A modern update of the "you'll love our stuff/prices" advertising:
Home Depot sez it is making it easier to buy stuff from their site with your Iphone when you swipe right. Yep, fall in LUV with your new frig! Gawd, Tinder association with Black Friday.
Do the appliances keep track? Do they get depressed when folks swipe left? Nobody wants me! wails an unsold microwave in a agony aunt feature in the Times Modern Love section. Did they want black instead of stainless steel? Is 1000 watts of power too much, making me seem overly aggressive?
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Meanwhile, both my credit card and debit card have been hacked in a matter of days of each other. I received a fraud alert from the CU and went in yesterday to get new card (rather than wait for it to be mailed) but no dice. Evidently, the printing software was having a bad Monday and was glitchy. Going back this am. Watch out! My finger points at Amazon.
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Thanksgiving feast! Puff pastry galettes with caramelized onions and a menagerie of mushrooms sauteed with rosemary; ramekins with dressing baked crispy, roasted asparagus. Served with mushroom gravy. Dessert: for C-vegan chocolate cupcake from Sweet Encounters downtown Lansing served with almond milk vanilla and caramel ice cream, I had a slice of carrot cake (Kroger was out of the single serve pumpkin pie with topping). For Buddy, it was a fresh can evening-Friskies Whitefish and Sardine shreds at room temperature-one of his favs. Yummers!
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11/24 Mostly sunny and cold: 23° this morning. Sharp North breeze.
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| Li'l Woody hard at work, I could hear him tapping as I brought in firewood. |
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| Buddy basking in the sun away from the wind. |
11/25: 16° Turkeys out and about
11/27 and 11/28 Snow and cold
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| Big Woody hard at work |
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Meet Hermagoras sigillatus, a stick insect found in tropical forests such as those found in Borneo.
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When I lived in OK for a bit, I found work via a temp service at a factory that assembled and packaged fishing rods. It was in a town a half hour drive away and I worked a 4pm-midnight shift. My co-workers were a diverse group: a pair of ladies from Columbia, several Cherokee women, a New Orleans lesbian chef who was a refugee from Hurricane Katrina, a variety of black, white and hispanic folk. The job was simple-one person broke open a folded box, taped the bottom, put in the requisite number of rods into it then sent the box down a conveyor to the next person who stuffed paper on top and taped the box shut and placed on a pallet. My partner was an old hand and team leader, a young guy whose nickname was "Gadget" because he had an Walkman. He had a limited amount of tunes available and this one we heard every night, several times:
This is Evanscence, an odd convergence of goth and soprano.
Our supervisor was a small black woman who always wore a do-rag with the demeanor of a drill sergeant. She was no-nonsense and had everyone on a short-leash. Hitting nightly production quotas was her main goal-we were packaging the rods to be shipped nationwide to stores before fishing season arrived. When I arrived for my first shift, her comment to me was that I was too well-dressed with a oxford style shirt. The next day I wore a long-sleeved t-shirt. One shift there was a big problem that she brought to our attention. She had done some QC on random boxes and had found that they were missing some rods. She was hollering! She was going to halt production, have us go through every box from several pallets already done and make sure all were correctly packaged. This seemed insane to me so I stepped up and made a suggestion. The mere action pissed her off even more-her eyes lit up as she stared at me. "Why not take the weight of a correct box, then simply weigh all of them?" was my idea. "This saves time since you don't have to re-tape everything and therefore less time spent away from production". Her eyes narrowed-she had me pegged as a college-boy anyway from the shirt incident and now this. "Sure" she said "since it's your idea, you get to do the job" with a bit of a smirk, as if this was some weird punishment. "No problem" and I set off to do the job. She got production going as I found an empty pallet, put a scale on a table and began breaking down a stacked pallet. Having spent years in grocery stocking, this was familiar stuff to me. Under her watchful eyes, I went through all the pallets from that night's production. In the end, I had found 4-5 boxes that were short. It didn't take that long and I returned to my station and the grins of my co-workers. I did earn a grunt of appreciation from the Super who from then on had a softened attitude towards me. I had earned her respect.
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