Random News Notes

Two completely disjointed things that I want to talk about, and this will be a comparatively short, for me anyway, post.

First is this news about Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who said yesterday that The Most Meaningless War Ever (tm) has been lost. The White House shot back that they thought his comments were 'disturbing'. I'm chuckling because I agree with the White House, but not in the way they mean. I find Senator Reid's remarks very disturbing because HE'S RIGHT! Did we tell President Idiot over and over and over that an escalation of troops wouldn't work? We did. Did he listen? He did not. Is it a catastrophe? Yep. Are we surprised? Nope.

Next, I was up much, much too late last night talking online about the new episode of Supernatural that aired yesterday FINALLY, after a month-long hiatus. After the episode aired and I did my traditional re-watch of the tape of it (since I miss bits of dialog, being deaf) I had on Headline News as background noise.

I glanced up from the laptop, where I was busily typing away to a cadre of other hard-core nuts, oh, I mean fangirls, to find a clip of Neil Patrick Harris on the Ellen Show at one point. He came out. First, Neil, GOOD FOR YOU, I love that the culture here in the States is becoming more and more accepting of homosexuality and that you feel comfortable enough to take that step. Next, duh, 'cause I knew that.

But the bubble-head on Headline News just had to make some dumb ass remark about "Wow, and he plays such a ladies' man on How I Met Your Mother." IT IS CALLED ACTING HONEY, EVER HEARD OF IT? You're an entertainment reporter. Yeesh. NPH is one of the good ones. I don't watch his current show, but he's been in a bunch of things that I liked, and he's good at what he does. Is it so unfathomable that a gay man could play a ladies' man? Herregud!

Speaking of TV watching, I would like to squee endlessly about last night's SN episode, but since I am a complete freak about this show, there are a few details that bugged me. (I lied, there are three things to talk about today.) For the other fangirls who check my website, because the rest of you? Are going to be real lost in about ten seconds and for most of the rest of the post....

I get really annoyed when they stray from the mytharc for a whole episode. Less than one sentence's mention of Heart, nothing at all about the YED...and a few other things about the episode that bothered me. It would take Sam 6 HOURS of watching dailies to figure out that the Latinating was for real? Have we forgotten that he was up for a full ride law school scholarship at Stanford? Law school, Latin...and the fact that BDW tutored them in this stuff from the time Sam was 6 months old on. Anyway. My point is: Continuity of the storyline!!!! Argh! Sam is supposed to be super-smart. And psychic.

Dean and the food, again. Haven't we beat that horse to a bloody, gruesome death yet? Not that I ever get tired of looking at Jensen's lips, but enough with the food already.

Metallicar was missing from this episode, and I felt its absence keenly. A late-model, bright yellow Mustang convertible did not make up for the lack of Metallicar, although it did help a little.

A thing or two that really made me laugh...Jared's non-verbals at the mention of Gilmore Girls, OMG that was funny. His facial expressions when he figures out just what Dean's been up to with Tara/Wendy, priceless. Priceless, I tell you. Dean, getting the girl, love that. Never enough of that in any of the episodes. Dean, getting dressed as he comes out of the trailer at the end of the episode and his hair's a big mess. (Resisting the urge to suggest that there should be a lot fewer layers of clothing...resisting...) I like that Dean wasn't all angst-y and tortured in this episode. I suppose I want it both ways, mytharc, which equals angst, and Dean-the-pickup-artist. That's a pretty tall order, but I expect fantastic things from the show. And when it works? It really works. The fact that they "salted & burned" in this episode, yay!!! There hasn't been near enough of that or shooting things in the face with rock salt this season. That rocked. Oh, and Dean's a total fanboy when it comes to horror movies, that, THAT is fantastically funny. The in-jokes about acting, the film and television industry were cute, too. I caught a whole bunch of them, but I'm sure I didn't see them all, having not ever really worked in TV. The ones I did pick up on were howlers. Which is why I can't wait until TWoP posts the recap, I'm sure that they'll catch a bunch more of them. TWoP's recapper for SN is hysterical.


All right, all right, enough already. Two paragraphs about politics/news, more or less, and too much ranting about my hopeless addiction. Must. Stop. Now. I'm not crazy. Really. I am a serious political blogger. I AM!!!


(Lucy, dear, if you have to tell the good people that...well, it is a little like declaring, "I'm a classy broad!" or asking how much something costs...if you have to ask, you can't afford it. If you have to TELL them that you're a serious politico....) ~.~

You Know...

that you're a hopeless addict of NPR when you continue to listen during the fund drives.
My local NPR affiliate is doing their spring fund raiser and oy. They interrupt the news, y'all! How dare they? Makes me nuts. But I continue to listen, even with all the filler they throw in during fund drives because I can't. turn. it. off.

that your sanity is slipping when you're seriously thinking about getting a tattoo.
My mother? Would kill me. My DH? Would probably not be impressed. I'm feeling like this is a further sign of my hold on sanity slipping because the last time I wanted a tat? I was 17. I told someone the other day, "I've always been precocious. Perhaps I'm doing a mid-life crisis a few years early?"

that you're getting OLD when you need your glasses on when you're on the computer; if you don't have them, you can't see the screen, so 'good idea'? Try necessary.
I need the glasses on the computer now. Sigh. I remember when my dad started to need glasses...he was 40. And it was for the newspaper, not the computer. He wears them all the time now, so I know that's coming for me. Can I just be 24 forever? Please?

that spring might actually be coming when you drive home from the gym at 8 pm and it is twilight, rather than full dark.
Initially, I was opposed to the moving of the time change. Because it just seemed stupid to me. But I forgot how much I like it when it doesn't get dark until nine or so.

that you spend way, way, way too much time on the forums when you realize that you've been posting messages for three hours without moving, but can't bring yourself to log off.
Seems like I think I'll 'miss' something if I sign off....

Random stupid thoughts with large amounts of bitching and gnashing of teeth

Things to bitch about
Have I mentioned that the CW television network is killing me by having another Supernatural hiatus until April 19th? Really, CW, you're killing me. The withdrawal may, indeed, be the death of me.

I feel fat.

My job sucks.

I miss my sisters.

I'm out of inspiration and things to post about, too lazy today to even check the news wires for ideas.

When did MTV stop playing MUSIC VIDEOS and instead start playing only really lame reality shows?

Things that are making me laugh

The entire Television Without Pity website. Reviews of TV shows that I don't even watch (and the one that I do) make me laugh out loud when remembered at inappropriate moments. And not that I need another forum to be addicted to, but the forum on that site rocks too.

The tulips I planted last fall are sprouting. I have not the slightest green thumb, killing any plant under my care quickly and easily. But bulbs? Bulbs are the easiest thing going. Put them in the ground, and if the goddam deer don't eat the bulbs, in the spring you have pretty, pretty flowers.

A commercial for a vibrating razor. WTF, dude? Why would you want your razor to be a vibrator or your vibrator to be a razor? I'm confused.

On Rude Behavior

I was on the treadmill at the gym, trying hard to keep distracted, when I came across an article in Details magazine about being a gentleman. Now, most of the 'Lad Mag' genre is icky, and articles about how to jazz up your pickup game don't do much for me, but this one got me to thinking about rude behavior that I encounter on a daily basis, and some that I participate in, embarrassingly enough.

The article in question can be found here, but be warned the site froze my laptop for no apparent reason.

The author talks about the lost art of being a gentleman, about knowing how to order a bottle of wine, how to turn off your cel phone, keep your pants on, and tellingly, "let the ladies go first". I'm all for most of that behavior...as the author rightly points out, dudeus americanus is an idiot who needs to clean up his act.

As I read this, the woman on the treadmill next to me got a telephone call. Her screechy conversation was about her daughter's troubles with attendance at school and how she was apparently in danger of being booted off of danceline as a result. It was annoying.

Normally, I am at the gym every morning when the doors open at 05.30. Yes, 5:30 AM. Until very recently, I thought the gym was pretty busy at that hour. This week, with the return to my sleeping pill prescription, I've had a more difficult time getting out of bed, and so have been dragging myself to the gym after work. I hate missing that early morning workout, because the gym is not only NOT crowded at all at that hour, contrary to my impression, but the people there at 05.30 are much more civilized.

Earlier this week, the man on the treadmill next to me was sweating so profusely that I was getting rained on. I can't even tell you how grossed out I was by that. I couldn't move to another treadmill because there wasn't one to spare. There were people waiting, like swarming sharks, for a treadmill to open up, so I stayed with Mr. Raindrop.

Another day, and this is petty and really obnoxious of me, the guy next to me kept coughing, and it irritated me so much that I kept turning up my iPod to block it out. And then I got a phone call of my own.

About 99.99% of the time, I don't even have the phone with me at the gym, nor do I take my work-mandated pager into the gym. If they can't be without me for an hour a day, well, the whole world is then totally fucked and I can't do anything to fix it. So the pager, phone, PDA and other gadgetry are usually in the car, or at home while I'm running. But I had called a friend on the way to the gym and requested a call back as soon as she got the message, so I took the phone into the gym.

I don't know if I've blogged before about my hearing loss, so bear with me while I explain that I am very hard of hearing, having destroyed it in my teens by clubbing, concert-going, and listening to my Walkman much too loudly back in the days before iPods. I have about a 40% hearing loss in my left ear, and about a 15% in my right ear. If you're not facing me, I can't hear you. If you whisper, I can't hear you unless you're whispering directly into my right ear. Yeah, I know how smart this makes me when I continue to listen to the iPod and turn it up too. Anyway, I told you all that so that you understand why the ring tone on my mobile phone is set to the "deafening" setting. 'Cause I can't hear it otherwise.

Back to the gym, where I'm running along on the treadmill, and the annoying older fella next to me is hacking, hacking, hacking and I'm turning the iPod up, and up, and up to tune him out. So loudly that I don't hear my phone ring, rather I see it vibrating and the lights flashing. I answer it, and have about a 20 minute loud conversation with my friend about cute gay boys that she's met, the actor that I think is cute, the fan forums, the hot guy who walked into the gym in front of me, my hormone levels, her lover, so, in short, sex.

When I hung up the phone, I resumed running (I had slowed to a brisk walk to be able to talk) turned the iPod back up, and stopped myself from belting out the chorus to Saliva's "Click...Click...BOOM". I try really hard to not sing out loud when I have the iPod on, but is is tough. (Great song to run to, BTW.)

It was a day or so later that I read the Details article, and the screechy woman next to me regaled her friend with her screechy opinion about her daughter's spot on danceline. Again, I was turning the iPod up, but I couldn't block her out entirely, she was too loud. I was starting to get seriously pissed off when I realized that Mr. Cough next to me earlier in the week probably hadn't appreciated Lucy's Frank Talk About Sex and Homosexuality any more than I was appreciating her diatribe. Oops.

As I continued to read the advice of Details to twentysomething guys on how to behave themselves and have some class, I was suddenly reminded of my mother's English friend, B. B was someone my mum ran around with about 20 years ago, and the first time I met her, at about 11, I was transfixed by her accent, the first one I'd ever heard in real life. B was (and probably still is) one very classy dame. I watched her every move, trying to figure out just what, exactly, made her so graceful and refined. She was never standoffish, rude, or snobby. She had the incredible gift of making everyone around her feel very comfortable.

Class is something that you either have, or you don't, and no amount of schoolin' is going to make someone like Paris Hilton classy. But class is also about a set of societal norms that we're supposed to conform to, yet another thing that tries to squeeze women into a nice tidy little box, prepared to be a doormat for the world to politely wipe its feet on, on the way to bigger and better things.

There isn't anything wrong with polite behavior. I think the world could use lots more excuse me's, please's and thank-you's, not to mention the fact that we have to now be 'told' when to turn off our mobile phones, because we can't figure that one out on our own anymore. Dude, were you born in a barn? The lack of manners, backsliding into an ever-increasing laissez-fare attitude to public behavior isn't a good thing. But a return to 1950s style societal norms isn't a great idea either.

I'm really on the fence with this one, can you tell? Years ago, I read an article in *cringe* Reader's Digest about rudeness, and the writer rather eloquently told a story about being bullied in a department store and then seeing something similar happen to her three year old niece on the playground. She wanted to rush in, protect the girl from the bully, but instead, she stood back and waited to see what the child would do. Out of the mouths of babes, y'all, because the little girl put her hands on her hips and said to the bully, "You. Are. Rude." And the boor backed up, blinked, and said, "I'm sorry."

Huh. Too bad if we did that to other adults we might get shot. Because it sounds like a great idea to me. You. Are. Rude. Pointing out the behavior just might get someone to recognize their own boorishness and stop and think for a second. In my fantasy, everyone-is-as-nice-as-me world.

This Celebrity Obsession? Has. Got. To. STOP.

So I'm chatting online with the sister who lives in NYC and she casually mentions that she's changed her view of my avatar, which is of course a picture of Jensen Ackles.

"Awwww," I responded, "Don't you like my cute actor? What did you change it to?"

"Some pic of you from xmas," she says. "I don't like looking at the little boy."

And I feel a completely irrational stab of, not anger, no, but rejection. I type a response full of teen angst that says he isn't a little boy (he is around the same age as this sister) and he's cute (this is my avatar pic on Google Chat, and helloooo, that's hot!) and blah blah blah blah, but I don't get a chance to send it because before I can, she sends me a link to Social Explorer and I'm off to geek around the maps for about an hour. A.D.D.? Me? No, why do you ask? Ooo, look, something shiny.

When I came back and read at our conversation again, I felt a little twinge of irritation at myself, and I realized that this obsession of mine has perhaps become a bit silly. I've made a few new friends online over the whole thing, and I'm really happy about that. New friends are great, and the longer you're out of University, the harder they are to come by. So that is to be treasured. I've been having a lot of fun in the CW forums, and Sunday, believe it or not, actually had a conversation about liberal vs. conservative politics with the kids in my favorite thread on the CW board. Really! I know, I was surprised too. The main forum that I've been participating in, JRA Unlimited, has some really great women on it from all over the world. One of the admins is in Brazil, other members are in England, Australia, Germany, Canada, Spain and Portugul...and besides being free to be completely ridiculous fangirls there, we talk about lots of other things.

I wonder where the line between fan and nutjob is. How close am I to treading it?

I guess I'm trying to reassure myself that I'm not crazy by all this angsty ranting, and my rationale goes something like this..."If I was nuts, I wouldn't be worried about it. Therefore, since I am worried about it, I'm not nuts."

There's a trivia game on the Anything But Ordinary board that took up a big chunk of time for me on Sunday, searching for a line from a particular episode. I watched parts of two different episodes looking for "who said that line?" and then I watched another complete episode to find a line of my own that would be hard enough for others to guess. Now that, that is silly. I'll freely admit to it. Sillier still, probably, is that I was thinking about starting a thread just like it on JRAU. So I can play the game on TWO sites, y'all.

Maybe I need a version of a 12-step program..."Hi, I'm Lucy, and I'm addicted to all things Jensen Ackles, I've been an addict for about 2 months." Oh, wait, I there's a forum for that, and I joined it. Yeah. Oy! Sigh.

Someone help me.

Please?

Soon!

Gloriously No Longer Stuck

In trying to describe the writing process, and what happens in my head, I'm totally lost on how to explain how I got unstuck. I was stuck for about a week, editing, editing, editing, and staring at the screen, trying to figure out how to move forward. Then I'd jump away from that, visit the forums, and come back to it, to stare blankly again at a point in the story that just couldn't seem to move on. It was very frustrating.

The book, as I have said, is almost all that I think about. How to make it better. How to improve a scene. How to make the reader see the same thing that I'm seeing in my imagination. I've told a bunch of people that I'm writing a book, hell, I've told the whole world, potentially, here. But it isn't all that I talk about, most of the time I don't mention it unless someone else brings it up.

Yesterday, I was on the forums, as usual, with about 6 tabs open on Firefox, and I got a phone call telling me that it was time to go. I gave the book one last look and signed out of all the forums, going downstairs and getting into the car. My mother had come to pick me up, my dad and DH were working on a project at my dad's office. The office is about 15-20 minutes from my home, and as we drove, we talked about the weather and the project the guys are working on, and I was staring out the window, thinking about the book. My mother's been asking to read it, and avidly interested about what it is about; I'm not ready to share it just yet, I've told her over and over. (Sorry! Not yet, either!) Seemingly, though, out of the blue, she asked me how it was going, and I told her about being stuck, and gave her some details, for the very first time, of what it is about. I told her about how I couldn't figure out how to move from where I was to the next plot twist, and as I was telling her about it, I just got a sudden flash of inspiration that if I simply went back and re-wrote from a certain point, changing a few details, the story would move forward naturally.

When I talk about knitting, I often say that my fingers itch to work on something; that I get this urge to have the yarn in my hands. With the writing, I'm feeling something similar, that I have a NEED to get in front of a keyboard and get cracking. Perhaps this is a manifestation of my OCD, I dunno, but when we got to my dad's office, I wanted to run right to a computer to work on it immediately.

The plan, however, was to leave the office and go to dinner. But since the plan is not often what happens, the boys were still working, and my mother and I stood around for a while, waiting for them. When I could see that it wasn't going to just be a few more seconds, (They were working on a car, did I mention that? No? Well, now you know.) I pushed myself up from the bumper of my dad's truck, and I told my mother, "I need to write. Now."

And I ran up the stairs to the office portion of the building, without a further word to anyone. I got about 10 minutes of clacking happily away on the keyboard before they yelled up from the garage that they were ready to go. But I'm unstuck! And I know what to do, where to go!

The Internet is such an amazing thing. I don't know if I've mentioned before that I'm writing the book inside of Google Documents, which means that I can work on it from any computer in the world that is connected to the Internet. So I'm not limited to the desktop at home; I can work on it wirelessly on my laptop at a Starbucks, I can work on it at my dad's office. And I can share it with anyone in the world that has a Google account, when I am ready to do that. Gotta love Google.

Now, if I could only dedicate more time every day to actually working on it, it might be in a bookstore near you soon.




One other thing to share today......

Apparently, I'm not evil enough to be banned in China. I saw this on Aunty Marianne's Blog, Tomato and Basil Sandwiches, and like her, I am much disappointed by the fact that I'm not enough of a rabble-rouser to be banned. Guess I'm less of a punk anarchist than I thought. Bummer.

Brain-Dumping Day Again

So as I have designated Tuesdays as official brain-dumping day, today I'm going to write about another old job.

By "brain-dump," I mean that I'm dumping a bunch of random thoughts in my head out on to the computer screen and seeing what comes of it. Perfecting my storytelling skills, as the quote from David Mamet says above. There's a funny line in a song by Tommy Lee, of Motley Crue fame, on the "Tommyland, The Ride" album (yes, I will admit to owning that, with a slight cringe), in the song Good Times where he says "All the trash in my head, gotta throw it away". I like that line. Wish that I could, sometimes, ya know?

I dearly wish that there was such a thing as a Pensieve, as JK Rowling writes about in the Harry Potter books. Pensieves allow you to remove thoughts and ideas from your head and store them for later reflection or because you don't want to think about them. I could get rid of quite a bit of my own trash that way!

Back to the old jobs, then, I'm really not going to write about Supernatural, Jensen Ackles or Dean Winchester today, really. That is, of course, some of what stomps through my brain on a daily basis, but I'm trying to remember that I live in the real world. (Oh, go on then. You've never had a crush on a celebrity? Riiiight.) No, I'm not going to post any of the pictures I found, or links to the episode recaps on Television Without Pity, which made me howl with laughter. No. I'm not. Really. And I'm not going to bitch, at all, about the fact that the show is on a month-long hiatus. The next new episode doesn't air until March 15th. The Ides of March?!? CW television network, you're killing me. Yeah, OK, all right, I'm a liar. Here. Take note, please of the pretty.

Where was I? Ah yes, old jobs. I wrote here about working for the cash vault of a large Midwestern bank, and said that the next job I had at the bank would have to be a story for another day. I graduated from University in 1998, and the bank began making vague noises that they were going to outsource the vault's operations to an armoured carrier service, in a cost-cutting effort. My co-workers, who were really nice women, but not well educated, couldn't see the writing on the wall, and kept telling me that there was "no way that the corporation would be able to do what we do by outsourcing."

They were 1000% wrong, as it turns out, and I quietly began looking for another position within the bank that required my degree. When I had been trying to leave the first branch of the bank that I worked for, with the Evil Hag, I had applied for a job in the bank's Trust department, but I hadn't gotten it because I didn't have a degree at that time. Now I did, and so I applied again and got the job. The department had many various names, but I'm going to refer to it strictly as the Trust department because it amuses me....bank...trust....big evil corporations....hee.

I went to work for a really nice guy, who happens to be a lawyer. Cue the lawyer jokes...and I've got a ton of 'em...but he was really a nice person, and a great example of how I'd like to be as a boss. Since he's still working for the big o'l bank, and I respect the hell out of him, we'll just call him Mr. Lawyer. Mr. Lawyer and I were a department of two, working on accounts of clients who had passed away. Perhaps it is no real surprise that I ended up working in such a morbid field...I've had a lifelong fascination with the paranormal and odd occurrences, a few brushes with the occult as a young teenager, and was a bit of a hippy child/goth girl in college. My baby sis was about 13 or 14 when I went to work with Mr. Lawyer, and when she saw my business card for the first time with the word "Estates" under my title, she suggested that we add the line "We see dead people" on the card. *snerk* The bank has NO sense of humor, however, so I never suggested it.

Most of the clients that we had were really, really old folks, and it never bothered me to be working on the estate of someone who had kicked it of heart failure at 87. We had the occasional younger person, but mostly these were folks who had lived long, healthy lives, and who were very wealthy, had wanted for nothing. Their heirs were a whole 'nother story. I can't tell you how many phone calls I had from nieces, nephews, cousins, and much more distant relations wanting to know where their money was even before Aunt Edna was in the ground.

Many of the stories I have from that time are things that I certainly shouldn't be telling on teh internets, as it would be a breach of confidentiality. At least, I think it would if I was still working for ye olde evile bank, and if I gave enough detail for you to figure out who these people were/are, but since I have not worked for the big ol bank in 3 years, I don't think it is illegal. I think it would be completely unethical to give away enough detail to allow even RL friends to be able to identify them. SOOOO, I'll have to tread very carefully here.

One of my favorite heirs was the daughter of a dead guy, and best illustrates the old axiom, "The wealthy aren't strange, they're eccentric." She showed up to our first meeting after her father's death wearing a sundress, a long sleeved t-shirt under the dress; socks, and Birkenstock sandals. It was January. In Ohio. There were 3 inches of snow on the ground. And she complained about being cold. She was one of the very few who wasn't a money-grubbing brat, however, and I'm being honest when I say that she was one of my favorite heirs.

The two heirs that I disliked almost the most of all of them had to be a pair of sisters who despised one another. The estate I worked on was their mother's, their father having passed on years ago. This was one of the larger estates I worked on...and to put that into perspective, a short government/history lesson is required.

At the time I was doing this work, the bank wouldn't take on an estate unless they could get a fee of about $100,000. Now I never saw a dime of that, and neither did Mr. Lawyer. The bank sure did, though. In the state of Ohio, the fees are based on the amount of the gross estate. So the bank could charge 1% of the first $100,000 ($10,000), 3% of the next $300,000 ($30,000) and I can't even remember what the balance was. Maybe 3% on the balance of the gross estate. So the bank could charge $40,000 on $400,000 worth of assets, and if the whole estate was worth $1 mil, then the fee would be in the $90,000 range. The ones I worked on were big estates. Small estates for Mr. Lawyer and I were in the $800,000 range. Big ones were over $10 million.

These two heirs I'm going to kvetch about were the sole beneficiaries of a BIG estate. Money, money, money, honey. And they hated each other with a passion and ferocity that you rarely see except in the most bitter of divorces. They were sisters, close in age. The assets were huge, real estate, cars, stocks....and these two morons were fighting over the sheets and towels in mom's linen closet. They fought over the holiday decorations and family pictures too, but I get that. My great-aunt had most of my great-grandmother's 1950s era Christmas tree decorations, and I would have loved to have them; they went to other family members, and given the chance, I would have fought for them. Sheets and towels? Um, not so much.

One of my favorite parts of that job was going into the houses of the decedents and doing an inventory of every item in the house. Which I will freely admit is morbid and creepy. Yes, we spent time in houses were people had actually died. Mr. Lawyer and I usually did that sort of thing ourselves, and there were strict rules about staying in sight of one another at all times. Not because of superstition, but because the bank took a pretty dim view of theft on the job. When we were in the dead person's house, we would be looking specifically for tax records, bank statements, statements from investment accounts, other important papers, but also we'd be on the lookout for artwork, antique furniture, clues about other assets the person had. I liked doing that because it got us out of the office. But also I liked it because it taught me a few things about human nature, and because I'm a nosy busybody.

We almost always found cash in the freezer. And under the mattress. People think they're so clever when it comes to hiding money, but they're so predictable. Human beings are creatures of habit. Mr. Lawyer even had one where he found stacks of cash on the steel i-beams in the basement...unfortunately, that was one he did before I went to work with him, but he always checked the i-beams in every house we went into, because you never knew what you were going to find. We found cash stuffed in filing cabinets, behind old framed cross-stitch samplers, in the medicine cabinet.

I must note that we did house inventories only when there wasn't a surviving spouse or other family member who lived with the decedent. So there were never family members hovering around when we did this. It was far too distressing for a family member to witness complete strangers going through Uncle Ernie's bottom drawers. And we did. We went through every single drawer, every single shelf, in every single room. We cleaned out the refrigerator, we gathered up the mail, took care of a myriad of details. We had a checklist that ran to 17 pages full of stuff that needed done pretty quickly after someone passed away.

I worked with Mr. Lawyer for 5 years, spending almost more time with him than with my spouse. We had a really great working relationship. Get your mind out of the gutter, there was none of that. He wasn't my type, and he is the same age as my dad, so ick. He was a great example of how to treat your staff; when I made mistakes, he would say things like, "You ought to be more careful" or "Slow down and take your time." He was gentle, extremely patient, nice, generally a good guy. I think we made a good team because I'm abrasive, bitchy, and impatient. We often did the good cop/bad cop thing when we needed to on various cases, even once switching roles so that he was the bad guy. Which was really hard for him to pull off...when he gets really pissed off, he says things like, "Jiminy Christmas" and "Gosh Darn it". When *I* get really pissed off, I say things like "Kiss my ass, motherfucker."

By the time I moved on from that job, I'd had more than enough of the bank's politics, policies, and the general garbage I had to do each day. Like somehow it had become my responsibility to sort the department's mail, and don't even get me started about the department's coffee service and how it became the responsibilities of the assistants to clean up the coffee area when everyone drank it. Stuff like that just burns me up. So I left with few regrets. Just about the only one is that I don't have the opportunity to bounce ideas, thoughts, and theories off of Mr. Lawyer on a daily basis anymore; his opinions tended to be rational, reasonable, well thought out. I miss a few other co-workers as well. But I really miss my free daily copy of The Wall Street Journal...

Technology? So Rocks.

Egad, I sound like I'm 13.

I've been working on the book all day, doing laundry, watching my television show (which yes, I did buy the whole season on iTunes so now I can watch it on demand, whenever I please, cue music that indicates drooling) and randomly surfing the internet.

What did we do before the internet when we wanted to know what the population of Peoria, Illinois, is? Or what streets cross Ventura Boulevard in Los Angles? We had the library as the only source for information like that. And it would have taken hours, hours I tell you, to find some of the more obscure information that is readily available online.

I posted a message on one of the fan forums talking about trouble I was having with teh internet yesterday, and realized, after I posted, that many of the other members of the board are high school students. (Yeah. Don't tell me about my lack-of-maturity when it concerns the fan forums. I know. I know! At least I'm not spending all of my waking hours reading/writing fan fic. Not yet, anyway.) Kids who will graduate high school in 2007 were most likely born in 1990. I turned 16 in 1990....therefore, I could reasonably be a parent to most of these kids. Yikes.

I didn't have an e-mail address in high school...teh internet was something that government contractors were still playing with back then. Now I have at least 5...Lucy's, one in my real name, 2 for work, one on Juno (my very first ever...you didn't even need an isp for Juno back then, you just dialed up, downloaded your e-mail, and hung up....keee-rist, I'm old), plus the Yahoo e-mail that I use when I buy things online.....


I think about my grandfathers, both of whom are no longer with us, when I think about the strides that technology has made in my lifetime. Grandpa S, who despised computers, he would hate, hate cell phones. I can only imagine what he'd have to say about them. He often quoted the "garbage in, garbage out" theory about computers, and I can't even fathom what he would think of my cell phone (I have a Motorola Razr, which has the capability to do pictures, video, be a personal digital assistant, and make phone calls). He would be annoyed by it, mostly, I think. Especially all the ringtones that I've added to the phone.

Grandpa B, I wonder what on earth he'd think of the internet. Grandma B is still around, and she does not have a computer. I was in serious withdrawal when I went to see her last year. I talked to her about the amazing things that you can do online, but she has a busy and active social life, and claims to not have 'time' for the internet. *ponders her own life sans internet for a second...shudders....*

I had a third "grandpa", a surrogate Grandpa L, and when he was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia, he asked me to research experimental treatments for him. Which I did, online, and forwarded the most promising to his daughter's e-mail address. I remember the telephone conversation I had with him about that...he was surprised that I'd been able to do everything I had done without ever leaving the chair I was sitting in when he called me.

I am continually astonished and amazed at what can be done from your computer. And I say this often about other areas of my life...I'm excited about the possibilities, the promise of what's to come tomorrow.