You are currently browsing the monthly archive for August 2007.
In 2001, I took a trip to Seattle with a couple of friends to attend a conference. I had been in that city a few months earlier, in May, for a similar conference. The weather in May was beautiful: Hardly a cloud, pleasant temperatures. In October, we landed in the rain. It rained the entire week. The weather conspired with the recent terrorist attacks to make us all miserable. The only respites were a couple of dinners we shared with our friend Melissa, who lives in Seattle.
Here in PA in 2007 the sun hasn’t made an appearance in five days. Today’s promised clearing and warming has yet to materialize. It’s feeling like Seattle in October.
I need a road trip.
The Bridge Avenue School in Cleveland has been profiled by a local TV station. Why is this important to me? Watch the video and then I’ll tell you.
The Principal who picks up kids himself? That’s my buddy Dan, a former youth ministry student, and then one of the best leaders I’ve ever worked with. Once, on the night before a mission trip to South Dakota, the rental car agency called to tell me they wouldn’t have my two 15 passenger vans in the morning; the ones I had signed a contract on months before. They said they would give me four minivans instead. The problem with this plan was I had only three drivers. I called Dan and said, “Dan, what are you doing for the next 13 days?” He said, “Going to South Dakota with you.” And he went. That’s the kind of guy he is.
His mother, the other teacher in the school, is the person who encouraged me to pursue my writing more seriously. She even encouraged a small private class she attended to open itself up for me. I’ve been published five times in international devotional magazines, Susan has read and edited each one of those manuscripts. Her suggestions made them publishable.
The following is true. Except for the parts I made up.
This story is surreal.
It’s a peaceful Tuesday Morning in Gig Harbor, Washington. A disabled woman is sleeping peacefully with her service dog by her side, oh, and a neighbor’s dog as well. Suddenly two pit bulls burst into the room looking for breakfast. The disabled woman tries to lock the neighbor’s dog in a closet, but like the men of Sodom, the pit bulls are persistent. They kill the neighbors dog and then turn their attention to the woman (whose own dog, apparently the only one with any sense, has long since fled the scene).
The woman goes all Rambo on the dogs. Or tries to, that is, but then her gun doesn’t fire. She picks up a stick, which the dogs take for the second of three courses. After tangling with the carnivorous canines, her blood leaving a trail, the woman flees the house, being careful to grab a phone on the way out and call 911. The transcript of the 911 call reportedly went something like:
“911 what is your emergency?”
“Sonzabitches! Bumpusses!”
It only gets better. Read it here.
Okay, so the gun wouldn’t fire but I still love the idea of a disabled old (59 isn’t really old, but whatever) lady packin’ heat.
***
The Pit Bulls’ names: Betty, and Tank. It was Betty did the killin’. The neighbor who owns the pit bulls says they’re usually good, which means…
…[the] pit bulls have long terrorized the area.
Brad King said his five-pound papillon, Toby, was attacked inside his home when the two dogs entered through his open back door last summer. “They had Toby in their mouths,” King said.
King was able to stop the attack, but Toby suffered a broken jaw.
Neal Fortner, who lives two houses down from Gorman, said the pit bulls came toward him snarling one morning as he tried to get into his car. He threw rocks to shoo them away.
“I can’t believe she made it out her back door,” he said of Gorman. “I’m just glad she made it with her life.”
Gorman said she has called 911 previously when Betty charged her and Misty.
The wilding dogs are now in custody awaiting a decision about their future, but a source whose reliability cannot be confirmed says the dogs have received a visit from Oscar.
The moral of the story: Don’t sleep in with your neighbor’s dog.
As always, thank you to Obscure Store for mass quantities of inspiration.
You can embed google maps now. Like, woah!
Unless of course, you’re on wordpress.com. In which case, you can’t.
Works on blogger though, apparently.*
*When blogger works. Which is not now. Heh. (8/22/07, 10:30EDT)
The Whoa! Where Am I fun begins, it is to be hoped, in a little more than two weeks.
Although my supervisor could put the kabosh on it at any time. She left for a two week vacation without giving me a signed leave slip. I don’t think she’s returning until a couple of days before I’m supposed to leave.
This year’s departure will be slightly different than last year. Then, I had to work on Friday and Saturday, in fact I worked that whole Labor Day week and it was 
the heaviest week of the year. I think that record still holds, believe it or not. Saturday was almost as bad as Tuesday, the day after the holiday. I had 13 trays of mail that day… 26 feet… on R7, a volume not equalled before or since. And I needed to get to Bowers well before the 6pm conclusion of the Pepper Festival. Looking back on it now, I’m not sure how I managed it, but I did.
This year I don’t have to work the whole week. Just Tuesday and Wednesday, maybe Thursday if they put me on R5. I’ll also have to work Saturday, but not Friday. That means I can go to Bowers, get a few bags full of hot beauties, come back and pickle some of them, hang the rest to dry, and pick up this year’s version of the beige bull.
Of course, the chances I’ll get called to work on Friday are just as real as the possibility that my supervisor could come back in a bad mood and deny my leave. So all this planning may amount to games of the mind.
Fun, though. I’m starting to think like a roadist. I sure do like thinking that way.
Wal Mart is offering DRM-free music for $0.94 per song.
A strong indicator of which way the market for digital music will go. Much to the probable chagrin of the RIAA and others in the industry.
But here’s the killer. You’ll need internet explorer if you want to browse their latest edition. Dumb.
If the big W is smart, the enhancements promised in the graphic will come quick.
UPDATE: It is possible to download music if you are using firefox. I successfully downloaded Peter Frampton’s song “Holding On To You,” which I’ve been looking for as a single download for months. It is now safely ensconced in my itunes library. I’m not sure which features one misses when not using IE, but I’m loathe to open the software and find out.
Soggy, wet. Overly moist. Double plus moist.
And I am totally incapable of sending some of the vast clamminess to those who really need it.
Just read this.
That is all.
Because you look like you could use a laugh:
A few days ago icanhascheezburger featured a kinda funny picture of a cat getting some air.
But another user has pimped cheezburger’s original photo. The result, with the original photo on top and the pimped lolcat below, is here.
My humble apologies if you are tiring of the postality category. If so, please skip this.
The other Jim in the rural area, Jim Regular, the carrier on route 5, has a new sub.
I’m assigned to R5 tomorrow but Jim’s new sub, a woman named Doreen, is currently in training. Her training will be over sometime this week. Jim’s switching his weekly day off from Monday to Saturday and Doreen, who can only work on Saturday, will be starting as Jim’s sub next weekend.
This (combined with the winding down of summer vacation madness) means a couple of things for me.
1. Tomorrow may be the last time I carry R5 for a while. I should be happy. R5 is awful. Doing it is like being Westley in the scene from The Princess Bride where Prince Humperdink runs into the Pit of Despair and in a fit of jealous rage cranks the lever on “the machine” that sucks away years of his life while Count Rugen yells, “NOT TO FIFTY!!!” Okay, maybe not quite that bad. But I’ve spent lots of sweat, tears, and even blood taming this beast. I feel a little bereft.
2. I’m suddenly going from being scheduled for six day weeks, every week, to one work day per week. It won’t stay that way, of course. Somebody will get sick or take a sudden vacation, or retire. But for the first time in months, the line next to my name in the schedule is almost empty. A year ago I would be doing a happy dance. This year I’m sad. A summer’s worth of six-day-week paychecks has me quite spoiled.
OTOH all of this could, and probably will, change by the the in short order. My prediction (one which is shared by Doug, whose sub I am) is that Jim’s new sub will last one week following her training. And there’s always the chance that Bill (who was out for almost a month with a ‘broken arm’) will get back to his frequent calling-in-sick routine very soon.
What I’m trying to say is, I guess, that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
serotoninrain 
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