Ever notice how it's the little things in life that amuse us so much? More to the point, ever notice how it's the silly little idiocies in life that amuse us more than anything else? Well, this is not as much ''the little blog that could'' as it is ''the blog that enjoys going up the down escalator in your local mall.'' Will it have anything of real importance? No, probably not. But enjoy the ride never the less!

 


Christmas has come and gone once more, and as is tradition, the day was spent with a great deal of swag, family and food. And relaxing. Lots of relaxing. Well...Gary, Mel & I relaxed. Shady just dragged herself over to a pillow and didn't move very much afterwards; I think she ate as much turkey as any one of us did at dinner.

Which brings us to...Boxing Day! (Which has now been cunningly dragged out into Boxing Week, because one can never have too many hands milking the cash cow.) It seems rather fitting that our shifts at the mall both started and ended with a Silent Hill level fog swallowing up the entire mall and surrounding area.


On the whole, Boxing Day was exactly as I predicted: slow. You see, it's one of the few times I can truly appreciate working at a store like ours (and by default, the kiosk too, since it saw even less traffic than we did). Primed with Christmas candies and loaded with money, people tend to blow all their cash on the following three things.

1) clothes
2) videos and games
c) electronics

As our store sells none of those things, at most we get curious onlookers and ladies who want a purse. (Though maybe next year we'll actually get the bras to go with those mislabeled boxes...) All in all, it was still an enjoyable time despite...um, everything else? With the worst of the season gone and done, all that's left is to coast through the remainder of the week & weekend, and then toast this bitch off in the new year.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have Hannibal Lector to read....

Labels: the rise and fall of Commercialmas (but no spiders from Mars), turkey

posted by Phillip at 9:35 PM

 


There are 2 days left until Christmas. More specifically, there are 2 days left until Christmas is over, and the whole bloody season passes us by for another year. I'm in a cheery mood, more than ready to deck the halls with the heads of customers who felt compelled by the spirit of the season to snark at us for not having the merchandise they wanted (and started looking for with less than a week to go before the "deadline", as it were... Smegheads).

But there's only one shift left for Mel & I to work before enjoying a couple of days off, and that means one critical thing: sleeping in. While I'm not quite as passionate about spending my mornings asleep as Mel is (on a sidenote: never poke Mel early in the morning for no good reason if you value your hand or your face), the last few weeks have seen me running around so much at work that I just crumple onto the couch or bed when I get home.

We'll see how the Sunday shift fares...

In the meanwhile, we get to entertain Gary with our amazing culinary skills. Consider the following near verbatum conversation we had in the grocery store tonight as we stocked up on Christmas dinner & munchie supplies:

Me: "So what is the plan for dinner on Monday?"

Mel: "Well, we could do a beef stew in the crock pot."

Gary: "Beef stew sounds good to me."

Me: "Great! Are we using the pork loin for that?"

[About here, you have to imagine Mel & Gary staring at me in disbelief.]

Mel: "You did hear the part about the stew being 'beef', right?"

Me: [oblivious] "What?"

Mel: "Having only pork in a beef stew kind of defeats the purpose of it being a beef stew!"

Me: "Um...what if it's pork-beef? Genetic splicing and all that. They can make meat taste like other things these days, can't they?"

Gary: "That's called chicken."


...and that, dear readers, is how to hoist oneself up by their own oral pitard. (Which, upon rereading, sounds like some terrible analogy in a lemon fanfic.)

Today's Lesson: on hiatus until I can stop watching Mel play Katamari Damacy out of the corner of my eye.

Labels: Commercialmas nigh, the miracles of modern pork-beef

posted by Phillip at 9:18 PM

 

The last week has been filled with the following: shifts, more shifts, shifts I shouldn't be working but have to since someone called out sick, and Mel contending with 2 term papers and 2 final exams all pretty much due within 2 days of each other.

So as I covered a night shift at the kiosk and let Mel work on the glorious essay that was "issues of American immigration." Whereupon I came to the not-at-all-startling conclusion: the mall is trying to kill us with incessant, whiney Christmas songs. Not the old traditional hymns that hit you with a one-two punch of both nostalgia and almost-hypnotic melodies, but the ridiculous perkiness of Baby It's Cold Outside or I Want Everything or Santa Baby.

(Every other song seems to have "baby" in its title too...why is that?)

To combat this unnerving reality, I spent the entire shift humming all the songs to Rocky Horror Picture Show and Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Once More With Feeling. Nothing brings the Jackson 5's rendition of I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus to an amusingly grinding halt with immortal lines like "his penis got diseases from a Shumach tribe" or "You'll get used to it, a mental mindfuck can be nice."

Next time around, I think I'll start up with The Lumberjack Song and see where it takes me from there....

Otherwise, there are 10 days left until we're done with the whole bloody season! Huzzah! I haven't felt this celebratory since the Christmas season began!


Today's Lesson: cancelled until I finish reading all 20 tankoban of the "Prince of Tennis" manga I scored off our local library.

Labels: Christmas muzak vs dancing demons and sweet transvestites

posted by Phillip at 7:55 AM

 

From the blogger's diary this past Sunday...


i'm at the kiosk right now, covering one of mel's shifts so she in turn can spend her day off with that most joyous of things: researching & writing 2 term papers. (an i'm also having a hell of a time doing this too, which brings us to 'today's lesson': no matter how much the i.t. department insists otherwise, an english keyboard and a french keyboard are not the same thing. i can't capitalize anything without pressing this weird other button that sits where the shift key should be, and will someone tell me how to get the friggin' quotation marks to show up...and i can't even figure out how to get a question mark to show up either.

i hate this keyboard.

anyhoo, as anyone in the toronto and nearby affiliated areas can attest, it snowed. lots. so let's have a brief breakdown of how i got to work today. mel normally drives me/us there, but it's rather pointless for her to drive me out across town and then drive home to work on her papers. it wastes time for her. i was ready to catch a bus down to the mall instead. but as it would fortuitously happen, gary was over helping my mom out with some accounting work. she offered to drive me up to the mall before going over the offices with gary. and all was good.

however...by the time we started out early sunday morning, the roads for the most part had not yet been ploughed, and my mother didn't entirely trust her driving skills to navigate a rather treacherous-even-without-snow route through town. (and after seeing a number of cars along the way trapped, crashed and angled acros the road, i can't say i blame her.) so my mom opted to get me a taxi, for which she'd pay the fare. all was good.

however...all of the taxi serives were backlooged due to weather and church calls. the earliest one could arrive to pick me up 15 minutes before i had to be at the kiosk. (it takes at least 20 to get through town to the mall.) so my mom drove me over the bus station, a mere 2 minutes away, so i could catch a bus to the mall. (and instead of paying the taxi fare, she handed me a bus ticket, so still no paying for me.) the plan was i could catch one of the buses going to the mall, and still arive with about 15 minutes to spare before everything had to open. and all was good.

however...the bus i needed to get into the kiosk on time was pulling out just as i nearly broke my ass running down the stairs after it. the next bus going out to the mall would leave right before the mall opened, making me very distinctively late. all was crumbling before me, and i cursed a great many things, most of all the snow and malls being open on sundays.

however...as I was idling about for the bus, i spotted a taxi cab driving along a sideroad leading towards the terminal. on a whim/hunch/wild-assed hope, i meandered over to the front of the bus depot, and was pleasantly surprised to see the taxi pull into the front. no one was inside. i popped open the door and asked the driver if he was waiting for a pick-up (to whom i would have defaulted to, since i'm not fond of stealing someone's ride when they rightfully called for it first), but huzzah for the driver saying 'nope.' i piled on in, got whipped up to the mall and arrived with just enough time to get everything primed for opening.

the rest of the shift was pleasantly dull and uneventful.

but to summarize: my proposed modes of transportation for today went from car to bus to car to taxi to bus to taxi.

be bedazzled by my reorg skills, people.

Labels: a change of driving plans, snow

posted by Phillip at 9:30 PM