Unshelved by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum
comic strip overdue media

Sunday, December 31, 2006

Updating

Thursday I went home and had a nice visit with my mom and grandmother. It was a nice, quiet 'Christmas'. I got my mom a large basket of lotions and bath products (complete with candles and neck pillow) and my grandmother a photo album with frames on the front for pictures of her great-grandchildren and the rest of the family. For my step-father I got a gadget, a radio/flashlight that never needs batteries or bulbs that you crank to run. (Let me tell you the non-electric radio story sometime. Oh, I may as well do it now. Years ago I had a friend who insisted he'd seen a similar radio and that it was a non-electric radio, operating on kinetic energy (he told this in all earnesty to several of us, one of whom was a mechanical engineer who now works for NASA, and nothing we told him would persuade him that it was, indeed, run by electricity, but it was simply generated without an outlet or battery. This was the same guy who thought virus intelligently chose their victims (I think he was really talking about viruses evolving in response to differences in those they attacked), parallel spontaneous evolution (American Indians didn't come from Asia, they evolved here), and that he was an Indian when in fact he had some amount of relatively distant Indian blood that kept multiplying the more he researched his family tree, until his parents would each have to be at least a half Indian each. Mind you, he was a blonde, blue-eyed wannabe who went on about what the white people did to 'his' people (disregarding the fact that most of his ancestors came from Europe and were, therefore, the great evil ones). In other words, he was the kind of white guy that drive Indians bonkers, especially when they start talking about the 'rez' and have never stepped foot on a reservation and try to get government to recognise them as an Indian (and allow them to get benefits, no doubt). Poor Mike. He went off in a huff after a few too many of these interchanges when we told him he was a loon. Then he went off and named his infant son Tecumseh. Imagine being in grade school with that).

Friday I spent with friends. Saturday I worked. Today we didn't have a game but I went ahead and did the normal game preparations and worked on the notes for three hours, much better than my normal hour-a-night. Tomorrow I don't have to anywhere until about 11 so I'm going to sleep in. Then it's back to work at the hospital at my normal schedule pre-motion lab, as the girl I was subbing for will be back.

Oh, by the way, I do know that the public library called the gas station to check on my performance and such. My boss was ribbing me about finding another job. (She really doesn't want me to leave.) But it may be moot because the job is every Sunday, a few nights a week, and every fourth Saturday. I can't give up my Sundays, even for $11 an hour (yeah, I know, it's pretty low, but better than gas station pay). Sunday is the only time I get to spend with my friends. It's possible we could work it out so someone else gets 10 hours and I get 10 hours, with the other person taking Sundays. But other than some variation of that, I don't think I'll be able to take the job, assuming they offer it to me. Hopefully I'll hear from someone this week about it.

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