Black Widow?

Here's a spider I found in my dad's barn:

Crazy

It's been a crazy couple of weeks. We've gotten a new customer at work, and it's added a lot to the work load. Janelle just did payroll and she had worked one hundred hours in the last two weeks. The sad part is that the first week she only worked 30 hours.

Last week I had to pull over and clean a bird's nest out of our diesel engine that we haven't used in a while. If I had've left it in there, it would have ignited, making it an even worse day. I had cleaned out the dry, leafy branches and there was still quite a bit in there, so I reached my hand down in the crevices of the engine, only to get my hand wet. The top of the nest had been dry, but the bottom of the nest was completely glued together with the bird's waste products. It stank like hell. Then, I went into the gas station bathroom to wash up, and the faucet was broken, and it gushed water all over the front of me.

The best and worst of last week was my dad's heart attack. He was in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming when it happened. Of course, he decided to fix another ATM machine before he sought medical assistance, and he refused to be flown to Idaho Falls, so my mom drove him all the way back home. The great news was that the clot dissolved, and he didn't even need a stent; he just needed to take loads of medication for the next year.

Update

This is an update of what has been going on in my life--absolutely nothing! I'm still looking for a job, still living with my parents, and still working for my parents in the delivery business. My life looks like a lot of young people's lives right now, and, knowing that the stock market crashed on the eve of my college graduation, there's probably many people living the same life, which totally sucks.

I went shopping with my parents today, and, except for my parents, I have Christmas done. It helps that all of my grandparents are dead; I have less shopping to do. It also helps that my family draws names, and I only have to shop for one person, plus my parents.

New Favorite Food

We had a retirement party for one of my co-workers last night. He likes sushi, so we went to Blue Hashi, and I had never had sushi before. I loved it.

I'm going to be sad to see Ron leave; he was such a pleasure to work with. I'm certainly going to miss the sound of his voice saying, "Super!" or "Fantastic!" every time I gave him something extra to do.

Les Miserables

I've been reading Les Miserables and thinking about the economic crisis. It used to be that when a person was thrown in jail, they were taught a skill, usually something like brick-laying or some other type of manual labor. They would then work to pay for their food and their stay at jail. At the end of the ordeal, they came out of prison with a skill and a pocketful of cash from the "leftovers" after the state deducted their living expenses.

Now we spend an exorbitant amount of money on state prisons, and our nations are heavily in debt. Yes, I think our prisons used to be cruel and harsh, but we have over-corrected ourselves.

Won't You be My Neighbor?

Our neighbor (the one next to our business, not the one next to our house) constantly bickers about our business. He lives downhill from us, and occasionally his building gets flooded just from the way water runs downhill. But of course, this is obviously our fault because we park our vehicles by his property line (which is five feet away from his building), and the snow that collects on our vehicles is most definitely the cause of his building being flooded. We end up having to shovel the snow away from the building because it is "our fault."

Last time we did this, my dad was kind enough to help shovel the neighbor out of his mess with his Bobcat. The Bobcat slid into the building, denting the side of it. It cost the business a hefty amount of money, and, needless to say, we vowed never to help the neighbor with his snow removal again.

Recently, we had some concrete done, and we worked with the neighbor and the workers to get some concrete put up on his and our side of the property line. The workers were even kind enough to slope the concrete so water would not flood the neighbor's building.

The whole time our neighbor was outside with a measuring tape and a level, griping to the workers and us about how the slope wasn't going to work.

Fast forward to this week. Someone hit the neighbor's car, and he is hopping mad (as any normal person would be). We are investigating it on our end to see if it is one of our drivers, which is very possible. We are more than willing to admit when we make mistakes.

What I did not appreciate, however, was our neighbor's pounding the pavement with a measuring tape, measuring the height of each vehicle in sight, including the vehicles of our customers, who need high security because they are armored cars with armed guards. I also did not appreciate his taking pictures of each and every vehicle that parked on our private lot.

Sure, I would be mad, too, if someone bashed into my car and did not leave any contact information, but I would hope that I would have the maturity to understand that a company that has already admitted their mistakes with me and offered compensation for other things will certainly be capable of performing a professional investigation without my help.

So, howdy, neighbor, this blog was written just for you with one message and one message only: get a life.

Thankless Jobs

Every job is thankless. Mothers don't get the praise they deserve; soldiers are rarely thanked for fighting for our freedom; teachers go to work every day to educate people; the list goes on.

I often hear people's frustration about how thankless their own jobs are, but I rarely hear of people who thank other people. Housewives often complain that their jobs are thankless, but do they ever show how much they value motherhood with a "thank you"? Do they write notes to their mothers, thank their mothers-in-law for raising great sons, or even thank their husbands at the end of the day for working to support them?

This realization helped me to be more grateful. I need to thank the people close to me for being there for me. I need to thank television networks for showing good, uplifting programs, instead of complaining about the "corrupt media" and showing everyone my distaste.

Sure, their are distasteful things out there, and I love to write my "rants" about them. But their are some great things out there as well.