Everyday Stupidities

(I have no idea what that bumpersticker means.)

Hello, folks. Here is a picture of the left corner of my livingroom, to show how the paint looks in real life (well, it's not quite as blue as it seems here) and to show off the new cabinet from Pier 1 ($200) which we're using as an entertainment center. Paige thinks the best thing about it is that the doors close, though this means you have to open them if you want to do anything with the DVD player or VCR. I think it's great because my new record player fits in it -- albeit not in a way that you can open the lid to put in a record without sliding the thing all the way out. The one shelf inside is held up by four screw-in knobs, not the usual holes for pegs like most similar cabinets, so there isn't a way to raise the shelf any further. We like it lots. The following stupditity story does not involve this piece of furniture, though it did have its own story of daftness when I tried to get it home -- it wouldn't fit in the back seat, it wouldn't fit in the trunk while it was in its box, it didn't come in pieces to construct like IKEA furniture, and when I did finally get it into the trunk the trunk latch scratched the front up so we had to do a little touch-up painting. (And it could use a bit more, the touched-up spots on the right door are a different gloss of black than the rest... will attend to that soon, as well as where I had to use a router on the shelf so the electronics' wiring could go out the hole in the lower section.)

The Pier 1 unit above replaces a large IKEA corner unit which had a storage cupboard on one side, and this has no storage space (due to the record player). So we were in the La-Z-Boy dealership last weekend and we found the As-Is department. We have an uncanny knack for that. There was this little two-drawer shelf with pull-out drink caddy in front and magazine rack in back, for $99 (list price $299), which matched the new TV stand closely. We got it out to the car, we came home, I'm getting it out of the car -- and the two drawers flew out simultaneously, spontaneously, inexplicably and both hit the ground, breaking the fronts of both in half. I've had furniture cheaper than IKEA gear that never shattered like that. So I wound up gluing the drawer fronts back together again, giving them four coats of paint, and it all looks okay if you don't get too close. We can't have nice things, I swear! I'll post a picture of this media storage cabinet, and what the TV stand looks like with its doors open, sometime soon.

The new job is pretty swell. Since many phish sites come about because an administrator password was easy to guess and the contents were put into an innocuous-sounding or already-existing directory which one wouldn't think to go into (like "photos"), it's usually pretty easy to get in touch with the host site's owner to say "someone hacked your site and stuck garbage in it" and they'll gladly remove the garbage (and hopefully change their login password). They aren't always as simple, but I'll learn how to take on the international only-for-phishing-purposes domains shortly. I've been there a week and already a new person has started training, and there will be another newby next week as well. My work schedule qualifies as a stupidity: I start at 9:30am weekdays this week, but it'll be 7:30am for the rest of the month (I AM NOT A MORNING PERSON!), then through April I will work 2pm-midnight on Monday through Thursdays (yaaay!) and in May it will be Friday through Mondays (booo!). The reasoning for what we called a "weekend power shift" at a previous job was because the busy days are Sunday through Tuesday, so with the week parsed like this it means everyone gets two days of heavy load and two days of lighter load. That's understandable. Not having even one weekend day free, though, that's a bother, but I'm told that swapping when there's a need (and advanced notice) shouldn't be too hard. Especially in a company of 20 employees.

Sign seen in a Puyallup antiques dealer: Untended children will be given a free espresso and a puppy.