The Full-Moon'ed Weekend, a Trip South...
BLOT: (24 Nov 2010 - 01:11:43 PM)
The Full-Moon'ed Weekend, a Trip South...
The past week or so has been, well, boring in a macroscopic way. Like, if you were to zoom out and then examine it, you would mostly see me reading blog posts about whether or not AMC theaters are showing anti-vaccine ads, about how this or that groping in airport is offensive or is not offensive, about how some patron at some library branch decided that "vaguely threatening" was the atmosphere that they should give off in order to get the best service. Work, but not so much school, has intervened. Lots of e-refs. Have not done much else. Was sick for a few days, blogged about that. Got over it about a week ago, and have since drifted through doing very little outside of reading, playing (slightly) a game or two, reading rules for RPGs, and, well, I guess sitting around. When you do a tally on the things you have done for the past few weeks, you expect for there to be some definite things right? Not just: "Nothing, I guess."
Which leads me to one important conclusion: I have done things, I am just forgetting them. Why am I so forgetful? I have no idea. I think October wounded me or something, with its massive assignments and busy-busy schedule busy. Mandatory one month healing time before I roll 3d10 and compare to figure 4-16: Healing from Life, Adjusted for Mental Fortitude. Which means in two weeks, I stand to heal from 3-4 minor wounds and 1-2 major wounds. *fingers crossed*
Since the weekend and the week prior has been plenty weird, in its own way, I have been trying to think up some of the highlights, which I will dish below, for your short and temporary amusement:
- On Wednesday or so, I went to Barnhill's about 2:30 in the afternoon. For those not knowing what it is, picture a slightly low-brow (once less low-brow, it feels as though it has went downhill some) "Southern style" buffet. You get fried chicken and potatoes and green beans and fried fish and so forth, all you can eat. They also have a to-go service, which is what I use them for: getting a piece of chicken and some veggies with a roll. At any rate, walking down there at 2:30pm on a weekday afternoon, saw a huge limo pull out of the parking lot. HUGE. Was it (a) the driver getting food while between clients or maybe (b) some dude who spent all his money on the limo and couldn't afford fancy food or (c) maybe someone who eats at places like Barnhill's to remember his past or (d) someone trying to fish for people to rent a limo and for whatever reason, this person felt that Barnhill's parking lot was *the* place to advertise?
- Which is superceded, by a notch, when on Saturday night three large buses, with police escort (State Troopers, even), pulled into Barnhill's. Either not caring, or for some reason thinking that Julia Street was merely a parking lot for Barnhill's, the police blocked off the road so that the buses could unload. One. At. A. Time. Which meant that those of us who live on Julia Street had to wait, the back-end of our car sticking out into University, until this was fixed (or presumably we could have driven off and tried getting home later, when the cops weren't informing us that it was less important for us to get home than it was for whoever it was on that bus—prisoners? sports team? tour group?—to eat). After several minutes, the cops seemed to realize and kind of pulled over to where they were only blocking those trying to get out of Julia street instead of both ways.
- The reason we were coming home at that particular time was because we had gone out to look for a coat for Sarah and, while down at the light to turn from University unto Enterprise, her A/C unit suddenly turned on full. I mean full. Fuller than I have ever seen it, before. We couldn't turn it off, but we could adjust the temperature. This continued even after she turned off the car in the parking lot in front of Ross's. She went in to go ahead and look for the coat, I stayed out trying to fix. I tried a few resets, trying to do things like flip it from on to off to on to see if it would help unstick (or at least make a noise that indicates something). Eventually, I gave up and pulled out the fuse for the "FULL BLOW" setting. There is another fuse that controls the initial settings, but pulling out the one shut the whole thing down. Apparently our Environmental Control unit is set to FULL ON and nothing less and now, without that fuse, it is just not working.
- Finally, going back to the night before, Sarah and I got back home to find a most unusual message. A guy named Rich had called to find out if I was the Doug Bolden he had served in the Navy with, several years ago. I did not call him back, yet, but I wonder if I should. Did he just call every Doug Bolden the nation? Or is this some sort of elaborate scam where he calls every male name he can find and asks if they were in the Navy back in the 70s, and if you say yes then he asks for a bank account number because, hey, don't you remember an old friend? I'm assuming no, to the fullest degree I can ever assume something is *not* a scam, but it was still a cute and kind of odd story.
And those are three vignettes (and one bonus) from my full moon weekend. Any fun stories on your account?
My sister-in-law is off visiting her cute and *fingers crossed* rich boyfriend in Japan. That's right, she's in Japan. "Seeing the sites" and "eating the food". Feel free to rib her for making a 7000 mile booty call. God knows I will. "You wanted to see Tokyo? Riiiiight.". She said she got to see the Tokyo Tower (*wink* *wink* say no more), which I told her she should take a photo of herself like she is a dai-kaiju trying to tear it down. Because, that's right, Japan, my understanding of your culture is forever filtered through my massive collection of tokusatsu. How massive? God, I don't know. I have something like 8 full
Speaking of trips to places where Tokyo Tower won't be destroyed but where a header might take place, I am going down this afternoon to see my mom for Thanksgiving. The last time I did that was, possibly, 2004 or 2005. Really, since retail guaranteed me a Black Friday early shift. That would have been 2004 to start, and then I worked retail up until 2007, when I went on the "Black Friday Hike". 2008 I was back in retail. 2009 had another hike. So yeah, maybe I went down in 2004 and it looks like 2003 when I went with Sarah our first year together. It is long overdue. Our trip will be kind of brief, because I am not quite done with the semester and the aforementioned October drained both of our reserves so we have to kind of hit the ground running next week and little time to recoup (honestly, we should have probably taken this weekend to recharge, but oh well). At any rate, sometime around Friday or Saturday, I'll be starting a picture upload process and you'll get to see lots of Evergreen and Flatrock and what have you photos.
Have a good Thanksgiving, everyone!
LABEL(s): Me in 2010
BY WEEK: 2010, Week 47
BY MONTH: November 2010
dickens of a blog
Written by Doug Bolden
For those wishing to get in touch, you can contact me in a number of ways
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
The longer, fuller version of this text can be found on my FAQ: "Can I Use Something I Found on the Site?".
"The hidden is greater than the seen."
