The Other Sandy

Every time I catch up on my flist, disaster strikes to put me behind again. In this case, my cable went out. That means that I have to completely avoid my flist in order to avoid Supernatural spoilers until the technician comes on Sunday afternoon. Yeah, that's two days from now. Imagine my delight. Oh, well. I suppose this is a good time to catch up on my reading. And maybe The CW will have the new ep online by the time I get home from work tomorrow night.

Is anyone else getting their butt kicked by daylight savings time? I'm usually a little fuzzy the first two mornings after the time change, but then I adjust and it's all good. Not this year. Every time I try to go to bed, my body says 'but it's early.' And you'd think that only getting 5 hours of sleep a night would make it easier to fall asleep the next night, but really not so much. It's been a week and a half. I'm tired of being tired. Do you think anyone would notice if I just changed my clocks back again?

Remember me talking about my neighbor who makes elaborate snow sculptures in his front yard? The statue that was in progress before is done. It turned out to be Atlas. He's also knocked down the Olympic torch and replaced it with a giant great white shark swimming above some ocean bottom plants. I wish I could get pictures.

P.S. -- Thank you for the virtual balloons, just_ruth!

The songs I hate getting stuck in my head the most are the ones that I don't know all the words to. Or worse, songs that I only know about two lines of. Then instead of getting the whole song stuck on repeat in my head all day long, I end up with just those two lines repeating over and over and over again. It's crazy-making.

Of course, if you need an earworm cured, my BF will be happy to sing "It's a Small World" to you until that gets stuck in your head instead. Ask me how I know this.

This NaBlo thing is hard on days when I don't have my shows to fall back on. So, today you get another story.

When I was in high school, I worked as a property clerk for the police department. I was in charge of the bike garage, an off-site storage facility where they kept recovered bicycles. Some had just been lost; others were recovered stolen property. My job was to try to trace the owners, open the garage to the public twice a week so they could come to claim their property, and do all the paperwork for the annual auction of unclaimed bicycles. The original garage was in a horribly run-down building in gang territory with holes in the floor big enough to fall in. They finally moved me out of it when chunks of the ceiling started coming down on a regular basis.

The new garage was in a very nice, barely used municipal building down by the river, right next to one of the better residential areas of town. Basically, you took the main drag through the neighborhood, and when the road turned right, you took an easily ignored left fork onto an old brick road that went down to the river. The garage area was completely invisible from the houses due to trees and a steep hill. The building itself was a row of attached garages, of which I got to use one.

One Wednesday, I drove down to the garage to open it for public hours, only to find a huge pile of metal girders in front of it. This pile of girders was almost as tall as the building and wide enough to block three garage entrances, including mine. I called it in to dispatch, but nobody knew what it was or why it was there. I kept looking over the pile while I was waiting for a supervisor to show up and finally noticed some long red and yellow bristles in the center of the pile, which is when it dawned on me what I was looking at--the guts of a dismantled car wash.

When I got back to the police department, I told my boss about it. He called the city, and the city promised to remove the pile by public hours on Saturday. On Saturday, the pile was still there. There was apparently some sort of jurisdictional dispute about who was responsible for removing the pile. It looked like the debate was going to drag on for awhile, and I figured the city needed some incentive to get moving. That's when inspiration struck.

I decided I needed to get some poster board and make signs saying "FREE CAR WASH" with arrows leading from the main drag down to the pile of girders, where I planned to put another sign that said "FREE CAR WASH. BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED. SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED." Unfortunately, I procrastinated one day too long and the city removed the pile.

It's one of the greatest regrets of my life that I never actually pulled off that joke. Opportunities like that come along once in a lifetime and I missed it.

First and foremost? Hot chocolate. And not just any hot chocolate, but Ron & Frank's. Ron and Frank are two retirees who make up batches of gourmet hot chocolate and tea and sell them around the country at craft shows. They have the most amazing array of flavors, all of which are awesome (and almost all of which come in sugar-free versions).

I still have some chocolate mint and French vanilla left over from last year, but I only have about two mugs of milk chocolate left. The dark chocolate and chocolate raspberry are also faves. The white chocolate is really good, but a little too rich for me. I also like the chocolate coconut. Ron and Frank will be at my favorite annual craft show next week (with thermoses for free taste tests), so I need to see exactly how much of my remaining two canisters I have left and give some thought to what flavors I want this year.

Looking for my usual reviews of Supernatural, Stargate Atlantis, and Primeval? Unfortunately, I will be out of state at a work-related seminar until Sunday. My Internet access will be unpredictable at best, and I highly doubt the hotel will have The CW, Sci Fi, or BBC America. I'm recording, and I'll get my reviews up as soon as I can after I get back.

Twice a year (in spring and fall), I go to a giant craft show at the Odeum in Villa Park. When you pay your entrance fee, they give you a postcard to fill out for a drawing. The postcard also has the dates of the next show, so when the next show rolls around, they mail out the postcard to remind you.

Today, I got a postcard for the spring craft show claiming it was going to be held the last weekend of April. I thought that was odd, because I just went to the spring craft show last weekend. Then I looked closer. The postcard I got was reminding me to attend the spring craft show in April 2007.

Thanks for the reminder. I'll be there as soon as I fire up my TARDIS.