BeMused

I think I managed to finally catch up on my sleep this weekend. The past two weeks I haven’t been able to sleep worth crap. I’d wake up in the middle of the night with a million drink recipes going through my head.

Yes, you heard me right, drink recipes.

I just completed a two-week course at a Bartending school in the area. I decided I wanted a part-time job (I could use the money) and when thinking over what I wanted to do, the obvious came first: webpage building, computer repair, etc. After mulling it over a bit, I decided that I a) wanted to do something that’d give me a bit of cash each night so I didn’t have to hit the ATM on a twice-weekly basis and b) would be something where I actually interacted with people, rather than a computer monitor. I figured I could deliver pizzas, or wait tables, but neither of those struck my fancy. As a friend just completed the bartending course, I decided to do the same.

I now have close to a hundred drinks memorized, and can make 12 requested drinks in 5:45. (to pass I had to be able to make 12 in 7 minutes). I am TAM Certified (Techniques of Alcohol Management) and am “qualified” to be a bartender.

Now I just have to find a part-time bartending job. There might be some tough competition out there: after all, it seems the most sought-after bartenders (at least in this area) have boobs.

As a quick follow up to a recent post, the test results on my dad’s tumor came back and it’s negative. Not cancer. Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers. They were really apprecaited. Now I can (hopefully) return to only stressing out about one thing at a time.

*whew*

In between classes, working on my Harleyroads website, catching up with Battlestar Galactica, and life in general, I managed to get a piece of flash fiction I wrote for class accepted for publication at Pedestal Magazine. Granted, my teacher for my creative writing classes is the editor, but he said, and I quote:

even if I didn’t already know you I would definitely accept this story for Pedestal on the strength of its construction

I even get paid for the submission. Being a piece of flash fiction, it’s a very short piece, but I think more importantly than being paid is that someone thinks enough of a story I’ve written that it’s worth publishing so other people can see it.

That in itself is worth it in my opinion.

I’ve been starting to work a lot on my Harley site, changing everything over to Expression Engine. When the time comes (and I have enough pocket change saved up), I’ll be spending the $150 for the full version, complete with forums. While I do like WordPress, I really love how tightly integrated everything is in EE, including a photo gallery (which I can’t wait to play with), a Wiki, and the forums. It’ll be nice to just tag everything wherever I want it in EE.

While optimizing my site to work with EE, I noticed something between Firefox, and Internet Explorer 7. It would see that IE7 is rendering fonts in a much nicer fashion than Firefox is, which is odd. Check out the example:

The top is IE7, while underneath is Firefox (1.5.0.6). I don’t know if what IE7 is doing is right, but it looks better in my opinion. It’s just a simple Verdana font, very common and on something like 90% of the computers. I wanted a sans-serif font, but something with a little class that was available.

So, who knows. I might play with some different fonts to see if I can get it to look more similar between the two browsers. Naturally, here on my mac, it looks peachy.

Sorry I haven’t written in awhile…seems to be a lot going on lately.

Friday last, my son came into the house around 5:30 and said, “What’s with all the cop cars out front?” Naturally this piqued my attention, so I wandered outside to check it out. There were five cop cars, an ambulance, a fire-engine and the County Bomb Squad.

Yup. A bomb-disposing-remote-robot-carrying bomb truck on my street.

Turns out a neighbor was driving through town when a package attached to a parachute floated out of the sky and landed on her car. She grabbed it, put it in her car and then drove home with it and put it in the garage. When her husband got home, he walked in the garage, said, “What’s that smell?”, discovered it was the package, dragged it outside and called the cops. Who in turn called more cops. Who then called the bomb squad.

After 3 hours or so of inspecting the package, they ended up dragging it to the middle of the road and blowing it up. I’m assuming there was no body parts or chemicals or anything else in there that might spread about after having been blown up. Hoping at least.

Just Weird. Yes, with a capital W.

Elsewhere in my world, as you may or may have not heard, AOL, the company I work for, is pretty much going free (if you have a broadband connection). Where once our subscribers had to pay $25 bucks a month, it’s now free. This has been a crazy few weeks, at least in my department, getting web registration paths lined up, etc. And we had a ton of new registrations yesterday, so that sounds positive. The not-so-positive part is the planned reduction of 1 Billion in overhead costs.

You know what that means. Layoffs. And a heap of them from the sounds of it.

So, not only have we been crazy busy (which I hope bodes well for my department), but we’ve been stressed about losing our jobs. Fun stuff.

And to add to my stress, my dad went into the hospital yesterday to have a softball-sized tumor removed from his pancreas. He was in surgery for over 11 hours. They sent the tumor off to have it tested and see if it’s cancerous. Here’s to hoping it’s not.

So yeah, it’s been a week. Thanks for letting me rant.