Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Flogging A Dead Horse

Okay, this will be my last Starbucks rant for a while. I promise, mainly because I am going to stop going there, even when the Keurig at work is broken...which is most of the time.

Oh, International District Starbucks staff...why is it so hard for you to figure out what should come naturally to you? The trains arrive at the same time each and every day give or take 5 minutes. That means at pretty much the same time every goddamn morning on every goddamn day there is going to be a goddamn rush of customers. Why do you choose these predictable and consistent rush times to send staff on break and/or to restock the one and only cream/sugar station in the store? Why don't you, oh, I don't know...make sure everything is stocked before each rush and remain fully staffed for when it is busy at the same f*cking time every morning?!?!?!? It really isn't that hard to figure out, for effs sake I put together a schedule for you in my head just sitting here...and I'm mildly retarded. Get it together, ID Starbucks!!!!

On a completely different note, I can't be trusted to make smart lunch decisions these days. I forgot to take lunch in today, so I ventured out to grab something to eat...because God forbid I miss a f*cking meal and waste away. Anycrap, the problem is that I fell off my healthy eating habit in a big way. All the weight I dropped a few weeks back has worked its way back into my life, mainly because I get sucked into eating really sh*tty food at Uwajimaya. That place blows, but it is cheap and convenient, two things that appeal to me. So, there I was this afternoon with no lunch and no motivation to go to Pike Place for a piece of fruit or Mel's for a salad. Instead, I ended up eating my body weight in rice, breaded chicken of questionable quality, and MSG laden Mongolian beef. It was a tragedy and I felt terrible afterward, so I wound up hoofing it to the waterfront to clear the crappy lunch haze from my head. And it worked, for the most part, but when I returned to work all slick with flop sweat from my walk and smelling vaguely of an Asian deep fat fryer, I was overcome with guilt and shame...shame for being so inefficient and lazy for falling into a lunch rut that is really, really bad for me. It needs to stop.

There, now I feel better for getting that off my chest...pray for me!

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

And Then There Were None

Summer seemed to make nothing more than a brief cameo this year, fall has arrived and shoved summer out on his ass. I don't mind fall, there's quite a bit to look forward to when Autumn arrives...Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas...and I do tend to get a bit Griswold about the holidays. However, I always miss summer when it departs. I've said this before, but from a completely pragmatic point of view I only have about 22 good summers left before some sort of calamitous health event takes me down or renders me (more) physically feeble than I am now...so unless there is a stunning and economically viable breakthrough in robotics or bionics in the next 20 years or so, the summer of 2033 isn't going to be all that much fun for me.

Yes, well...that was depressing.

Sooooo, yeah...I still hate the Starbucks in the International District. The remodel makes about as much sense as Chinese sign language to me. Someone from corporate store design needs to come down and gaze upon the disaster their vision has wrought. It is pure effing chaos in that place when it is only moderately busy, when crowded it's the equivalent of a marketplace in Mogadishu (Blackhawks optional) or the Renton WalMart (minus the tire fires in the parking lot). I think the only place designed more inefficiently and staffed with less motivated employees would be the Krusty Pup or scone stands at the Puyallup Fair...goddamn, it takes less time filling out first time patient paperwork at a dental clinic than it does trying to order a corn dog at the fair. I cut the fair some slack because the booths are staffed by dipshit DECA dorks, very special people, and their parents, but Starbucks earns every atom of rage I throw their way. They should know f*cking better than to try and corral everyone into the center of the store! Ugh.

Wow, so speaking of dentists, I visited an absolute loon of a dentist a couple of weeks ago. Now, I could have looked past the greasy hair, the neonish pink shirt, and the ill fitting dress trousers...dentists can be wacky that way. What I couldn't get past was when he asked to compare wallets with me, his fumbling attempts to give me a soul brother hand shake, and his borderline inappropriate comments about my skin tone. Oh, and he told me that if I decide to have my wisdom teeth pulled I would miss about three weeks of work. Yep, three weeks. Because one of the teeth is crazy sideways. He said removing that tooth would be the equivalent of a compound break of my femur. And there would be an 80% chance the right side of my face would be numb from the nerve damage from the extraction, but hey, Sly Stallone has a numb face and everything worked out for him! If I don't get the tooth pulled then I have a 1 in a 1000 chance of getting inoperable cancer from it...then he saw the horrified look on my face and changed the odds to 1 in 10,000. So I have that going for me. Anyhoo, I won't be going back to that quack anytime soon, especially since the hygienist liked to play rough. My goodness, I had never, ever experienced pain the way I did in that dentist's chair. It was blinding at times and two of my teeth still hurt from whatever it was she did to them. I won't print the dentist's name, but if you email me I'll be more than happy to give you that info so you can avoid them at all costs.

Lastly, I have picked what appears to be the end of the corn I planted. What I have picked so far was pretty good, if not a little underdeveloped. I'm not sure if I want to plant it again next year, although the girls want me to. They really enjoyed watching it grow and picking it, along with the tomatoes and peppers. If the corn had turned out better I was prepared to plow under the entire back yard and turn it into a cornfield next year...but that didn't happen. Too bad, I was looking forward to buying a brand new combine and then having John Cougar Mellenhead write a song about me when I missed a couple of payments and the auction man came to take it away....

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Begun Anew, The Rodent Wars Have

The end of summer renews my hostilities with the local field mouse population. They want a warm place to make nests and spit out their vermin brood, I'd prefer they do so elsewhere or die a snappy mouse trap death or a miserable warfarin induced slow death…the choice is theirs to make, I'm a sweetheart that way.

Anyhoo – this year I have decided to try finding where they are getting into the house and crawl space. That means donning a Tyvek suit and other protective gear plus a respirator to enter the crawl space searching for any entry points the mice may have and sealing it off. And placing a glue trap or two around it baited with D-Con. I might throw a mountain lion down there as well to scare the little bastards off.

Going into the crawl space is not my favorite thing in the world. While I don't believe the flesh eating creatures from The Descent reside down there, other things do…like maybe the hanta virus…and giant spiders…and mice. In other words, not good times.

I really wish the mice would just take a hint and take up residence somewhere else….

Don’t Let’s Start

This blog has come to another screeching halt. Part of the problem has been time, as in a lack of due to raising kids and not wanting to ignore The Better Half. The other issue has been a crippling case of self-induced writer's block. I have several posts in the hopper, but I have been hesitant to pull the trigger and getting them published. Why? Well, it's because I have been afraid of offending people. Yes, you read that correctly…I don't want to offend the tender sensibilities of Facebook friends that may visit this blog from time to time…

When I started the original Grande Pescados back on WordPress, it was surprisingly successful. I developed a decent readership and would sometimes get over 1,000 hits a day. The high points of the original Grande Pescados blog was my correspondence with Dave Wakeling of The English Beat/General Public fame and my bitchy slap fight with a Counting Crows band member. Not bad for a tatty blog that I didn't do anything to advertise. The 'new' Grande Pescados is lucky to get 5 hits a day…and that's with me posting links to the site on Facebook. This has been discouraging, to say the least.

The lack of consistent readership has been a motivation killer. I can admit to that, but the main reason no one has been reading this blog is that it hasn't been very entertaining…my writing has been stifled and self-censored, making my posts boring as hell. I've been so afraid of turning people off with my opinions and sometimes abrasive style that I have become an effing drag when it comes to writing damn near anything.

I started Grande Pescados because I wanted an outlet for my thoughts and opinions and to entertain my readers with a chuckle or two. I'm never going to make everyone happy, but in trying to do so I've made no one happy…including myself. That has to change if I am going to continue this blog, which is what I plan to do.

So, thanks again for stopping by. If any of the past or future content offends or upsets you then this isn't the blog for you. If you disagree with anything I've written or want to add to it, please leave comments. And for eff's sake, people, learn how to take a joke…okay?