Blown Fuse

A Picture Share!

A Picture Share!,
originally uploaded by blownfuse.

Damnation.

I left my iPod home today.

Feel...so...naked!

Who?

Gimme some sugar baby.


Which B-Movie Badass Are You?
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Via Diana.

I actually had to Google "Give me some sugary, baby" to find out what the hell movie that was from. I've only seen part of this movie, but from what I did see it seemed pretty campy.

*crosses legs tightly*

We're having a new roof put on. When I pulled up to the Circle this afternoon at 5, as always, I discovered that my yards have become construction site theme parks. There are huge tarps covering God-knows-what, boxes of supplies blocking my driveway, and shingles in the mailman's delivery truck path (he actually had to get out of the truck to deliver the mail, heh).

I had to tiptoe and creep to get into the house without significant damage to my person.

Being the exceptionally paranoid ranter that I am, I'm terrified that I'm going to go into the bathroom, where there's a vent in the ceiling, and look up to see one of the contractors looking down at me. I realize that they're simply taking the shingles off and NOT the wood beneath it, but I can't help but to think that they can see me.

To make matters worse, I went into the bathroom two minutes ago to try to pee with some dignity and a bunch of roof crud came showering down from the vent as I stood there.

I backed out slowly and turned off the light.

I can hold it......

*shakes weak, tired fist*

Paul from Snooze Button Dreams commented that it really gets his goat when the big girly men see that the water cooler bottle is empty, however rather than replacing it, walk away and wait for someone else to flip it.

>:|. You put a jinx on me, man.

I came into the office, fully expecting to have my hot tea before I start my routine, but guess what? There's no water in the cooler. Guess who had to flip it? Yup. I tore my back and shoulders up last night in pilates class, and I'm flipping water bottles that weigh more than my desk.

Bunch of savages.

Idol Watching

Let me just disclose here that the individuals seen on the Greensboro, NC segment of American Idol in no way reflect the actual concetration of sanity/breeding/English-speaking in the rest of the state.

Carry on.

Chew Toy

Last night I tried to be a fair and equitable kitty momma by letting Puffy Savage have a chance to sleep at the foot of our bed. Bodie normally navigates the slumber ship from there, but Bodie also won't meow and scratch at the door all night if we don't let her in.

I put Bodie out, Fred Flintstone style, brought Puffy in, and closed the door. Scott was incredibly frightened that Puffy would take a massive shit somewhere in our environs, but lo - she didn't have the chance.

I had been asleep for 15 minutes when I was awoken by cat teeth on my earlobe. I thought I was dreaming that fly was buzzing around my ear. I swatted it away. Again, I felt the gnawing. Puffy was chewing on my earring, and by de facto, my cartilage as well. I picked her scrawny little kitten ass up and closed her back in the guest room.

Five minutes later, Bodie resumed her normal spot on the bed.

She just ain't ready.

College Nightmares.

Before I met Scott, I lived in a 2-bedroom apartment in the psuedo-ghetto with a roommate. It was in one of those apartment complexes where most people didn't speak English, where there would be diapers floating in the pool at any given time, and where strangers would allow their children to sit/play/stand on your car when they were outside.

Home sweet home. With my credit at the time it was the best I could do.

Anyway, my roommate was a girl whom I'd met in my...damn, what class was it? I think it was my chemistry 011 lab. She stood at the station beside mine. We sort of bonded over how crappy the T.A. leading the lab was. Often the students in our section went to the lab next door to ask the other T.A. to check our T.A.'s work. Anyway, that's neither here nor there.

We became friends and she often spent the night with my roommate and I in our dorm room. We had this super-comfortable recliner she would sleep in that just so happened to be more comfortable than the bunk beds.

At the end of the year, four of us (my roommate, myself, Chem chick, and a floormate) decided that we'd all move off campus for the next year and we tried to find an apartment to accomodate all four of us. Tried as we might, either the apartments were just way too small to accomodate four beds or we couldn't figure out a way to determine who would get a room to themselves if we got a three-bedroom.

We ended up parting ways on that endeavor: my roommate and hallmate opted for a more expensive one-bedroom apartment, and my classmate and I qualified for a less expensive two-bedroom 1,000 square foot apartment.

I'll cut to the chase and tell you the end before I get there: I moved out (unofficially) within six months of living there.

Chick was trifling. I don't mean your standard run-of-the-mill trifling meaning "nasty," but trifiling all the same.

On move-in day, I waited around for a little while after dumping in all my shit. I had both of the keys and needed to run some errands. When I returned she had come up with a U-Haul and her entire extended family to help her move in.

After they left, her friend still remained. Friend spent the night. Friend spent the next night. Friend never left.

It seemed I had inherited a gypsy. She never paid a cent of rent, however was there all day long, watching t.v., making phone calls, surfing the internet and what have you. This pissed me off to no end. I guess the way my roommate saw it was that if she was sleeping in her bedroom, then she was the one ultimately responsible for covering that part of the rent. I disagree with this logic. Anyway. I was sick of people using my shaving cream and eating my food. Having one roommate was more than enough. I was never home - I was either at school or at work. When I went home, I wanted to open the fridge, have a soda and watch t.v. I didn't want to have to fume over who ate/drank my food or "What's that smell?" (it was a bag of potatoes that had been left to grow foliage and rot under the sink). My roommate(s) spent all of their spare time in their bedroom with the door closed.

When Scott came along, I basically moved in with him the first night I met him. No joke. (I guess it's that whole "knight in shining armor" thing us girls look for).

I paid rent at that aparment for another five months or so even though my shit was gone and I didn't live there. I was so happy on the day I went to the apartment office and signed the forms to have my name taken off the lease. I was through with it. I actually feared going back into that apartment to remove my things thinking that I would have to confront my roommate. That never happened, fortunately.

That's about 8 months of my life I'd like to have back.

And the moral of the story is: never move off campus into an apartment with people who are obviously sketchy.

Just saying what I mean, is all I'm saying.

I've discovered lately that as I age, I am beginning to lose my censorship chip. When I was younger, I was very concerned about how people perceived what I spoke. I'd be really deliberate in making requests and suggestions.

Not so much, anymore. I was in a seafood restaurant a couple of weeks ago and had half a plate of fried shrimp left over. When the waitress asked if I wanted them boxed up, I simply said, "No. I'm not going to eat them." She looked concerned. I didn't bother to explain any further.

The average person would have said something along the lines of, "No thank you - I'll forget that I have them and won't remember to eat them" or "They were delicious, but I don't eat leftovers."

I can't even turn on the part of my brain that tempers my speech. Don't care, either.

iPod Help

Tonight we bought an iPod dock thinking that we needed one to plug the electrical adapter into (erroneous). Well, that's okay - we can still use it to connect to the television.

The problem now is that our television doesn't have an S-video out port, but the DVD player does. How do we communicate to the DVD player that we don't want to play a disc, but want to use it instead to shuttle data from the iPod?

If anyone can tell me, I'd be most grateful.

Less work for you - don't say I never gave you anything.

Just an FYI: you will no longer be forced to preview your comment before posting.

I put that system into effect last year to combat the spam bots, but now that they're under control in the Munu kingdom, I've disabled them.

Feel free to comment your little hearts out. I know that's what was holding you back, eh?

Bunch of savages.

I was doing some BlogExplosion surfing this morning and realized a pet peeve I didn't know I had:

People who have beautifully designed websites who are unable to spell worth a shit. I know you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but damn, I got let down a few times. The misuse of they're, there, and their is burning my eyes!

The inhumanity!

Mine arms have seen the glory of the coming of the comb.

I'm contemplating if I should wash my hair. When it's curly and wonderfully carefree, I at the very least, condition it daily. When it's straight and processed, I shampoo less frequently.

The problem with having hair that's as thick as shag carpet is that it takes 30 minutes to blowdry. I just don't have that kind of upper body strength, y'all.

...I almost want to go out and pay someone to do it for me, but after too many hair stylist disasters, I think I'd prefer my hair to stink. Which it doesn't, by the way.

Crafty.

I've been working on a couple of knitting projects lately when I'm not busy saving the world and prying the cats apart from their swatting matches.

Scott asked for a scarf, which I know he'll never wear and will have turned into a huge waste of my evenings and weekends, but I don't want to hear any guff over it.

I've been working the "Here and There Cables" pattern from Pam Allen's Scarf Style. At the pace I'm working I feel like global warming will render the project moot by the time I'm done.

I'm also working on a little pink tote from the Fall 2005 Knit it!. It'll be great for those days where I'm carrying around all of my various electronic gadgets and need a little room to fit my wallet and keys in.

If a mail truck made an animal noise, it'd be "Moo."

This picture was taken earlier in the week...Tuesday, I think. The mail has been running progressively later each week, and these two mail trucks were in front of my house at around 5:15 making a huge racket.

What you can not see is the THIRD mail truck 100 feet in front of the second one in front on my neighbor's mailbox. This confused me greatly. What I think occured was that mail truck #1 broke down in front of our driveway. Mail truck #2 arrived to take over the rest of the route. Mail truck #3 arrived to tow mail truck #1 away.

This was amusing for about 5 minutes and then I was distracted by a ringing phone or meowing cat.

Damn, me too.

Karsh is at a loss for words. Me too. I've just been boring this week...sorry. I can talk about the cats some, if you'd like? No? Okay. Well, I guess I'll play a little truth or dare.

Ask me 4 questions. Any 4; no matter how random. I have to answer them honestly and I have to answer them all.

Have at it. Responses (as I write them) will be in the extended entry.

From Erica.

1. What's your favorite thing this week?

My favorite thing this week has been my iPod. I'm still learning all the features of it. I took my detachable computer speakers with me to work on Tuesday and plugged them into my iPod and us folks in the back of the office rocked out all day. The air guitar chorus to "Bohemian Rhapsody" was particuarly amusing.

2. What's on your feet right now?

A pair of Sperry Topsiders loafers....because I don't have any clean dress socks and they sort of accomodate that.

3. Look around. What's the first red thing you see?

A few red correction pencils in my pencil/pen cup.

4. What are you looking forward to?

I'm looking forward to sleeping in laaaaaaaaaaaaaaate on Saturday. I'll be skipping Pilates in favor of a warm blankey and drool on my pillow.

From Jim:

1. With spam now generally under control here at Munuviana, are you going to remove the forced comment preview dealie?

Just as soon as I figure out how to reverse my steps and recode the template, heh.

2. Where will your next vacation be?

Las Vegas if all goes well with the tax refunds.

3. Word association: Bloomberg.

Not Giuliani.

4. What is the average airspeed of an unladed swallow?

Well, you have to know these things when you're a king, you know.

From Keeme:

1. Do you consider yourself a success and why?

I consider myself to be a success at some things. Part of my personality is that I always want to jump forward and move on to the next great thing. Because of that I never really feel like I've "finished." The one thing that's really important to me to accomplish, being a published novelist, just isn't working out right now because of that whole problem of having a 9-5 job.

2. What is your deepest regret?

That I never learned to tell people when they hurt my feelings at the moment it happened.

3. What is your favorite memory?

Being on a Trailways bus with my grandma heading to New York and eating fried chicken she'd cooked earlier in the day. The smell of chicken in ziplock bags stored in the fridge always reminds me of that.

4. If you had financial serenity what would your life be like?

"Serenity," heh. I like that. Scott and I would be living in a house like this and I would be staying home to write and eat sunflower seeds all day.

*shakes a fist*

Anyone else use Netflix and send movies back last Tuesday or Wednesday that didn't get "received" by them until today?

Looks like they're using the postal holidays as a good ruse to disguise the throttling they're laying down on you. Just send me my frickin' 'Allo 'Allo!.

How to shut 'em up.

The setting: Tiffany stands in kitchen, lazily dunking a tea bag in a cup of hot water. An overweight cat with desire in her eyes circles Tiffany's legs, begging for food.

Tiffany (to cat): I would like to eat something, too. Are you going to make me breakfast?
Bodie Cat: Mrew. (walks away)

Try it.

Truer words were never spoken.

We ask new hires to take a personality survey when they're interviewing to see if they're going to able to fit into the company culture. I took one many moons ago, but never read it. I retook it yesterday during lunch: the results are in the extended entry. Basically, it says (very professionally) that I'm a stark raving bitch but I get 'er done.

Summary
Tiffany, your responses indicate that you apply yourself to perfecting systems, and you prefer to rely upon your own work rather than training fellow workers and delegating to them. You are highly creative and, at the same time, very quality control-oriented. You are inclined to work your way diligently through the course of reaching a decision. Your concern about making a correct decision is enhanced by your capacity to see ways of improving upon it. Exaggerated statements cause you to be skeptical.

Communication Style
Tiffany, you are very direct, candid and fluent in your communication style, and you appreciate straightforward answers, based on reality, to your questions. You are very effective in your use of a commanding style rather than a persuasive one. You tend to get straight to the point. Also, Tiffany, you are reserved and prefer to communicate with people one-on-one. You need to be spoken to and listened to in a respectful tone. You express yourself straightforwardly and with candor. You are analytical and you like to be in control. You say exactly what you mean and prefer that others do the same. You are only interested in details if they relate directly to getting results, you readily adjust systems, and you might appear strongly critical of others without intending to do so.

Tiffany, you relate best to a team when it fits into your selected goals. You drive hard to get things done and, in doing so, may forget other's feelings and ignore their time restraints. You do not tolerate mediocrity readily. You are pleasant as long as results are being accomplished.

You push aggressively to get the job done, and prefer not to work under close supervision. You function well when given problems to solve, when allowed to make things happen, and when given specific goals. You are adept at handling technically oriented projects.

Leadership
Leadership Style: Authoritative
You perform your leadership role by assuming a tone of direct command and a concise use of words. You are inwardly directed, prefer to think matters through alone, and show a lot of self-confidence in your ability to accomplish projects. You tend to take on additional responsibilities and may be disinclined to delegate authority. Within your realm of expertise, you make very quick decisions. You want fast, accurate results and may be reluctant to delegate details.

Conscientiousness
You are able to apply self-discipline and thoroughness to your work. Your orientation toward tasks and achievement is guided by an above-average ability to plan, organize, and fulfill specific goals and obligations. Your motivations are usually positive and focused on results.

MOTIVATION

Motivation Needs:
Tiffany, you tend to be motivated by daily challenges and tangible results. Power, prestige, and rewards for results achieved are important to you. You prefer direct answers and candor in communication. You desire freedom from constant supervision, and control over your own environment. You are most productive when operating under strong, capable leadership, when allowed to make decisions regarding your daily routine, and when you have bottom line responsibility for business activities.

You are demotivated by the absence of challenges or significant goals. You can be frustrated when vague answers are given to direct questions, and when your day-to-day tasks are closely supervised. Vacillating leadership demotivates you, especially when it makes you unable to give straight answers to your co-workers or staff. Primary Motivation:
Daily challenges.
Tangible results.
A position with power and prestige.
Direct answers and candor in communications.
The respect of the leadership.
A generous amount of freedom from controls, constant supervision and details.
The ability to measure results on a regular basis in monetary terms, (keep score).
Opportunities to be in charge, make decisions and be responsible for the results achieved. Primary Demotivation:
Not challenged.
Supervised too closely.
You receive vague answers to questions.
Leadership vacillates.
You lack significant goals.

Emotional / Intelligence
Tiffany, your responses indicate that your Emotional Intelligence is exceptionally well developed. You tend to recognize your own emotions, moods, and drives as they occur. You perform accurate self-appraisals of your talents and abilities. You are able to attune your own style to the emotional reactions of others. You strive continually for self-improvement, and you prefer that your work be aligned with your personal values. You tend to feel at ease in almost any social situation. You form carefully considered judgments about people or situations.

Take me with you.

If you look to your right, you'll see a button for AvantGo - this is for all you folks with handhelds who download blog feeds. AvantGo is a free service up to a certain bandwidth. If you ever use it to download MapQuest directions, you'll see it's the same service.

Now you can read me whereever you go - you decide whether you want the images and link connections, too. Yay!

Busybusybusy

It was my intention to take today off work, but after learning that Puffy wouldn't be available to pick up until after 5, I decided I didn't want to waste my remaining 2005 vacation day. I'll use it sometime at the end of February when there are no holidays in sight - the office doesn't close for a holiday again until good Friday.

It feels as if I got a lot accomplished today. I got the water in the expansion space switched to our account (after twenty minutes on the phone with the City of Durham I can tell you that such is quite a feat). I ordered business cards for a new associate. Put together a contract package for yet another new hire. Got three new computers set up.

The one thing I did not get accomplished was getting the police on the case of our stolen phone service. I called the police this morning to follow up on a fax I sent last month and was told that I either needed to come to the station in person to file a report or dial 911 and have an officer come to me.

I left work at 2:30 to drive to the police department on my way home. Being there, I learned that there were no officers there and I would have to wait a while for one. The secretary suggested that when I get into work tomorrow I simply dial 911.

So...yeah, I'm totally putting that into my Palm for 9 o'clock tomorrow: "Dial 911."

On an interesting note, I figured out how to use my PalmOne to download driving directions (because I'm directionally inept). It was so cool using that to navigate around Durham instead of a stapled pile of paper.

Mommy, I'm cold!

S'all good. I picked Puffy up from APS at 5 on the dot. She appeared to be visibily annoyed at seeing me. She's normally a very vocal kitty, so the very quiet drive home was creepy. She's in her bedroom eating kibble now. A brief cuddle and a kiss on the nose seemed to fix things well. If you maximize the picture, you'll see the smiley face tattoo the vet tech applied after surgery.

Puffy's Big Day

7:26 and I sit here at the helm typing a blog post. Normally at this hour I'd be making a hot cup of something at the office and preparing for the day's drudge. Otherwise, it'd be a weekend and I'd be knocked-da-fuck-out.

Puffy Savage has to be at the animal shelter between 8 and 8:30 for her surgery. When I woke up this morning and pulled out the little appointment reminder slip I read for the first time that she wasn't supposed to have food between 10 last night up to now.....oops.

I mean, what's the worst that could happen, she'll poo a little or throw up? I have her a quarter cup of kibble last night at around 7 and she ate about half. I would guess that she ate it yesterday.....but I can't be sure.

Shit, now I'm worried.

*lick*

Here's Kitty Jr., or formally Puffy Savage, checking for privacy before she commences to "bathe" herself.

I have to take her to be spayed tomorrow. The poor thing...I feel sorry for her. When I brought Bodie home from the shelter, they had spayed her on the same day. We've had Puffy at home for a couple of months now. I'll hate to hand her over to be operated on.

*snuggle*

Oh, that's mine?

Do you ever have to wait so long to get something you ordered delivered that you forget that you ever ordered it?
I was about to get angry and indignant when I got home this afternoon. Back in November when I ordered my flute and accessories I ordered some tone hole covers. Yeah, I know - blah blah blah. To make a short story even more concise, the package came today. Yes, they use FedEx to deliver a 2 ounce item. Hmm.

Oh well. It's sort of like Christmas all over again.