Today was a good day. On the topic of today, the weather is quite nice by PDR standards. I’d heard all these predictions that we’d be having the snowiest year in a figurative forever, but so far I don’t think we’ve had enough cumulative snowfall to hide the corpse of that hobo you would have accidentally hit when your car skidded off the road because of all the snow. There’s people out there who like to experience their holidays with snow, and sure I’d be happy for them if they had it, but I’ll personally take the bleak rainy overcast days we’ve got. I suspect it would be more popular if it wasn’t so dark, cloudy, and chilly but since I am, y’know, a creature of the night, the darkness is no problem for me. In fact since I currently do not own sunglasses, it is ideal. I wouldn’t mind a few less bone-chilling breezes, but hey, I’ll take what I can get. I mean, since there was no snow, you didn’t hit the hobo, so you don’t even need to hide his corpse! See how much better that is?

On the less cool side of this weather: the other day there was a total lunar eclipse, right? Some people even tried to make it extra cool by pointing that it landed on the equinox and that rarely happens apparently. It’s all well and good to enjoy that, but I don’t care ’bout no equinoxes, I just like eclipses. It was not visible, though, because of all those clouds that gave me the darkness earlier. Hey clouds! At night it is already dark. I don’t need you to save me from the sun at night.

Marq has been doing behind the scenes work to get the transfer to the Book of PDR to the new WordPress and all that. Thanks Marq! But in doing so, he’s discovered something that is, quite frankly, shocking. Well, not shocking I guess. But it’s… not interesting… uh… notable? Not really, but that’ll have to do. Here’s a list of roughly how many posts I’ve done in each year that the Book of PDR has been in business.

2006 = 100
2007 = 81
2008 = 68
2009 = 58
2010 = 60

Now, first of all, 2006 is the highest by far and I wasn’t even on for that full year! I started in May or something. I can only assume that this because in 2006 I was still working with some of my Contains2 work ethic. On Contains2, if I didn’t post something every couple days, I wasn’t doing it wrong. But since 2006 consisted mainly of Contains2 dying and me working alternating day and night shifts every week, two of many things that make me look back on 2006 as utter ballsack, most of my posts were just complaining about work. Eventually I got sick of those complainy posts and made a conscious effort to do less of that. Sadly I don’t have much else going on. I can sit down and think “What’s going on that I should write about?” and mostly the only thing going on is that I don’t want to go to work. That is not newsworthy, so I just skip it.

The low point of 2009 is a bit of a surprise. I guess that during that year I had issues with my computer, including it finally dying, but it doesn’t look like I did much when I got the new computer either. Now keep in mind that in WordPress there is a difference between Posts and Pages. Posts are what this is and all my journal or prose or all that. Pages are stuff like my FAQ or my About page and I have put more work into those in the last couple years (plus there are tons of pages that are not even published that I use to keep notes for myself) and I think most of my writing in 2009 is probably on Pages. So it probably isn’t as bad a drop as it looks.

I’m going to try to get 2010 up a higher, but I’ve only got a month and a bit left and considering I was quite happy with the way I just avoided talking about Christmas last year, I’m going to have to find something else to talk about. Weekly comic posts are going to help, though. And I can say this: I’m going to break the record in 2011. By a lot if I can help it. And I can.

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.