Week of Feb. 20-26

Monday: Left work last night at 11, had to back to work this morning at 8. I am wicked tired today, but I have finally arrived at the top of the stock clerk food chain at my store. The boss has purposely scheduled me so that I can work with him, rather than for him. Granted, being the best of the people I work with doesn't mean much, because the people I work with have the combined IQ of eggplant, but that's beside the point. We were gearing up for inventory, which is that delightful time when all the managers wring their hands in panic and shout orders, seemingly at random, to whomever is in their path at the time. Through all this chaos, the goal is to have everything that has passed through the store in the past 13 week accounted for. Good times.

Tuesday: More inventory fun. More indiscriminate yelling.

Wednesday: This morning I went to work at 8 AM, and by 10:30 AM, I had reached 40 hours and was earning time and a half. That sure makes the day go by faster! Indeed my day sped along until I racked up about 6 hours of over time, which will translate into a nice paycheck. I was talking to Bill on my way out the door, and he mentioned he was going to a place called Smokey Bones for the best burger ever. This piqued my curiosity, and I was invited to join Bill and his girlfriend, as well as one other couple at the restaurant in Clearwater. This place is just off of US 19 on Gulf To Bay, and despite giant signs in my case, and having been there before for Bill and his friends, we all collectively managed to get lost in our own creative ways. Dinner was good, and we had a very cheerful waitress, but my burger was a little overdone. If even just for the atmosphere and incredibly tasteful restroom decorating, I will certainly go back and give them another try.

Thursday: Day off! A real, actual day off from work! I spent this glorious day, complete with nice weather in my favorite way possible: washing and waxing my car. I find it to be very therapeutic. Also, I feel that you never fully bond with your car until you buff it with your old clothing, under shirts in my case. An afternoon reaffirming a relationship is an afternoon well spent in my book!

Friday: Today was a complete throw-back to middle school days, including eye exams, dental appliances, and Mike D'Amico. I went to the eye doctor, to learn that my eyes and diligently moving toward their ultimate goal of complete uselessness. It was after this appointment that I ran into Mike D'Amico, completely out of the blue. We caught up for a few minutes, then I was off to get a retainer to fix my slightly deviant bottom teeth. This because a tour of new and innovative ways to cut up the delicate flesh under my tongue. By the end of the day I was pretty much miserable.

Saturday: Let the good times roll! With my new Vietnamese mouth torture device set firmly in place, I was off to work for the last day before inventory. Fortunately I was positive I wouldn't be one of the unfortunate souls designated to stay to the bitter end desperately trying to count and catalogue the random things that are eternally showing up without notice. Today was actually pretty mellow, thanks in no small part to the vast amounts of work Carl and I put in this week. Also exciting: the baler broke. Again.

Sunday: Started off today with a stab at sourdough pancakes. Apparently sourdough puffs up less that standard pancakes, and we ended up with sourdough crepes. In case you're wondering, I am indeed trying to shoehorn the word "sourdough" as many times as I can into this blog. Up until today though, I had no reason to use it. Now I have some catching up to do. At work I was charged with training "The New Guy" and "show him the ropes." I grabbed this task with gusto in the form of loading him up with everything on the canned vegetable aisle and leaving him all day to figure it out. Seriously, this is not a difficult job, and I personally feel that anyone incapable of grasping the finer points of putting stuff on a shelf according to a predetermined labeling system probably shouldn't be here in the first place. Not to mention that it is a supreme waste of my talent to hold this new guy's hand and walk him though his first day. I suppose the alternative is to let Dumb and Dumber teach him exactly how to do everything wrong. On a lighter note, I have to admit that my life is in a good place when the biggest challenge facing me all day was deciding whether or not I wanted to put milk on the Froot Loops I was planning on having for dinner. Well, that and the debilitating pain in my mouth every time my tongue touched the razor bracket on my lower teeth. In case you're curious, I ultimately ended up eating Raisin Bran. With milk.

Stay tuned for a mid-week special Olympic blog with my personal, if belated feelings on the games. That is to say, the mid-week blog is special, not a mid-week blog about the Special Olympics.

Winner & Losers

Winner: Volkswagen. In the commercials for the GTI Mark V, they have expressed the part of personality the desired to go fast as a little Pokemon-like bauble that gives orders to VW drivers. I applaud Volkswagen's accurate representation. VW owners only have a simple palmful of fast. By comparison, those of us who drive Camaros and Corvettes, and yes, even Mustangs, have huge amounts of Fast, sometimes so big that we are allowed to drive in the HOV lanes.

Loser: Jessica Simpson. She took a perfectly horrible Nancy Sinatra song that was best left at the foggy edges of the music industry's collective memory and remade it for the remake of Dukes of Hazzard. This remake of course sucked. She then remade the song again, with new lyrics, for a Pizza Hut commercial. This goes to prove that there is no level to which her singing career will not go. When you think she's hit bottom, she picks up a shovel. Her disappearance from the public eye can't come soon enough.