It just gets better and better.

Not only do I get a massive promotion and a raise, and I get to have a decent manager that I can respect and learn from, but my current "boss" is getting demoted!

She seems to think that she has grounds for a discrimination lawsuit, but that's just laughable. If anything, she's been getting preferential treatment because nobody wants to offend her or make her cry by telling her she needs to do a better job.

Now that she's forced to learn my job, they're finding out just how little she does and how little she's capable of. They are reducing her position to that of a second AP specialist. They are also going to redistribute the work load so that it is more even between the two positions, which is going to either force her to learn something, or quit, or be fired.

I can't wait to see how this plays out. Am I just mean, or is it justified to want to see someone made miserable when they get their comeuppance?

Color me pleased with myself.

I have a new job! I have a new job! I have a new job! I have a new job! I have a new job! (Insert happy dance here.)

I am moving from an Accounts Payable Specialist job to a Senior Accountant job. I knew an education would pay off sooner or later. And I don't even have the degree yet!

Boy, if I felt overwhelmed before, I'm in for it now...

So, have you finished reading "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" yet?

Let me just say this. I am not going to kill myself like that one guy did(n't) when he found out who killed whom.

That's all I'm saying... at the moment.

Oh, and this.

AAAAAAAUGH!!! THAT BASTARD!

That's all.

African Grey Parrots

Some birds can do a pretty reasonable job of imitation, but this one is one of the best I've seen.

Alex is still the best.

I've moved into the 21st century!

No more dialup! Woo hoo! I downloaded both of the text books for my next class in less than 2 minutes! I have broadband! I have broadband! I have broadband!

Now I must celebrate by downloading things I could never download before. I have many software updates on my agenda.

And some mp3s are out there with my name on them...

I'd just be the frogman of your life.

I am having a really slow day at work, so thankfully a friend sent me a link to a great website that has misheard lyrics on it, such as the following gem from Elton John's song "Your Song."

Misheard Lyrics:
You've got a real hairy body
And a great big s******
You may have a wide pimpled butt
But it turns me on.

Correct Lyrics:
And you can tell everybody
That this is your song
It may be quite simple but
Now that it's gone.

I've been amusing myself off and on all day with this. I have to keep lying about what I'm laughing at.

You, too, can be a victim if you only try hard enough!

My "supervisor" came in today, absolutely breathless to tell her co-workers about the latest tragedy in her life.

Just for clarity, I must add that she has no tragedy in her life. She's only happy when she has something to complain about. It is all about her family's problems. Her nearly blind dying mother. Her crackhead son. Her Omarosa-like sister in a marriage of money. Her promiscuous artist sister. Her sex-addicted son that likes abuse from women. Her crackhead son's dirt-stupid drugged-up girlfriend. Her crackhead son's latest illegitimate child and the abuse she suffers at the hands of her parents. Take your pick. I only feel free to mention these people's personal problems because the "supervisor" broadcasts them around the office with impunity, so no harm done.

So this is her latest tragedy. Apparently there was nothing happening on the family front, so she had to find another way to portray herself as a victim. She was on the way home from work yesterday and there was a fatality traffic accident that kept her from getting to her hair appointment. So sad.

Fatality traffic accident. Hair appointment.

You know, even in my head, I can't keep the sneer out of my voice when I re-read that.

And so he says to me, you got legs, baby, you're everywhere…you're all over the place! Yeah!

I’m wondering if it is just my imagination that I keep ending up dealing with smelly or otherwise tremendously annoying people on the train. Almost every day, I end up in a booth with one of them. I get to the train fairly early so that I can relax and read and get a good seat. Almost every day, one of them sits in my booth instead of, say, one of the 12 empty booths near me. I seem to have some kind of freak magnetism.

Yesterday I had a fat, smelly, sweaty, coughing, eating guy with headphones turned up loud enough for everyone. He was huffing from the four stairs he had to climb to get on the train, so I had to listen to him breathing for 40 minutes from 6 feet away over the noise of the train. Even worse, his breathing sounded like snoring, but I know he was awake. Every three and a half minutes he would cough – one loud, sharp cough that actually hurt my ears. He ate something that left greasy fingerprints all over the table and crumbs on his messily unshaven face. (Men, if you insist on maintaining the stubble look, keep it neat.) He kept picking up his backpack, rummaging through it, taking out a water bottle, drinking, then putting it away, and then doing it again. He must have done this eight times instead of just leaving the bottle out where he could get it.

This isn’t the first time, either. I seem to get one or two a week, especially on the evening train. I figure that if they can afford the $4.00 trip, they should be able to afford to shower and wash their clothes regularly enough to be inoffensive. There’s a guy on the morning train that never changes his clothes. You can smell him before you see him. He always gets to sit alone. I wonder if that is the intention…

Then there's the total psycho. He sits in one of the end booths with his back to everyone and if anyone coughs or sneezes, he turns around and glares at them repeatedly. After a few times, he starts making comments like, "Knock it off, you're just doing that for attention." He sits and plays with his little beeping watch the whole time, which is really annoying, and he has it set so that the alarm goes off just before the Kent stop. He's always clutching a bag or breifcase-like-thingie to his chest. His glasses are huge and thick and come down to his cheekbones. He reminds me of the Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs at Midnight!

When I am on the train, I do not make any noise, I do not touch anyone, I do not make anyone smell me. I try to be invisible just out of courtesy to others. I know they don’t want to be bothered with me any more than I want to be bothered with them. Are some people so desperate for contact with others that they will annoy strangers just to draw attention to them?

And speaking of drawing the attention of strangers, here I am with a blog… Hello, pot? This is the kettle. You’re black!

The need for speed.

You can't tell, but I'm doing a happy dance.

I'm getting broadband this week! Broadband! Broadband! Broadband! Excuse me while I squeal like a little girl.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!

My basic excuse for this extravagant expenditure is that I need it for school. It is painful to download 12mb annual reports with a 56K modem. It makes me cry when I have to download 100 newsgroup messages. I want to shoot myself in the head when I take online proficiency tests that I have to do over when my ISP boots me out just as I submit my final answers. I may be able to cut down my homework/school time by 8 hours a week with faster downloads/uploads.

And then there's the streaming capabilities... but that would be playtime. I have no time for that... No, really! Playtime is for non-undergraduate students. I wish I was a non-undergraduate student... There are so many things I would be able to do if I had time that I don't even know the possibilities. I could probably play Doom online, and stream music and videos, and shop on eBay...

Did I say that out loud?

But, hey, yeah, I'm thrilled that I can now get at my schoolwork in a minimum of time. That'll rock. Nothing makes life quite worth living like blazing fast downloads of college textbooks.

Life is full of surprises.

My sister is kind of the geanealogist of the family. This is a big shock to me, simply because I pictured her becoming something more like a groupie for AC/DC than a committed family historian. Anyway, in her searches, she has found that we are related to some very interesting people. One of our 7th great grandfathers was Sir Thomas Forster X. It gets more interesting from there, but I won't bore you with further details. Unfortunately, this won't do me any good, but it does give me a giggle to think of the histories of my ancestors.

I think I'll plant a white rose bush in my back yard...

I thought it was just me!

I constantly find myself behind drivers who are startled and baffled by virtually everything they encounter, as though they've never been outdoors before. They'll see, for example, a tree, and immediately they hit their brakes, as if they expect the tree to leap into the middle of the road. They also brake for mailboxes, buildings and their own rearview mirrors. But above all, they brake for the most disturbing and mysterious of all earthly phenomena, a green traffic light, which causes them to come to a virtual standstill, paralyzed, until the light turns yellow and then red, at which point they accelerate to 275 mph and shoot through the intersection, leaving me stuck at the light, shouting until spittle covers the dashboard.
-- from “Winning the big butt games” by Dave Barry (Column was originally published on Aug. 28, 1994)

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

They got Ralph Fiennes and Miranda Richardson for the next movie! Woo hoo!

Hello, Dalai!

Hey, its the Dalai Lama's 70th birthday!

You've got to check out the picture of the Tibetan Bagpipers... I am not making this up.

London

Maybe I'm stupid or naïve or ignorant, but it seems to me that people who bomb innocent commuters are not doing anything to further their own causes. All they do is make everyone hate them. Maybe that's what they want. Nothing else makes sense. Do they really think that anyone is going to have any sympathy for their cause after doing something like this? Why can't they just be civilized beings? Are we going to read the news reports about harmless little old English ladies with flowered hats splashed across the Underground and say to ourselves, "Gosh, I think we may be misunderstanding these poor gentlemen so profoundly that they feel the need to kill random, innocent citizens. Let's do whatever they want us to do"? As some wise person once said: puh-leeze. I think not. I'm guessing that the guilty parties are in for a world of hurt if they get caught. They certainly have it coming to them.

The reaping of the hay field.

My property finally looks like a lawn again! On Monday, my neighbor Dan stopped by with a brush cutter to brutalize my back yard into submission. Once that was finished, I whipped out my weed whacker and my newly repaired lawn mower and finished it off. My neighbors no longer glare in contempt as they pass my house. Now the trick is to maintain it while still getting everything else done. I have no idea how I'm going to manage that.

Mt. Mystery from Upper Royal Basin 

Mt. Deception from Upper Royal Basin 

Mt. Clark (on left) and the Needles from Upper Royal Basin  

Royal Lake 

I survived the hike!

Woo hoo! Royal Basin is all that I remembered and more.

I started out early from home and drove to the trailhead in the pouring rain. Since it was raining so very hard, I decided that I would get to the trailhead and wait until noon to see if it would clear up. It actually stopped raining before I got there, and it never started again. On the drive, I saw a racoon, two cats, a raven, 17 deer, and a grouse, in that order. It was an omen of what was to come.

I hiked up to Royal Lake. It is about 5 miles and 2600 feet of elevation gain from the parking lot to the lake. The trail starts out gently, small rolling hills through forest and an empire of moss. Eventually the trail conditions get rougher and the trail itself gets steeper each time it starts uphill. Luckily, the trail grade is not consistent, and you get lots of breaks on flat trail before continuing upward. Last year I could have handled more of an incline, but this is only the second hike I've done since last August, and it is the first overnighter. That's a heavy pack to throw on when you're out of shape!

The lower meadows are gorgeous. I love the wildflowers, the views of the peaks surrounding the basin, and the ice-milk blue stream that runs through it. They've put good footbridges over all of the larger creeks. It used to be more difficult to cross them. I got to the lake at noon and set up camp. Before I even had my tent up (and it takes about 5 minutes), I had a deer in camp begging for food. I had intermittent visits the whole time I was there.

After eating lunch (lasagne!), I headed up to the upper basin. The trail from the lake passes through the meadows in which the ranger station is located, past Shelter Rock, then up for a while to another huge alpine meadow. The avalanche lilies have taken over this part of the trail. I've never seen so many in one place! After crossing a stream coming down from Mt. Deception (you can see a huge waterfall off to your left at this point), you start up a trail that is pretty steep and narrow along what looks like a recent landslide. It may have happened years ago, but it has the look of a fresh one. It is all lose scree, and the footing is a little tricky - especially on the way down.

Since the weather wasn't great, the pictures were just OK. It was cold and overcast. The upper basin is at 5600 feet, so low clouds up there are at about eye-level. I hung out in the basin for a while, eating my victory snack (a Snickers bar) and watching a party of four descending the glacier next to Mt. Deception. I also saw a group of five descending Mt. Clark. I stayed in my safe little haven of the upper basin next to the big tarn that looks like an underlit opal. I watched the marmots for a while. There is an abundance of marmots up there! After I got cold, I headed back down to camp.

Once I got back to the lake, I walked the trail around the lake and took pictures. I then went back to camp and ate dinner (Chili Mac with beans!) and had a victory drink (Vodka!). I stashed my bear vault and organized camp. It was time to relax! I sat by the lake and dangled my feet over the little cliff for a while, reading my book (Holy Blood, Holy Grail) and watching some guy fishing. It was getting pretty cold at this point, so I headed into my tent with my book.

I woke up only a few times. Once, I heard someone come into my camp and stand there for about 30 seconds, then leave. I know it was a person because of the stomping footfall and the swishing of the pants with each step. Another time, I heard something kick some rocks as it walked past my tent. That one was probably a deer. I hauled the required 2-1/2 pound bear vault up for protection from deer? I woke at about 2 a.m. to find the temperature was about 35 outside, but it was about 55 in the tent. I didn't realize how much breathing and body heat could warm up a tent!

When I woke up at 6 a.m., it was about 59 degrees in the tent and it was very bright. I stuck my head out to find a crystal clear blue sky. I got up and ate breakfast (scrambled eggs and bacon!) and headed back up to the upper basin. More deer, more marmots, more flowers, no people! I got there just in time to see the first jets of the day marring the sky with contrails. As soon as one contrail dissipated, another would cross the sky. I had to be quick with the camera to get pictures that didn't have little white lines all over the background. I did get some nice pictures, though! I'll post a link when I can.

I headed back to camp. On the way, I spoke with two other hikers who mentioned a weather system that was coming in that they didn't want to get caught in. I didn't want to get caught in it either. I broke camp and headed out. It turns out that it never happened, but I needed to get home to do some work anyway.

All in all, it was an excellent weekend hike.

Since this was my first camping trip of the year, my legs took quite a pounding. It took me almost as long to get back to my car as it took me to hike in, and I was already stiffening up by the time I got out of the parking lot. I've been hobbling around this morning as though I crossed the country barefoot! But hey, I did it, and the weather was perfect, and that is all I really wanted anyway.

Ask Adventure Woman!

I have apparently become the resident hiking advice person in my office. I've had three people tell me to tell them where to go this weekend.

You can probably imagine where I'd like to tell them to go, but I give them a list of hikes instead.

So if you're in the area and you don't know where to go, read this list and make up your own mind.

Only 10 hours and 22 minutes until I wake up and start preparing to leave! Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Local hero

One of our guys that was dragged off a year ago returned to the office today from a 10-month stay in Iraq. He has no physical scars and no obvioius emotional scars. Woo hoo!

They were here first.

There are those people who don't like bears. I have a lot of words to describe those people, and none of them are very nice. I particularly don't like the idea that they believe bears are a nuisance to be removed from the population. The fact is that we are infringing on their territory more every year. They have nowhere to go, and their food sources are waning. They don't like us because we know that we will hurt them if given the opportunity, but they still show up where they are not welcome. For instance, in mid-June there was a black bear captured near a local elementary school using 20 dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts as bait. It is all fine and good that they feel they must protect the children (spare me that rationale, please - we could stand to lose a few), but poisoning this poor animal with refined white sugar and flour in order to capture it and relocate it seems more of a publicity stunt than anything.

Do not believe for a second that I am not willing to poison myself with refined white sugar and flour. Oh, yes, I will do that in a heartbeat. I do it every time I have the option. I would fall into a trap set with Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Fatty fatty fat fat!

However, you just don't do that to the animals. That's just cruel. How's that bear going to get doughnuts where they relocate her? What's she going to do to satisfy her carb cravings, eat fruit? Can you imagine?

And to those rich people who build their houses up in the mountains and then complain about the bears getting in their hot tubs and clogging the filters with their hair, I have only this to say. "Dude, you bought a house in the wilderness. You can afford a locking hot tub cover. Get over it."