Staccato Roller-coaster

Friday certainly had its ups and downs. I woke up and was on the computer for a bit, and I enjoyed myself because of Tumblr and the Sims Social and also because T-Kun was online so I could talk to her for a very brief while.

I was doing my sit-ups when Hannah and Mama went out to take Ringo to the vet. I decided to stop before I was done so I could go say goodbye to him for the same reason I like to make sure I hug my parents and let them know I love them before I head out for a drive: there's always a chance, no matter how small, that that might be my last moment with them and I want to make sure it's a good one.

After the stairs and a shower, I rushed off to work. I had a stress-free day at work because I stopped worrying about the amount of completes I was going to get and just focused on the calls at hand. I also had some tea, which was nice. In between calls, I browsed Wikipedia. I went from MyKad, to Eddies, to Billabongs, to Waltzing Matilda, to the All-Black's Haka, and then back to Waltzing Matilda. I also ended up reading about the Mechanical Turk and a bit of the bombing of Dresden in between all that. I learn quite a lot in-between calls at work.

Near the end of the day, I lost a complete because the fire alarm went off. I followed the instructions pinned to my desk, but apparently we're not supposed to do that. Next time the alarm goes off and we're almost done, we're supposed to finish up unless the manager gets a call from the alarm company confirming that there's a real fire. That seems quite absurd to me, but I'll roll with it.

I asked Kelly a few questions after work and learned things. I like it when Kelly's around because then I can actually "Refer to [my] supervisor IMMEDIATELY on ANY issues" like the whiteboard near my desk says.

On Saturday, Lutfi will be in, so I won't be able to do that any more because when I ask questions from him it reflects badly on his position as a trainer, so I'll just keep schtum. As Uncle Shark(Shak? Chak? I need to ask him how to spell his name sometime) says, the boss is always right.

Anyway, I stayed back for an extra hour to finish my tabs and to memorize Waltzing Matilda. It is an incredibly catchy song. It ends in hobo-suicide, though, so make of that what you will.

The whole ride home I had the radio off while I sang the unofficial anthem of Australia. When I got home my happiness was promptly murdered when my mother told me that Ringo had died while he was undergoing an operation at the vet to remove a fluid build-up in his lungs. He had been misdiagnosed earlier in the week and so the medicine that I was forcing down his throat to try and make him better weren't actually helping. I'm glad that at least my last memory with him was giving him a goodbye stroke before he went off to the vet instead of fighting with him to get him to swallow pointless pills.

Despite all that, I still had a craving for karaoke that I had let build up all throughout the time I was at work, so I took the set and plugged it in Susanna's TV and we sang together for a while until it was time for dinner and mature grown-up conversation with Uncle Shark, Papa, and Mama.

I left at one point to check my computer, and I found the Secret Recipe website, so I gave the local branch a call to make sure they were still open. I then drove down to pick up some chocolate indulgence for Hannah, because chocolate cake is my default response to sadness among women. When I got home, I put it on a plate with a tiny spoon and then I brought Mercy and a glass of cold water over to Hannah's room. Mercy ran off and Hannah told me that she didn't like cake. She ate half of it anyway, though, and I got to have the other half. I gave her Faith to replace Mercy as role of comforter-in-chief for the next week. Until the ninth of September, 2011, he is her cat.

I then went and had a wee bit of wine and some conversation with my parents and their friend. I have learned from past experience that nobody tells me anything if I blog about everything they say, so this paragraph will be intentionally left vague.

Anyway after that I went on my computer for way too long. I was on Tumblr for a long while and then I read this and then I made a long blog post. I guess after that I'll take a shower and go to bed for a short while before waking up early for the weekend shift, where I will earn a lot of money for a lot of work, and after that it will be Geraldine's birthday party and I will be bringing the karaoke. It looks like it will be a difficult, then very fun day for me.

But yeah, rest in peace, Ringo. Even though you couldn't possibly find a better owner than Hannah in your next eight lives, hopefully you'll at least last a bit longer on your next few times around. Go make some friends your age who will actually want to play with you, and never ever lose your questioning meows. Those are adorable.

Possibly the Second-Last Wednesday I'll Have with this Job

Today I woke up, like normal, and I slept through my first two alarms, like normal, and I read my Bible, like normal, and then Hannah and my mum arrived home from the Netherlands, which isn't normal because it doesn't happen very often at all.

I said hi and I hugged my mum and I went to the kitchen to get some water. My mum had brought home loads of candy and biscuits and licorice in many bags of luggage. It was delightful. Hannah had brought back stories of the speed of the internet in the Netherlands. 800kb/s, she'd said. Five minutes to download an episode of How I Met Your Mother. Lucky Dutch.

I opened the least-best candy first (saving the best for last has always been kinda my thing). It was the Engelse Drop. I had some of that and it was nice. I can't wait to get to the other stuff.

My mum showed me pictures of the funeral, and also a picture of Oma a week before she died. Oma looked healthier than you'd expect from someone who was a week from death. She looked quite grey afterwards, though. I think it's a bit morbid to take pictures of the body at a funeral.

I'm glad that my grandmother had a good life and that she raised a good family. She's with her husband now and I guess that means she's glad, too.

Corinna was at home, which was unusual. I asked her why she wasn't at BLTC and she said that it was a public holiday. My mum said that BLTC was over for the year except for a party on Friday. Corinna would be around a lot more now. Today, she was meeting up with Grace from BLTC to go shopping for dresses or something in Mid Valley at 11. I told her I could drive her there on my way to work.

I went to do my exercises while Jan took a shower. He was going to Mid Valley to meet Cherie and her sister and Adriel and Gabriel. I told him that I could drive him there but he said it was at ten, which was a bit inconvenient.

I took a shower and went on the computer for a bit, but Tumblr kept dying. I asked Hannah if she knew what was up but she didn't. She wasn't on Tumblr in Holland; she was too busy hanging out with Stefanie. Anyway, Tumblr started working again and I answered a question and asked some questions and then I turned off my computer and got ready to go.

Corinna was on the phone with one of her friends from Germany or something. She didn't mind the bill, either because her parents were paying or because she had loads of money; I forget which.

We went to McDonald's for breakfast first. I had a lot to eat. Corinna had a milo. After we entered the restaurant we talked about Pepsi and Coke. Pepsi is cheaper in Germany, apparently, but everyone thinks Coke tastes better, even without the labels. We left the restaurant while talking about dreams. Corinna said she had a dream about me but she couldn't remember anything from it except that it involved Megamind somehow. I told Corinna that nobody is really interested in anyone's dreams unless they predicted the future somehow or they involved the person that the dreamer is talking to or they were about sex. Corinna said that everyone dreams about sex. I told her I don't. It's odd; I think about it all the time but even in my dreams I can't get laid.

I dropped Corinna off at Mid Valley and drove to work. I was late again. Yesterday I was late because I had spent too long on Skype talking to Sara. This time I was late because of the extra time it took me to eat a Sausage McMuffin I wasn't expecting to order.

I worked for a while and now it's late. After I'm done blogging about this I'm going to read another Machine of Death story and then I'm going to leave before the system locks me in again .

This One Time I Killed A Cockroach That Saw Me Naked

(Originally written on the 13th of May, 2008)

I hate cockroaches.

I'm terrified of them. It's only roaches, not any other insect. It may have something to do with their slimy bodies or their hairy sharp-looking legs, but the most disturbing thing about cockroaches is knowing that for every cockroach you see there are always dozens more hiding away. They’re like ninjas in that way.

To a normal person with a fairly clean house this fear would not be much of a problem. However, although I have a fairly clean house I am apparently not a normal person. Normal people don't have cockroaches appear on them at random times for no reason.

I've had a cockroach suddenly appear on my arm while I was taking a whiz in the jungle which resulted in frantic brushing off of the area for the next few hours every time I felt a movement, I've had one crawl up my thigh towards my manparts which resulted in frenzied slapping and more brushing, and I've had one drop on my shoulder while I was changing my shirt which has led me to conclude that there is something about me that cockroaches seem to find irresistible.

One night as I was exiting the shower I saw something scuttling across the bathroom floor. Without my glasses I could only just make out that it was a cockroach, and a pretty big one at that. I was absolutely mortified when I realized what I was looking at since these things have a history of crawling on me and now I am totally naked.

Panic took hold of me. The roach was too close to my glasses for me to risk grabbing them, so I sprang for the nearest weapon, which happened to be a bottle of heavy duty toilet bowl cleaner. I decided that it would be easier for me to poison the bastard than crush him with the bottle, so I unscrewed the cap and squirted the cleaning fluid with as much precision as I could manage without my glasses (which is not much precision at all). The roach ran from one side to the other and I traced its path with a blue trail of cleaning fluid across the tiles. The roach then scuttled under the door and out into the bedroom.

I had lost. The roach had escaped to terrify me another day, and I was left with a whole bunch of cleaning fluid to mop up. I put on my glasses and was about to start cleaning up the mess I made when I heard a meow.

My cat is the best cat that a guy who hates cockroaches could want. I’ll wake up some mornings and find hairy sharp-looking legs strewn across the living room floor and a limbless, chewed-up cockroach corpse under a chair or table. He likes to bat them around a bit before he tries to eat them, you see. It’s not just cockroaches that he hunts down and kills; one time I came home to find a dead pigeon in my bed and my cat next to it. He was pretty pleased with himself after that one.

Anyway, I looked in the direction of the meow and sure enough my cat was batting at the now belly-up roach. So I did manage to poison the bastard. Usually I’d leave the roach to suffer and die but my cat was in the room and I didn’t want him to start chewing on the toxic carcass so I decided that I had to get rid of it soon.

I shooed my cat away and threw some toilet paper on the writhing roach. Its flailing legs moved the paper around a bit, but it didn’t manage to uncover itself. I smacked the bottle of cleaning fluid on top of the paper and heard a crunch and a stain appeared on the paper. I kept hammering the paper with the bottle long after the roach would’ve been dead and then hammered some more. I picked up what was now nothing more than guts and crushed bits of exoskeleton in yet more toilet paper and flushed it away.

After washing my hands and putting on my jammies I climbed into bed and pulled the covers tight over myself while my cat kept watch on the bedside to ensure no cockroaches would be crawling over me at night.