sometimes Always

I’ve sorely neglected posting as of late. This is mainly because last week was filled with complete morons at work, and I came home a few times all annoyed and pissy and just couldn’t wait for the week to be over. The weather has been frigid and I absolutely can’t stand being cold, which meant that from last Friday until Monday I was just shy of being considered an ice cube.

We did have some excitement last week. On Monday we had wicked strong winds and rain, which could have been really much worse if it wasn’t almost 60F outside. The fun part was watching the wind blow the front doors off the store. The store has your typical drug-store entryway, all glass with an automatic door. The winds were so so strong that they were blowing apart the windows at their seams, so after a few calls to the DM and loss prevention, the supervisor on duty was told “call the store manager and get him to come fix it.”

Because when you have customers walking through a death trap, you want the store manager to jury-rig the very heavy, steel and glass doorway with a few 2×4s from the Home Depot down the road.

Which is exactly what happened. While he was jamming wood into place, the DM and loss prevention showed up, and then a “professional” showed up, who promptly told the DM that the store should have been closed down as soon as shit started coming apart, because it should have been obvious that someone could have been killed (which it was very obvious – we were told not to let anyone park in the “fall zone” but yet still let people go through the entryway).

We did our taxes over the weekend. We’re going to be using the federal refund to buy our tickets to Las Vegas this weekend. Eddie is sitting behind me looking through the menus of various places to eat while we’re there. At this point it looks like we’ll more than likely be staying at the Luxor, and I’ve managed to convince Eddie that I really, really need to upgrade the room to a spa suite, because I’m going to take an hour or five in that bubbly spa tub after the race.

Some of the state refund will be going towards fixing our windshield, fixing Mal, and our vacation next week.

Around Christmas I decided that to avoid having to do the same thing that I did last year around this time – trying to use up my vacation time before it expired by taking one day at a time off here and there – I’d take a whole week off at once. Eddie decided that he’d take the same week off, so we’ll be home all next week doing nothing at all that we don’t need to do. Which means that we’ll be hitting up the Olive Garden for their soup & salad lunch special, getting our hair cut, going to a burger place that we’ve been told is AMAZING, and the highlight, a trip to into Boston to visit the Boston Museum of Science, where we’ll check out the Harry Potter exhibit up there and the giant Imax theater. I’m wanting to go up to the Wrentham Outlets to pay a visit to the Nike outlet up there and try and weasel my way into a pair of new birthday running sneakers (did I neglect to mention that MY BIRTHDAY IS NEXT FRIDAY??), since the Garmin Forerunner that I’m covetting is too far out of my price range for something that would be classified as “gadget I want but will use 4 times a week for an hour or two.” There’s also going to be running every single morning we’re home, and hopefully that will get my ass back into the routine again.

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While we eagerly await the return of Glee, Lost, Doctor Who and the latest from Survivor, Eddie and I have been watching a few other shows, just to see if we like them. Some aren’t too bad, some… some are really, really cheesy.

First up, we’ve got Spartacus: Blood and Sand, which is the latest offering from Starz. Imagine, if you will, a basement full of 16 year old boys, who decide to remake Gladiator in the same visual style of 300. Russel Crowe gets to act in front of a green screen digital landscape where epic battles produce equally epic amounts of bloodshed. All of the battles feature the same jerky slow motion effect that was used in the oracle scene of 300 as well as copious amounts of Matrix-style bullet-time.

Now, imagine that among that group of boys, someone chimes decides “There’s too many half-naked men in this movie, people are going to think that we’re making gay porn! WE NEED BOOBS!!!!” Thus, every other scene involves a shot of nipple. And then you get to see some dude’s ass. And then when you expect more battles, you’re treated to a full-blown orgy. Oh, and there’s a string of plot, involving a warrior who needs to leave his wife behind to go do battle. Because that’s what happens to gladiators.

On BBC America we’ve picked up 2 new series, Demons and The Inbetweeners. Demons follows the life of the teenage boy who also happens to be the last of the Van Helsing family line. Imagine Buffy The Vampire Slayer, but British, and with a penis. Boy meets monster of the week, boy smites monster, boy deals with love and family. Not the greatest show around, but it’s good for when you want something that you don’t need to think about.

The Inbetweeners, however, we’re loving after just one episode. Awkward teens, hormones… so far, so good to us.

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The ear is doing fantastic. No pain when I sleep or use the phone (and due to the fact that I’m deaf in the other ear, I can only use the phone on the ear with the piercing), no crusty shit, NOTHING. I picked up a pair of over-the-ear headphones at the beginning of the week, and while I miss the noise canceling properties of my beloved purple Skull Candy ones, if I turn the music up higher I wont hear the treadmill.

Happily, Eddie’s septum has decided to be happy. It took a post-dinner trek back into Providence on Wednesday night to make it happy, but since then it’s settled down and isn’t so angry anymore.

The low point of the work week was the fat woman who came up to the counter, lifted her shirt up (OMG I SAW UNDERBOOB!!!!!) and told me “See this rash? IT’S ALL OVER MY BODY AND YOU NEED TO GIVE ME SOMETHING TO FIX IT!” The high point of my week was telling her, “Hold on, let me get the pharmacist for you, she should be able to tell you just what you need” and seeing her repeat the whole underboob-revealing process for poor BossRPh. We’ve also decided that when Supertech leaves us in June (bitch is moving to FLORIDA because it has no snow or something like that), we’re all going to mouth off at patients as though it was the last day for all of us. Then, when people start complaining about it, by the time our district manager confronts us we can just say, “Oh, that must have been Supertech, we got so many complaints that we had to fire her.”

I ran 5k this morning. Pity that it wasn’t a race because it would have been a personal record for me. I’m really, really wanting to get outside more, but sometimes I just can’t get out the door. Once I’m out there, I’m fine, but the actual getting up and going is the hardest part of morning runs. It sucks because I really need to get out there and run if I’m going to do anything in Vegas this year.

Eddie bought me a small $20 mp3 player today. It’s got 256mb of space on it, but you can stick an SD card into it and get more space. I happy stuffed a 2gb card into it filled to the gills with Lady GaGa, Paul Oakenfold remixes, Girl Talk, and The Kleptones. Nothing like a monster beat to make running great.

I have 2 more weeks – that’s 10 more work days – before Eddie and I are on vacation. Any bloggers in the area want to meet up for lunch or something? I’m sure we’ll be bored out of our skulls by Tuesday afternoon.

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Daith [d·aw·th]
-noun

1. an ear piercing which passes through the ear’s innermost cartilage fold.
2. OMFG THAT HURT

Eddie had decided a few weeks ago that he really wanted to go and get something pierced. He really wanted his septum done, and not being the type to go into the piercing shop and not get something done I set about to figure out what I wanted to get. As much as I love the look of a monroe, and as much as I absolutely adore the medusa, I can’t have either of them at work. He didn’t want to wait until our vacation in February and I figured that a weekend is not enough to re-learn how to speak, so the tongue was out (which I wouldn’t get anyway, because I’d probably manage to break half my teeth and choke on the shards). I decided to get an ear piercing, specifically one that I fell in love with a few years ago, the daith. I love how simple and how hidden it is. I loved the fact that it wasn’t going to get snagged on a hair brush or stuck in my shirt when I get undressed. Then I read some of the background on it and decided that I had to get it done.

“…rings left in an orifice of the body act as a ‘Guardian of the Gate’. They can be magically charged at the moment of the pierce to act as a ‘filter’ to what goes into and out from that orifice. In the case of the ear, an appropriately placed and charged ring could filter out all that is nonsense or bullshit and let pass that which is intelligent.”

I’m now the proud owner of my very own bullshit filter.

We got everything filled out and paid for and were waiting on the couch at the shop, when a woman and two teen girls came in. The woman was the mother of one of the girls, and I give her some credit, she’d done some research and knew what she needed to bring to prove that the girl was hers so that the daughter could get her navel pierced, and what jewelry they were looking for to put in it. The girl’s friend was asking if she was scared more of getting pierced or of getting a tattoo when she turned 18, to which the girl replied:

“I’m more scared of the piercing. The piercing goes through your skin and flesh, the tattoo doesn’t.”

Oh. My. GOD.

Eventually we did leave the waiting room, and after Jason marked my ears, I was asked to lay down on the examination table. Time does funny things in a piercing shop, or at least it does in Rockstar. You can sit there and everything will be normal, then you’ll get to the aftercare lecture and things start to slow down, like when the flight attendants start to demonstrate how to use your seat belt when all you want to do is get up in the air. Your piercer will get everything set up and say “I’m going to put this tube in place, so you’re going to feel some pressure.” And it will seem like he’s got his hands in your ears for roughly 10 minutes as he maneuvers that tube into just the right place. Once the tube is in place, he’ll say “Ok, I’m going to just start to line things up a little; you might feel a pinch.” That’s the point where time speeds up, and it takes somewhere between a millisecond and “two shakes of a lamb’s tail” before you’re told, “Take a slow, deep breath in, and then let it out just as slowly.” Everything at that point runs at light speed, your heart races and the blood roars through your skull and you feel every single thing.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve done some painful shit to my body. I had a giant bar shoved through my ear. I’ve pierced my nipples. I’ve pierced other parts. I’ve tattooed my freaking chest. But this was probably the most painful out of all of it. I said as much when it was done, to which Jason replied, “Yup, that one… she’s a stinger.” Plus, it’s the only piercing I’ve gotten where I was actually able to hear the fabled cartilage “pop”, but I attribute that to the fact that I just had a needle shoved into my ear canal. I’m going to see if I can find some head phones that go over my ears rather than into them, at least until this thing is healed up some.

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