I love making my friend Sandi laugh. When I get around her, I always act like any facet of me, concentrated. It's usually the clown side of me, the one whose life is making others laugh, not taking life too seriously. Often, the one being made fun of is either me or other people. I tell her things that will make her laugh. I'm practically addicted to her laugh, and so I am addicted to making her laugh.

It is such a frequent occurrence, since we work in the same office for about 50 hours a week, that if the employees hadn't already known me for two years already, they may have assumed that we were gay. It seems that, according to the workers in the body shop, any strange or unusual behavior between women is grounds for homosexuality. I really think that they are not used to seeing two women genuinely enjoying each other's company. And I agree, it rarely happens. It doesn't happen enough.

Sandi inspires me to be creative; I think of all these silly things and tell them to her to get her response:

What if you could have your children's vocal chords removed until they moved out of the house? I thought of this because when I hang out at her house, her four year old son drives us both nuts.

I wish it were legal, at certain specific times, to hit other cars. I mean we spend all our lives being trained to not hit them, but we all have been sitting there, inching up at a red light, thinking about it. If bumper cars were invented for that purpose, then they need to be available more regularly.

I wonder if heckling tourists is really such a bad thing. Whenever we go to a bar in the French Quarter, we run the risk of being swarmed with people on one of those Haunted History Tours who come in for a quick drink before they walk to the next haunted house. Her and I try to behave, we really do.

Thoughts like these get at least a giggle, so I figured they're worth a giggle. I know I work to make Sandi laugh because sometimes, it's all I can do. I can't get really emotional with her when tragedy strikes her life (which has been happening frequently enough). I don't know why. I've had things happen to me, but a lot of what she goes through I have no experience with. At times, I know that this inability to break down in front of her can be taken as an indication that I don't care. I can't think of one woman that I could easily be emotional around, period.

Who are you a clown for?

Everything Day Logs
Yesterday | Tomorrow

Everything Snapshot

Time: Mon, 29 May 2000 01:04:20 GMT
Everything server: Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) mod_perl/1.21
Number of nodes: 540347 (1612 new since May 28, 2000)
Number of users: 15050 (26 new since May 28, 2000)
Number of links: 1712603 (15382 new since May 28, 2000)

Node to user ratio: 35.903 nodes per user
Link to node ratio: 3.169 links per node
Link to user ratio: 113.794 links per user

New Nodes: Users Online (28): [Deborah909] [yossarian] [ailie] [Lord Brawl] [wharfinger] [hamster bong] [icicle] [Jinmyo] [getzburg] [ShadowNode] [mat catastrophe] [Electric Mollusk] [Wyclef] [achan] [shmOOnkie pOOnks] [Ninja-Lad] [plonk plonk] [noumiso] [ithron] [binarydreams] [freeborn] [Space Butler] [fricto] [314159265] [TallicaBurton] [Ninja Pope] [0137] [greenMoNkEy]

JeffMagnus node count: 3675 (1 new since May 28, 2000)
JeffMagnus experience: 6150 (14 more since May 28, 2000)
JeffMagnus experience to node ratio: 1.673 XP per node
JeffMagnus nodeshare: 0.681%
JeffMagnus node of the day: Everything 2 Civil War

<< week | May 28, 2000 | May 29, 2000 | May 30, 2000 | week >>

Everything's Best Users Snapshot

Users                  XP wa7 inc   l_XP l_wa7
Pseudo_Intellectual 12765 161 169  12596 160
dem bones           10981  55  19  10962  61
jessicapierce       10904  61  61  10843  61
DMan                 9230 169 204   9026 163
pukesick             8624  76   5   8619  88
Saige                7778  65  20   7758  72
  ...
artfuldodger         2730   -   -      -   -
Kit Lo               2722   -   -      -   -
EBU #50              2629  58  67   2562  56 

Server time: 01:47 Mon May 29 2000 TZ +0100 still not UTC

l_ = last (previous) value; inc = increase in stats value
wa7 = ((stats + (6 * l_wa7))/7) = weighted average with denominator 7

Random Nodes

E2 is still in TZ +0100 one hour ahead of UTC, since May 26, 2000.

Nodes to node

It's Spring Bank Holiday here in the UK (I'm guessing this includes Scotland - my diary's not to hand).

Phone charges are standard weekday tarrif, however.

Oh well, unmetered access is on its way. We can but wait (and pay 1p/minute in the meantime).

Happy Memorial Day. Yet another holiday that used to have a meaning, but rather than having become the usualorgy of capitalism, is more of one huge national drunken frat party. Down in these parts that kegger usually takes place on the lake, which is many miles out of town. Drunken yuppie rednecks, SUVs, high speeds, water, heavy machinery, what a combination. Thank heavens I'm leaving...but of course I'm leaving early, which is not cool because there's so much left to pack. May not leave till near midnight, in which case we probably won't make it any further than Ft. Smith, AR before finding a motel and crashing, so I doubt there will be anything to add to Wintersweet's I-40 Road Trip. My dad is here to "help" and is driving me up the wall. Yaaargh. ... Okay, there is NO WAY that we are leaving tonight. Tomorrow morning. Maybe. Geh.

It's been a very long day. I'm exhausted. Thank goodness for Starrynight, who ICQ-chatted with me for much of the day. And for the silliness in the Chatterbox. P_I, yer pony rides rule.
Yesterday morning I went out to Coquitlam to the Beacon unitarian church to sing. It was nice. I like singing. We joined up with Beacon's choir. They didn't know how to say the hebrew words in one of the songs, and their choir leader was mildly irritating - I thought she and our alto lead were going to wrestle, or something, but it all worked out well. My boyfriend and his mom came to hear me, and to deliver blackberry jelly to someone.

I woke up at 5:30 to my cat leaping on to my chest. Oof.

After the service I went to visit with my hax0r & family. We had pancakes and sausages and strawberries for lunch. I curled up and slept on the couch, then woke up and curled up in his bed and slept, and then woke up and did a jigsaw puzzle. Ducklings in a basket, 100 pieces. Not at the height of my spatial abilities this week. I slept so much. There's a lot of turmoil at work these days - sleep and worry sleep and worry - it doesn't help, exactly, but it's there to be done.

Went to visit with my parents and have chinese food. They biked down to Point Roberts and back this weekend. They brought me a bag of penny candy from the general store we used to go to when I was little. Mmm, I'm a penny candy addict. The highlight was the Trolli gummi pizza, which looked disturbingly like some real pizza I had last week, except in scale.

Went home and slept. This morning, for all my sleeping, I'm weary as a long-broken trail.

The price file wasn't there - after twenty minutes of tinkering we got it to transmit. No crashes yet. 1500 transactions came down, and most of them posted. Yay.

In a fit of melodrama, the current sysop of the tabnet webbbs took it down. Oh well. I of all people can understand the need to take a bbs down, and even the urge to be very melodramatic about it. I always gave notice, but I never really felt like it - once you feel your board is dead, it feels cruel and painful to keep it up. You want it over with, NOW.

My partner is still on vacation. Just as well - business is slow.

The building's owner has decided to put an enormous statue of a bull in front of the building's lobby, to attract financial companies maybe? God only knows. (update on the bull: apparently the family who own the building make soap out of cows.) It's the silliest thing ever. It's life sized, anatomically accurate, painted to look like a dairy cow, and has a very placid expression. People walking by start to giggle.

23:54 EET

I've been voluntarily walking many kilometers a day for 4 days in a row. I have no idea where this came from, I just got an urge to walk last friday and have heen doing it since. After a 4.5km trip home from work I found myself not exhausted but totally energized, wanting to hit the road for more. I have no idea where this energy is coming from, with my level of fitness and all..
Hopefully this will form into a permanent habit, because I really need the exercise.

I finally "gave in" and ordered a portable minidisc recorder, Sony MZ-R90 to be exact. I had the craving for a portable music machine but a Discman didn't seem that tempting. The MP3 players don't have enough memory to store squat, and IMHO a major point of the format is to make storing lots of music in a small space possible. The models with enough memory/space are just too damn expensive, like extra memory. So, I'll go with MD.

Working has been quite nice after recharging over the weekend. My boss even liked my idea for the latest design chance (see May 26, 2000). The project is going well on schedule, so there's not much stress at the moment. I just hope the client won't be making our lives difficult any more..

Damn, I need a diversion today. Memorial Day is an emotionally mixed bag for my family as we have many friends and family members to honor. One important thing I've learned over time is that not only is it proper to pay tribute to those who have passed, but even more vital to express our love, gratitude and admiration for those who are still among the living. After all, eventually we will all be but someone else's memories. Shouldn't those recollections be fond ones?

Mejier Employee Record

Employee: Nicholas Joseph Killewald
Store number: 63
Employee number: 0630350
Hired: August, 1997 to Department 40 (Service)
Transfered: September, 1999 to Department 1 (Grocery)

As of May 29, 2000: Missing in action

...that same day...

May 29, 2000
Liberation Day

That was it. No more.

I had what I can only call a nervous breakdown at work today. I should have realized something was going to go wrong when I sat down at the blood pressure machine on my last break and watched the readout: 179 over 97. The area that can only be defined as "Dangerous".

I took this as another reason to leave. I felt that they were damn lucky I stuck around for Memorial Day. All I knew was this: I would NOT be back for Independance Day.

What happened next was completely unexpected.

Garbage time. The garbage compactor was opened early to allow me to get to it before I had to leave. (How nice) I was supposed to have someone take over the bottle return while I was getting rid of the garbage. While at the compactor, waiting for it to get unjammed, I heard the bottle return machines start to beep. "Hrm..." I thought, "the other guy should be there to get it."

Five minutes of exciting compactor-unjamming action later, someone runs up and asks, "Who's running the bottle return?" I realize that the guy is NOT there, and was forced to dart back and take care of four buzzing machines, one of which was completely stuck. My time had come, it was 7PM, time to leave.

Exhausted, I started off for the time clock.

Another machine buzzed.

Something inside me snapped.

I screamed. I ran. And ran.

I hit the timeclock and left, jittering and mumbling the whole way. Once I finally got home, I screamed and ran into my room, sobbing and gasping for breath.

End of Meijer career.

friday

meet up with some of craig's friends at a bar. drink too much. get called a ding dong by a john doe for a reason i can't recall. nearly get in fight. get whisked out of bar by boyfriend. forget the rest of the night.

saturday

wake up at 8 with a mouth full of cotton and drink a full pepsi in one gulp. go back to sleep. wake up half an hour later jittery and unable to fall back asleep from caffeine. read An Intimate History of Killing (quite a good read). take a shower at 11:30. noon-thirty: breakfast at the worlds greasiest spoon. car's dead (oops). get a battery charger from the used car dealership next door. assure them three times that i don't want to buy a car. get the car started and go find a place to get an oil change and a new battery. visit craig's mom. go to the dayspa for a haircut.

ahh! no more hungover super-ultra-mega bitch! (it's amazing what a scalp and shoulder massage will do for a person.)

meet up with craigs friends again at the theatre to see mission impossible 2. evacuate theatre halfway through (strobe lights flashing and fire alarm blaring and soft soothing woman's recorded voice giving instructions). stand in a crowd of hundreds in the street making a path for fire trucks. bumrush the theatre at the all clear. finish watching movie. recieve free passes. go to bar (i didn't drink). go home around 2am. sleeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

sunday

sleep 'til noon and go to a gunshow. drive back to my place in maryland. go to dinner with my sister and her husband. rent movies (Bringing Out the Dead -- excellent, Double Jeopardy -- fun to pick at the inconsistencies in the plot). sip wine. sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

today

wake up at ten and take an hour long bath. wake up craig. watch educational tv for a bit. drive around the countryside (the back BACK way to craig's). stop for dinner. get to craig's house. curl up in bed. watch Who Am I? (a jackie chan flick). sadly head back to my house again, leaving craig in virginia.

ta da!

Y and I looked for apartments this morning closer to where we work. It's strange. Picture a nucleus of companies in a generic-looking wasteland surrounded by expanses of houses and apartment buildings. You work, you go home. You work, you go home. It makes me nervous, and I don't think that I could stay there for too long.

We saw about three different places before noon, which made us feel ultra-productive - even more so because we pretty much made a decision on one, which has data/voice jacks in every room (and a big laundry area/server closet).

Later, we watched The Opposite of Sex, and just as we got to sleep (in the afternoon, b/c of working the midnight shift) the Census gestapo paid a visit. They rang the buzzer, twice, and just when I went to the door to see who the fuck was waking me up they went through the other door. I heard them walking upstairs so I went to the other side of the building to meet up with them. They had Census IDs, and I told them calmly that I did not appreciate being woken up only to have them go elsewhere just when I get to the door, and that this was 0300 in my reality so would they please leave me alone. So I walked back to my apartment. They were right behind me and started knocking on the door. When I opened it (not be receptive) they went on about "upholding the Constitution"...blah blah blah. Uphold this. I don't think that they've ever read the Constitution. Being thugs on Memorial Day, no less.

I don't care that if they only had three questions. I made it clear that it was the middle of the night for me. They went on to say that if we didn't comply, more people would come over and that we would be bothered more and more. I told her that she was escalating the issue by being so insistent, and she said that *I* was escalating it. They finally went away, but we were pissed.


_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

C. To whom do I report the inappropriate behavior/appearance of a census taker?

We regret that the behavior/appearance of the enumerator was not business-like and up to Census Bureau standards. This should be reported to the Assistant Manager for Field Operations, or to the Manager of the Local Census Office. You may get the telephone number for the Local Census Office from Directory Assistance or from the Census internet site at http://www.census.gov/jobs2000/www/where.html (Note to Census Bureau headquarters staff: take the initiative to go on the internet site and provide the appropriate LCO telephone number to the questioner.)

There are fines for non-response and for false response as well, though the amount has risen from the 1790's $20. Today failure to respond can result in a $100 fine; providing false answers is a more severe offense, and carries a $500 fine. Recent news reports, however, indicate that punishment for failure to respond is not usually enforced. The controlling section of the Code is 13 USC 221.

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