Why i don’t eat at our cafeteria downstairs
So I’ve always thought the women running the cafeteria downstairs looked a lot like villains from a Dukes of Hazzard episode. They’re probably in their late 30s but because of 25 years of smoking Menthols and drinking Busch lite, they each look like they’re in their late 50s. Add to that their accents resembling North Georgia Hill people with a 3rd grade education and you have a recipe for a really awkward experience. Like this past friday’s:
I was in sort of a hurry so I went against my better judgment and ran downstairs to get some lunch. I surveilled the offerings and found the usual: white bread, kraft singles, stale lettuce, and cheap deli meat. So I asked what I thought was a perfectly reasonable question:
Me: “Ma’am, do you have any kaiser rolls today?”
DoH Villain #1: (without looking up from what she was doing. and add to the mountainpeople accent a certain amount of lethargy and I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude that can only come from a Wild Bills induced hangover) “Sweeeeeetheart, its Friday. I don’t have the time or energy to make anything spicy”
Me: “Uhhhh — wait, something spicy?”
DoH Villain #1: (keeps her head lowered and looks up at me with these eyes that says “Boy, do I LOOK like I do custom orders??”)
Me: “Yeaaaaah (looking at one of my co-workers). Wanna go to Publix?”
And so it is.
Nice Job Harry Reid
Dear Democrats,
I will stop voting for you as long as your leadership acts like a bunch of ignorant assholes. Consider my vote up for grabs (I’m talking to you Ralph Nader)
From this article:
Mr Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, who faces a tough re-election battle in Nevada in November, said through a spokesman that although he respects the constitutional right to freedom of religion it was “very obvious that the mosque should be built someplace else”.
Random thoughts
Twitter has killed my capacity to construct more than a 140 character thought. So I offer you this, a collection of random thoughts.
- re: Music
- Yesterday: pandora
- Today: rdio
- Tomorrow: grooveshark — they have everything I want to listen to. freakin everything
- re: Family
- My older brother is still living with us. Cue (or is queue? I can never remember) the never ending reel of stories.
- My younger brother would’ve been 31 in less than 10 days. I remember that when we were little, he got a huge stuffed panda one year at the carnival. He named him “Jason”. I never really understood that name for a huge teddy bear.
- My sister is coming to visit in a few days. I plan on destroying her in Scrabble.
- re: Travel
- t-minus 1 month til we head to Vegas for year #5. I. Can’t. Wait.
- re: Twitter
- Speaking of…..Twitter seems to think I should follow Oprah. False.
Yeah, i think that’s it.
Laura Ingraham, you slut
Zing! Colbert takes Ingraham down a peg or two. A few stray observations:
- Is she wearing lucite heels?
- Does anyone else think she looks like a pterodactyl?
- I wanna date colbert so bad.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Laura Ingraham | ||||
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No one forgets their first car
I was recently reading an article saying how no one forgets their first car…
My first car was affectionately known as the Mule Mobile. My parents “bought” it for me when I was 17. My mom told me we were going to look for cars when we strolled up to a car lot in Duluth. She pointed at a luxurious 1988 gold Toyota Corolla and said “its yours”. I had all these questions floating through my head: “My folks bought me a car?” “Am I gonna get LAID in this thing?” “Does it have A/C?”
The answers, in no particular order:
No.
No.
No.
At about the same time that my mom handed me the keys, she handed me the car note. Hey, i’m glad I paid for my first car.
As for the A/C, the car didn’t have that either. Nor did it have power doors, windows, or steering (power steering? Really? you youngsters out there have no idea how good you have it). The real charm though was the amazing electrical short the car developed in its elder years. I had to tote around one of those battery chargers, hook it up while I went into wherever I was going, and pray that the battery was charged when I returned. This same car battery (or series of 15 of them) led to some quality encounters over the years. Such as:
Getting a clown to help me change the alternator. The restaurant I was working at when I was in college hired a clown to come in and entertain kids while they waited. Aside from being one of the creepiest guys I’ve ever met (he ended up getting fired for hitting on a patron wearing a sailor’s outfit. seriously), he was a skilled redneck. So one day, before our shift began, I recruited him to help me change the alternator to my car. So there we were, me wearing overalls (I worked at a Roadhouse Grill), he dressed as a clown, under my car changing the alternator.
“Did I just lock the keys in the car?” In Holly’s senior year of college, we were headed to one of her formals when we stopped at the local target to pick up some things. Of course, I didn’t have the battery charger and when we came out, the car was dead. Over the years, I’d gotten good at using my wily charm (or undeniable body) to get old ladies to give my car a jump. This incident was no different. A very nice, but forgetful, old lady agreed to help. She got out of her car, I popped the hood, wired everything up, and voila, got my car running. Now HP and I were ready to run off to her formal.
But not quite.
The nice old lady had left her car running. And locked the doors. That’s right. Locked doors and car running. Not necessarily a combination you want to occur at the same time. So even though we were running late, we had no choice but to take the sweet lady home to get her spare set of keys. She even invited us in for a cup of coffee. I had to remind her that her car was running at the Target and we were running late to college drinkfest.
I don’t even have time to get into when I totaled the car, recruited my mom to go to the junkyard and get spare parts for it, or the time the clutch went out in the middle of traffic on I-85, or how the passenger side door handle broke off and I had to rig it up with a literal shoestring to open it.
I drove this car til it had 190,000 miles and sold it a few weeks before we got married for $50. Oh the memories.
Additions to my blog roll. You’re welcome
Posted by TJ in Technology on June 29th, 2010
Since my blog is becoming yahoo like portal for all things entertainment, I’ve decided to bestow kindness and tens of referrals to a few new blogs I read on the reg.
- Jason and Natalie have a kid — Jason and Natalie have a kid. Watch out everyone. Skelley as a human being is one thing; Skelley as a parent is something else entirely
- The Decatur Project — Meg and Jonathan buy a house. And in what would take HP and I 14 years they will accomplish in 5 months. I hate them so bad.
- Yen Garden — Yen starts a garden. And apparently devotes one entire blog to it? She now possesses two spots in my blog roll. Ridiculous.
Things I learned from my dad
Here’s how I view the relevant differences between fathers and mothers:
Mothers are nurturing. They hold you when you’re hurt, help you with your homework when you’ve fallen behind on a project, and coach you through life’s mysteries as you grow older.
Fathers, in the words of Royal Tenenbaum, are meant to “brew some recklessness” into their boys. My pop taught me how to play poker (our favorite was always 3-5-7), how to body surf through an impending tropical storm, and how to use colorful language to get your point across. But these are just a few things I learned from my dad. Here are my all time favorites:
How to get rid of an old car. Back when I was little, the apartment my mom lived in backed up to a wooded area in Houston. It was a great place for little kids to play in. To build forts. To play jailbreak in. And a prime spot for your dad to dispose of an old car in.
My dad has never been much on fancy cars. Or working cars. Not long after my folks were divorced, they moved into apartments not far from each other. My dad would frequently come by and visit and on more than one occasion, the car might have trouble starting back up. Dad would tweak something under the hood or maybe get a jump and the car would be back and running in no time. This happened on a succession of cars over a number of years.
One car in particular gave my dad fits though. I can’t remember the make or model, but I do remember that it was green, old, and big as hell. It had died in the parking lot of my mom’s apartment complex and in my dad knew exactly how he’d handle this situation. Instead of getting it towed or figuring out what the problem is, my dad instead recruited me, Andy, and 3 or 4 of our pals from the neighborhood to help him get rid of the car. As my dad steered the car, he had 5 or 6 8, 9, and 10 year olds pushing the car through the street. We weren’t exactly sure where we were going but we made a turn to head back behind the apartment complex. We kept pushing, the car getting heavier and heavier (they made cars out of raw steel and iron back then I could swear) until we pushed the car over a curb and right into the woods (and we didn’t exactly make a great effort to hide the car either. It was basically on the edge of the woods). The kids were kind of giddy (especially Andy) because we knew we were doing something wrong but this time, we had adult supervision — if my then 45 year old dad could be called “adult”. To this day, whenever I think of the final days of one of my cars, I wonder where I can find an undisturbed, pristine section of woods that I can use to dispose of my car.
Exploiting child labor. When I was probably 10 and Andy 8, my dad experimented with getting out of the restaurant business for a few years and instead managed a Radio Shack. About once or twice a month, pop would take us to work with him. This was pretty much the coolest “take your kid to work” situation I could’ve hoped for. While my friends went to sit in a cubicle with their dads, I got to hang out at the mall and play with the cool gadgets Radio Shack sold (remote control cars! color computers!! short wave radios!!!). However, more often than not my dad motives other than mine and Andy’s enjoyment when taking us to work.
Every month (or quarter, I can’t remember), Radio Shack would make their stores count inventory. In most retail establishments, this is probably not a huge deal. But did you ever go to a Radio Shack in the 80s? And did you see how much tiny, microscopic crap they sold? Diodes, LED lights, the stuff that goes into electronic equipment!! This was a monumental pain in the ass for the average manager.
But not for Bruce Muehleman
He would take his two youngest boys, ply them with $5, a slice of Sbarro pizza, and maybe some free time at the arcade, and get them to do the counting. Andy and I thought we’d died and gone to heaven. Now we’re getting PAID to go to work with Dad?!? This was AMAZING. Maybe we weren’t the most reliable inventory specialists in the organization (we were, after all, little kids easily distracted by remote controlled cars) but we always got the job done. And dad was always very pleased with our work.
Bonus child labor exploitation story: Brewing recklessness wasn’t limited to the Muehleman boys. He also didn’t hesitate to get Amy involved in the racket. Back when he owned a restaurant, he’d get Amy, then 15 or 16 (or thereabouts) to run the bar when things were slow. This was great until a representative from the Texas beer and liquor licensing department came in and noticed this transgression. Whoops?
To my dad, Happy Father’s day.
And to all the father’s out there, don’t forget to brew some recklessness into your kids.
