Someone buy me this door mat!

IP Relay

For anyone not familiar with IP Relay, it's a way that deaf people can still "talk" on the phone by IM'ing an IP Relay employee who tells me what the person's typing. Then I say something to the employee who types it to the person. It's genius. Except not. Keep in mind that there's like a 3 minute pause after everything that's said so that they can type back in forth. Here's how the one today went:

IP: This is Ron with IP Relay. Are you familiar with IP Relay?
Me: (sigh) yes.
IP: Good. I'll start talking as the person starts typing. (pause) Is this Dr. Grist's veterans office? Go ahead. (after you're done talking you have to say go ahead).
Me: Yes, go ahead.
IP: We have two cats, go ahead.
Me: (pause) Are they ok?
IP: Is that a "go ahead" or not a "go ahead"
Me: Go ahead.
IP: We have two cats with wet eyes, go ahead.
Me: Do you want to bring them in, go ahead?
IP: What's wrong with them, go ahead?
Me: It's hard to know without them coming in, go ahead.
IP: How much will it cost, go ahead.
Me: Again, it's hard to know until we know what's wrong, go ahead.
IP: What? go ahead.
Me: Bring them in, go ahead.
IP: Where? go ahead.

Twenty minutes later, I hung up. I think you get the idea.

Munchie!

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN

YOU'VE MISSED SO MUCH!

Cocoa's owner FINALLY paid like a hundred bucks towards their bill (it only took them two months). So all that they had to do now was take their crazy dog home. That was like two weeks ago, and poor Cocoa is still here. At least we never showed up on the news like he promised we would.

Erin (the other receptionist) put in her notice a couple of weeks ago, gave me just enough time to get really freaked out about being the only receptionist, and then told us she wasn't leaving after all. Thank you, Lord.

I geeked out and put up a link to my calendar (to the right) so that everyone can see that I don't do anything besides work.

Our three year anniversary is a week from yesterday! THREE YEARS! Oh yeah. Yub it, Nance.

My neighbor goes to the vet, and she figured since she found a neighbor who also works at a vet, that I would be perfect to cat-sit for her. So I'm taking care of her cats while she's gone. They're awesome. There's this really cool persian one with more fur than a few normal cats put together. It looks like it's wearing really fluffy pajamas. I'll try and get a picture of it up here. It's named Munchie.

Thanks to The GIMP for the new header. If The GIMP were a person, I would write it love letters. And it would write back. Me and Ms. Gimp would be meant for each other.

The Photoshop Effect

Josh Groban Concert

The concert was last night at the Bilo Center. It was pretty awesome. Here's the summary...

We got there at like 7:45 so the opener had been playing for about 15 minutes. She was this crazy little African woman who danced around and sung like she didn't know she had a microphone. She was belting it.

She did her thing till around 8:15 and then took off so they could set up for Groban. He finally came out sometime around 8:40, complete with a full strings section, a set of drummers, a pianist, a keyboardist, and a guitar and bassist.

He ran through just about the whole Awake album and did a few songs (like "Remember When It Rained"...Nancy's favorite) from Closer. He sounded good. Said he had a frog in his throat and we heard him squeek a couple times but that was it.

There was also this insane violinist he had with him who played like the devil and looked like she was having an angry seizure while she was doing it. She played a solo at one point and then went into "Kashmere" by Led Zepp which just about rocked my face off.

He left after about an hour and a half and came back for an enchore of some foreign song I had never heard. Then he did a second encore of "You Raise Me Up" which had Nancy bawling. Then we went home.

More pictures:

More love from The GIMP

Click to view it large.

There goes my morning.

Crappy original:
After cropping and lots of saturation:
After some selective b&w:

Walla! Crappy pictures turned into only slightly mediocre picture. Title: "On The Other Side". Thank you for The GIMP.

Some crazy daredevil human glider...

A toast to Fig Newtons.

I love Fig Newtons.


Bet you didn't know that Fig Newtons date back to 1891 didja? They're named after Newton, Massachusetts. Originally created by the Kennedy Biscuit Company, the concept was sold to soon-to-be Nabisco in 1898.

Fig Newtons are delicious. What was once only a soft, cake-like pastry filled with fig jam has spread its wings! Variety! Nabisco now blesses us with Strawberry, Cherries 'n' Cheesecake, Caramel Apple, Raspberry, and Apple Newtons, along with the classic Fig. Way to evolve, Nabisco. Way to put the "new" in "newton".

Ever since the day I was born, I have eaten at least one hundred Fig Newtons daily. A Newton a day keeps the Doctor away. What a coinky-dink that Newtons share their name with Sir Isaac Newton, who was almost as much of a genius as Joshua Josephson, the Kennedy Biscuit Company worker who created the Fig Newton. Sounds like predestination to me.

Fig Newtons will go down in history as the snacker's snack.

Don't you want one now?

Special thanks to Nabisco for sponsoring this post.

Photo Shoot with Nancy

A Boy Scout's Dream

Here's the link.

Latest Vet Story

This one's purty nasty...just to warn you.

This family brings in a dog last Saturday who hadn't been eating or drinking for a few days. Eventually we found out there was a blockage and then the dog started vomiting so we went into surgery at closing time on Monday. I stuck around pretty much to watch but also to tell the owners how it went.

So Doc opens him up and finds all this nasty intestinal tract that's black and rotten like it has been blocked for a while. She had to cut out like 3 feet of it to get all the bad stuff out of there. Then Kayla opened up the removed intestines to see what was in there...turns out it was this big pair of women's underwear. The owner thought it was funny that the dog liked to eat underwear. I'm not even going to ask. BUT I will say that when Kayla pulled it out, it was literally THE WORST smell I can ever remember smelling.

And after all that (we didn't get out till almost 9:00 PM), Erin came in the next morning and...(drumroll) he hadn't made it through the night. Poor little guy.

Please people...underwear is to food as shoestring is to parachute. I have drawn a picture to illustrate.


See what I mean?

Post-It Notes really are useful.

Past Week.

Nothing too interesting to report. Still haven't heard from Cocoa's owner. Nancy had the week off school but she's going back tomorrow :(. I saw Winter Passing last night and I loved it. I'm such a sucker for depressing movies and music for some reason. Weird, cause I'm always in a good mood. Everybody check out Josh Montgomery, cause he's a pretty awesome singer-songwriter who lives in Greenville and he's only my age. Supposedly a really nice guy too. Nancy knows him. So he deserves a plug. He's also the guy from whom I stole the video with the cute little black kid.

I was just thinking about my freshman year English class. Professor Rogers told us to write an essay about a cultural group who was defined by their food (because it was a whole class of writing about food). Lots of people wrote about Japanese with sushi or Italian with pasta. I wrote about Cannibals. I felt like an idiot after I realized what everyone else was doing, but by then it was too late. Cannibals were really the only cultural group I could think of. But are cannibals even a cultural group? Do they have some underground cannibalistic culture with cannibal music and cannibal clothes and everything? Turns out, some South American tribes really are cannibal tribes with their own little cannibalistic society. And they really are defined by their cannibalism. I figured I was a genius. I got a C-. What the crap right?

Anyways, goodnight.

100th Post

This little blog of mine has made it to 100 posts. Have a cupcake to celebrate.

NANCY GOT PURPLE HAIR

Well the whole thing's not purple. She got this hardcore "asymmetrical bob" with a few pretty intense red streaks and one big awesome purple streak in the front. It's so hardcore. It's like indie rock and awesome hairdresser at the same time. I'll post a picture when I get a decent one.

Is this true?

The stone-age whale hunters who kill with their bare hands

The Office - What's Updog?

Don't you want this guy as a lawyer?

Holy crap.

Light Graffiti

"Using LED glowsticks, flashlights, even fireworks, combined with time-lapse photography, light graffiti artists create a unique tagging that wraps around objects dimensionally, allowing them to tag in a way they’d never be able to with spraypaint."

 

Check out lots of them.

Hahahahaha

While we're talking about bad assignments...

My Political Science professor asked us to reflect on working for the Greenville Literacy Association as it relates to current political events. I started writing directly out of my butthole, having no idea what I was talking about. What came out was really intense and angry and had absolutely NOTHING to do with what I really feel. But I got a good grade. And it's funny to read now. (I cut out the intro because that's boring).

It was quite a reality check to see the private lives behind the public immigration policy dispute. It seems that historically America’s story has been told from the viewpoint of the powerful, while the viewpoint of the oppressed is kept secret. The vicious Christopher Columbus has his own holiday though he coldheartedly exploited Native Americans and eventually led them into genocide. Lincoln is praised for ending slavery when in reality, the post-civil war blacks were little more than slaves. Now, political leaders throughout wealthy American neighborhoods are leading the immigration policy fight while the people that it really affects don’t have a voice. One might find that it is humbling to consider history and current events through the eyes of the unfortunate. Most importantly, I think most people would realize that they would do the same thing that the oppressed are being forced to do. Specifically, illegal immigrants are widely hated by Americans. I would argue this is out of ignorance. Meeting with some immigrants shows me that I would be doing the same thing that the are. A couple GLA students that I talked to are here to make money to send home. One moved here with his family in hopes that they could all find jobs to support each other. It is important for us to realize that they are out of other options.

I understand the argument that many immigrants are here illegally. However, like Crossing Arizona mentioned, dealing with the results of the problem never does anything for the problem. We are trying to control the flow of immigrants coming into the country while not paying attention to why they are coming in. They are forced to come illegally because the legal immigration system is so backed up. There are horror stories about it taking decades to obtain the legal right to enter America. Until the government focuses on improving this system, the problem will continue. What we are doing now is like trying to heal a brain injury by stopping the nosebleed.

Through a pure democracy is probably illogical, it seems to me that any other “democracy” is not one at all. I have always understood it to mean one person one vote, and the idea of electing people to make decisions for us literally takes away our control of the decisions. America gives less than a tenth of one percent towards aid for underdeveloped countries, and many still feel like we’ve done all that we can do and it’s time for us to stop trying to help so much. In my opinion, the fact that the average American is overweight while most of the world goes to sleep hungry means that we have a responsibility towards the less fortunate. In no way have we done all that we can do. Survival of the fittest isn’t human nature; it’s completely inhumane. This imbalance of power between rich and poor nations makes me wonder how we can be so selfish that we are able to turn a cold shoulder. We, as a nation, are striving towards human progress, but we can’t agree on what progress means. If our nation is getting stronger, wealthier, and more powerful while simultaneously stepping all over the poor nations that need our help, is that really progress? Was the Native American genocide that led to the westernization of America really progress? Is out of sight really out of mind?

Not for me.

The Worst Poem You'll Ever Read

I'm incredibly bored right now, but too lazy to get up and do something about it, so this is what you get. This past term, I took a Human Resource Management Class where the professor made us write these stupid poems about whatever we were learning about. Here's what I came up with. Feel free to laugh....I cracked up as I wrote it.

A Tale of Discrimination
Mike Crittenden

I should have known it too good to be true,
For a person of color to live the dream.
My skin may be darker but my morals stark white,
And now my resentment as dark as the night.

“I’ve got it,” I said, “the contacts, look here.”
The history, the skills, tenfold that of him.

But his work doesn’t matter as much as his skin.
My patience for injustice wearing so thin.

Paleness isn’t a BFOQ.
Hail this lawsuit as proof to you
That ’64 and ’72 aren’t that far past,
’91 and Title VII give proof of that.

The EEOC versus you…seem unfair?
Makes you the minority. Now do you care?
They set you up, FEP’s knock you down.
Scuffing your spurs and cracking your crown.

Don’t expect pity, because you see
They’re stealing back that which you stole from me.

Check out this kitten.

Funniest little Scottish Fold ever.