~Friday~ I got on the Wolfline bus at its second stop, again to find an early morning grocery shopper toward the front of the bus taking up two seats with her bags. I took the seat next to her, but on the other side of a partition. Unlike the shopper last Friday however, this one quickly realized how crowded the bus was going to get and put her fingers through the approximately eight plastic bags, and bunched them all up on her lap. She was a plus-sized girl, who evidently used the two family-sized bags of potato chips—each sticking out of a separate bag—to help maintain her weight. No he dih-ent.
By the time we got to her stop, there was no way she was going to be able to get to the back door in and around all the people crammed in the aisle, and as she went to stand up, she said to the driver, “I’m not going to be able to get to that back door, can I go out the front?” I’ve mentioned before that, while on the city bus you can exit either the front or back doors, on the Wolfline bus, you can only exit through the back doors.
“Yes, come on up,” the bus driver replied, and then to the people waiting to get on, “Hold on.” As she stood up her pants had pulled down her butt not far enough to show crack, but quite a valley of dark flesh. I thought of Psalm 23:4.
I had a 9:00 meeting with one of my favorite work peeps, and we worked through the design of the new Google Apps @ NC State website that we’re working on together—her from the design and coding perspective and me from the technical communication perspective.
Today was the last day to sign up for our “NC Flex Benefits” for 2010, which include:
- Health Care Flexible Spending Account (Hate the guessing game of how much to fund this account with!)
- Dental Insurance
- Dependent Day Care Flexible Spending Account [Declined]
- Vision Insurance
- Critical Illness Insurance [Declined]
- Cancer Insurance [Declined]
- Core Accidental Death and Dismemberment Insurance
- Voluntary Accidental Death and Dismemberment Insurance [Declined]
Due to rate increases in a couple of items, and having to add a vision plan (last year you got one vision exam included in the medical plan, so you didn’t need to buy the separate vision plan, but this year they’ve discontinued that), my overall monthly deductions have gone up, which of course translates into a pay cut.
At lunch time, I walked down to get a famous apple fritter from Reverie Coffee Den on “Fritter Friday,” but they were sold out of them for the day. Sallah, the proprietor, has got it going on there—those things go like hot cakes and always sell out, yet he continues to only make them on Fridays and only make a certain number of them. Keeping the supply low seems to be keeping the demand high.
From there, I walked to the State Employees Credit Union, where I cashed a $1200 check, depositing $600 into my checking account and asking for $600 “to go.” $500 of that is going over into my IBM credit union account from which I write checks. I kept a $100 of it for me, just to get myself something niiice.
Being the last working day before Halloween, the tellers were all in costumes. Well, all of them except mine. There was a princess, a female football player, and a maiden. I said to the guy helping me, who had on a dress shirt and tie, “What are you dressed as, a teller?”
“Exactly,” he said as if for the gazillionth time today.
Earlier in the work week, I bought a ticket for a spaghetti dinner fundraiser from a colleague, so that’s what I had for dinner tonight. The event was raising money for a Boy Scout troop, and it was being held at a church that is right up the street from my house.
I enjoyed a salad with some delicious Italian dressing, some lemonade, a big plate of spaghetti with meat sauce, and a disappointing piece of bread. Don’t get me wrong, the bread was good, but it wasn’t garlic bread like I was expecting. And since it wasn’t, it would have been nice to have had some butter to put on it. I ended up soaking up the remaining salad dressing at the bottom of my bowl with it. Pretty tasty.
Overall though, two thumbs up, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I certainly appreciated not having to cook tonight.
I read some of Big Machine before falling asleep for a couple of hours. I’m still ambivalent about this book. It feels like edging, which is great when masturbating, but not so much when suspending disbelief.
I am also experiencing some “noise” reading it, because of something I read on the jacket cover. There’s got to be some kind of disconnect when you read the cover and you say, “Really? Is that what’s going on in this book?”