AnonymousCoworker

Last night the happy hour was a blast. I think we probably raised a decent amount of money (I haven’t checked anyone’s blogs yet, so I don’t know if there’s a total) and I know I had an awesome time. (insert obligatory post-happy hour post here with obligatory link-orgy) Ha ha! It was so funny!

Anyway, last night people were bugging mokie to create a blog because of his oft-times HI-larious comments. He deferred, and said he may post on my site from time to time if I needed him to. This morning I needed him to.

I fell asleep at about 1:30am while watching Mythbusters, but only after consuming a 12oz jar of HOT! salsa and about half a bag of potato chips. ACWF woke me up and I went to bed. I less woke up than became aware of my ability to maintain consciousness when ACWF was getting ready for work at around 7am. I was planning on sleeping in, heading to the DMV, and then going to work.

I had realized my ID was gone the day before, and was planning on going to the DMV during lunch today. But my boss called last night while I was heading to the happy hour and told me I needed to meet with an important client during lunch. I thought I was going to have to wake up early on Saturday to get my ID until I hatched upon a plan to go to the DMV before going to work.

I called my boss in the morning, and she said it was fine if I went to the DMV before I came into work. She just reminded me that she needed 2 proposals by noon.

Shit. I had forgotten about the proposals, so I figured I’d write them at the DMV, type them when I got into the office, and the head straight out to my meeting. But this would leave no time to post for you wonderful souls! What to do? I called mokie (as he was taking a crap as he so delightfully informed me) and asked him to post. After a few minutes navigating the terrifically difficult world of checking his email to affirm his invitation to post on my blog, he was good to go. I dashed out the door to the DMV.

I opened my portfolio at the DMV and fired off the proposals in no time, so I decided to pay some bills I had in my bag as well. I was digging around for a stamp when I saw something out of the corner of my eye. It was a tiny little face staring at me. A familiar face. My face. MY ID!

I was nestled away in the business card pocket of my portfolio from earlier in the week when I went to meet with that crazy company. I had forgotten that I had put it there.

ID now back in my wallet I darted from the hellhole that is the DMV and sped into work. I finished typing the proposals with enough time for my boss to go over them with me and congratulate me on working so hard on them. I had to leave my office for the lunch meeting before she had time to issue any more accolades.

The lunch meeting was a disaster in itself, but not a funny one, so I’ll spare you.

Now I’m T-minus 10 minutes from my next meeting, and then hopefully I’ll be home free for the day. Fingers crossed, bitches.

Can anyone recommend a good photographer for my wedding? The internets have been helpful, but I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed with all the options. A personal recommendation from someone, at this point, would be fabulous.

Is it your first day using the internet?

All your base are belong to us

While I’m at it, I should also bring these to your attention:

The Star Wars Kid

More Cowbell

Numa numa

Dancing Baby

Hampsterdance

Homestar Runner

God kills a kitten

Real Ultimate Power

Please. If you’re going to use the internet, do it responsibly.

(What did I miss?)

The other day my grandmother went to the hospital to have a pacemaker put in. Apparently she had some kind of heart trouble and needed the pacemaker. I’m still not exactly sure what was wrong, or what happened (my family doesn’t communicate well), but she’s doing okay now.

My grandmother has been having memory problems that resemble Alzheimer’s Disease for the past few years, and while it was once quite fun to sit and talk to her, it’s now become awkward.

When I talk to her now, I feel like I should treat her as a normal person. When I do that, she seems like a normal person for a few minutes, and then she gets confused again. It makes me feel like I’m being naive.

When I acknowledge her disease, it makes me feel like I’m ignoring the person, my grandmother, that made my childhood alternately wonderful and frustrating.

I don’t know what to do. When I talk to her like my old grandmother I get disappointed, and when I talk to her like someone who has Alzheimer’s, I feel like I’m betraying her.

When we were growing up, my grandmother loved to make my brothers and me do Math problems. The newspaper would publish a Math problem for its readers, and she would give it to us to do. We had only a vague knowledge of what multiplication might mean as we struggled with addition and subtraction. We had no idea what division was. We knew fractions only as how to divide food three ways.

She’d bear down on us to, “Just think about it! Think! Look at the numbers and think about it!” until we were reduced to tears. It’s not like we wanted to watch television instead, we just wanted to go outside and play.

The problems were unrelenting. She was always giving us problems that were years ahead of our ability. She was giving us Algebra problems when we only knew basic arithmatic, Trigonometry problems when we only knew basic Algebra, Calculus problems when I was failing Trigonometry. For some reason she just thought it was a matter of “getting it” and not a matter of her square peg of Math being pounded into my round hole of Writing.

Once I was in college, and had finished the one and only math class I would take there, I knew I was free of her restraints. She couldn’t impose Math on me anymore. I’d make her give me the Jumble instead. The jumble always frustrated her. She could never get the final answer to the riddle if she even managed to make it though all the other words she had to unscramble first. I didn’t even gloat the first time I finished the jumble without even writing anything down before she had solved the first word. I think she just acknowledged that the jumble was my realm, and that math was her realam, and those paths would never cross again.

My grandmother wasn’t all discipline and education though. She also loved to feed us. We’d show up at her house and wander in the front door and head straight back to the kitchen. She’d toast us up some bread to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but she’d butter the bread first. That’s not how my mom made them, but they were delicious even if the idea of butter on my PB&J repulsed my delicate 7 year old stomach.

She’d serve the sandwich to us with a glass of skim milk, always cold, always skim, and we’d sit with our backs to the wall on the long bench that always trapped a child in the middle, munching on our sandwiches and listening to my parents talk to my grandparents. As we grew older, the sandwich selection grew as well. Suddenly we were offered turkey on rye with mustard; ham on white with mayo, lettuce, and tomato; or, as always, the peanut butter and jelly on buttered toast.

One Thanksgiving we were all sitting around talking, the whole family was, in a rare occurence, gathered in two adjoining rooms. Aunts, and uncles, and cousins, and parents, and grandparents, and children, and grandchildren were all happily settling into a post-feast food-coma as my brothers and I were settling into some after dinner drinks. My cousin Ryan, who was about 3 at the time, was being a spaz, and his parents couldn’t get him to settle down. At one point he ran from one room to the other and crashed into my legs, leaving a wake of adults in his path who had tried to tell him to stop, but had instead clamped up and pulled their empty hands in toward their chests once he made it past them. The room was nearly silent as I looked down at him and said, “You’d better behave or Grandmom is going to make you do math problems.”

The room exploded. Apparently we weren’t the only three who had to endure my grandmother’s request to solve math problems, we were just the most recent to be able to look back on the situation fondly and laugh.

Yesterday my company paid a visit to another company in the area that we’ve been collaborating with for some time. It was sort of an informal get together.

They’re a technology and research company, and they’re working on some pretty cool biometric stuff right now. For example, they have an iris reader that has an algorithm that measures the way an eyeball, retina, and iris typically move, so you couldn’t just hold up a picture of an iris, or tear out someone’s eyeball and use that.

They also have a fingerprint scanner and geometric hand scanner that measures blood pressure and pulse rate in order to ensure you’re not using someone else’s stolen appendage.

They even have a program that scans your face while you’re at the computer so if you get up from your computer it immediately locks the computer until the camera can see your face again. They even spent 10 grand to get a mock-up made of one of the designer’s faces in silicone. This thing was freaky. It looked just like him. However, when he held it up in front of the scanner, it wouldn’t recognize him. Though he admitted that even if a mask, or full 3D model didn’t work, a decapitated head probably would.

They were really obsessed with people not being able to chop you up and use your body parts to do stuff all over town.

The only thing that was scary was the Big Brother nature of all of it. They could sell their technology to a bank, and a bank could collect an image of your iris for their new “secure” ATM, and they’d do it in exchange for a football phone. So now you’ve got your football phone, but you’ve voluntarily participated in the creation of a registry system that could be purchased by, um, let’s say, the government. And the government can use it however they want to since you voluntarily participated. They could cross reference your iris scan with the smack you talked on your blog in November 2004 and list you as a potential flight threat. All because you wanted that football phone you selfish bastard.

At the end of the day we had chicken wings and cake, though. So it’s all good.