Technology Help

Do you have those friends or family? You know the ones, they know what a computer is but have no idea what it actually does or how to ‘go on that internet’. Well I have them. One is on the way over here as I type because she needs to order a dress after shopping at Kohl’s today. She calls me to say, ‘I need to have you order that dress for me online by tomorrow because the sale ends tomorrow, and I just don’t know how you’re going to do that but I suppose I’ll have to get you some numbers.’ So I say, I imagine I’ll go to Kohls.com and we’ll order it up from there. Then she says, ‘well you don’t have to be a smart ass, you know I don’t know how to do that’. So I said, thank goodness you know me then, huh. She can get her email but certainly can’t order a dress. This ought to be fun. Not so cute for a 44-year-old.

This little exchange reminded me that this same thing happens when I go to visit my parents. I better warn you, my parents just got rid of their rotary phone, yes, I said rotary phone. My Dad’s gigantic remote, you know the one, big as a laptop with numbers the size of China, quit working so I told him I would fix it when I was home. I asked if he still had the instructions but of course the answer was ‘perhaps in a drawer’. Well, I knew that was a task I didn’t want to take on as their house has about 736 drawers so I told him I didn’t need them. I get home, look up the remote on good old Google, find the instructions and reprogram the remote. It was about 10 minutes of my time, not bad, and Dad was happy. About a week later my brother calls to tell me he heard Dad talking about me fixing the remote. Apparently he said “she fixed it in a matter of minutes, you know, she took her computer, plugged the remote into it and it was fixed”. Now at 80, that’s cute.

Funny Video

This might be the funniest video I’ve ever seen. There are several people in my life that this reminds me of. I love how he is not helping her at all, in fact, he’s in his own world, I’m glad to see that doesn’t go away as we get older. Enjoy.

I found this video thanks to another blog on WordPress.

Funny Pictures

I’ve been trying to clean up my computer and ran across the following pictures I must have saved for some reason.

How much do you think the car cleaners at the rental car place liked me when I returned this bird poop ridden car? I dare to bet not much. My advice, don’t park under the trees in Canada, those birds are brutal.

I wonder if I should have suggested she wear pants when we went fishing with the boys?

I’m not sure what smelting is but I do know what fishing is. Ummm, you, in the boat, pretty sure that’s a fishing boat and you boys in the hip boots, if that’s smelting, you’re in big trouble! Funny how people just don’t obey the law anymore.

Don’t ever wear a strapless bra to an entertainment park. This is the ride from hell at Universal Studios where my strapless bra decided to completely flip down while I was riding next to a perfect stranger. Attempting to fix it while on the ride was pointless, plus, the guy next to me was wondering what I was doing. He figured it out pretty quickly when I got off the ride and had to fix it, not something you can really be discreet about it.

Sleepless in Wisconsin III

Whew, we’ve got to stop meeting like this!! I mean, it’s 1:50 AM and here I am once again on the couch, writing, wondering why I’m not having some spectacular dream (which doesn’t usually happen anyway) and cursing my crappy sleep habits. Tonight’s non-sleeping issue is especially irritating because I didn’t get off the phone until midnight and didn’t go to sleep until about 12:30. Yup, 12:30, just over an hour ago. Yup, 12:30, TODAY!! This is the craziest damn thing, all I can think of is what the hell is wrong with me….well, could be several things but we’re not going to go there.

This morning I’m thinking that I might be able to find something good on TV or at least something that will put me to sleep but I realize late-night TV is crap….and I mean crap!!

I’m settling on ESPN for once. I did miss some of the highlights as I haven’t been home a lot so this will give me a chance to catch up.

Well, it’s now 3:07 and I’ve caught up on sports, that’s for sure. After SportsCenter it switched over to NFL Primetime which is SportsCenter on football steroids and now we’re back to SportsCenter. I have now watched every highlight about 4 times. Every other show is nothing but SportsCenter, you’re not fooling me. I’m not sure how guys can watch these things over and over again because he still makes the catch, he still drops the ball, he still steps out-of-bounds at the one yard line, she still gets fined $2000 for yelling at the ref (really?), he still hit a home run, the damn Vikings still lost and the Gophers coach still has a seizure!!! How many times do we need to watch the highlights (or lowlights)?

It’s amazing to me how people can watch this stuff over and over and over again and act like it’s the first time they saw it. Ohhhh, when they come back from the commercial now they’re going to tell me who the best of the best of the best was. I can’t wait, I bet it’s something I haven’t seen yet……..or not.

I think Jerry Springer is on somewhere, perhaps I should get an ego boost quick before I try to go to bed again. This show makes my life look like a walk in the park as my parents weren’t cousins, my boyfriend isn’t sleeping with my sister, I’m not pregnant and not sure which of 6 men is my baby’s daddy and I’m not going to lose my shirt on national TV when I get in a fight with my aunt because I’ve been sleeping with her newest husband. Nevermind, that was enough of an ego boost for me not to have to watch it.

Hey, guess what? Tom Brady threw for over 500 yards and the Vikings lost….haven’t heard that yet tonight!!

Surprise Party

Yesterday we had a surprise party for one of our friends. Her husband planned it but a bunch of us girls were responsible for keeping her away from home for most of the day. There were some key elements to pulling this off:

Get together the night before so she thinks nothing will go on two nights in a row. Stay out until 2:00 AM.
Make the party beans when you get home at 2:15 AM.
Laugh uncontrollably while doing this with your partner in crime (one of the other girls) because you measure by the handful and make too many beans for the crock pot but ‘make them fit’.
Go to bed at 3:00 AM.
Get up at 6:00 AM to accompany one of the girls because she has to do 5 hair-dos for a wedding.
Fall asleep at her client’s house in the chair….twice….one time jerking awake as you had a dream you were falling.
Get to pedicure appointment around 9:30 to meet up with the other 7 girls.
Allow a very tiny woman to do your toenails and give you a leg ‘massage’. I use the term massage loosely as I think she’s a dominatrix at her second job.
Laugh the entire time at the salon because we’re a bunch that thinks most everything is funny.
Go to the grocery store and buy $130 worth of food for lunch at my house. Tip: Don’t go to the grocery store hungry and thirsty with someone else who is hungry and thirsty.
Spend an hour or so having lunch and drinks. Tip: Always have a house that’s presentable in case you decide to invite people over at the last minute.
Move the party out to the country to someone else’s house for drinks and haircuts.
Start panicking at 3:00 as a group as we’re supposed to have the birthday girl to her house in 30 minutes and we don’t have a story yet.
Almost get caught by the birthday girl several times trying to make plans.
Husband calls birthday girl saying he’s going to bbq for everyone at their house. Bring a can of beans. Well, one can of beans, the leftover lunch food and a cooler are packed to make it look legitimate. Us laughing at one can of beans almost spilled the beans about the party. We deserve Emmys.
Arrive at party an hour and a half late. But the birthday girl is completely surprised.
Eat too much.
Look at hilarious pictures of birthday girl and her family, missing the 80s.
Drink too much.
Talk smart with friends and family.
Sit by the ‘fire’. It was more of an inferno as we had to sit 25 feet away because it was so huge.
Watch birthday husband fall head first for no reason into a pile of wood in the dark.
Watch husband’s friend ‘check for injuries’ with the light from his cell phone while laughing hysterically.
Go inside to use the bathroom and see birthday relative with no pants on. Seriously, she was undressing with the door of the bedroom open right inside the door from outside!
Round up 5 people for the trek home at 11:30 because of the trama of the no pants incident.
Laugh all the way home at the stories from the day.
Sleep like a baby.

The key to success was a relaxed day, good friends, a little luck and lots of laughs.

Sidewalk Finds

Two coworkers of mine ran across a pair of dirty (and they meant DIRTY) men’s underwear on the sidewalk in downtown Duluth a couple of weeks ago. Now, this isn’t really what I was thinking I would write about when I started this blog but we couldn’t help but laugh thinking about the scenarios for why they would be there.

A homeless guy decided that enough was enough, he’d gotten the wear out of them he needed.
A drunk had an accident at some point and realized that he couldn’t go on any further without discarding them.
Some guy had Mexican for lunch and couldn’t quite make it back to the office.
It was laundry day and they were in the basket (God only knows why he would try to salvage these) and they fell out.
A homeless guy may have lost them out of a shopping cart or his pocket while he was walking, but again, why was he saving them? From the description the girls gave they were un-salvageable.
He could have put them there on purpose to cause just this sort of reaction. But again, I have to stress, they WERE NOT clean so he would have had to soil them at some point. I would think anyone would want to hide the evidence, not flaunt it.

Now, none of these scenarios is a good and here are the reasons why:

If someone had been wearing them and decided he couldn’t live with them anymore how in the hell did he get them off? He would have had to take his shoes and pants off, then the underwear, then put the pants and shoes back on. All in the middle of the sidewalk.
It could have been a cross-dresser and he just slipped them off from under a skirt.
If they had been in a laundry basket, there is not a laundry mat anywhere close so he perhaps had to get on a bus, which brings a whole new scenario.
The poor Clean and Safe Team, although it may not be the worst thing they’ve ever seen, give these good people a break.

My advice is throw them away people, bury them in the trash or burn them in the back yard. There is no need to share them with the world.

Falling Funny

It seems funny fell into my yard the other day. Here she is:

Now, I have no kids, the immediate neighbors on each side of me have no kids and the people directly across the alley have no kids. It certainly wasn’t there the day before, she was very noticeable when we walked out so we would have noticed her. She’s a little thing, about 4 inches high or so.

I wonder how she got there, especially head down. And not just head down but feet straight in the air head down. Did she jump off my roof to try to commit toy suicide? She looks like she’s been put through the ringer so perhaps a child finally got sick of her and tossed her, but from where? Did she fall from the sky? Perhaps she was flushed in an airplane miles above me.

We found this whole thing incredibly funny and the possibilities of how she got there became ridiculous. Not sure if it really was that funny or if it was the company we were keeping and the made up stories that took place. She looks a bit rough but she’s okay.

Bartending

Bartending is almost as good as going to the state fair or Wal-Mart, especially in west-end Duluth. It’s entertainment, an ego boost and exhausting all at the same time.

Yesterday started with me screwing up the popcorn, there was a miscommunication in the way it needed to be done. I was informed there was a ‘new’ way to do it which consisted of two glasses of oil. Well, two glasses of oil is enough to deep fry a Cornish hen and a couple of corn dogs, but okay. It became painfully obvious this wasn’t going to work so I was going to dump some of the oil out. Why wouldn’t I do that in a plastic glass? What a jackpot! Sometimes I wonder how I get through life. After a couple burns and a roll of paper towel I removed enough oil to get the job done. Come to find out, there was no ‘new’ way, it was the same old way I’ve always done it. I should have asked for clarification.

I brought two books with me today with intentions of getting them finished, well, that didn’t work out either, stayed just busy enough to be irritating. I didn’t feel it was appropriate to tell everyone to leave so I could read, I think that would have affected my tips.

We open at 10, which means most of my patrons have had a good 3 or more hours of drinking in, considering they go to Wisconsin to start drinking at 6. Yes, that’s 6 AM I’m talking about. They start in Wisconsin, move to next door about 8 and then move to me at 10.

Today the motorcycle club was having a party so they were all leaving from the bar, which is good because it kept me on my toes until about 12:30. After that a couple old guys, some regulars and two hilarious ladies kept me company until my shift ended.

The two ladies completely made my day, they were drinking PBR taps, eating pizza and writing dirty limericks. So funny. While I was chatting with them one of my old guys left but said he was going to be back, I look over at his glass and there was a bottle of lotion next to it. Lotion? Really? He had been there for quite some time, no lotion prior to this. Where did that bottle materialize from? The three of us found it hilarious and made up a few stories as to why it was there. Let’s just say none of the stories were good.

The other bit of good news is that I only had to cut one person off, which is odd, usually there’s a few of these. I didn’t have a choice, he couldn’t keep his eyes open and I could no longer understand what I can only assume was English coming out of his mouth. The speech was hindered by beer and a severe lack of teeth.

Gym-Bound

I’m going to join the gym, again. This obviously isn’t the first time and it will not be the last I’m sure. But right now, I’m doing it, I’m going to join the gym. I’m excited, I’m joining with one of my friends, I figure the buddy system is the best way to go, not only for moral support but to be there to document the good stuff.

Last time I was gym-bound I had a buddy as well but she didn’t always want to get up in the mornings so I would go by myself.

The following near death experience is why I quit going last time.

My normal workout was 45 minutes on the elliptical, sometimes I would even bike or walk the treadmill, I really thought I was doing great. One particular morning I decided on the treadmill, there was only one other ‘exerciser’ in the room.

Since I had been working out for months and could do a pretty good pace on the elliptical I thought I would try to jog, what a better time then when the place is empty, right? I walked at a pretty good pace for about 10 minutes and then upped it to a slow jog, now, when I say slow, it’s pretty darn slow. Here’s how it went:

This is great, I can do this
Watch out Grandma’s marathon, here I come
I wonder if I should speed it up a little
Whew, getting winded, wonder if it’s been 5 minutes?
This is harder than I thought, did this thing speed itself up?
Legs are tightening up
I wonder if the other exerciser can see me struggle?
I look over to see him through a blur.
Is this thing speeding up more?
I’m losing my eyesight, my God, I’m going blind!
I’m losing consciousness!
I wonder if the other exerciser will call 911?
I’m screaming for help but nothing is coming out
Apparently he’s not going to call 911 for me
I stab at the machine until it slows way down
I remove myself from the devil machine, looking around for oxygen
I drag a leg over to the water cooler
I look around wondering if he saw me
I check the time, so sure it’s been 10 minutes…….
47 seconds!
I almost died at 47 seconds from jogging
Eff this, I’m going back to the elliptical……

I sure hope my new workouts go better than my last. I will keep you posted.

People of Wal-Mart

Now, I refuse to post the people of Wal-Mart photos here as there is a website dedicated to them (click here). However, I received an email today with some new photos and I haven’t had one for a few months. I’m not going to lie, to see these boosts my ego. I sometimes wonder if these people are planted and they pose for these photos, today I realize a majority of them are probably true though. Here’s why:

Some heavy women tend to think they look good in anything, including fish net stockings and a mini-skirt that’s 3 sizes too small. You can find this at any state fair.
People don’t read what’s on their shirts, front or back. I have seen a VERY large woman in a restaurant with a shirt on that said “Big Daddy”. You really put that on to go into public?
Just because you’re skinny doesn’t mean you can show off everything, that includes muffin tops, tattoos, butt cracks and butt cheeks. I see this all the time, even at work.
I understand you might be crazy, but don’t advertise it by wearing your hospital gown, your pink size 13 high heels (men) or your lingerie to the store. I work in downtown Duluth, I see these things on a weekly basis.
No one would walk into a public place with a poop stain in the shorts willingly, no way, no how. No way that one is fake!

I believe these pictures could be labeled, People of the State Fair, People of the County Fair, People of My Hometown or People at the Flea Market. They are everywhere, some of us may even be these people from time to time, I have some items I wear walking that should not be for public consumption.

My advice to you: cover it up, buy it big enough, wear underwear smaller than your shorts, check out the damage after some bad gas and for the love of God read very carefully what your shirt says before you wear it in public.