Plenipotentiary

Aaah! The Whatever is gone! It’s GONE!!! I’m having a panic attack. I don’t know what to do with myself. Hold on… I have to go breathe in a paper bag for a few minutes…

I’ve been patiently waiting for Scalzi to get his act together, and then BAM! I check my beloved site and it’s GONE! I’m going to go run in circles and scream and shout. What are we going to do, kids? WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO!?

UPDATE: 10/1 – Scalzi’s up and running. My mistake. And we breathe a collective sigh of relief.

Hear about this?The US Navy is spending $600K to alter a building so that it doesn’t look like a swastika from space. Are they worried that the extra-terrestrials monitoring Earth are SS agents? Afraid anyone using Google Earth are going to think that the US Navy are Nazi supporters? This is just idiotic. (Thanks, Doug’s Darkworld, for the story.)

Just swiped this photo of the James River a bit west of us in the Blue Ridge mountains titled “A River Morn” from D.L. Ennis at  Visual Thoughts - and it’s lovely. It’s so easy to forget I live 1/2 mile from this kind of beauty. Especially this season – early fall is the very best time to live in Virginia, in my opinion. This is a pic I took of the James River just up the road from me:

Note to self: get out to the river more often! You know, stop and smell the roses and all that.

Oooh! And another one I swiped from D.L. Ennis. The James north and west of us. I think I’ll leave the photography to the professionals. This one is “Paint Me A Picture of Autumn Anew.”

I.M. Bitter (who used to play the bassoon) just tagged me with the “eight random things’ meme. As I’m a tag virgin, I thought I’d give it a shot…

1. I used to sing professional opera. Actually, I only got paid once, but it was a professional stage production and I was one of the leads, so that qualifies. I started my career as a mezzo-soprano. These days, I’m more contralto. Age and hard living, you know. I don’t sing much anymore – other than in my car. But it ain’t over ’til the, ummm…, ’til it’s over.

2. I shook hands with His Holiness Pope John-Paul II at the Vatican. Not being Catholic, and being occasionally a dumbass American, when he held his hand out to me, I shook it instead of kissing the ring. My mother was mortified. JP patted me on my cheek and told me I looked like my mother. It was a pretty terrific moment.

3. I jumped out of a plane at 14,000 feet, and hope to do it again. It was awesome.

4. I used to be an outdoor education teacher. I took teenagers down rivers and through mountains and on horses and through ropes courses. I was a bad-ass. I lived in a tent for nine months out of the year. If it payed a living wage, I might still be doing it.

5. My twenty year high school reunion is three weeks away. This has left me flooded with conflicting emotions. But I can’t wait to hang with the Gang again, as we don’t spend much time together anymore. We’re starting to worry that we’ll never all be together again until we start attending each others’ funerals.

I’m running out of things to share…

6. I’m deathly afraid of needles. I mean really bad. And Hubby has to shoot himself all the time. It took me years to even be able to stay in the same room with him when he gave himself a shot. I cried when I got a flu shot. I’m a complete wuss this way.

7. I took – and passed – the ‘Jeopardy!’ test four years ago in DC. I beat out a Johns Hopkins doctor and a regional director of NPR. I was supposed to fly out to LA and be on the show sometime that season. Ken Jennings had his winning streak that year, and so they didn’t need any more contestants. Poor me. If I want to be on the show, I have to take the test again and do the whole thing over. I haven’t decided yet.

8. Whenever I take a sip of something – no matter what it is – I hold it in my mouth for a while before I swallow it. I don’t really notice doing this, and would probably never have noticed if it were not an idiosyncracy that drives my best friend completely nuts. She has been known to shout right in my face, “Swallow, dammit!” which always generates odd looks from people nearby.

So now I’m at the place where I have to ‘tag’ some other people. I can’t tag Bitter back, so I’ll try some others. Also following Bitter’s lead, I’m not going to do the full eight, just one or two (or five) – none of which will probably respond, but that’s their problem…

Devin @ Hangar Queen, who inspires me.

Jonsonblog, who makes me laugh.

Gimme a Minute @ Stranded on Gaia who makes me laugh, and occasionally cringe.

Misty and Stephen @ Live Grenades - either one of you or both. I’m STILL laughing at LOLTrek, and Misty and I have a lot in common, I think.

Badgerdaddy @ The Bingo Caller of Love. Inspirational (running-wise, anyway – and that whole work thing he does). And he cusses like an American abroad. Cute.

That’ll do, for now, though I can’t promise not to tag someone in the future, though I understand from the blogoshpere that tagging is en passant. Did I mention I’m a nerd? Nerd Queen, in fact!

Like there was ever any doubt. I wear the title proudly.

Just shows how much more there is to see.
create your own visited countries map
 or vertaling Duits Nederlands

4:31 pm. There are five MORE Bubbas (perhaps I’m not being fair here – these new guys seem pretty on-the-ball) surrounding my poor van. I went out to give them my keys, and they were friendly as they were dismantling the side of my car. I asked if they were going to vacuum the glass, and smart-ass Bubba said (completely straight-faced), “No, ma’am, that’s not my responsibility.” But before I could pop a blood vessel, his partner lifted the shop-vac and said, “Ma’am, we’ll take care of that for you as soon as we’re done. Don’t worry.”

Don’t worry. Hmmm.

 My vehicle has been violated by some sort of high-velocity projectile that no one can either find or explain, other than it was apparently launched from a lawn maintenance machine. I now have two broken windows, covered with plastic and shouting “Ghetto-Mobile!” I have been put through considerable inconvenience and irritation to solve this problem. I have endured a cadre of Bubbas standing around scratching their heads and making man-noises and telling me what to do about it, but not really offering to do anything themselves except find out who to blame and charge for the expense. And be fascinated at the mystery of the un-findable projectile. I spent an hour on the phone with the glass repair man, again with Bubba-advice everywhere, trying to explain to him exactly what I meant when I said ‘driver-side rear.’ I handled all of this, along with the recognition that until the repairs were made my van was undrivable and I had to leave it unattended in a public parking lot overnight, with good grace and humor. No, really. I figured life happens, even though as far as this auto is concerned it seems to happen to me with alarming frequency, but there was no help for it and I may as well try to preserve my blood pressure.

That good grace ended early this morning when the glass guy called me at home and asked me for the same information I gave him yesterday, acting like we had never spoken. My ability to deal with dipshits had reached its quota, and I had to then hand the phone to Hubby, who further infuriated me by playing good-cop with this obvious incompetent nincompoop. I arrived at work this morning to find yet another Bubba circling my car with a tape measure (!) trying to determine the exact size of the window. Because the window size isn’t listed on ALL THE OTHER DIMENSIONS I HAD GIVEN HIM THE DAY BEFORE.

It is now 3:00pm. No one has done anything about the fact that I have a Mommy-mobile in the parking lot with plastic over one whole side of it, and that I need to leave in less than two hours. Nor has anyone commented about the fact that there is more glass – little stick-in-a-child’s-toe-and-never-come-out shards of glass embedded in my leather seats and carpet, snagged in my door, and basically blanketing the interior – on the inside of the vehicle than on the outside.

I am royally, if impotently, angry about this whole thing. And none of the Bubbas will talk to me any more after I yelled at the dipshit this morning. Even the measuring-tape guy was scared of me. I guess I’ve got myself a reputation now. They insist on dealing with my husband. Who isn’t here. So he’s gonna get a blast of hot air from me if he continues with this “I’m a good guy and I know how to talk to people so just let me handle it, honey” kind of bullshit. If my car isn’t fixed by the time I leave here today, I’m taking the company president’s car to go get my kids, and then I’m going to stop for ice cream and let them eat it in the car on the way home. While playing their game boys. With the windows down.

Found this link on Jonsonblog, and thought it was interesting. Check out how your zip code compares with others. I was kinda surprised, actually. I didn’t think my zip code was so predominantly “cracker, but OK.”

Today is international Talk Like A Pirate Day. Sure. Whatever. Apparently the day originated with two guys acting like dweebs, and then Dave Barry took up the banner. (Which makes sense as I think Dave Barry qulifies as a genuine dweeb hero.) (No offense to dweebs. I like Dave, too.)

Maybe I’m interested in this because I’m tired of hearing about OJ again, and at least this is something different. But the fact that this is on the front page of the paper should tell us all something about ourselves. Even if it is kinda funny.