Regarding Cats And Sandwiches

I made myself a pair of sandwich wraps to take to work today- I’ve been making the effort over the last couple weeks to make sure I’m eating more often during the day (talk about hard!).

I finished them up, wrapped them in foil, and stuck them in my tote bag before leaving the room to grab my sweater.

When I returned, Hero was inside the bag, ripping the foil apart to get to my precious, precious lunch meat.

(Before you think that perhaps she is starving, both bowls of food are full and I had already given her a scrap of the meat so I could actually make the sandwich without her sitting on the kitchen counter looming as I shoved her off over and over and over again.  This cat loves her lunch meat to the exclusion of all else in life.)

A Food Suggestion

Next time you make taco salad, add a chopped handful of cilantro.

It’s amazing.

On A Whim

I had Borders Bucks to spend (hooray for surveys that give me free book money!), so I went to the bookstore.  As is my habit, I stopped at Half-Price Books on my way home- where I did not buy anything!

On my way out, I picked up an application.  What harm can it do, right?

Two Short (I Mean Long) Work Stories

Friday and Saturday last week were interesting.  I mean, I was suuuuuuper chipper at work (for reasons I couldn’t quite figure out- maybe the 2000 iu’s of D3 I’ve been taking every night for the past month have finally kicked in?), but I had a few of the strangest happenstances…

On Friday, I was accosted by a customer who had a very legitimate complaint: his White Castle burgers (bleh bleh bleh) hadn’t been heated all the way through.  I apologized profusely, and said it would be under a minute to cook him new ones.  It turned out that his had been made from the box o’ frozen burgers, so I opened up the thawed box and made him new ones, handing them over in the promised under a minute and apologizing once again.

This should have been the end of it, except that he then followed it up with:
“Well, I would like to get a free large popcorn for my inconvenience.”

I hesitated for just a moment before replying, still chipper, “I can absolutely get you several of our complimentary bags of popcorn!”

He scowled, and began to glower ominously at me, “I want a free large popcorn, because this was terrible customer service.”

I began to worry, but said, “I’m very sorry about your burgers, but as the large popcorn tubs are inventoried, we aren’t allowed to give them out.  I can give you four bags, which is the equivalent size.”

“I can’t believe that management would allow this to happen!” he began to raise his voice near to shouting, “My food was COLD and I had to WAIT to get it fixed!”

“Well, I can go find a manager and check if we can make an exception this one time.  It will likely take several minutes, if you’re willing to wait?”

All I got was a sneer and a snarled, “You DO that.”

So I found a manager and explained… only to be told that no way were we giving him a large popcorn, and he could take the comp bags or suffer.  I was also told to go tell him that myself.  I was taken aback.  I’d said the guy was mad, and I was getting sent back to tell him no and get the brunt of his rage?  Not happening.  The guy was more than twice my size and his veins had been bulging grossly out of his forehead.  I told the manager that, with all due respect, I would very much prefer that he- the large, male, former Marine- go talk to Angry Man.

And because the manager didn’t want to deal with the guy, I got told instead to just give him the popcorn.  I was more than a little pissed.  And the moment I told the customer that he was going to get his way, he turned sweet as pie.  Which totally screams scammer to me.  Then he told me that he shouldn’t be eating popcorn with the butter and salt he had me put on it because he had a heart attack last month.  Then he sat in the lobby with his son for a good half an hour before going into his movie.  He wasn’t even missing his movie to get his issue resolved.  Jerk.

*     *     *

Then on Saturday (after I’d had a horrible leg cramp of DOOM during the night, which caused me a great deal of pain all day Saturday and annoying pain on Sunday), there was an incident with a particularly dumb co-worker.

Every night we inventory the entire vending stand.  Every single thing is counted, and any discrepancies have to be accounted for before people leave.  It’s straightforward enough- Count Everything.

One of the newish girls wanted to do counts, and since I was a midday, and the girl assured me that she’d done them before and done decently well, I let her.  Then she spent the next two hours asking me questions.  When do I count that? (when you’re done restocking)  Do I really have to restock first?  (yes, else you’ll run out of things and your counts will be off)  Where is this?  (right where the label on the shelf says it is- if it’s empty, fill it)  I was beginning to worry, and then an hour before I was scheduled to be off, the vend manager came to me and expressed worry over counts, because the girl doing them had told the manager that she thought that they were going to off, and wanted to know if she really had to stay and fix them if they were.

So, I offered to go double check what she’d done before I left, because I am a goddess of inventory (I blame all the years at Borders).  The first page of two was correct, but only because we were totally out of everything on the page and she didn’t have to count anything (in the stock rooms- they were still in the stand).  The second page… had errors on almost half the items.  And not small errors- the numbers were off in ranges of 20-2500.  It looked like she’d just made things up.  It was awful.

Needless to say, we took them away from her, gave them to another girl, and the first girl will not be allowed to do counts again until she’s intensely trained- probably by me.

Really- off by over two thousand?  How does one count that poorly?

A Thought…

Perhaps the reason I am so very very chipper today is because I dreamt of bookstores and ginger kittens and baby hedgehogs last night?

This Is How Much I Love Woodman’s

I went to Woodman’s on my way home from work tonight, adding a half-hour round trip to my journey home. That may sound like a lot, but consider…

I bought:
2 bags of tortilla chips
1 quart of salsa
2 pounds of chicken breasts
a bunch of fresh cilantro
a pound of tomatoes
8 avocados
a gallon of whole milk
a loaf of bread
and 4 packets of koolaid mix (hey, I had a craving and I haven’t had koolaid in yeeeeears)

for twenty dollars.

Yeah.  At Pick n Save, the avocados alone would have been fourteen bucks.

Mankato

Out of the goodness of their hearts, my brother and parents are letting us use the spare car until we figure out what to do about my Oz. The problem was that this spare car was with my brother at his college in Mankato, MN. So… yesterday right after church I headed north with my mom and youngest brother to pick up a car from six and a half hours away.

It wasn’t until we were halfway to Madison that my mom pointed out a vital piece of information that I’d forgotten: Mankato is where the Betsy-Tacy books are set. I’ve loved these book since I was rather young, and I think it was Coral’s fault I read them in the first place (a lot of things I was introduced to as a kid were her fault). And despite this being Paul’s sophomore year of college, I’d never been to Mankato.

Despite the snow, we took a look at Deep Valley from the window of Bethany’s library…

We also saw the houses themselves.

And I climbed over a huge pile of snow in order to get to the bench where the girls would sit during the summers.  I was giggling with so much girlish glee that I’m surprised my face didn’t crack from smiling in the bitter cold and snow.

Someday, when Simon and I have little girls of our own, I want to take them to the places where my favorite childhood books were set.  I’ve been to Chincoteague, the Little House in the Big Woods, and Mankato.  I think I’m left with Prince Edward Island- so far as reasonable requests go…

Hokay. Breathing.

Last night, at 1am on our way home from gaming, the car died.  My car died.  My pretty little trustworthy Oz rattled horribly and died on the side of the interstate.

It took over two and half hours before we got her towed to the dealership and home.

I cried the whole time.

I love this car.  Almost seven years ago I bought her with my own money that I’d saved up.  I’ve been the one paying for her insurance, her upkeep.  I’ve decorated her with stickers, buttons, stuffed animals.  A little fairy named Aerie lives in the front seat.  Oz has treated me remarkably well.  She’s survived numerous Wisconsin winters.  I know every quirk she has.

She’s thirteen years old, and has 266,000 miles on her odometer.  Other than regular maintenance, all I’ve had to do for her is replace the ignition cylinder a few months back.

The dealership called us now, and there was a crack in the engine… the oil just poured out, apparently, and drained the engine bone-dry.  We need a new engine.  Or a new car.  Whichever is cheaper.

If she’d lasted five more months, it wouldn’t have been an issue.  In five months, Matt would have a job, I could quit mine, and we could get by on one car until we’d saved up money for a new one.  Right now, one car is an impossibility.  We just need to be in two very different places at the same time too often.

I know it’s silly to be upset over a car.  I haven’t cried this much since June last year.  I feel dumb to think that the reason I have a splitting headache and feel like I’ve been punched repeatedly in the face is over my car.

But she’s my car, and I don’t want a different one.  I want my Oz.

Young Adult Books You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of

Today, I’m joining other bloggers to tell the world about a few Young Adult books that you may never have heard of. This has been organized by Kelly of YAnnabe, whose post for today can be found here. A few of these are some of my favorite books ever, but some are simply books I’ve enjoyed. To make this easier (for me and my book-sorting brain), I’ll arrange the list alphabetically by author.

The Secret Country
by Pamela Dean
If you know Pamela Dean’s work at all, it’s usually because of her novel Tam Lin, which is my absolute favorite book in the entire world (and let’s be honest- most people who read my blog have heard me rhapsodize on my utter adoration of Tam Lin on many an occasion).  Through that, however, I became acquainted with her Secret Country trilogy, a lighter fantastic romp through a not-quite-imaginary land with five not-quite-magical children.  What would you do if your game of make-believe turned out to be quite real and in need of your help?  If your answer is quote great literature and use your knowledge of fantasy to help you impersonate a person you spent nine years “making up…” then you’ll quite enjoy this series.

Dingo
by Charles deLint
Charles deLint is one of the few authors whose books I will buy strictly because he wrote them and thus they must be mine.  Before reading one of his Newford books, I hadn’t realized that this amazing genre of Urban Fantasy existed, let alone that it could be as lyrical as a fairy tale.  In Dingo, one of his more recent books set in the Canadian city of Newford, a boy meets a girl and her dog, and another boy meets another girl and her dog… there is magic in those connections, and while it becomes obvious fairly early on that the book can only go one way, the journey is still a satisfying one.

Waifs and Strays
by Charles deLint
A collection of various short stories from the different worlds that the author writes in- Bordertown, Newford, and a few others.  Sometimes the magic is obvious- sometimes it’s in the subtle connection between friends… but the magic is always there.  I love the way that the stories transport me from our solid reality into a more fluid dream- just the way a fantasy should.

The Silenced
by Jim Devita
Dystopian literature was never an addiction of mine (that would be more my friend Coral’s area of expertise), but I picked up this book anyway, based strictly on the fact that it was written by one of my favorite actors from a local theater company I adore.  The story, like most of its genre, is a fairly straightforward one- the oppressed begin to learn who they are and to rise against the totalitarian regime- but was inspired by The White Rose, a German resistance group formed against the Nazis during 1942.  The knowledge of that inspiration made the whole book more interesting to me.  In addition, the characters were well-formed, and the story is paced well, leading you to the (rather predictable) ending while maintaining suspense.

Cybele’s Secret
by Juliet Marillier
This author’s prose is lush, like silks and sandalwood, and she uses it well to describe the Ottoman Empire in which this adventure takes place.  There is a search for an ancient artifact, subtle negotiations, kidnappings, and romance.  Although the plot can feel rushed at times, the sheer joy with which the author uses language entirely makes up for the parts that are lacking.  Her dialogue is witty without being too shallow, and I cannot stress enough how well she paints pictures with her words.  (Can you tell I love love love this author?)

Mara, Daughter of the Nile
by Eloise Jarvis McGraw
Thutmose and Hatshepsut are vying for the throne of Egypt, and Mara- a slave girl- is caught up in the machinations of the nobility and their followers.  Her gift with languages very nearly wins her freedom until she’s swept into being a double agent.  She can’t tell anyone without her life being in danger- so who will she choose?  And will she even be given the chance to make that choice herself?  This book has everything I love- romance, adventure, court intrigue… I’m on my second, very battered copy, of the book, as I find myself re-reading it at least once a year.  At least.

The Sherwood Ring
by Elizabeth Marie Pope
Ghosts, spies, cyphers, underhanded dealings, Tories, Patriots, and a bit of romance tossed in for good measure.  It’s a bit fluffy, but well-written, and another one of my favorites.  Really, who can object to a charming young redcoat named Peaceable Sherwood?

Changeling
by Delia Sherman
I am a huge sucker for fantasy, and especially the stories of changelings- the human children taken by the fairies.  This was a light and fluffy little tale about a girl who lives happily with the the fairies in New York City until she breaks a rule she’d never known existed… as always happens in fairy tales.

The Safe-Keeper’s Secret
by Sharon Shinn
The safe-keepers will never break a confidence.  It is never their choice which secrets to keep and which to tell, and so when a baby is brought to Damiana, she raises him alongside her own daughter.  There are more secrets than just that one, and Reed and Fiona must learn who they are and what they themselves need to do about it.

Calico Captive
by Elizabeth George Speare
While most people know this author best for her book The Witch of Blackbird Pond, I’ve always liked this one of hers best.  Based on the true story of English settlers captured by the Abenakis and sold to the French as prisoners of war, it is told from the perspective of Miriam, a young woman who is a little too spunky for her own good, as she learns how best to survive as both a prisoner and a foreign seamstress in Montreal.

This Is Really Too Much

Wandering the interwebs, I found this, much to my  horror:

Now, I am not a Bronte fan, but the gasp of shock was enough to scare a cat off my lap.

Imagine my appalled stare when I then found this and THIS.

Really?  Really?  They feel the need to sell classic lit to teenage girls in the guise of Twilight novels?

My literature-loving soul wants to crawl in a corner and weep for the future of humanity before dying in agony.

(Yes, I know it looks Photoshopped, but that’s just the way the cover is.  The only thing I did was paste blown-up sections of the cover together so I’d have something that wasn’t teeny-tiny…)