over and over

Oh god, how I love the nerds.

+447024039835.

If you're googling this number, chances are you were contacted by the same scammer who just tried to extract funds from me, claiming to be a friend of mine stranded in London alone after a mugging.

Yes, it's a scam. Ask your friend for details verifying his/her identity.

And to the scammers - you're in hell. Why don't you quit playing the small games and stand up and be human? Life is better than this.

Yellow Air Taxi

I'm sitting in Fort Lauderdale international airport, and I'm beside myself with fatigue. After Yellow Air Taxi changed our flight time at the last minute from 7:50 a.m. to 5:45 a.m., we cancelled our hotel reservations and spent a horrible night propped up on the terribly uncomfortable bench chairs here (the kind with the integral arms, so you can't lie down on them - what are, we, bums?) because our inbound flight arrived at midnight, and international check-in would have been at 3:45 a.m., thus erasing any of the benefit of getting a hotel room. We found out at 5:30 a.m. that Yellow Air Taxi had bumped us back to the flight we were originally on.

Now, I've travelled so much in my life that I'm fairly bulletproof, but this is just too much. I'm so exhausted I'm seeing double, and there's no give left in the system. Yellow Air Taxi joins British Airways on my shit list. BA double-charged me for changing my flights after my father died, and I've been cursing their name ever since. Yellow Air Taxi is just greedy and incompetent. There are other ways to get to the Bahamas, if I really have to go. I won't be flying them again.

making what you need from what you have

Forgive me, but I'm not sure about this sentiment...

It works for MacGyver, but how universal is it, really?

catastrophizing

...well, this IS post #666, after all...

Kvatch got me thinking about the Tierra del Fuego/gnawing on knuckles remark I made. It's an old meme, from the beginning of my marriage to my husband (incidentally the most patient, loving, incredible man on the face of the earth, no offense to the rest of you guys). I'd been having some trouble with my state of employment at the time - we were living in Cache Valley, Utah, and the general rule there seems to be that if you're not (a) LDS or (b) a graduate of Utah State or (c) related to local families or (d) all of the above, you're S-O-L when it comes to finding meaningful employment.

It was dire. At one point while driving to a job that paid me just about enough to cover the cost of gas to get there, I started to have this wonderful fantasy: what if I just kept going past the turnoff? The highway would run into the interstate on the other side of the pass, and I could just keep going south. I could zip through Salt Lake City and Las Vegas, and eventually pass over the border with Mexico. But why stop there? I could just keep driving my little Nissan truck, down through Central America and out into South America. I could see myself having all sorts of adventures - stuck in jungle mud, fending off bandits with a .22 rifle and a machete - but the question remained: what was my goal?

If it was only to keep traveling south, I'd eventually run out of land somewhere in the Tierra del Fuego. Presuming I still didn't want to go back north and face my shitty job, I'd be stuck there. I've never been to the Tierra del Fuego, but my impressions from reading books is that it's wind-whipped and desolate, with many cliffs and shingle beaches, and that the main forms of wildlife are cetaceans and pinnipeds.

Presuming I could find enough food to live, my fantasy ended up with me, prematurely aged into a mad old crone, living in a hut made of whalebone and sealhide in the shelter of some eldritch cliff, cooking thin gruel over a fire fed with dung and gorse. While this kind of life might be a triumph of melancholic poesy, I'm pretty sure I'd be fucking miserable.

So I sucked it up, faced the music, and resigned from my job.

I have other, more entertaining and fulfilling things to do with my time than gnaw on my own knuckles these days :)

knuckles

Kvatch said: I will eagerly watch this space for the progression of your obsession, but if you really do start talking about 'gnawing your own knuckles', I'm outta here!

Nah...not so much ;)

I did break my toe last week though - does that count?

Phil

There was a time during the late 80s and early 90s that I had an evolving hypothesis with my friend Shaye. We both asserted that no matter what the time was, day or night, you could find Phil Collins somewhere on the FM dial within two minutes of turning the radio on.

We were never proven wrong.

freefall

A little over a year ago I stopped blogging regularly. This coincided with my entry into the life insurance biz.

Guys, I'm leaving.

I didn't get thrashed out by the economy, nor by the grinding misery of building a book of business from the foundations up - I swear I'm a victim of self-help books.

When you're new in a sales position and you're unhappy with cold-calling, people tend to loan you books with helpful titles like "Get In The Game" and "Your Unique Ability" and "The Psychology of Sales Call Reluctance."

Oddly enough, after digesting a few of these, it appears that I have a passion in life, and it's not life insurance. It's LED art. It will not leave me alone. I am singlemindedly dedicated to creating lit sculptures with light-emitting diodes.

This could not happen at a worse time economically. The global financial system is all broke up; who knows when it'll pull out of the tailspin...if I had any sense at all I'd be curling up with a good cold-call list and lining my little egg-nest with as much eiderdown as I could pluck from others. But no...

I'm woken up at 4am - regularly - by inspirations visited upon me by whichever minor god governs blinky lights and optical fiber. I simply can't walk away.

Will I make it? Will I end up six figures in debt by this time next year with nothing to show for it? Will I end up running away to Tierra Del Fuego to live in a hut made of whalebone on some desolate beach where I can gnaw on my own knuckles and talk to my invisible companions in peace? Watch this space.