Everyday Stupidities

Hello, friends. I'm a week and some overdue in my writing, but I will claim that getting into the new job is to credit/blame for that. So far it's pretty good, just a matter of learning what goes where and the answers to questions you wouldn't picture people asking. The commute is stupid but bearable and, as I determined a few years ago when I worked just down the hill from where I am now, sort of a relaxing down-time (though I prefer to do something with my down-time... you can't read or get on the computer while driving). And then there's the price of gasoline, which is mega-stupid, but sometime I'll evade that by abandoning or augmenting the internal combustion engine. The picture of the day came from the latest Tacoma Photo Gang jaunt... a barber chair on a business' porch roof wrapped in rope lights.

Noted last time was that we can't start decorating until we put our tools and stuff away. Well, we haven't made much headway into that, however we now have all the cabinet doors off and five of them have been stripped. The rest will be stripped shortly, I presume. As for the drawer fronts (the drawers will be dipped end-first in stripper, not taken off) and the cabinet bodies (spray-on stripper!), those will likely wait until January. Then we can clean up and put stuff away? I believe we're at a stopping point with the kitchen (once the doors are stripped) so we can put away the tools that fill the diningroom and move diningroom items out of the livingroom. We're working on the color scheme for the cabinets now, one shade of grey for the doors/drawers and another for the cabinets. The Christmas tree will be going up likely the second week of December. As much as I love Christmas and decorating, some rules of decorum such as not before Thanksgiving!! have to be followed. Stocking up on goodies, though, that I do year-'round.

The latest tale of stupidity, as of today (my wait to write had some benefit!), turns out to have a happy ending. Okay. As you know from flipping back a couple entries, I lost my job with the antiphishing place on October 20. When I was signing the termination paperwork, I asked the supervisor to promise that he would not interfere with my attempts to collect unemployment, and he said he wouldn't. Hmm, well, three weeks later I get a call from a case manager at Unemployment, asking for my side of the story. It seems that he told them that the site I mistakenly blocked was legitimate and that I had not made any improvement in my work pattern since my written warning of August, when I did put a couple bank sites on blocking. "That's inaccurate," I said calmly, and told her what happened once she asked. And to my surprise, I received two envelopes from Unemployment today: one containing a letter saying they took my word for it, and that incompetance [heh] is not the same as willful misconduct; the other containing a $249 check for the one week I was able to claim before starting my new job. I closed my claim last week. It's a small victory and one that I wasn't going to pursue unless I hadn't gotten this job, and the real value is that in case I wind up leaving this job in the next month I can re-open my claim without so much hoop-jumping. That, I should hope, is the end of the story.
[And CR: you should have stuck to your word and to the truth.]

Okay, actually, I do have one real-world stupidity: how does lying to a grand jury have a larger penalty than murder? Seriously, Barry Bonds (whom I could care about since he doesn't play for the Mariners) is facing thirty years in jail for perjury. Not that I believe he'd actually do a day in the pokey, but the penalty threatened is a lot greater than what people who actually commit grevious crimes sometimes get. There's only one person who needs to be put away for telling lies, but he's still in office for another year.

I didn't say this was an exciting entry, just an overdue one. You want exciting? Check out the new electric vehicle, the Aptera. I know, that's Latin for "without wings", but this is an affordable plug-in electric or gas-electric hybrid with a low-weight futuristic look. I razz on "futuristic" and unrealistic looks, but the form follows the function.