Today is the first day of my vacation and hopefully by this time tomorrow afternoon I will be on the beach in the Bahamas looking at the real thing.
Oh by the way, Happy Valentine’s Day, here’s a twofer.
Also by the way, NSFW (as if anything with THONG in the title would be considered safe)…
🙂
Have I told you lately what a self-centered selfish bastard I am?
No?
hmm.
My phone rang about a quarter ’till twelve last night and I checked the caller-id. It was one of my waitresses. I ignored it, figuring if it was something important they would call the manager. Ten minutes later the phone rang again and it was the store where she works (the first one was from her cell phone). I ignored that one as well.
I’m on vacation dammit!
So I check my voice mail. The waitress is blabbering about a cop being in the store with one of my bank deposits. My manager had had some sort of accident and they needed to turn the money over.
I lay there for a couple of minutes.
I could either call and take care of the problem and most likely have my vacation canceled on me or just let them continue calling up the food chain of command. Someone else could handle it.
I’m on fucking vacation.
So I call the store and end up speaking with the officer from the Carroll County Sheriff’s Department. My manager had been on the way home last night from handling shift change with her three boys in the car when a drunk driver hit her head on. I got dressed, cursing drunk bastards the entire time
Her boys are all OK and they life-flighted her to Grady hospital. The cop seemed to think she would be OK but she had broken both of her legs and her pelvis. He didn’t seem to think that the drunk driver was going to survive and said that if you had looked at the collision you wouldn’t think anyone could. She got lucky I guess.
I got to the store shortly after midnight and took care of the money and then drove down to Grady hospital, which is about forty minutes away, after speaking to my boss. I let him know what had happened and told him that I would most likely be late this morning but to call me and let me know what to do. He told me they would be fine for the week and to go ahead and stay on vacation. I made sure he repeated it again.
I never made it to the hospital last night. I know (or at least used to) how to get to Grady from the north side of town but have never driven there from the south and didn’t see any signs so I drove a couple exits past and turned around to get off at the correct one. Once I got off I ended up making a right and got fucking lost. I drove around and saw it above other buildings several times but never could make it to the hospital. Courtland, Harris, Piedmont Avenue. Fuck. It’s right there but I couldn’t find the fucking building or parking area themselves. Bear in mind that I had been up almost 24 hours by then and I moved out of Atlanta nineteen years ago. Three cars is heavy traffic for me. Somehow I ended up finding 85 south again and went the fuck home.
I have to take Riley to the vet this morning and then I will drive back downtown to find the hospital in the daylight after a quick stop at Google Maps. I feel dumb as hell sometimes. Heck, there wasn’t even a cop to be found to get directions from.
“His platoon leaders described him as the type of soldier every leader wants: A very talented, dedicated soldier, who did everything that was asked of him.” That’s what Lt. Col. Greg Butts, commander of the Army’s 2nd Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, said about Cpl. Ryan J. Buckley at his memorial service. “I’m glad I could come here. It was an opportunity to recognize one of my great soldiers.”
Cpl. Buckley lost his life on June 26, 2006 when an IED detonated near his Humvee during combat operations in Baghdad. “I held him while he died,” Spc. Richard Morris, a fellow soldier who was wounded in the attack, said after the service. “He was my best friend. This nation has lost a hell of a soldier.”
Ryan Buckley, a 2003 graduate of Hillsboro High School, was attending Lincoln Land Community College in Springfield in March 2004 when he left school to join the Army. He had told his mother on 9/11 that he planned to join the military to defend his country. Jennings Carter, who recently retired from the Army, was the commander of the Litchfield Army Recruiting Station when Buckley signed up. Carter said Buckley was an unusually cheerful young man. “Every time we saw him, he was always smiling,” Carter said. “Before he went to Iraq, we saw him a few times. He was always happy. He would come by and tell us what he was doing.”
Jean Buckley, Buckley’s aunt, said he was always a responsible young man, who took his school work seriously, as well as his role in the school bands. The talented French horn player was awarded the John Philip Sousa award his senior year as the outstanding band member.
“He was always a protector,” Jean Buckley said. “It’s such a sad time. We’re so thankful for the Ryans of the world. I appreciate all the veterans and all they’ve done for this country.”
Cpl. Buckley was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star for his service in Iraq from Nov. 30 to June 23. Bronze Stars were presented to his wife of one year, Tina Buckley, his mother, Sally Nation, and father, Dennis Buckley.
These brave men and women sacrifice so much in their lives so that others may enjoy the freedoms we get to enjoy everyday. For that, I am proud to call them Hero.
We Should Not Only Mourn These Men And Women Who Died, We Should Also Thank God That Such People Lived
This post is part of the Wednesday Hero Blogroll. For more information about Wednesday Hero, or if you would like to post it on your site, you can go here.
I received this email earlier while at work it best to just reproduce it here in it’s entirety. If you are in favor of the act make sure and contact your congressional representatives.
Last night, a bill was introduced in the U.S. House that would stop Comcast, Verizon and AT&T from controlling the free flow on information on the Internet.
The only way we can stop these gatekeepers is if we all take action to support this crucial legislation:
Tell Rep. Phil Gingrey to Support Internet Freedom
In 2006, your voice helped stop mighty phone and cable companies from gutting Net Neutrality. In 2007, you pried open their cell phone networks and gave users a choice.
This year, we’re going to stop Internet blocking and censorship once and for all.
Why This is Important: Reps. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Chip Pickering (R-Miss.) introduced the “Internet Freedom Preservation Act” (HR 5353) to stop relentless corporate attempts to set up roadblocks on the information superhighway.
It guarantees Net Neutrality by restoring it in the foundation of communications law. This bold move promises that the public — not phone and cable companies — will control the fate of the Internet.
The legislation also calls for a nationwide series of public hearings before anyone in Washington hands these gatekeepers and their lobbyists more power. (Read more about the bill here)
Take Action Now: Save the Internet
How Far We’ve Come: In 2006, more than 1.5 million Americans called on Congress to keep gatekeepers off our Internet. Last year, more than a quarter-million people sent comments to the FCC and opened up cell-phone networks to user choice and innovation.
This new bill was made possible by our amazing grassroots movement. SavetheInternet.com has brought together Democrats and Republicans, consumer groups and small businesses, bloggers and video gamers, in a new bottom-up majority that’s shaking up the status quo.
What You Can Do: For too long, communications policymaking has been rigged against us. But by taking action to support this bill, you’re telling Congress that high-priced lobbyists will no longer set the agenda.
Tell Rep. Phil Gingrey : ‘Support the Internet Freedom Preservation Act’
The purpose of the Internet is to give power over information to everyone. The role of our elected leaders is to protect our basic right to communicate from those who want to take it away from us.
We’ve started a new chapter in the fight for an open Internet. We realize that it takes more than one piece of legislation to reverse decades of corrosive telecom policies.
But with this bill — and your help — we are on our way.
Thank you,
Timothy Karr
Campaign Director
SavetheInternet.comP.S. Bloggers, activists and Internet experts are logging on to the Free Press Action Network to discuss Net Neutrality, an open Internet and people-powered broadband policy. Join the discussion at http://www.freepress.net/action/
Technorati: Wordless Wednesday
Part of this video is Willie Nelson’s new single Gravedigger. He does a passable job with the Dave Matthews cover. Boy is Willie starting to look old or what?
Yuck is all I have to say. Rat meat (also eaten in China and Vietnam) became popular in Taiwan in the 1940s and 1950s among people who couldn’t afford chicken or pork. Ho-la, a rural restaurant in Chiayi county serves ten rat-themed meals including rat soup, black pepper-dipped and deep-fried rat. The diner goes through about 40 pounds of rat meat per day.
The rat is also part of the Hawaiian and Polynesian cultures as some of the traditional diet.
My web host has suggested that I move to a new server they have online. That will be nice as it should make things a bit faster. I received this email earlier:
Hello,
Richard, after our monthly server evaluation we’ve identified that your account is one of the top 10 in terms of traffic, and hence server usage. To offset some of the load on the server we would like to move your account to our newest server called Chanel. There will be no planned downtime during the move, and you’ll benefit from the speed the new server has to offer.
Please let me know when you’d like us to schedule the move to the new Chanel server.
Thank you
That will be pretty darned nice. I have had to disable 90% of the plugins and addons for MT due to CPU usage and the fact that I couldn’t even log in. I even had to disable my server stats plugin, MT-VisitorStats because the MT dashboard refused to load even after upgrading to the newest release. It will be nice to be able to use some of them again.
Here’s a triple threat tramp stamp!
I will be in Nassau this coming weekend so hopefully I can get a few pics down there to post.
It was a pretty uneventful day. I spent the great majority of the morning running around and didn’t make it back to the house until early this afternoon. I actually had written a couple of posts on my phone but for some reason Pocket SharptMT keeps losing my darn settings and won’t post. Guess I need to look into that before the weekend. I won’t do a ton of blogging but I am bound to post at least something from the phone. While I won’t have any cell phone service on the island there is bound to be someplace with wireless I can upload a couple of offline entries.
That’s what I am referring to in the title. 90 Hours from now the wife and I will be on New Providence Island in the Bahamas hanging out on Cable Beach. I don’t see us doing much of anything on Friday after we get there around noon other than hanging out at the resort, although I do want to check out the Crystal Palace Casino on Friday night. Saturday we’ll go into Nassau and do some sightseeing and shopping as well as head over to Paradise Island and check out Atlantis.
We were going to rent a car but the wife has pretty much talked me out of it. I am still pretty hesitant about not renting but since I don’t know anything about available parking downtown I suppose we’ll be fine. If we get stuck somewhere there’s always the taxi. There is some type of pretty cheap bus service (privately, individually owned) that costs a buck according to Fodor’s we will most likely use.
I think we are pretty much decided on taking only carry on bags, maybe with a cloth bag stuffed in there in case we buy a bunch of junk and need to have it checked on the return trip. The less time I have to spend in the airport the better I will feel about the whole trip. Jeans and T-Shirts are going to be the order of the weekend, with shorts during the day. I guess I need to take my camera vest too but that will be about it. If it were later in the year I could probably pack even lighter but I have to dress for Atlanta weather and since we have to leave the house at 6 a.m. Friday it’s sure to be pretty cool.
Anyway, I started the post writing about my day. I spent the greater part of the morning at Douglas County Dodge. My airbag light has been coming on constantly since the day after I bought the thing, so I set up an appointment at CarMax to get it looked at. It’s still under manufacturer’s warranty so I was only there long enough to get directions to the Dodge dealership. Why they didn’t fucking send me there in the first place I’ll never know. Ends up they couldn’t do anything today. They have ordered a part and are going to call me when it comes in. Something about a spring. All I could picture in my head was this big old bed spring pushing out this little airbag into my damn face when I hit the breaks…
I also had to stop by one of my stores and leave my expense report for my boss to approve. He and all of the great muckety mucks and the rest of the dog and pony show are going to be in Colorado for the next two days for their annual meeting and I start my vacation the day they come back. I thought that was good planning on my part even if I wasn’t aware of it. That means I won’t get hassled too much when I have a cook in my restaurant on Wednesday morning. I may run one tomorrow as well if I can get in touch with the girl. I have a ton of stuff I need to get finished between now and then.
I went ahead and had a tasty cheese steak and hash browns for lunch while I was there dropping off my paperwork. Sitting in the damned waiting room was famishing. I did type a couple of posts but as I said above the stupid program lost them.
I also had to stop at the vets and make an appointment for Riley on Thursday morning. His ears seem to be bothering him lately. Most likely he’s got another infection and needs some antibiotics. I don’t particularly want to leave town with him sick.
That’s about it for today. I have to Blogs for Borders thing to post after this but I think I am going to hit the sack early. I didn’t sleep for shit last night and am nodding off sitting here at my desk. Me drooling on my desk is not a sight anyone needs to see.