On the floor

Today wasn't as bad as I expected, but it's not an experience I care to repeat anytime soon. My manager is very knowledgeable, so as long as she was around for me to ask questions, I did OK. As soon as she left, things went down hill, as the guy that replaced her wasn't interested in helping much.

Tomorrow is inventory at the other store, which I have already done at the store that I am currently at, so at least I will have some idea of what I am doing.

I ache from work today. I thought that my experience as a dealer would help me survive standing all day long, but I guess I am too out of practice now. I am sure that I could do this job, and do it well a few months down the road, but what worries me is that this job pays very poorly. The commission that the store pays is really poor. I know it's only my first day, but I only made about an extra dollar an hour in commission. Maybe.

-'Mad

Update

Well, tomorrow is my first official day on the floor at my new job. I actually started on the 23rd instead of the 25th, but so far I have either been training or doing inventory. The training was COMPLETELY worthless, and inventory was just tedious. At least inventory helped to teach me where things were...

I am going out to sell products tomorrow that I have NO clue about. NONE. I don't even know how to operate the cash register yet. I am going to be a sales associate, and I couldn't tell you thing one about what I am going to be selling. How good of a salesman will I be when I don't know anything?

Needless to say, I am nervous as hell.

-'Mad

Support the Chinese Olympic Team! Shop at Wal-Mart!

The trade deficit irritates me. The huge budget deficit really irritates me. The lack of interest by the federal government in improving the quality of Education and the infrastructure of the US irritates me. Our reliance on foreign oil and the willingness people have to drill for more in otherwise pristine land here in the US irritates me. Wal-Mart irritates me.

I'm really irritated right now.

-'Mad

August 25th

Well, I have a new job. I will be working at Radio Shack starting the 25th, which ironically is the day I should have started school. I like the idea that I will be making money again, but I will really be hating the fact that I have to give up on my goals for money reasons. AGAIN.

-'Mad

School's out.

Well, I tried. I couldn't make it to school again this fall. I still have one option left, but it's a rather extreme option to take. I could cash out my 401Ks to use for school, but I won't be doing that for this fall. I don't know how much I would get out of cashing them, I know you get penalized a lot if you do that. It's an incredibly stupid short-sighted option, but I don't have any other ideas right now. School will cost approximately $6,0000+ per year, and there really isn't a cheaper option out there that I know of or have found.

I suspect that I could pay for one semester if I sacrificed my 401K, which is one big reason I hesitate. Only one semester isn't going to accomplish anything. I need to get at least a full year in with good grades in order to qualify for other financial aid. It's a long story that I am not really interested in telling here as to how that works.

In the meantime, I guess I continue looking for a job, only now I am not limited to part-time afternoons and evenings. I can go for about anything. I can find another dead-end full-time job to spin my wheels in and go nowhere with.

yay.

Maybe next year.

-'Mad

Books!

I stole this from my sister-in-law's blog:

1. Copy the list on your blog.
2. Read through the list and mark the books you've read in bold.
3. Italicize any you started, but didn't finish.
4. Color the ones you loved in a color. (whatever color, really.)

1. The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
2. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams ----Superb!
3. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
4. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
5. Life of PI - Yann Martel
6. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
7. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
8. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
9. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
10. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
11. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
12. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
13. His Dark Materials (trilogy) - Philip Pullman
14. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
15. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller ----I need to read that one again.
16. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
18. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
19. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
20. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
21. Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
22. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
23. Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
24. Animal Farm - George Orwell
25. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley -----I need to finish this one.
26. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
27. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
28. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
29. Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
30. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
31. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
32. Complete Works of Shakespeare ----I have read a lot of his plays, but not all of his poems.
33. Ulysses - James Joyce
34. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
35. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
36. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
37. The Bible ----I skipped some things like Numbers.
38. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
39. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
40. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
41. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
42. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
45. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
46. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
47. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
48. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
49. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
50. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
51. Little Women - Louisa M. Alcott
52. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
53. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
54. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
55. Middlemarch - George Eliot
56. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
57. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
58. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
59. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
60. Emma - Jane Austen
61. Persuasion - Jane Austen
62. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
63. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
64. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown ----I wanted to finish this, but had to return the book.
65. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
66. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
67. Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
68. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
69. Atonement - Ian McEwan
70. Dune - Frank Herbert
71. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
72. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
73. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
74. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
75. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
76. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
77. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
78. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
79. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
80. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
81. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
82. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
83. Dracula - Bram Stoker
84. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
85. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
86. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
87. Germinal - Emile Zola
88. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
89. Possession - A.S. Byatt
90. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
91. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
92. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
93. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
94. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
95. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
96. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
97. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
98. Watership Down – Richard Adams
99. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
100. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas



Hmmm... Unless I counted wrong, I have read 27 on this list, and started but didn't finish 12. A rather depressingly small percentage of this book list, really.

More linking goodness! Statler and Waldorf

I have always loved Statler and Waldorf...

Statler and Waldorf commentary.

Last Laugh for Tonight.

Statler and Waldorf vs. Milton Berle.

Enjoy!

-'Mad

It's not the 4th of July, but...

...I still had to post this.

I find the muppets to always be entertaining.


I haven't figured out how to embed a video on the blog yet, so you will have to go to the effort of clicking a link. I am sure you will survive.

-'Mad

This just in...

It's raining outside. I have to go outside now and enjoy this... I love the rain. :-) It's too rare here. Yeah, yeah, I have no sense, whatever. Go away. :-P

-'Mad

Trying again...

After almost exactly 3 years, I am going to try this again. My original blog is here. I stopped blogging on that website for one simple reason: I lost the password. I tried recovering it, but the site emails you the password, and I never got an email on any of my known accounts when I tried. Thus new blog!

Tons of things have happened since I last wrote on that blog, but if you know me, you already know about it. Pretty much the usual life stuff: Marriage, moving, and drive-by shootings. Nothing you don't already see every day. :-P

Steph is 9 flavors of wonderful. I am glad I waited so long to get married, otherwise I wouldn't have found her. We don't have any kids, but we might someday. We aren't hurrying. We are more worried about trying to get into and through school more than anything.

Trying to get into school is the same old story for me, I have been trying to get into (and stay in) school for years. I haven't been successful yet, but I am enrolled in school for this fall, starting on August 25th. I don't know how I will be able to pay for it, so it may be a very short enrollment. It's about $3000 when I don't even know how I am going to pay for insulin right now.

They have changed some stuff about this website since my last blog. It will probably take me a while to customize the place to my taste. I will have to see what I can do later.

In the meantime, everyone should watch Dr. Horrible. It's about 42ish minutes long. Starring Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion, and Felicia Day. Joss Whedon directed, and several of his family members co-wrote and had bit parts in the show. Very funny, very entertaining. The link above is the show on Hulu (unfortunately with commercials) This link is the original site with some additional content. It's better to watch it on Hulu, which is why I linked to it first. Enjoy!

With any luck and a little self-discipline, I might actually update this once a week. Yeah, right. :-P

-'Mad