Month: September 2005

Stupid shoe stores

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On our way out of Phoenix last Sunday we stopped by a shoe store to buy my birthday gift, my birthday is actually the 12th of July but I just never got around to getting the shoes until then. I had the same problem as I always do, it turns out that the major shoe companies think that everyone has really narrow feet, I do not. Thus most of the shoes just didn’t fit.

The problem I have with finding shoes really doesn’t have much to do with the width though. You can pick up just about any pair of New Balance shoes and they will fit pretty well, if not New Balance seems to sell far more extra wide shoes than any other company. The problem that I have is that the only color I can wear is black, and the shoe needs to be made out of leather (or a faux version of it). I can’t wear suede or just the normal canvas like fabric because the blood that I drip on my shoes soaks through them, and that is really really gross.

I tried just wearing a pair of those solid black work boots some years ago, they fit my criteria perfectly. The only problem with them is that I am not just standing around hacking apart animal carcass all the time, I also have to be able to bend at the ankles when I am trying to stock product in the coolers and the such, those black boots don’t allow for much flexibility at the ankle (well none at all). So sneakers it has to be.

This time we went to a DSW shoe warehouse which had thousands of shoes on display, unfortunately there were only about three of them that met my color and material requirements. Of those three there was only one that had my size in a wide, it is a Reebok low top. It is a fairly comfortable shoe, I don’t have any complaints about the shoe itself, yet I do wonder why I can’t find anything in a mid to high top that meets the stated criteria. The two colors that go with everything are white and black. For some reason you just can’t find a men’s athletic shoe that is solid white or solid black, what the hell is up with that? Did someone just eventually realize that if they sold black athletic shoes men would wear them to formal occasions rather than buy a pair of formal shoes? Seriously, why don’t they just have solid black or white?

I was able to find shoes in my size that met all the criteria so I guess I shouldn’t bitch, but I just have to. The low tops usually slip on the back of my ankles and lead to blisters. I guess that is better than my other option, which was usually to buy shoes about three sizes too big so that my wide ass feet could fit into them. If I was just looking for the cheapest shoe in the store I could understand them not having what I was looking for, but I am talking about looking for any shoe, price be damned. Oddly, as I think about it, I could probably find all sorts of solid black shoes made out of faux leather at Payless Shoe Source, but they would last about a week with the punishment they would be subjected to.

I guess I better quit bitching about shoes, lest you think I have some sort of weird fetish (of course I do have some weird fetishes, none of them involve shoes though; none of them really involve any sort of clothing come to think about it). Stupid shoe stores and their stupid no solid black shoes policy.

Back from vacation

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As the title should imply I have made it back from vacation. In one piece no less. I had a lot of fun throwing away my money this year, but that is a story for a different time.

When we arrived at the hotel last Sunday I started to type a post into my wife’s laptop. I actually typed out a total of three posts while we were up there, all in the first two days, after which I decided that I should really just disconnect and enjoy the vacation. I will probably get the wife to email me the .txt file that I saved those posts in just to see if there was anything noteworthy written in them, somehow I doubt that that is the case. If there is anything good in them, expect it to follow within the next couple of days.


Vacation was awesome! If you have never been to Laughlin, just imagine Las Vegas on a river; There are numerous boat tours ( a couple of which we went on) and a much less seedy atmosphere than Vegas, and you can walk on the beach! Not the beach of the Hotel we stayed in though. Well, technically you could walk on that beach, if you were brave enough, the wife tried it for a couple of minutes and then gave up. Turns out that the smoking $19 room rate doesn’t give you the best of beaches to walk on. Who knew?

Laughlin is also built as a casino town. What that means to you and me is that when you look over to the next casino, then consider walking there, it is actually something you can do. While in Vegas we made the mistake of trying to walk from one casino to the next, it seemed like it was so close. Fifteen minutes later, with sore legs and a sunburn, we made it to the next casino; Laughlin has the casinos built much closer together. There were only two casinos that we actually got in the car to drive to, and that could attributed more to us being lazy than the length of the walk. The ‘captain’ on the boat tour said that the rest of the water’s edge had all been bought for further casino development, which is likely true, but they offer shuttles from the current ends of the strip for four bucks (boat shuttles by the way, try getting that in Vegas).

Beyond that, Laughlin is very similar to Vegas. They try to pump as much alcohol as possible into you to keep you throwing money into the machines; They have cheap, cheap, really cheap food; The majority of the casinos are owned by the same corporations that own the casinos in Vegas; The casino with the best (or cheapest) buffet is usually the busiest one. Also, there are a lot more old people in Laughlin than in Vegas, I don’t know if that is by design, but there were certainly a lot of people I met there that should have been coffin fillers years and years ago…

The one major advantage that Laughlin has (currently) is the lack of porn and prostitution advertising. The porn and prostitution smut that you see everywhere in Vegas is just not there. That was a really nice bonus. I don’t suppose that means that there is any less prostitution, but it does mean that you don’t really have to see it so much. That is good all around.

Just in case I haven’t yet mentioned the river, I am going to talk about that for a bit.

They have little boats that go casino to casino along the river; they have boats that do tours of the river; they have day tours that go all the way down to the London Bridge. The prices on them go from slightly outrageous all the way to flat-out, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me. I doubt that the flat-out you’ve got to be fucking kidding me is worth the money, but I am pretty cynical, as such I never paid to go on it. I did get the chance to go on a couple of the boats though, just not that one.

The rides on the boats were pretty cool, well worth the price of admission, if you ever find yourself in Laughlin you should certainly do it; Not only is it a pretty sweet ride, but it will also keep you out of the casino for a couple of hours, and that is worth its weight in gold.

This vacation, as opposed to all other vacations that I can think of, I didn’t put a single thing on a credit card. Well, I suppose that I did book the room on a credit card, but after that it was cash for everything. I lost far more money than I care to admit, but it was actual cash, no debt resulted from the vacation to Laughlin. It was good times.

More to follow?

Vacation

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I think that the Gogos may have said it best: “vacation is all I ever wanted, vacation is how to get away…” while the aforementioned band did go on to say other things, I like the sentiment of that particular verse. It is, unfortunately, pretty hard to pull off.

As I sit here now it is 12:34 AM according to the clock at the bottom right of my screen, and we only just started, and finished, packing for vacation. My “official” last minute at work was at 8 PM tonight, but I can never assume that I won’t be callled back for various reasons long after that. It took me about four hours of waiting for the call from work (which thankfully never came) to actually start packing my bags. I think that I might actually be on vacation tomorrow…I may be somewhere that is away from here, sweet!

I will be on vacation in Laughlin this year; Laughlin is basically Las Vegas without the advertising, not to mention a bit closer to home. I hope they have the same buffet prices as Vegas though, else the 19 dollar room rate might not seem quite as good.

I am so amped up about vacation that I doubt I will get a wink of sleep tonight. I just want to get in the car and go. I am desperate to spend some time away from work, anywhere. I still fear that I might get that call about something else that is broken and I will have to go back to work. I wish that my wife was not so tired from spending her whole Friday and Saturday cleaning up the house, then we could go right now!

We only started to select clothes for the vacation at about 11:30, and we are now done. A few vacations under your belt can certainly help you to find the correct clothes, but, a good rule of thumb is that you aren’t going to wear pants if you don’t have to. If you have no pants in the suitcase, you aren’t going to wear any. Pretty sound logic, and also pretty good advice. You know that you aren’t going to wear the pants, why throw them into the suitcase?

This year my wife made it a point to make sure that I had a pair of shorts for swimming purposes, I guess she heard my cries the last few years about not having a swimsuit when she wanted to go swimming. Now I might actually have to be at, near, around or otherwise in the presence of a swimming pool…Then I might have to actually get in!

For all of the wonderful things my wife does for me it is hard to fault her for anything. Yet, when she wants me to be in swim trunks, thus showing off the fact that I am trying to hide the planet “Nepture” within my stomach… That is pretty harsh… I never ask her to put on a bikini and parade around a bunch of 20 something observers, I doubt she would get a negative comment though; Along with her slightly larger stature, she got an attitude to match. You really don’t want to piss her off…Trust me…

Anyway, the vacation… It really started about five hours ago for me, it doesn’t seem like much of a vacation yet. Once Ray gets here, in the morning, I guess I will finally concede that it is time to leave work behind for a few days.

Thing is that you never can…At least I can’t…

Blood on Blood

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This post has been a long time coming. When I started this whole blog thing I figured that I would start diving back into memories from my youth, and while the memories from my youth are grand, they simply aren’t the Blood on Blood memories of High school. What could possibly iconify that Blood on Blood attitude more so than a post to explain the logic behind it? Well, nothing, that is why I sit here typing.

I was a grade behind my brother when this alliance started to form. It was Dan, Dave and Steve that made up the core of this little group, while I was the little tag along that no one gave even half a shit about. As the High School years went on (actually I think it was after Dan’s first year of High School while living with dad), Dan moved away to live with my mom in Arizona. That left Dave, Steve and me to tear the whole state a new one, boy god how we tried.

I am probably not really proud of some of the stuff that we did, but I had a hand in it either way. I might have cared that I was with the girl that I thought would be my wife, yet I didn’t let that have any effect on our nightly prowl. We were closer than brothers, and as such we chose the old Bon Jovi song Blood on Blood as an anthem (it is the first song on the list you get there if you happen to click through).

I haven’t heard from Dave or Steve in a lot of years now. I guess that is sort of the way it goes when you are children (basically) talking about the life you will lead later. No one really knows where their life is going to go, mere speculation does not a doctor make. We have all gone our own ways to live separate lives, which is good, there must be something after high school, right?

Yet, as I sit here thinking, I can remember only one of the very last lines from that damned Bon Jovi song. It says, “Through the years and miles between us, it’s been a long and lonely ride, but if I got that call in the dead of the night, I’d be right by your side… Like blood on blood.”

I don’t really know what happened to Dave Tolleson and Steve Fausnaugh, but I really would like to. And like the song says, though I haven’t spoken to one of them in Ten years, and the other in 15, if I got that call in the dead of the night, I would be there in the morning.  We were, after all, like blood on blood.

That is all.

Vacation is nigh

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As I alluded to recently, I will be out of town for vacation starting Sunday. I had previously thought that having the blogger script would allow me to actually make more frequent posts while away, but it is starting to look a lot less likely than I had hoped. The hotel that I am going to be staying in has a fee of $1 for any toll free number dialed, and since I am now on dsl at home I don’t think I can use the msn dial-up numbers any more. Let me call and check. I’ll be right back…

Okay, back. Well it turns out that the people at qwest aren’t really sure whether or not I will be able to access the msn network through dial-up. Two people said I should be able to, one person said that I wouldn’t be able to. Now to answer the question of why I spoke to three people in the first place. I thought that they were overcharging me for the dsl service, which they told me would be 39.99, but which I am getting charged 44.99 for. There is a credit on the bill to knock it back down to the 39.99, but they charge for taxes and the such from the 44.99 price, therefore I pay almost fifty bucks for it after all discounts and taxes. I was fine with that, now I know, and “knowing is half the battle”.

The lady on the phone, however, suggested that I sign up for an uber offer which is supposed to be only for new customers; 19.99 a month 1.5 dsl for an entire year! I jumped on that shit. Thus I was transferred to another person to ask the question about dial-up when you have a dsl account. Of course at this point I really don’t care. If I do have to pay a buck every time I access the internet while I am on vacation, it is certainly not going to cost me the $240 dollars that I am saving by initially calling up to ask the question. One of the few times I have actually ended up happy after talking to a customer service rep.

Anyway, the posts may not be very frequent, if at all, while I am on vacation. I don’t trust the hotel policy, I don’t trust my wife’s laptop very much and, given what happened last year while I was on vacation, I don’t really trust the tiny little wires that run through the hotel either. I will just have to test the waters once we get there.

BTW this post has that name in particular to be a juxtaposition to the post about the apocalypse. All things are relative after all.

The apocalypse is nigh

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I suppose that I am a bit of a jackass, based solely on the title of this post. The world has been going to hell-in-a-handbasket for at least a couple of years (which I attribute directly to Dubya). Thing is that the weather patterns really are starting to look like my fuzzy memories from reading about the apocalypse. I mean with the tsunami’s overseas, then New Orleans turning into the biggest cesspool in recorded history, we may not have much time left.

If you happen to believe in any GOD, you really must be thinking that that GOD is really mad at us. If there actually is a God (or Gods) I guess I could see why. We have taken a beautiful planet and raped it. Invented chemicals that it can not break down; changed the course of many rivers to meet our own ends; placed lakes where they were never meant to be. Yes, if God created earth, people created earth 2.0 customized, which was good for a while.

Whether you believe in evolution, creationism or intelligent design, you must concede that the earth has been around for, at the very least, 3,000 years or so (what is the time frame for creationism by the way, I am far removed from my Christian roots). The earth went merrily about its daily business until pretty recently, probably the turn of the 20th century, then the shit started to hit the fan.

If there is a God, I am pretty sure that he never envisioned the day that mankind would start to screw around with the random rocks and chemicals that he left in the earth. Beyond that, I doubt that he would have ever thought that we would figure out how to create new elements from them that cannot decompose/degrade to start anew. If there is a God, he is obviously didn’t know that some of the chemicals we would manufacture would destroy the atmosphere that he spent so much time creating (though, in the King James version of the Holy Bible, he actually only spent one day on the Heavens and the earth, so not a lot of time). Still, we have found a way to destroy it. If there is a God, I guess now would be a pretty damn likely time for the apocalypse.

That all being said, I think it is just an odd coincidence that New Orleans has been turned into the largest, nastiest, bathtub on earth, so soon after the horrible tsunami’s overseas. Coincidences don’t have to have a divine meaning and, I, for one, think it is just that: coincidence.

Yet I ramble on…

The absolute worst thing about disaster is that it brings out both the best and worst in people. In times of tragedy there are two decidedly different attitudes: Help those in need, or, every man for himself. This is the truth in every tragedy that comes immediately to mind; For every man that offers his help to a stranger, there is someone that will lie, cheat or steal to make sure he survives.

It is extremely difficult to fault people who are involved in the tragedy for some types of looting; The stores are obviously closed, where do you get your diabetes medication? Considering that your house is now non-existent, and there is no one there to sell you the medicine, and you will die without it, how wrong is that, really? Of course stealing things like firearms, ammunition, electronic devices, etc. That is probably wrong. The news reports are never quite that specific though, they do tell the story when people raid electronic stores, or when firearms are looted, but what about the “looting” that is stealing medication for sick friends or family members? What about stealing pillows and blankets for people to sleep on while they wait for someone to come and help them? What about raiding the local supermarkets for canned food, as they watch the dead float by them?

I read a story today that said that another problem, possibly exclusive to the New Orleans disaster, is rape. Now don’t get me wrong, I have been pretty hard up a few times (pun intended) but I don’t think I would be able to rape other victims of the same tragedy (though put into that position who knows). It has to take some pretty weird logic to be thinking with “Little (add name)” when it is entirely possible that you may die. Come to think of it that is pretty sound logic; one more before I die… Not that I condone that sort of thing, just that as I typed it it seemed odd.

Of course, as usual, that one went way off course. The sentence where I said that “tragedy brings out the best and worst of people” was not meant towards any of the victims of the New Orleans disaster. I was going to go into details on the fraudulent “non profit” organizations that spring up after any tragedy. Though I don’t believe in a God, I hope those that try to profit through the suffering of others get their just due in this life (hopefully), failing that there is always the prospect of HELL, or being born again as a mistreated cat. All of which seem a bit too good for those that would try to scam people who just want to try to help out a little after such a tragedy.

The only organization that I would trust with my money for any donations is The Red Cross. They have been around a really long time, they do a lot of good, and they don’t telemarket. Also, if you have it in you, I am sure that there is going to be a huge need for blood (pun intended). The blood is free to give, the money comes out of your checkbook. Either way, I bet they will appreciate it.

That’s our Bush!

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Bush finally responds to the disaster in Louisiana. I don’t know exactly where I copied these lines from, fair use laws be damned!

Bush returned to the White House on Wednesday, two days early from a monthlong Texas vacation, to oversee relief efforts. Bush dismissed criticism that he didn’t return sooner as political sniping

Yeah it was probably just democrats trying to make him look bad, not that he needs any help.

“I hope people don’t play politics at this time of a natural disaster the likes of which this country has never seen,” he said.

Respectfully, Mr. Bush, that would be Way more believable had you not just done it yourself. With you avoiding it altogether for the week that it was coming, not caring for the first several days, then only coming home when you saw that it really was pretty bad…That is playing politics, mostly because you said that no one should be playing politics once you decided to come back. Everyone in the country, except you, seemed to know that it was going to be pretty catastrophic, now you dare to talk about playing politics?!!


On the return flight to the White House, Bush viewed the damage as Air Force One descended to below 3,000 feet over the hardest-hit areas, including New Orleans.
“The devastation I saw was very emotional. It is so devastating it is hard to describe it,” Bush said, adding that he observed flooded neighborhoods in New Orleans and “entire communities obliterated in Mississippi.”

So it’s all good. The leader of the country viewed it, briefly, from 3,000 feet…Many days too late…It’s all good!

Perhaps he needed to get a slightly closer look of the situation, you know, see the carnage, smell the stench of death flowing (well stagnating, as there is nowhere for the water to go) through the water… Something tells me that a 3,000 foot “fly by” didn’t really put him in mind of the actual situation. Bodies floating in a stagnant pool; people killing each other for a place on a bus out of there… It is bad. Bush actually said, on record, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.” The truth is that everyone on earth, except him, thought that the levees would break. It is not Bush’s fault that they did fail, but it is entirely his fault that it took three or four days to make a plan of action once they did.

If you truly worship a god, Mr. Bush, please ask him to give you advice and advanced warning about events that might cost thousands of people’s lives. At the very least, find a god that wants you to help those in need (you know, the ones that are actually dying as a result of a hurricane while you are on vacation).

The longer Dubya is in charge, the more people that die because of his negligence, the longer it will be before anyone who is even slightly liberal votes republican. Do you have a death toll in mind, Mr. President?