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When religion and pop culture collide

When religion and pop culture collide
Flickr: Don NunnWe actually made a U-turn to come back to this sign, which deserves ridicule like no other church sign I’ve seen.

The power of observation, I guess

So this morning at IHOP the server asked if I wanted my usual, and I said, uh, what is my usual? and she said eggs over medium and pancakes with link sausage, and I said, how do you know that? I’ve only had that once here and you weren’t my server, and she said, when folks come in two Sundays in a row, they always get the same thing.

It was kinda creepy. But the food was good.

How my workday is going

I just spent several minutes staring at the names of two permissions groups, trying to figure out

1. why there were two groups with the same name, and
2. how anyone had MANAGED to save two groups with the same name. When I try that, the system bitch-slaps me.

Turns out one had a hyphen where the other had an underscore.

It is by such simple means that I can be trapped utterly into the world of Must Figure This Out Or It Will Kill Me!!!.

I am an easy mark.

Insomnia blows

I worked late on Wednesday and I have to go in early Thursday. These two simple facts have turned my brain against me and I’m lying here in the soft glow of my phone’s screen, typing a mobile post about how I’m not sleeping right now.

This is a crazy world.

Flying carpets

Flying carpets
Flickr: Don NunnBalcony door was open, warm in the apartment and I was cooking. I kept hearing these odd boom/crash sounds. I wasn’t sure if it was a car backfiring or, who knows, gunshots or whatever.

When I went outside, I caught the end of the carpet installers’ four-floors-up carpet-tossing act.

My Treo’s microphone does no justice to the loudness of the slamming sound these carpet remnants were making.

I love living in the city. :-)

Who goes there?

It’s a little blustery tonight.

Across the street is a tree that moves in the breeze across the line of sight between my balcony and the security light on the building directly south of mine.

The tree’s crossing the light keeps making me think there is someone walking across my balcony. In the last few minutes I’ve had several WTF moments.

Time, methinks, for bed. Have a nice Sunday night. :-)

On the rain in Seattle

We have a Pineapple Express-style storm rolling through Seattle today and tomorrow. I’m quite enjoying it, mainly because I’ve been home from work for five hours now and avoided the majority of the afternoon rush hour, one advantage to my early work schedule. I usually beat traffic unless there’s a crash or something.

I did, however, experience some of the usual Seattle Rainy Day joy. In this city with its reputation for endless rain and the gorgeously green landscape that accompanies, once again I was amazed by the sameness of the rainy-weather experience.

Some things never change:

• I was angrily glared at, flipped off, honked at, passed stupidly closely, or cut off several times on my way west on SR 520, all because I was leaving several carlengths of empty space ahead of me and apparently Seattleites aren’t happy unless EVERY GODDAMNED INCH OF HIGHWAY is covered over by crawling vehicles.
• Several spin-out crashes reported on the traffic updates in the 30 minutes I was on the road between Redmond and Queen Anne. This lack of willingness to slow down just mystifies me, particularly when people aren’t very good at braking correctly even when the pavement’s bone-dry.
• Several cars I saw, the drivers seemed dead set against using the windshield wipers. At a couple points I was wishing my car’s wipers had something beyond the normal and fast options, perhaps an OH SHIT I CAN’T SEE A DAMNED THING setting that made the wipers invisible, they were zapping back and forth so fast. How can anyone think not using wipers at all is a good thing, even in the mildly misty rain we usually have?

Each of these happens every time we get rain here, particularly if there’s been more than about 12 minutes since the last storm. I just don’t get it, EVERY TIME.

Can anyone splain this to me?

“simply smart”?

“simply smart”?
Flickr: Don NunnHoliday Inn Express, what does that even mean?

When Clorox attacks

When Clorox attacks
Flickr: Don NunnLeaking bleach bottle vs. canvas bag: Bleach wins.

Damned phone books!

Damned phone books!
Flickr: Don NunnSilly Yellow Pages people deliver the stupid books nobody uses anymore even to the businesses that don’t yet exist

LeSignOfTheApocalypseSac

LeSignOfTheApocalypseSac
Flickr: Don NunnOr: LeWhatTheHellIsThisSac?

So I was standing at the urinal just now

And I was thinking, hey dude in the stall by the sinks, you should turn your phone to its “silent” mode if you’re going to press a lot of buttons while you’re doing your natural business in there, because it sounds like you’re emitting an oddly staccato but low-pitched grunt otherwise.

Then I thought: Speaking of phones, I just put my phone in my pocket. Did I lock the keys?

Next thought: Wait. That sounds a lot like my phone.

Final thought, as somehow I managed to maintain my aim while I dug my phone out of my pocket and looked at the screen to see the short stack of random calendar events created by the keyboard presses the phone had endured in my pocket: Dammit, I really need to dig out my phone belt clip again. And stop, in the silences of my mind, giving other people shit about their weird bathroom habits.

Jerky fail

Jerky fail
Flickr: Don Nunn$23 a pound for the priviledge of a gnaw?

I can’t believe they actually used this headline

I can’t believe they actually used this headline
Flickr: Don NunnCNN.com’s editors must be chuckling up their sleeves at their own cleverness.

Compromised

This morning I was horrified to discover I left my apartment front door unlocked all night, and I left my front passenger window rolled down when I got home yesterday afternoon.

Strictly from a personal– or property-safety perspective, neither of these is cause for huge concern. The part of town where I live isn’t a massively high-crime area, and I live in a secured building so the front-door thing was less a personal security risk and more a memory failing. And while there have been some vehicle break-ins in this neighborhood over the years, there have been none in my building’s parking lot in the year and a half I’ve lived here.

It’s much more the lapses of memory that wig me out.

While I was lying in bed last night, just before I drifted off, I did wonder to myself if I had locked the door after I got home from the day’s activities. But I dismissed the concern out of hand, so when I reached to disengage the deadbolt this morning on my way to work, I thought: Did I already unlock the door this morning? Why, if I did? And if not, why didn’t I listen to myself last night when I wondered if I had locked it?

Even though my building is secured and my neighbors are pretty low-key, I normally lock my door the moment I close it because my apartment door is at the end of a corridor with an exit stairway door immediately to its right. I would lock the door immediately more often than not, but I purposefully got into the habit after the time a few months ago when a man I’d never seen before (nor since) walked into my apartment thinking he was opening the stairwell door. He didn’t immediately realize his mistake and turn around even when he saw a coat tree and a litter box instead of a stairway, or perhaps he just figured someone was using the stairwell as a storage space of some kind. So he continued further into my apartment, I guess thinking maybe the stairway was around the corridor or maybe off the bedroom.

Shocked looks on both our faces when I came out of the kitchen to ask him just what the hell did he think he was doing? He mumbled something about looking for the stairwell and hastily backed out the door, and I started keeping the door locked all the time.

The car thing is a little more disconcerting. I had both front windows rolled down on my drive home yesterday afternoon, and I clearly remember closing the driver-side window when I got home. Passenger window didn’t even register on my mind at all, in fact I didn’t notice it was open until I started the car and thought, hmm, seems louder than usual.

And sound louder it does when the window’s open, idiot!

I did the quick once-over: Glove compartment, center console, visors, stereo intact. Nothing was missing or even appeared disturbed.

Signs of approaching middle age, I suppose. Urk.

I am SO there

I am SO there
Flickr: Don NunnMy family all know how impossible it would be to keep me away from this show.

While I was in the shower this morning, I had a Profound Thought

Star Trek: First Contact would have been a TOTALLY DIFFERENT MOVIE if the Vulcans had first visited Earth based on our creation of striped toothpaste.

KFC’s “Kitchen Fresh Chicken” slogan

Just saw an ad for this, in which Terminally Happy Commercial Minions spout off about “Kitchen Fresh Chicken” and how wonderful it is, and then the one Guy Who Figures It Out says, “That’s such a mouthful! They oughta just call it KFC!”

But at that moment, there’s a fine-print disclaimer at the bottom of the screen:

Fresh claim not applicable in Alaska, Hawaii due to unusual supply outages.

Translated, courtesy of an intercepted telegram:

CHICKEN BITZ FROZE AND/OR MELTED ON WAY TO STORE STOP
NEW SUPPLY DELAYED BY POLAR BEARS AND/OR SHARKS STOP
COOK AND SELL IMMEDIATELY CURRENT SUPPLY STOP
DO NOT USE WORD ‘FRESH’ AT ANY TIME STOP