Risen From the Grave

I died for a little while.
Which is why I haven't posted anything recently.
But I'm better now.
Although this odd craving for brains just won't go away.
Hmm.....
Regardless, returned I have.

I was going through some of my old pictures and I found one from the day the Brevard Zoo was having some kind of family event and they had games and activities and such.
The first activity was a face-painting booth right near the front entrance.
I saw some of the other kids' faces and they looked pretty good, so I took my little brother up to get his face painted. He said he wanted to be painted like a tiger.
I figured, "Hey, it's a zoo face-painting booth. Animals are a pretty safe choice." Right?

Wrong.

My little brother walked up, stood there for barely a minute while she painted his face, and ended up looking like this:

For those of you who aren't aware, tigers look like this:

Not only was this girl too lazy to fill in his whole face with orange, I'm pretty sure she's also never seen a tiger in her life. Any hope I had for the public school system is gone.


-Tim


There are two kinds of people in this world. Those who finish what they start and those who
-Brad Ramsey

I think I'll use this as a basic structure for The Gauntlet

I already talked to Sauron, and he's cool with helping me out.

-Tim

Steaming crotch, a letter to Bruno Mars, and The Gauntlet.

Fun fact I learned today:
People tend to look at you funny when there is steam rising from your crotch.
I was rolling silverware at work tonight. I rolled everything that was clean, so I grabbed the dirty bin and sorted it to run it through the dishwasher. When it was done, I hauled the extremely hot sorted bin over to the silverware counter. It was pretty heavy, so I braced it against my belt to make it a little easier to carry. The second I set it down, one of the other bussers asked me to go watch his side of the restaurant while he talked to the manager. I grabbed my tray and headed out into the dining room. I stopped at the first table to ask if they'd like a refill on their drinks and bread sticks.
That's when I realized they were staring at my torso with extremely confused expressions. I looked down and realized that the hot water from the sorting bin had soaked into my apron, and since the dining room is cooler than the kitchen, the cold air was making a copious amount of steam rise from the hot spot conveniently located around my belt.
I quickly asked what they were each drinking and retreated into the kitchen. I doubt I'll live this down for a while.

Dear Bruno Mars,
While I was at work this evening, your song "Grenade" began playing on the radio. I would just like to inform you that any girl that has grenades thrown at her, people trying to stab and/or shoot her, and trains attempting to hit her, is PROBABLY involved in something you don't want to be a part of. Either that or she's a champion at being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In either case, she's probably not worth the time and effort, especially since as you say she wouldn't "do the same". I would recommend finding a girl that would put your life in less jeopardy. Also, while I found your song catchy the first time I heard it, after hearing it played 5 times in 2 hours, I'm ready to throw a grenade at YOU. Fair warning.
Signed, Just Looking Out For You

Florida Power and Light (affectionately nicknamed Florida Flicker and Flash, or as I've taken to calling them Florida Fickle and Fascist) shut off my electricity yesterday. I've been living alone in my mom's house, and have the electric bill down to roughly 50 dollars a month. I've been giving my mom the 50 dollars and entrusting her to pay it.

When her dog got hit by a car* a while back, she had to use the money to pay for vet bills and ended up being 2 weeks late on the payment. They sent us a letter saying that "as a precaution against future late payments" they were charging us a 300 dollar deposit...on a 50 dollar bill. My mom refused to pay it and they've been badgering us about it ever since. They finally came through on their threats to shut off the power, and I came home to find a notice on my front door.

It was late, I was tired, and I didn't bother to do more than glance at it before I began fumbling around in the dark packing things up to come stay at my grandparents for a few days. This morning, I actually bothered to read the notice, which was pretty self-explanatory until the end. The last bullet says:

"For safety reasons, please turn your main circuit breaker or fuse box to the off position. You must ensure we have safe access to your meter (i.e., gate open, dogs and/or other animals secured, apartment complex meter room door unlocked).

Excuse me?! You charged me an extravagant deposit and shut off my power, and now you expect me to make it easy for you to fix your mistake? I think not, my good fascists. Instead, I shall devise a series of horrible, horrible obstacles unimaginatively titled "The Gauntlet", which your technician must overcome in order to have the privilege of turning my power back on. As an added incentive for you to send only your best, if they fail I shall imprison them in a pit with an electricity-sensitive lock. This lock could therefore only be opened once it had power flowing through it. So, your technicians either beat The Gauntlet or become prisoners. And maybe I'll feed them to some lions.

Your move, FPL. Your move.

-Tim

The following sentence is true.
The previous sentence is false.

*She's fine now. She's just stuck in the cone of shame for a while.

Question Quest

The title actually has no meaning. It just so happens to be the book sitting next to me right now. It's part of the Xanth series by Piers Anthony, which, if you haven't already, I highly recommend reading.
That, and the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan/Brandon Sanderson.
That series has changed my whole life.

But I digress.
(Is it a digression if you were never ON topic to begin with? I'm not sure...)

Tonight was the opening night of the reprisal of Man of La Mancha at the Cocoa Village Playhouse. The show ran last May, and it was so wildly popular our director chose to bring it back this season. We had a grand total of three rehearsals stretched over November and December to refresh our memory of what we had to do.

What.
A.
Rush.

It's hard to describe the feeling you get when the curtain rises and you see the audience sitting there waiting for you to amaze them. And without fail, after our Don Quixote de La Mancha sings "The Impossible Dream" there is a full minute of standing ovation before we can continue the show. It's an honor to work with people who have this much raw talent.

But enough about that. Let's talk about hurricane-proofing.
Now, I live in Florida. We're so used to hurricanes, they hardly even faze us anymore. But I had assumed that their destructive potential was still recognized. Apparently, I assumed wrong.
Two days ago, I walked in to Olive Garden to clock in and noticed that an entire section of the restaurant was empty. And I don't mean "slow night" empty. I mean "lacking tables" empty. Apparently a small child (Best guess: 6-7) had been playing around outside earlier and had tossed a marble-sized rock at one of our expensive hurricane-proof windows...which promptly shattered. So obviously we have two possibilities here:

1) The child is some kind of genetic mutation, or possibly a demigod, possessing the type of superhuman strength required to shatter a reinforced window with a tiny stone.

Or

2) "Hurricane-proof" just doesn't mean what it used to.

It makes me wonder what other standards have begun to slide.
"Now don't worry folks, this submarine is 100% water-proof."
"Our credit card database is completely hacker-proof."
I was going to add child-proof to that list but then I realized that standard went out the window (no pun intended) a while ago. I've seen parents hand a "child-proof" container they couldn't open to their kid, who opened it with no trouble.

So the next time someone offers you something _____-proof, you might want to ask for some proof (that pun was intended) before you buy it.

-Tim

This is my quest, to follow that star ...
No matter how hopeless, no matter how far ...
To fight for the right, without question or pause ...
To be willing to march into Hell, for a Heavenly cause ...
~Man of La Mancha

(Oh hey, look at that. My quote just kind of tied the title in nicely. Do I rock or what?)

DISCLAIMER:

I just want to let anyone who stumbles across this page know that I started this blog with nothing but good intentions. I caught myself staring blankly at my computer screen for roughly the 3,857,673rd time, and decided that I needed to have something to fall back on when I'm too lazy to leave my computer and actually find something to do.

Lo and behold, this blog was born.

Even as I started to create it, I was forced to admit to myself that it will probably end up as the stomping ground of some of my more sporadic, possibly ADD musings. I would like to think that they might be half as amusing as Allie Brosh (the author of the Hyperbole and a Half blog [http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/])'s posts, but there's really no way to know that ahead of time. So this is a fair warning that I'm a half-sane, caffeine-addicted insomniac who has read more fantasy genre books than is most likely healthy. I probably have a few undiagnosed psychological disorders, I'm slightly anti-social, and I talk to myself and inanimate objects more frequently than I'll openly admit.

So, if I still have your attention:
This is your captain speaking. I have just switched on the "Fasten Seatbelt" sign as we're expecting a bit of turbulence ahead. I know you have a lot of choice when choosing blogs, and would like to take this time to thank you for flying Abstract Company. Have a tiny bag of peanuts and ignore the screaming baby two rows back.

Now, if you'll kindly excuse me, it's nearing 7 a.m., which means it's time for me to get ready for bed.

- Tim

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
~Edith Wharton