My Favorite Facts About Jack Bauer

Okay, I admit it.....I'm addicted to 24. *LOL* Dave Barry is also a 24 addict, and the posts on his weblog regarding Jack Bauer are just hilarious.

This week one of the bloggers posted a link to random "facts" about Jack Bauer. Here are a few of my favorites:

1. You can lead a horse to water. Jack Bauer can make him drink.
2. If you wake up in the morning, it's because Jack Bauer spared your life.
3. Upon hearing that he was played by Kiefer Sutherland, Jack Bauer killed Sutherland. Jack Bauer gets played by no man.
4. Jack Bauer once forgot where he put his keys. He then spent the next half-hour torturing himself until he gave up the location of the keys.
5. Superman wears Jack Bauer pajamas.
6. Jack Bauer doesn't miss. If he didn't hit you it's because he was shooting at another terrorist twelve miles away.
7. Jack Bauer can get McDonald's breakfast after 10:30.
8. Killing Jack Bauer doesn't make him dead. It just makes him angry.
9. Jack Bauer has been to Mars. That's why there's no life on Mars. .....and my favorite "fact":
10. If Jack Bauer was in a room with Hitler, Stalin, and Nina Meyers, and he had a gun with 2 bullets, he'd shoot Nina twice.

I just hated Nina. *ROTF*

Monday, Monday

Sure, it's Monday, but it's better than my SUNDAY was! Fever, chills, joints that felt like they were full of ground glass, and frequent visits to the little girls' room. YUCK!

I'm a little tired today, but otherwise much, much better. It has, however, been Monday. That's okay though....in 15 minutes, I can go home. *sigh*

Yuck

I feel perfectly dreadful. I felt pretty well all during the day. Randy and I went to visit Mom & Dad this afternoon for awhile, then went to Wal-Mart to do some marketing. I started feeling bad in Wal-Mart, but thought maybe I was having a sugar drop or something.

We came home and had supper, and I kept feeling worse. I went to bed early and fell asleep watching TV. Then the idiot who lives upstairs and his equally idiotic friends woke me up about 11:00 p.m. with loud shouts, laughter and stomping around. That only lasted a half-hour or so after I woke up, but I haven't been back to sleep since.

I'm feverish, my stomach hurts, and my joints feel like they're full of broken glass. I'm not sick enough for it to be flu, but that's what the aches feel like. My hip joints hurt so much I couldn't stand to lay in bed any longer, so I decided to get up and get on the computer for a little while to see if I could take my mind off the pain.

So, now I'm going to quit whining and reminding myself how much I ache and go web surf awhile to distract myself.

I'm hoping for a better tomorrow. :-)

E-Mail Notification Program

Forgot to tell you about that e-mail notification program I use. I have several different e-mail accounts, as I'm sure most of you do. To keep up with new mail received in these multiple accounts while I'm at work, I use a terrific little e-mail retrieval and notification program called E-Prompter. It's free (they do, however, accept donations if you feel so inclined) and can be found at eprompter.com. It auto-updates itself when a new version is issued, and it's performed very well for me for a long time now. Enjoy!

A Nice Surprise

I got a lovely surprise this morning in an e-mail account I rarely use but check via a little notification program I use. (More about the program later.) It was an e-mail from one of my first cousins, Bunny. I'm sure she probably hasn't used that nickname for years, but it's hard to escape those nicknames of childhood. We'd been out of touch for a long time, and it was just wonderful to hear from her.

I don't make New Year's resolutions (too much guilt when I break them!), but if I did, one of them would be to make a better effort to keep in touch with distant family and friends. I've lost touch with so many people. We're all too "busy". I remember when letter-writing was an art. I was always terrible at it. I had the best of intentions. I bought boxes of lovely stationery, fountain pens, sealing wax and an imprint stamp so I could press a stylish "D" into the warm sealing wax once I'd sealed the envelope. Someone would write me, I'd write back, we'd exchange a few letters, then I'd get a reply and think "I'll answer that in a day or two." Then that would be that. *sigh*

When e-mail came along, I did better. I'm still not great, but I'm better. :-)

One of my tasks to do this weekend is to get my wall calendar updated and put back up on the kitchen wall where I'll see it and deal with things. I must remember to put "Keep In Touch" on it in at least 2 slots per month so I'll write friends and family.

I'd like to think that a note from me would mean as much to someone as Bunny's note to me meant.

I'm a bad, bad blogger.....

I swear, I don't INTEND to be so bad at posting on my blog, honest! It just seems that life gets ahead of me sometimes....okay....MOST times.

Holidays were good. Relatively quiet, but good. On December 24 we went to visit Randy's mom (she's in a nursing home), then went to Mom & Dad's that evening for a holiday dinner with them, Bud & Daphene, and Dallas & Sue. A good time was had by all. Too much food, as always, but fun.

On Christmas Day we went to North Carolina to see Randy's granddaughters. As usual, it was loud and wild. Sky was really keyed up; Chloe was sick and cranky because she'd been up all night and was sick with a cold. After we left there, we went by Sandy & Wilton's to visit for a bit, then came back home. It's a 3-hour drive each way and we left very, very early that morning, so I was truly glad to see the end of Christmas Day!

New Year's Eve would have slipped right past us, but a car alarm went off under my bedroom window at 11:30 p.m. So, for the first time in many years I actually saw the ball drop in Times Square! *LOL*

I was off from December 24 through January 2 and really enjoyed having the time off. I can't say I accomplished a great deal, but at least I finally got some rest.

Went back to work on January 3 and things haven't let up since. I was for Martin Luther King Day on January 16, and believe it or not I NEEDED a long weekend by then.

Well, lunch break's over, so I'd better get back to work. I'm trying not to let the mess on my desk overwhelm me, but it's beginning to bug me!

The Saga Continues

My sister called me this morning, and still doesn't have electricity, bless her heart. The Vicksburg Post reports that as of Sunday there were still 6,000 without power. This is down from 22,000 the day after the storm went through. So, things are improving; hopefully it won't be much longer.

I don't know how she can stand the heat with no air conditioning; the very thought just makes me ill.

Randy got a new job; I drove him to Shelbyville yesterday so he could go through his orientation today. They'll dispatch him Wednesday, so we didn't want his car just sitting in Shelbyville for who knows how long. It was a good day for a road trip, but 5 1/2 hours there and 5 hours back turned into a really long day. I'm a little tired today, but not nearly as bad as I thought I might be.

I hate to gripe, but.....

In light of the devastation on the Gulf coast, this seems really trivial, but gasoline prices in my neck of the woods were $2.489 for regular unleaded on Monday. When I filled up my tank on the way to work yesterday, it cost me $2.629 per gallon. When I passed the same station yesterday afternoon, it was $2.999 per gallon.

I understand that there's been a hurricane. I understand that there's no electricity to pump crude from the pipelines at the coast. But I also understand that it takes 3 months to turn that crude into the gasoline I pump into my car. So why did it take two days for gasoline prices to increase $0.51 per gallon???

There's "panic buying" in the area. Some stations are having to limit customer's purchases to 10 gallons to avoid running out of gasoline, but are still running out. What a mess.

*Whew*

My sister's family is okay. They lost power and still didn't have power when I talked to them late yesterday afternoon, but other than lots of rain and some pretty high wind they didn't see much of Katrina, thank goodness.

My sister works in a Blockbuster. Believe it or not, customers were unhappy when they had to close the store when the power went out. "What am I going to do with these kids without videos?" Sheesh. How were they going to watch videos with no ELECTRICITY??? Cripes.

Those poor people on the coast....my thoughts and prayers are with them all and their families.

Hurricane Monday

See the yellow star over on the Mississippi-Louisiana border? That's the approximate location of Vicksburg, where my sister and her family live. That swirling ugly mass of green and yellow is Hurricane Katrina, currently wreaking havoc on the Gulf Coast.

It's 9:30 a.m., and I have my AOL Instant Messenger program open on my computer at work in case Lesa tries to reach me by instant message. When I last talked to her by instant message last night, she didn't really seem worried. She talked as if she expected to lose power, since they usually lose power during even a "normal" thunderstorm, but didn't seem particularly concerned.

Am I worried? Well, SURE I am. I wish she and her kids were as far from that frightening, swirling mass of high wind and water as I am. (Her husband is a truck driver and was in Texas when I talked to her, so he seems to be out of harm's way.)

So here I am, at work, not being particularly productive because I keep drifting back over to Weather Bug and Weather.com and keeping an eye on AIM to see if she comes online.

Where's the Pot O' Gold??

Dolly Parton: "The way I see it, if you want the rainbow you gotta be willing to put up with the rain. "

We had a relatively mild thunderstorm this evening and were rewarded with a faint rainbow. It's been a rough week so far (and this is just TUESDAY) and the rainbow was a lovely end to a rotten day.

A Rotten Week....But It's Nearly Over

I've had better weeks.....

1. Rain, heat, humidity;
2. It took Randy over 42 hours to make a run that should have taken about 27 hours;
3. It appears that idiots bombed London's underground again today; and
4. Scotty beamed up for the last time yesterday. *sigh*

At least my work week's nearly over. (18 minutes, but who's counting?) Tomorrow I'm taking Meggie to see her new veterinarian. I'm switching from the vet who's taken care of her since I bought her at 5 weeks to a vet nearer home. After that, Mom & I plan to make a run to Kingsport just to knock around in a few stores. No huge shopping trip, just an opportunity to look around at our leisure. Hopefully it won't be as hot and humid as it's been so far this week.

Is This Week EVER Going To End?

It's been a long week, and this is only Wednesday.....

Randy started driving for a different company this week. We found out last week that the new company didn't provide cell phones for their drivers, and our cellular plan wasn't national. So, I went to SunCom and gave up my old, beloved UnPlan (which worked beautifully for us until he went on the road) and upgraded to a national plan. In the switch I had to upgrade our cellphones to GSM phones, so I did get a nifty new Motorola V180. Nothing fancy, really, just smaller and nicer than my old Nokia.

I haven't blogged since my furniture installers FINALLY arrived on July 1. I love my new office furniture. Anyone who walked in and hadn't seen my old stuff probably wouldn't understand why I'm so thrilled, but it's soooooooooo much better than what I had before.

Mom and Dad are in Wilkesboro, NC camping. If it looks like Randy's not going to get home before Saturday (and so far, it doesn't look like he's going to), I might run down there Friday and visit awhile. It looks like a pretty neat place.

It's a gray, humid day here. Good day for a nap, but not good for much else. Hope Meg and I can make an early night of it tonight. :-)

Waiting, waiting, waiting.....

Waiting for the installers to arrive with my modular furniture.....can't do much but wait at this point. Everything's ready for them; as soon as they complete the installation and clear out, I have a very full day of moving things back into the office, hooking up equipment, moving files, etc. *tired just thinking about it*

The fever blister is improving. It looks terrible, but feels much better, thank goodness. It's very warm and humid here today, so that doesn't help anything.

Hey, I thought I just heard a truck go through the parking lot.....*crossing fingers*

Thursday.....Finally.....

I'm temporarily ousted from my office. My old desk has been carted away to who knows (or cares) where, and I've got everything ready for the installation of my new modular furniture tomorrow. Thank goodness. I'll be glad when they've come and gone and I can get my office life back to something resembling normalcy!

I've been battling a fever blister all week; it feels better today, which means it looks terrible. *LOL* I have all intentions of going home after work and hiding from the world as much as possible. Right now I'm pretty tired from all the packing and lugging around of stuff. I wouldn't mind having a nap, truth be known. I'll be ready for the 3-day holiday weekend by the end of tomorrow, I'm sure!

I wonder if I could talk Randy into pizza tonight? *plotting yet another night of not cooking*

I think I should try to establish FlyLady routines at the office.....turn over a new leaf to go with the new furniture. Seems to me I remember seeing office routines on her website. *going to look now*

I was right....there's an Office Control Journal, and a great essay called "Control the Chaos at your Desk". It's common sense, but it sometimes helps to have common sense spelled out for me!

I was doing really well on my mission to Fly, then backslid a bit when I started working flex time (four 10-hour days) for the summer. I've made myself an amended time schedule, though, and will make a real effort to do better. I like having everything neat and decluttered.

I tore my home office apart last Sunday and still haven't finished putting it back together. I had a good start at it, then developed the fever blister Monday and have felt rotten ever since. Hopefully I'll get that finished up Saturday or Sunday. I have to get Randy's road stuff ready, but that really shouldn't take very long. (I hope.)

A Long, Long Week

I captured this glorious webcam image from Purchase Knob this morning. I'm using it for my wallpaper. I've posted it here to test the "photo posting" feature now available in Blogger. Cool.

I'm getting new office furniture....it only took 18 years, but I'm getting new office furniture! :-) That's the good news. The only downside is that my office is in total chaos because I had some modular wall-mounted work surfaces that had to be taken down and moved to my assistant's office. I had to let our maintenance guys take them down Monday because that was a good day for them to do it, and I didn't want to be any more trouble to them than absolutely necessary.

So now a lot of my things are temporarily boxed up and tucked away until the new stuff is installed on Friday. *sigh* What a mess! And maintenance will be back sometime after lunch tomorrow to take my old decrepit desk away. Can't say I'm going to miss it a bit, but that means I'll have to shut down my computer sometime late tomorrow morning and get it disassembled and out of the way. I'm not quite sure how productive I'll be tomorrow afternoon, but it can't be helped.

I'm excited about getting the furniture, but the first day of July is probably not the best time for this to have happened. We're on a July - June fiscal year, so June and July are really busy. Oh, well....it'll all work out one way or the other.

I'm battling a fever blister. It came up Monday while I was at work, and by the time I got my Zilactin-L on Monday evening it was too late. The blister was fully formed and sore as the dickens! I put Zilactin on it all day yesterday, but it didn't seem to help much. Today I brought Orasol to work with me. It won't heal the blister, but at least it'll be numb!

I had a note on my last post to tell the tale of the Lynchburg trip. There's truly not much to tell. There was a Human Resources/Payroll conference in Lynchburg, and Deb sent my new assistant, Mary, and me to it. It was a nice trip, good informative sessions, and best of all I got to put faces with names of folks I talk to on a regular basis but never get to see. The room was nice, the food was good, and the trip was a little long, but okay.

Well, I've finally received some information from the VP that I need to work on. *drudge, drudge*

FOUR MONTHS????

It's been THAT LONG since I posted? Sheesh. Let's see now, what's happened since then??

Well, I'm on a flex schedule for the summer. I'm working 10-hour days, Monday through Thursday, with Fridays off! *YAY* I love flex schedule. I'd work it year-round if they'd let me. The 10th hour gets pretty long, but I dearly love not having to come to the office on Friday.

The first Friday of my summer was spent waiting for Randy's boss (A.K.A. the Procrastinating Jerk) to call to let him know something about his truck. I vowed that would NOT happen to me again.

On my second Friday, I went to a neat little tearoom in Kingsport all by myself for lunch, then shopped a bit and visited with Mom & Dad. That was really fun.

My third Friday (last week) was spent picking up tags for my car, visiting Mom & Dad, and shopping a bit. One of the items I shopped for was a DVD burner for my PC. I just love new toys!

I've not decided yet what to do with this Friday. In fact, I'm not sure yet whether Randy will be in town or not. He's been driving a truck for the past few weeks, but has been home for the last few days. He came in from his last run early last Saturday morning and hasn't gone back out yet.

If he's in town Friday, I may have to find him a project to keep him occupied so I can go do something with MY FRIDAY. *LOL*

Memo to self: write more tomorrow and tell the tale of last week's business trip to Lynchburg.

Why Dogs are Better Than Men

First, I'll explain why this subject came to mind for today's entry. *LOL* At 5:00 a.m. today, my phone rang. Randy's mom hasn't been well at all, so my first thought when the phone rang was that something had happened. I grabbed the phone, and sure enough, it was Randy. He asked what I was doing. I said, "It's 5:00 a.m. I was sleeping. What's wrong?"

Surprised, he said, "Nothing. I thought you get up at 5:00." Grinding my teeth I replied, "No.....I get up at SIX. What do you WANT?"

You're gonna love this. Last night I sent him out the door with a bag of trash (which he'd offered to take to the dumpster for me) and a Wal-Mart bag containing a bathmat for his apartment and 3 pounds of breakfast sausage I'd fried for him and put into individual little freezer bags so he could microwave a piece or two for himself for breakfast. Some time last night he discovered that he couldn't find the bag with the sausage and the bathmat in it. So.....being the MAN that he is.....he decided to wait until time for me to get up and call me to see if I had any idea what he did with it. Unfortunately, he'd miscalculated my wake-up time by an HOUR.

As calmly as possible, I told him that all I knew was that he left the apartment with the trash bag in one hand and the Wal-Mart bag in the other. He said it wasn't in his apartment, it wasn't in his truck, and he just didn't know WHAT he could have done with it. Taking my cue, I ground my teeth some more and said, "If you threw it in the dumpster with the trash, is there any chance I could reach it?" He was sure I could, because the dumpster was nearly full; he remembered that the trash he put in was at door level.

I put on my warm robe and my winter coat over it, yanked on mittens and a hat, grabbed a flashlight and made the trek across the parking lot in SIXTEEN DEGREE weather in the dark to see if I could find a Wal-Mart bag in the dumpster. In fact, I found several. None of them, however, contained sausage and a bathmat. Back through the darkness I trekked, making a short side trip to the parking space where his truck had been the night before to see if maybe he'd left the bag by the truck.

Back in my cozy apartment, I called him and told him I didn't find the bag and that if he'd stop on his way over tonight and buy three more pounds of sausage, we'd try again. I would NOT, however, buy him another bathmat. He apologized profusely for waking me up and asking me to go out in the cold and hoped I'd be able to go back to sleep.

Yeah......right.

So, on my way to the office, I called him from my cell phone at 7:30 to ensure that he didn't get to sleep in after waking me up. Bwahahahahahaha!

Why Dogs Are Better Than Men

1. Dogs never hog the remote control, and they never change channels when you're out of the room.
2. Dogs do not care whether you shave your legs.
3. Dogs aren't threatened if you earn more than they do.
4. Dogs don't step on the imaginary brake.
5. Middle-aged dogs don't feel the need to abandon you for a younger owner.
6. You can force a dog to take a bath.
7. Dogs think you are a culinary genius.
8. Dogs understand if some of their friends cannot come inside.
9. You can train a dog.
10. Dogs don't feel threatened by your intelligence.
11. Dogs are happy with any movie you choose to rent, because they know that the important thing is that you're together.
12. Dogs never....NEVER....accidentally throw three pounds of sausage in a dumpster then ask you to go out in the dark at 5:00 a.m. to look for it!!

A Sense of Loss

When I got out of the shower this morning and went back into my bedroom to get dressed for work, I had the terrible surprise of hearing Ed McMahon tell Katie Couric how much he would miss Johnny Carson. I pretty much gave up on late night television after Johnny retired, so I can't be objective about how his successor has fared. For me, late night television WAS Johnny Carson. Since his retirement in 1992, I've watched the occasional Top Ten list on Letterman, but that's been about it. Today I feel an odd sense of loss....but I'll bet the first monologue in heaven was a doozy. :-)

Some Weeks It Just Doesn't Pay to Get Out of Bed

In most respects, it's been a perfectly dreadful week. Monday was a holiday, but I didn't get much rest. I spent the morning doing household drudgery, then cooked a big ol' lunch for Randy. After I cleaned up the kitchen, I did manage to spend some time on the couch watching a DVD with him that we'd borrowed from Mom & Dad, so that was pretty restful.

Tuesday was back to work, and it's been just horrid all week. I got the W-2's out, so that was good to have out of the way. I'm taking a half day off tomorrow to go to the neurologist with Randy. Though spending time in a doctor's office isn't my idea of a good time, at least I'll get out of the office early!

Randy's mom has really gone downhill in the past couple of weeks. Yesterday her doctor said that it's time they sought some full-time professional care for her. No one was happy about the fact that it's time to find a nursing facility. Randy said that yesterday she didn't even seem to know what was going on around her, just staring into space. I feel so badly for her.

I must have had her on my mind last night, because I didn't rest well at all. I felt badly enough when I woke up that I toyed briefly with the idea of taking a day of sick leave. But, after I'd had a long, hot bath I felt a little better, so I dragged on in. I have to admit, though, that the thoughts of going home and having another hot bath and going to bed early is sounding REALLY good.

The weather forecast is calling for an 80% chance of snow....accumulations up to a couple of inches. Maybe, just maybe, we'll get a snow day tomorrow! *crossing fingers for luck*