct requests ignored in favour of their usual  dog and pony show where they try to sell you  $800 car alarms that costs me $140 online (OEM)it's plug and play and really easy to install. How hard is it? Patriot, any color, minimal trim and an Auto Tranny? 

I said I would  arrange financing privately and get back with you. Get a call from her before  9am asking were I was at.   Thankfully this convinced me that I didn't want to deal with ANY  new car dealer and redoubled our efforts to get a second hand one. There's a second hand Isuzu Rodeo outside.   I own it, no payment , fuck them all.

Walmart:

Bought a fresh turkey, the bag broke on the treadmill covering some produce. Not only did I have to clean it up  but I had to buy the unusable produce.  Supervisor refused to engage Erin on this and wandered off.  Their fucking packaging broke , took out yet to be paid for items which she made us pay for. We'll see what their reply is on this one.