I’m not able to sleep, but I know I should be. I was writing a Friday the Thirteenth-related story, but then I got distracted. I’ll not have time to finish it on this day so instead, I’ll write a post here. Even if I get that story done late, it’s still done, right? Anyway, I’ve been saving up things to say, so I might as well use them.

Back when I used to take cabs home from work like twice a week Casino Taxi (they’re the fast ones) used to treat me pretty well. The dispatcher lady knew me by name and would ensure that cabs came to pick me up tout de suite and they all knew where I was going. Now that I only need a cab only once a month or so, the new dispatcher never remembers me or makes smalltalk and I feel less special. Sure, they’re probably more concerned with people who use cabs more regularly, but c’mon. Where’s the love? I’ll always be loyal to Casino Taxi thanks to their old commercial, but I miss the love.

Why is it that the further a store is from my apartment, the better the ice cream it sells? I had this thing called Caramel Hat Trick the other day. It was sweet. I guess this is just a rhetorical musing. That is all.

I put together a futon over the weekend. It wasn’t hard or anything, but I still used the instructions as a guide. Doing so, I noticed that the French language bit of the manual got a step that the English and Spanish ones did not. It detailed these little rubber things I had to stick on to prevent the mattress from sliding or something.

I don’t know if this means the manual writers were so pro-French they wanted to leave the others out on the full details of what to do, or if they figured that English and Spanish speakers were smart enough to figure it out from the diagram (Like I did!) but the French were not as quick on the uptake. It is important to find out if we’re going to know who should be angry here.

And clearly someone needs to be angry.

I find the month of June 2010 guilty of the following:

• One count of my partner who does all the work I don’t want to do being on vacation for a month, leaving me with twice the work to do and the only person at work I can have a real conversation with gone.
• One count of a staff member just not showing up any more leaving us shorthanded by one for the duration of the month.
• One count of a staff member injuring herself with a box cutter leaving us shorthanded by another one for the duration of the month.
• Two counts of staff members losing family members causing us to be further shorthanded, in one case for a week and in the other for the duration of the month.
• Four counts of machinery literally breaking.
• Three counts of my supposed second in command leaving early without letting me know and leaving me with extra work that I had to rush through so I could be done in time to catch my ride.
• Two counts of my supposed second in command calling in to say he won’t be coming to work for reasons deemed suspicious.
• One count of me not getting done in time to catch my ride.
• One count of the paper being delayed hours to wait for the results of a hockey game. (Fact: Anyone who cared about that game and for some reason hadn’t watched it on television or caught the results on the news or on the Internet or from friends should really just not bother)
• Untold counts of me spending hours trying to get to sleep but unable because of heat or noise from outside.
• Eight counts of me finally being asleep and then being awakened by some external stimuli (In one case it was a cannon salute for the Queen. Am I the only one who thinks maybe she’s been around the world enough that a cannon salute isn’t going to impress her much?)
• One count of being called into work when I had already been awake for twenty-one hours.
• Three counts of me crashing an sleeping for ten or more hours at a time, eating up an entire day of time spent not working.
• Two counts of having to postpone Father’s Day dinner because of work.
• Two counts of having to cancel blood donation appointments because of work.
• Three counts of having to turn down Hanging Out With Friends time because of work.
• One count of ruining a shirt on a jagged metal bit at work.
• Two counts of ruining pants beyond the point of wearability (and for me that point means they are quite damaged.
• One count of me injuring my finger in such a way that blood came out from under the fingernail.
• One count of a long scratch on the back of my neck from the corner of a machine I was reaching under.
• One count of not having access to the Internet on my only day off during one week.
• One count of the twenty-four hour gas station I used to stop for juice when I had to walk from work apparently not being open twenty-four hours any more.
• One count of locking myself out of my apartment.
• One count of the truck I was in nearly being hit by a drunk driver (or if not drunk, just a very bad driver).
• At least three counts of papercuts (those are just the ones that occurred after I decided to keep a list of annoyances).
• One count of being a month with so many annoyances I decided to keep a list.

Now, I fully admit that the vast majority of these are quite minor and several were obviously much worse for other people than me, but the fact it was all condensed into one four-week span really made June 2010 a month that I will not miss in the least. It joins the year 2006 in Times PDR Mostly Didn’t Enjoy. But hey, it is all over now.

Sadly, my time off of work is now drawing to a close. I can’t say I accomplished many great noteworthy, thanks a lot Nintendo Entertainment System, but I am pleased with the time as it was spent…

I used up all the gift certificates I’d had since Christmas for DVDs. I got Zombieland, Stand By Me, Tropic Thunder, Dial M For Murder and A Serious Man. Not a bad haul to add to my collection.

Haiku!

This is a haiku.
I wrote it on my website.
This is how it ends.

I seem to have fixed the problems my computer has been experiencing. This is because I am a master hacker. I hack computers and make them become hacked. Yep. I’m a hacker. Hackedy Hack. Hacker. Well, anyway, after an whole afternoon spent playing with various things that were supposed to help, one of them apparently did.

Also, since I am sure my nonexistent readership has tired of my plain-looking website, I have gone through things like my About page and my FAQ and added some pictures and stuff. Try to make things a bit more visually interesting. Every little bit helps.

Unrelated to my time off, I have noticed that according to the side of the carton, the grapefruit that I regularly drink gives me way more than the required daily dosage of fruits and vegetables. I am sure this is a good things, but finding that out really just highlights how much I don’t get of the other food groups. Oh, food groups, why are you so hard to maintain?

For the record, I am much better at Operation: Wolf than I was as a child, but I still can’t beat it.

The joke is that I didn’t post anything on April Fools Day, I guess.

I got poisoned, though! Well, not really, but on Thursday I ate one of these little yogurt parfaits that the Superstore sells and the blueberries tasted a bit off, but because I wanted to get to the oatmeal beneath them, I just kept right on eatin’. After I woke up later Thursday I had a terrible taste in my mouth and a bit of general queasiness and such. I figure I probably shouldn’t have eaten those blueberries. Blueberries are delicious when they are fresh, but not worth it when they aren’t. Fact. I’m still in love with the parfaits, though. I’ll stick with the strawberry for now.

So, I bought a book a few weeks back (Trouble With Lichen, by John Whyndam) and was like sixty or more pages into it when I realized that thirty pages were missing. In a row. And it isn’t a clean tear, either. There is enough of the pages left in that I can make out whole words in some instances. That is the sort of thing that I should have caught before I bought it, but I guess it does explain why I got it for a dollar and it was marked “as is”. Ah, well.

Haiku!

Can’t stop the bum rush.
Don’t even bother to try.
You just can’t stop it.

So, for as long as I can remember, the newspaper that employs me would make its cover page black and white on Good Friday. You know, like they are mourning Jesus’s death an’ all ’at. This year they did not. This proves the newspaper is now Satanist. Proves it.

So, I managed to, at the last second before I had to go to work, get that Robot story up for International Robot Day. Good for me. For those who don’t know (which is a group that exceeds the population of the Earth) the robot Robexor first appeared in a story I did years ago. Things did not go as well for him that time.

For the record, I Googled “International Robot Day” and it seems there already is one on February 5th! So now we get two! Robots are so lucky.

And if they choose not to recognize my International Robot Day, you better believe I will retaliate. PDR style.