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!

 


It's barely even spring, and inexplicably my legs are an itching mess of red, swollen bites. Obviously, I am vexed by this turn of events. I don't even know how or even when it happened. One morning I woke up, and both my calves were covered in maddeningly-itchy bites (from what I can only assume are mosquito in origin). My right leg is even worse, with bites having made it all the way up past my knee and onto my inner thigh. Of course, this means that only was I attacked by a mosquito, but a perverted one at that. Consider the sheer fortitude it had to display to fly up my pants and start going to town on my supple, athletic gams. Worse than that is the possibility that there were multiple mosquitoes doing this at once. If that's true, then I was violated by a bunch of bugs having some kind of freakish, blood orgy in my pants.

Why is it that I get to celebrate the start of the season by being violated by bugs?

Anyhoo, I have recently started to devise what I call the Cameron Conspiracy. I've been noticing a trend in James Cameron's films wherein if the main couple have sex, all hell will inevitably break loose. And I do mean it breaks loose with all 9 levels. Consider:

--Terminator. Sarah Connor and Reese sleep together. This gives Sarah a slight case of the stupid, and she notifies the Terminator of their location. Car chases, explosions and a hailstorms of bullets ensue. And people get killed.

--Titanic. Rose sleeps with Jack, an act that summons a mighty iceburg. And the boat sinks.

--Avatar. Hot, wild Navi sex occurs. By the next morning, they're nearly run over by a giant bulldozer, and the tribe's home/tree gets torched.

--True Lies. Poor Arnie doesn't even get the chance to sleep with his wife. 2 minutes into foreplay, and they're kidnapped by terrorists and nearly vaporized by a nuclear bomb.

All of this evidence brings us to Today's Lesson: don't have sex in a James Cameron film. Within the next 12 hours, you'll wish you only had a crazed maniac in a goalie mask after you. It's the armageddon afterglow, baby!

Labels: the Cameron Conspiracy, WTF bugbites

posted by Phillip at 2:58 PM

 


I pride myself on being quite amicable with small children and babies. I have a natural affinity with them, and more often than not if I smile at them, they grin back at me. Or else a gang of them end up tackling me as they decide I make the perfect jungle gym. (You may laugh, but sadly I've lost count of the number of times I've had to help look after a group of kids and the playing devolves into the entire horde chasing me around the play area/ground.)

However, I'm at a bit of a loss when it comes to my niece. Josselyn has issues with me. It first began when my sister asked me to entertain Josselyn for a car ride, so I opted to start telling her about Sesame Street's "The Monster at the End of this Book." Here's how the conversation went:


Me: "So, kiddo, there's this book. And there's also this monster at the end of it."

Josselyn: "AAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!"

Me: [panicking] "No, no, it's okay! It's okay! The monster turns out to be Grover, so it's all good."


Sadly, Josselyn refused to stop crying for the rest of the car trip. I still haven't lived that particular moment down. But with another visit from them today, this was my chance to redeem myself. Josselyn was in a great mood, grinning happily whenever I smiled at her, and she enjoyed when I helped play with her toys. Then I tried to pick her up. Here's how the conversation went:


Me: [hoisting her up] "Okay, kiddo, upsie-daisy."

Josselyn: "AAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!"

Me: -.-;;; "Aw, crap."


Everyone reassures me that once she gets a little older, Josselyn will warm up to me. I can only hope so. It's slightly less mortifying being flying tackled by her as opposed to her bursting into tears every time I violate her personal space...or read her a bedtime story.

In other news, spring cleaning has begun. This is also known as the "Hey look what I found...and just how long was that hiding here?" season. So far the only substantial discoveries like that we've made have involved bunny poop. I can't say this pleases me. Really now, how exactly can a rabbit with limited access to her romper room get poop in behind otherwise-inaccessible pieces of furniture?


Mel: "That's probably because our cat has been batting around the bunny pellets and chasing after them."

Me: "Don't tell me these things after I've let him lick my hands!"


On the other hand, this is better than discovering Chance has yet again indulged in his shoe-snuggling fetish. But yes, cleaning and rearranging continues. The biggest problem we're facing is that we have a fair bit of display items and not a heck of a lot of display space. Oh curio cabinet manufacturers, why must all your models that match our apartment's colour scheme be notoriously expensive? (Which is to say nothing of our need for bookshelves...which we can't really afford since we end up spending our money on more books.)

Labels: strange little cat hobbies, the monster at the end of this book spoilers

posted by Phillip at 8:54 PM

 


Well, it's the middle of April and I've been in hiding for the past 3 weeks. That can mean only one thing: our store Inventory has just finished up. And I have to say, I'm glad it went as smoothly as possible, but it's still not necessarily worth all the exhaustion.

We had the added bonus of contending with two Inventories as a matter of fact. With Mel working at the Kitchener store, she had to help/contend with their Inventory for this past Tuesday morning. And with me at the Waterloo store, our Inventory was the day after (Wednesday). So between the two of us, we've clocked in roughly 80 hours a week for the past 3 weeks. Quite frankly, I'm amazed we managed to get anything else done, like chores or cooking meals, considering how flat-out exhausted we've been by the ends of our shifts. But amazingly the apartment doesn't look like a disaster area...mostly...and we have been eating a very healthy share of home-cooked meals. Not the most extravagant-to-prepare meals, mind you, but at least they haven't all been fast food.

The admitted downside to all this was that Mel, being a full-timer, ended up working a lot of evening shifts. She worked opposite the Kitchener manager, who works primarily days, and it's not surprising to have the store manager working days--especially with an impending Inventory count. Of course...me being the manager of my store meant I was needed to work primarily days. As a result, there had been a week or two where we only saw each other for a few hours at the very end of the day...and I was already nodding off by the time Mel got home. Not the best situation, but at the very least it's over and done with now.

And the Inventories themselves coasted along with relative ease and simplicity, probably due in part to the fact that both Mel and myself have done these for more than a few years running, so it's a bit old hat, so to speak. (And sadly, we did have to count a few hats.) I can't say I was thrilled to be up at 5:30am, just so I could make it to mall for the 7am start time, but I survived. My brain was the equivalent of Shake N Bake by the end of that day, but I managed to still sound mostly coherent by the end. Mostly. Kind of.

The only hiccup occurred when Mel came back from her Tuesday Inventory, and proceeded to gloat about how their crew managed to count everything in an hour and a half. Naturally this galled me. This galled me a lot. So when our Inventory started the next day, I announced to my crew the slander they'd put against us and stated my expectations that we'd have to beat the pants off them! And what do you know...we beat their time by 5-10 minutes. An hour, twenty. Ha!

Though oddly enough, Mel didn't exactly share in my overt celebrations when I got home that day. One punch to the arm later, I stopped gloating.


In other news, I am vastly amused by the "daily question" up on LiveJournal's homepage at the moment: "Would you be upset if a long-term partner confessed that s/he'd committed a serious crime before you met? How do you think it would affect your relationship?"

The reason I find this amusing is that it's a ridiculously broad question, and anyone's answer would ultimately vary from one detailed situation to the next. I mean, if Mel took me aside and admitted she'd stolen a car or two when she was younger, I'd in all likelihood shrug off; what's in the past is in the past, and if I ever locked myself into a car, it'd be handy to know that I should call her first to get me out instead of calling CAA. On the other hand, if she were to confess that she'd had four other husbands before me, and ended up viciously murdering them all, I might be inclined to worry about where our relationship was headed.


I'm also being amused as Spam trends, as the penis enhancers have all but vanished from my Junk Box, only to be replaced by ads for imitation-brand watches. Apparently cool watches are the new, shiny penises. "Ha! My shiney new penis can go from zero to a minute in sixty seconds! Wait...does that sound right?"

Labels: love means not asking why your wife is burying a corpse in the backyard, the inventory in which I won by five minutes and then gloated and then got thwapped for it

posted by Phillip at 8:08 AM

 


Ah, quality.

Ah, lack thereof.

Last week I discovered that our store is steadily delaminating. That's the official term. What this essentially means is a bunch of the shiney white panels in our store are starting to peel off the walls. That's right: not six months after moving into our new store, it's already starting to fall apart.

My first clue that something was wrong was when I opened the doors to the store and had the top half of a panel bend down and try to tap me on the head. Bear in mind this panel is about 8 feet tall and at the very front of the store, where not only everyone can see it, but it could easily attack them. I managed to keep it at bay with a display easel. Upon realizing there was a problem, I looked around to see if other panels were suffering similar fates...and I found two other spots (one minor, one really major).

So, I called Head Office. They sent Tom, our magical maintenance guy. You remember Tom from this little bit of nowhere, I'm sure. He's the fix-it guy who has pretty much given up on Head Office actually possessing half a brain to share amongst its staff. Well, Tom arrived at the store and fixed up the minor spot where the laminate was peeling. Then the following conversation occurred:


Tom: "Yeah, so that one spot's patched up. I also took a look around and found another three spots where the walls are peeling off."

Me: "Wait...you're telling me that my store is molting?!"


Yep. It's official. My store is right on par with a bird or a snake. The real kicker is that, after further investigation of the now multiple 6-8 feet tall panels peeling off, Tom isn't even sure if he can glue them back up. The act requires absolute accuracy (you get one try, since the glue is insta-bond, so if you screw up you're doomed. Doomed!) and at least 2-3 people given the size of the panels. The only alternative at this point would be to physically tear the walls apart and install new panels with (theoretically) laminate that won't peel after a few months.

I can't see Tom, our Head Office or the mall administration really vying for that last part, since it will involve a lot of mess and easily a few days of either being closed or loooooong after-hours work. Right now Tom's deliberating things with Head Office, and I suppose we'll hear later what happens next.

Stupid molting store....


In other news, our apartment complex's rear stairwell smells like cheap aftershave. I'm not sure I want to find out why.


Customer quote of the day: "You're not a poor packer. I went to Newfoundland without any underpants."



.

Labels: stupid magical maintenance tour, the incredible molting store

posted by Phillip at 2:46 PM