The Last Donut
So, it's been a long time since I updated my blog.
There's a really good reason for it.
On Sunday night at 11 pm I officially finished baking for Donut King. I handed over the keys to my replacement, Lothar, Monika's father. The original agreement was that I was going to bake and train Lothar Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but somehow Monika extended it out to Wednesday morning because Lother wasn't available Thursday night. I had an unexpected ally in Lothar, who simply said to his daughter in his clipped German accent, "It is impossible." Monika wanted me to teach her father how to bake, how to make the cake donuts, how to ice the donuts, how to make the cream and custard, and how to clean the entire store.
"I don't want to do it," Lothar said, "It's impossible for me to learn in one week what you did in five years, it is kahrazee for her to expect it." What Lothar hadn't been taught, he obviously couldn't do. So, I 'forgot' to teach him how to ice donuts, make the custard and cream, or the cake donuts and, in fact, everything except what he - and I - were originally specifically hired for: Baking the yeast donuts.
Monika expected me to be in the shop tomorrow morning at 2 am, making the donuts and icing them, so that she can stride in at 6:45 and all the work will be nearly finished, so that I will have time to disappear, have a shower, get in to my new work clothes, and work from 9 - 5. She knows I will not be there because the only reason I would be, would be to train her father in these extra things that her father has already told her he will not do. This is exactly the situation I told her that she would face on the 21st of June if she did not hire additional staff. And yet I will not be surprised if I recieve a phone call at 6:45 am - "Why are you not here?" - and I will have to give the honest answer, "Because I have been captured by aliens and am in a human biodome inside Jupiter, please send help."
But seriously folks. She dragged out 'three weeks notice' to 'one month' and a replacement for me to train only arrived the day before finally reached the limit? It's just not good enough. If she had her way, I would still be working there forever until she sold the shop.
This part of my life is over. The door is closed, never to open again. I will not look back in this direction.
So, on more cheerful news...
Dani sent me a present for my birthday!
OMG PACKING TAPE? How to open?
I know how to open.
Rusty's Sword of the Seven Weasels In Your Pants STRIKE! (Insert cherry blossoms blown on wind).
The box lead me a merry chase but the battle is over. SPLODE!.
I lewt the corpse.
OMG! Potions of Mighty Awesome Power!
You don't believe? Behold.
Mighty.
Awesome.
Power.
But wait, there's more...
So much more...
I try to open the good old fashioned way but I r fail.
OMG! 20,000 years of evolution tells me...
SOLUTION GET.
(Close up so you can see my glorious, handsome features. You know, 'An Hero Cam')
I do this for Auir.
Pwned!!1111kek
Come on, MOAR cherry blossoms.
K, stop cherry blossoms.
Suddenly, with the packaging torn asunder, the holy goodness contained within is revealed.
Dani.
I am so happy.
Because of you, on this day, the light is with us.
Ahm chargin mah lazah.
Ahm still chargin mah lazah.
BI-DOO!!
Paladin Sky Paladin Salutes You for your very clever, thoughtful and wise choice. Thank you, Dani. I will put all of these things to good use.
Green is my favourite colour!
Sky gives this card a thumbs up for hilarity. (And thanks for signing it too, Twal!)
Additional Dani commentaries that she wrote that I wish to share with you so you can see just how clever she has been:
On the main box:
"To: The Illustrious Mr Christopher Dunn".
Oh ho ho. I am VERY susceptible to bribes.
On the silver, made of something-to-hard-for-me-to-eat box:
Sky's Epic Present
Binds when picked up
Unique
Trinket
Classes: Paladin
Requires Epic Win
Equip: Increase Reputation gain with all factions by 200% (where where you when I did Argent Dawn!?)
Use: Increases levels of win and awesome by 500%.
But seriously, thank you Dani. It was too much fun. I hope you enjoyed watching me open it even as half as much as my brother and I had opening it. For future reference, yes, AN EMTPY BOX is not only a suitable gift, it is a well planned out and thoughtful gift. Something is not natural about my brother and I.
Speaking of Rusty, he recently learned that there is more to the Internet than downloading pr0n and made a myspace page. He writes quite well for a child, but he should learn to spell check and praise me more often. That I am listed after Optimus Prime as a hero is acceptable, but to forget to mention me by name is...foolish.
What's been happening? I'll cut back to the last post that I unceremoniously abandoned.
Well, the netherstorm thing was a success. Ves and Mal escorted Bessy the undead cow back to her undead farmer, so that they could...hmm...make undead milk I suppose. What would that be? Yoghurt? Butter? Cheese? Well, it sure was worth it, and Mal walked away with a new belt to protect his, ah, belt area. I don't know why undead farmers are carrying high level gear, or even why the goblin run arena system has better pvp gear than the two main factions that have an entire arms industry devoted to supporting their soldiers, and I don't know why I was duel wielding swords in those pictures when a Paladin can't do that. Clearly, I am a super paladin. You know, like super man. "Look, up in the air, it's a bird, it's a plane, it's Skyyyyy Paladin!" Hmm. Now that I think about it, being in the air IS the kind of place a Sky Paladin would be...
AND THUS SUPER PALADIN WAS BORN.
At the moment, WoW is on hold while I recover from the last week. I will probably be working on Taren to get his alchemy skill up. I also want him to get to use the level 35 Sword that Raziri, in an attempt to fatten him up before she eats him, put a whopping Crusader enchant on. Mal is currently on an extended mining expedition, attempting to find a living ruby in adamantite deposits and stockpiling the left overs for our favourite lady warlock, while both he and Ves wait for a group to go in the mana tombs with. It doesn't help that we are both ridiculously flat out right now and don't really have time to play at all.
So, my new job.
The official position is a computer programmer under the instruction of one William Scott, ex flat mate and also fencing buddy. What we are working on is not top secret but it is commercial so I'm kind of politely discouraged from talking about it in great detail. I haven't actually made very much programming progress at all, but I have made a number of improvements and suggestions to the overall design of the projects and apparently they were well recieved. My job is to write the user interface for one project, and design another project, ah, pretty much from scratch. Both of these need to be done by Christmas.
The first week was spent reading up on the programming languages I will be using, meeting people in the office, and discovering that about 50% of my time is spent talking to other people. The staff use MSN to communicate with each other. I despise MSN. I destroyed it and burned it out of my home computer, and vengefully hunted down the system processes and services and killed it there, too. I like mirc because it is simple and non intrusive. I hate msn for precisely the opposite reasons - when somebody writes to me, the little taskbar flashes continually. It's so distracting. I have to respond and most of the time it is just people making conversation. I don't mind being friendly, in fact I like it, but I also like to get my work done. On top of that, if I think I have managed to escape from a conversation, the people can send me a nudge or something to try and get my attention back. It's really intolerable. I can't stand it and wouldn't have put it on at all except that it's the only way everyone in the building communicates and I must know where the meetings are going to be.
There are two projects that I am working on. On Monday, my first day, we learned that the computer I had been given could not handle either of the programs I was supposed to write. The graphics card couldn't handle OpenGL past 1.1, and the machine was so old they couldn't find a replacement video card. So, this morning I got a new one! It is a much more flashier creature than the previous one.
I really like the new job. The environment is good, the people are friendly, and they share my sense of humor for the most part. Early Friday morning, by cooncidence, there was about a dozen of us lining up for coffee. Somebody commented on this, and I said "Prehistoric man's ability to find coffee in the wild helped bring our society through the treacherous Ice Age. Shorly after, the terrible coffee against tea drinker wars commenced. It was a dark time, a shadow upon humanity." At that point, one of my new co-workers announced he would only drink tea. We both glanced at my cup, filled with coffee, then at his cup, filled with tea. "Ah, my ancient enemy," I began, but then everyone started laughing - my work was done.
Yesterday I met with the professor who is also the boss of my boss about the work we are doing. It was supposed to be a meeting where I found out what the specific requirements of the program he wants me to write are, but this didn't eventuate. I really don't know what benefit the meeting was, as it didn't clarify anything for me. I keep hearing people say "People are talking about you", and the general impression is 'good', but so far I haven't ACTUALLY done any work, so, I don't know what it could be from. Maybe they like my clothes? Anna counselled me on colours, so, I think I owe her a big thanks sometime.
So, my first meeting was Monday at 11 am. It was a birthday get-together for one of the staff and also a celebration for someone who had recently moved in to a new office. (They like to have a meeting for just about anything. It's a wonder any work can get done.) I met a few familiar faces, which was a surprise, including one of my previous lecturers. Anyway, it's possible I am actually overdressed for the job. Mostly only the professors and senior staff are wearing a full suit, with tie. I am wearing a jacket, business shirt, neat dress pants with belt and shoes and no tie. Somebody commented that my belt was too loose. I looked down and, in fact, it was! Apparently I had set it one too many notches out. At the same time, somebody said that there was plenty of cake left, and encouraged us to eat it. So it was at this point I happily said to the nearby group, "Oh, I have to eat more to fill my pants up." Predictably everyone went silent just in time to hear this. The group near me knew the context was 'Eat CAKE to make the pants FIT' but everyone else heard 'eat CAKE to fill pants with SHIT'.
Awkward.
What was more awkward was when I then went to get a piece of said cake, and everyone went silent and watched me.
Aaawwwwwwkkkkkwwaaaardddddd.........
So I went all slo-mo and traded a piece of cake for an empty piece of air, Indiana Jones in the Temple'o'Doom style. Yeah.
The main thing I had going with the customers at Donut King was that I pretended to be a Pirate. I would often regale the customers of the birth of the donut, how ol' Captain Pete Heyn made the donut when he accidentally stepped on a bun with his peg leg, at the same time as his metal hook was struck by lighting and fried the donut. Like most of the things I say, I script them and practice them when nobody else is around to get the voice and the tone right, and can recite it from memory - fairly accurately. I'm working on the pirate theme in the office, but so far I am keeping it light. The occasional 'yaarrr' and 'ahoy matey' is all I've done so far. I'll give it a couple weeks before I start showin' up with me captains hat. At Donut King, this was met with looks of confusion, surprise, and terror. But here, so many computer programmers...actually understand what I am saying! It's not uncommon to get a counter 'yarrr!' and every now and then, someone who will claim they are a ninja, or that I will have to walk the plank, and...ah. It's just a good environment. I'm really happy.
Next of course is to introduce the epic battle between humans and dinosaurs.
Ok, Saturday.
Saturday I worked at Donut King. Then I met Sarah for coffee at short notice. Like really, really short notice. I walked out side and got a text message. I haven't seen Sarah for a long time, since she finished her PhD (So she's Dr Sarah now) and aside from the occasional e-mail we send each other every few weeks just to stay in touch, that's the only contact we have. I was very very hungry, so it should indicate how highly I think of her that I spent a long time eating my ham and cheese croissant because I was enjoying talking with her so much. The poor girl is so tired, I can hear it in her voice and see it in her eyes, I'm glad I made the decision to catch up with her even though I was in my filthy baking clothes. I don't really know her very well at all, and we're not all that close, but somehow we've just always kept in touch. Maybe we both understand that the other is crazy busy but we want to be friends? I don't know. Well, she is a person I would like to see more of and now that I have proper social hours, maybe! For one thing, she organises really good costume parties. The very first one was, in fact, a pirate theme. Ahoy!
Right after that it was drive home, pick up my brothers (Aero was down for the day) and go watch the new Harry Potter Movie. After we arrived, I went back to the car to put my ticket in there (so that the evil park Nazi's wouldn't give me a ticket) and, that's odd, I don't remember billowing clouds of steam issuing out from beneath the hood when I left. So I popped the hood and yes, you guessed it - a radiator hose had split. It wasn't a very severe split, but the timing was really annoying (but not as annoying as it would have been if it had happened even two minutes earlier, costing me another engine). I watched Harry while mulling about what to do with the situation - I had to get my brother back to the bus station and I knew there wasn't enough time to get the cable fixed before that...and it was already after noon, so (as I later found out) all the mechanics were shut. I eventually put Rusty and Aero in a taxi and paid to get them home, while I called the RAA and waited for them to come and fix my car.
RAA - Royal Automobile Association - will come out and get your car going or tow it somewhere, but it is usually prohibitively expensive to join up at the same time as you ask for help. I had been meaning to join with my first new-job-pay on this Thursday, but God decided he wanted me to have RAA membership NOW. I was able to solve the problem by throwing money at it, but due to the area the car was broken in, the mechanic couldn't get to me until 5 pm...by this time, the big football game finished, and the entire area became an immutable sea of cars. Somehow, immediately before this, Rusty had arrived back with his own car. What a good brother! What else could to men do when stuck in a place for a long time except go blow things up? So that is what we tried to do. We went to try some of the games at the nearby theatre, then decided it wasn't enough, and went in to watch Transformers instead. Wow.
Just wow.
Rusty has seen it four times. I can see why. It was perfect.
I came back late Saturday evening. I don't really...remember much of what happened in between Saturday night and Sunday night. I think I went to sleep, and got up at around 2 am ish. Anna was on, but it was too late to drink with her unfortunately. We had tried to arrange a chance for floor sky once more but because of our busy schedules it didn't work out this time.
Well, I wrote a lot. I'm going to leave it there and come back later. If you want something to do, go reply to Anna's blog. She wrote some really good questions and I will get on to them real soon.
There's a really good reason for it.
On Sunday night at 11 pm I officially finished baking for Donut King. I handed over the keys to my replacement, Lothar, Monika's father. The original agreement was that I was going to bake and train Lothar Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but somehow Monika extended it out to Wednesday morning because Lother wasn't available Thursday night. I had an unexpected ally in Lothar, who simply said to his daughter in his clipped German accent, "It is impossible." Monika wanted me to teach her father how to bake, how to make the cake donuts, how to ice the donuts, how to make the cream and custard, and how to clean the entire store.
"I don't want to do it," Lothar said, "It's impossible for me to learn in one week what you did in five years, it is kahrazee for her to expect it." What Lothar hadn't been taught, he obviously couldn't do. So, I 'forgot' to teach him how to ice donuts, make the custard and cream, or the cake donuts and, in fact, everything except what he - and I - were originally specifically hired for: Baking the yeast donuts.
Monika expected me to be in the shop tomorrow morning at 2 am, making the donuts and icing them, so that she can stride in at 6:45 and all the work will be nearly finished, so that I will have time to disappear, have a shower, get in to my new work clothes, and work from 9 - 5. She knows I will not be there because the only reason I would be, would be to train her father in these extra things that her father has already told her he will not do. This is exactly the situation I told her that she would face on the 21st of June if she did not hire additional staff. And yet I will not be surprised if I recieve a phone call at 6:45 am - "Why are you not here?" - and I will have to give the honest answer, "Because I have been captured by aliens and am in a human biodome inside Jupiter, please send help."
But seriously folks. She dragged out 'three weeks notice' to 'one month' and a replacement for me to train only arrived the day before finally reached the limit? It's just not good enough. If she had her way, I would still be working there forever until she sold the shop.
This part of my life is over. The door is closed, never to open again. I will not look back in this direction.
So, on more cheerful news...
Dani sent me a present for my birthday!
OMG PACKING TAPE? How to open?
I know how to open.
Rusty's Sword of the Seven Weasels In Your Pants STRIKE! (Insert cherry blossoms blown on wind).
The box lead me a merry chase but the battle is over. SPLODE!.
I lewt the corpse.
OMG! Potions of Mighty Awesome Power!
You don't believe? Behold.
Mighty.
Awesome.
Power.
But wait, there's more...
So much more...
I try to open the good old fashioned way but I r fail.
OMG! 20,000 years of evolution tells me...
SOLUTION GET.
(Close up so you can see my glorious, handsome features. You know, 'An Hero Cam')
I do this for Auir.
Pwned!!1111kek
Come on, MOAR cherry blossoms.
K, stop cherry blossoms.
Suddenly, with the packaging torn asunder, the holy goodness contained within is revealed.
Dani.
I am so happy.
Because of you, on this day, the light is with us.
Ahm chargin mah lazah.
Ahm still chargin mah lazah.
BI-DOO!!
Paladin Sky Paladin Salutes You for your very clever, thoughtful and wise choice. Thank you, Dani. I will put all of these things to good use.
Green is my favourite colour!
Sky gives this card a thumbs up for hilarity. (And thanks for signing it too, Twal!)
Additional Dani commentaries that she wrote that I wish to share with you so you can see just how clever she has been:
On the main box:
"To: The Illustrious Mr Christopher Dunn".
Oh ho ho. I am VERY susceptible to bribes.
On the silver, made of something-to-hard-for-me-to-eat box:
Sky's Epic Present
Binds when picked up
Unique
Trinket
Classes: Paladin
Requires Epic Win
Equip: Increase Reputation gain with all factions by 200% (where where you when I did Argent Dawn!?)
Use: Increases levels of win and awesome by 500%.
But seriously, thank you Dani. It was too much fun. I hope you enjoyed watching me open it even as half as much as my brother and I had opening it. For future reference, yes, AN EMTPY BOX is not only a suitable gift, it is a well planned out and thoughtful gift. Something is not natural about my brother and I.
Speaking of Rusty, he recently learned that there is more to the Internet than downloading pr0n and made a myspace page. He writes quite well for a child, but he should learn to spell check and praise me more often. That I am listed after Optimus Prime as a hero is acceptable, but to forget to mention me by name is...foolish.
What's been happening? I'll cut back to the last post that I unceremoniously abandoned.
Well, the netherstorm thing was a success. Ves and Mal escorted Bessy the undead cow back to her undead farmer, so that they could...hmm...make undead milk I suppose. What would that be? Yoghurt? Butter? Cheese? Well, it sure was worth it, and Mal walked away with a new belt to protect his, ah, belt area. I don't know why undead farmers are carrying high level gear, or even why the goblin run arena system has better pvp gear than the two main factions that have an entire arms industry devoted to supporting their soldiers, and I don't know why I was duel wielding swords in those pictures when a Paladin can't do that. Clearly, I am a super paladin. You know, like super man. "Look, up in the air, it's a bird, it's a plane, it's Skyyyyy Paladin!" Hmm. Now that I think about it, being in the air IS the kind of place a Sky Paladin would be...
AND THUS SUPER PALADIN WAS BORN.
At the moment, WoW is on hold while I recover from the last week. I will probably be working on Taren to get his alchemy skill up. I also want him to get to use the level 35 Sword that Raziri, in an attempt to fatten him up before she eats him, put a whopping Crusader enchant on. Mal is currently on an extended mining expedition, attempting to find a living ruby in adamantite deposits and stockpiling the left overs for our favourite lady warlock, while both he and Ves wait for a group to go in the mana tombs with. It doesn't help that we are both ridiculously flat out right now and don't really have time to play at all.
So, my new job.
The official position is a computer programmer under the instruction of one William Scott, ex flat mate and also fencing buddy. What we are working on is not top secret but it is commercial so I'm kind of politely discouraged from talking about it in great detail. I haven't actually made very much programming progress at all, but I have made a number of improvements and suggestions to the overall design of the projects and apparently they were well recieved. My job is to write the user interface for one project, and design another project, ah, pretty much from scratch. Both of these need to be done by Christmas.
The first week was spent reading up on the programming languages I will be using, meeting people in the office, and discovering that about 50% of my time is spent talking to other people. The staff use MSN to communicate with each other. I despise MSN. I destroyed it and burned it out of my home computer, and vengefully hunted down the system processes and services and killed it there, too. I like mirc because it is simple and non intrusive. I hate msn for precisely the opposite reasons - when somebody writes to me, the little taskbar flashes continually. It's so distracting. I have to respond and most of the time it is just people making conversation. I don't mind being friendly, in fact I like it, but I also like to get my work done. On top of that, if I think I have managed to escape from a conversation, the people can send me a nudge or something to try and get my attention back. It's really intolerable. I can't stand it and wouldn't have put it on at all except that it's the only way everyone in the building communicates and I must know where the meetings are going to be.
There are two projects that I am working on. On Monday, my first day, we learned that the computer I had been given could not handle either of the programs I was supposed to write. The graphics card couldn't handle OpenGL past 1.1, and the machine was so old they couldn't find a replacement video card. So, this morning I got a new one! It is a much more flashier creature than the previous one.
I really like the new job. The environment is good, the people are friendly, and they share my sense of humor for the most part. Early Friday morning, by cooncidence, there was about a dozen of us lining up for coffee. Somebody commented on this, and I said "Prehistoric man's ability to find coffee in the wild helped bring our society through the treacherous Ice Age. Shorly after, the terrible coffee against tea drinker wars commenced. It was a dark time, a shadow upon humanity." At that point, one of my new co-workers announced he would only drink tea. We both glanced at my cup, filled with coffee, then at his cup, filled with tea. "Ah, my ancient enemy," I began, but then everyone started laughing - my work was done.
Yesterday I met with the professor who is also the boss of my boss about the work we are doing. It was supposed to be a meeting where I found out what the specific requirements of the program he wants me to write are, but this didn't eventuate. I really don't know what benefit the meeting was, as it didn't clarify anything for me. I keep hearing people say "People are talking about you", and the general impression is 'good', but so far I haven't ACTUALLY done any work, so, I don't know what it could be from. Maybe they like my clothes? Anna counselled me on colours, so, I think I owe her a big thanks sometime.
So, my first meeting was Monday at 11 am. It was a birthday get-together for one of the staff and also a celebration for someone who had recently moved in to a new office. (They like to have a meeting for just about anything. It's a wonder any work can get done.) I met a few familiar faces, which was a surprise, including one of my previous lecturers. Anyway, it's possible I am actually overdressed for the job. Mostly only the professors and senior staff are wearing a full suit, with tie. I am wearing a jacket, business shirt, neat dress pants with belt and shoes and no tie. Somebody commented that my belt was too loose. I looked down and, in fact, it was! Apparently I had set it one too many notches out. At the same time, somebody said that there was plenty of cake left, and encouraged us to eat it. So it was at this point I happily said to the nearby group, "Oh, I have to eat more to fill my pants up." Predictably everyone went silent just in time to hear this. The group near me knew the context was 'Eat CAKE to make the pants FIT' but everyone else heard 'eat CAKE to fill pants with SHIT'.
Awkward.
What was more awkward was when I then went to get a piece of said cake, and everyone went silent and watched me.
Aaawwwwwwkkkkkwwaaaardddddd.........
So I went all slo-mo and traded a piece of cake for an empty piece of air, Indiana Jones in the Temple'o'Doom style. Yeah.
The main thing I had going with the customers at Donut King was that I pretended to be a Pirate. I would often regale the customers of the birth of the donut, how ol' Captain Pete Heyn made the donut when he accidentally stepped on a bun with his peg leg, at the same time as his metal hook was struck by lighting and fried the donut. Like most of the things I say, I script them and practice them when nobody else is around to get the voice and the tone right, and can recite it from memory - fairly accurately. I'm working on the pirate theme in the office, but so far I am keeping it light. The occasional 'yaarrr' and 'ahoy matey' is all I've done so far. I'll give it a couple weeks before I start showin' up with me captains hat. At Donut King, this was met with looks of confusion, surprise, and terror. But here, so many computer programmers...actually understand what I am saying! It's not uncommon to get a counter 'yarrr!' and every now and then, someone who will claim they are a ninja, or that I will have to walk the plank, and...ah. It's just a good environment. I'm really happy.
Next of course is to introduce the epic battle between humans and dinosaurs.
Ok, Saturday.
Saturday I worked at Donut King. Then I met Sarah for coffee at short notice. Like really, really short notice. I walked out side and got a text message. I haven't seen Sarah for a long time, since she finished her PhD (So she's Dr Sarah now) and aside from the occasional e-mail we send each other every few weeks just to stay in touch, that's the only contact we have. I was very very hungry, so it should indicate how highly I think of her that I spent a long time eating my ham and cheese croissant because I was enjoying talking with her so much. The poor girl is so tired, I can hear it in her voice and see it in her eyes, I'm glad I made the decision to catch up with her even though I was in my filthy baking clothes. I don't really know her very well at all, and we're not all that close, but somehow we've just always kept in touch. Maybe we both understand that the other is crazy busy but we want to be friends? I don't know. Well, she is a person I would like to see more of and now that I have proper social hours, maybe! For one thing, she organises really good costume parties. The very first one was, in fact, a pirate theme. Ahoy!
Right after that it was drive home, pick up my brothers (Aero was down for the day) and go watch the new Harry Potter Movie. After we arrived, I went back to the car to put my ticket in there (so that the evil park Nazi's wouldn't give me a ticket) and, that's odd, I don't remember billowing clouds of steam issuing out from beneath the hood when I left. So I popped the hood and yes, you guessed it - a radiator hose had split. It wasn't a very severe split, but the timing was really annoying (but not as annoying as it would have been if it had happened even two minutes earlier, costing me another engine). I watched Harry while mulling about what to do with the situation - I had to get my brother back to the bus station and I knew there wasn't enough time to get the cable fixed before that...and it was already after noon, so (as I later found out) all the mechanics were shut. I eventually put Rusty and Aero in a taxi and paid to get them home, while I called the RAA and waited for them to come and fix my car.
RAA - Royal Automobile Association - will come out and get your car going or tow it somewhere, but it is usually prohibitively expensive to join up at the same time as you ask for help. I had been meaning to join with my first new-job-pay on this Thursday, but God decided he wanted me to have RAA membership NOW. I was able to solve the problem by throwing money at it, but due to the area the car was broken in, the mechanic couldn't get to me until 5 pm...by this time, the big football game finished, and the entire area became an immutable sea of cars. Somehow, immediately before this, Rusty had arrived back with his own car. What a good brother! What else could to men do when stuck in a place for a long time except go blow things up? So that is what we tried to do. We went to try some of the games at the nearby theatre, then decided it wasn't enough, and went in to watch Transformers instead. Wow.
Just wow.
Rusty has seen it four times. I can see why. It was perfect.
I came back late Saturday evening. I don't really...remember much of what happened in between Saturday night and Sunday night. I think I went to sleep, and got up at around 2 am ish. Anna was on, but it was too late to drink with her unfortunately. We had tried to arrange a chance for floor sky once more but because of our busy schedules it didn't work out this time.
Well, I wrote a lot. I'm going to leave it there and come back later. If you want something to do, go reply to Anna's blog. She wrote some really good questions and I will get on to them real soon.
Just have been reading "the life and times of..." Sometimes I feel a bit sad and guilty that I have let you down as a mum. BUT... you are now well on your way. I love you without question and I know that you will become whatever you want. If we don't dream then we never aim higher. BTW had tears rolling down my cheeks at the photographic exhibition. Saw it on Rusty's space. Showed it to school friends who also giggled. thanx
Posted by
Anonymous |
July 24, 2007 at 7:47 PM
Excuse me...but Shane wouldn't do "pron" BTW Don't tell him, I cried when he said I was his hero...He's always been mine - as all of you boys, but he has had to face such adversity through life and always...well usually comes up smiling. I am so VERY proud of my boys.
Posted by
Anonymous |
July 25, 2007 at 3:23 AM
> Equip: Increase Reputation gain with all factions by 200% (where where you when I did Argent Dawn!?)
Not ALL factions. Cat faction says no. Cat faction says you are breathing still so you are LOSING rep. Sadface. :(
I think I wanted to say about some other thing, but I am "flat out" (I think? Silly Kangaroo language...) so I can't remember.
Posted by
Root |
July 25, 2007 at 6:39 AM
To Kate:
I don't recall saying anywhere that you had let me down, and if you really believe that, I am sorry for anything that I might have done or said to have given you that impression. It's not the case. Dismiss that thought and think of brighter things.
To Anna:
If stuffing my shirt full of delicious plastic bags didn't help, then I'm all out of tricks. Maybe if I wear an emu costume he will want to hug me :)
But seriously, I hope you get some time to relax.
Posted by
Sky_Paladin |
July 26, 2007 at 2:01 AM