06.30.08
Perhaps I should lay off the bleach…
Before I relate my big bumbling blonde week, I issue a disclaimer of sorts: I have nothing against blondes, don’t think they are intellectually inferior in any way, and love being one. But there’s nothing wrong with taking a good-natured stab at my hair color every now and then.
Ordeal Number One
I’ve been a wreck since about last Thursday. I’ve obsessively checked my bank account online for the past week or so, waiting for two checks (payroll and a week’s worth of round-the-clock-sibling-babysitting) to post.
Thursday night: Still no money. My mom calls her bank. The check she wrote me for sitting cleared.
AAAAARH!!! Somebody has my money!!!!!! … right? I sure don’t have it.
Friday morning: Call the Herald, somebody cashed my payroll check as well. I take off work to battle with my mom’s bank, to discover the bugger who cashed that darn check. No luck there… A trip to Fayetteville, all to find the stupid system down.
The fiasco stressed me out so much, I was forced to go to the pound and play with puppies to alleviate the tension.
Monday morning: I spend a grumpy and drowsy pre-coffee couple of hours on the phone fighting with both my mom’s bank and my bank, trying to get to the bottom of this. Still, not much luck.
I get this call from my bank around one.
“Cassidy, we researched this check.”
“…Yes ma’am. (internal: YEAH, OKAY!!!! ABOUT TIME! AND!)”
“… apparently the deposit slip you used was for your parent’s business account with us. So the money is in their account.”
“Oh. Ooooh. Well, thank you for all your help.” (hangs up).
Furious giggles overtake my body and tears absolutely erupt from my eyes. I can’t decide if I’m frustrated or wholly amused. Perhaps I’m simply overcome with gratefulness because my money’s safely in my parent’s bank account. It’s also a bit unnerving — those checks were made out to me, they had my signature on them, and I’m not affiliated with that account at all. But whatever. Mostly my mistake.
Ordeal Number Two
I just couldn’t take the hint and stay away from banking this weekend. Last night I head out to Food Lion for the weeks’ grocery shopping (a big event for a family of six). I stop by the ATM, with what I firmly believe is my mom’s debit card.
The stinkin’ machine just ate that card UP. No hope of spitting it out. I call THAT bank (I’m burnt out on 1-800 numbers, let me tell you) from the sketchy parking lot (at great personal risk) and they give me the spiel about picking up the card at the bank in Spring Lake on Monday, blah blah blah.
Positively fuming, I somehow manage to get a week’s supply of milk and other necessities (I paid with cash, I think it’s the only thing I ever want to deal with ever again) and head home.
My mom reports her debit card lost or stolen. No problem, we can deal with this.
It’s two hours later. My pulse’s just returned to a human rate again, all the stress of the ATM fiasco’s gone, my mom’s cleaning out her purse…
“Uh, Cass… THIS is my debit card. You put my Discover credit card in the machine.”
… Whoops. Now I really do want to cry.
So this morning, while I’m on my cell phone resolving Ordeal Numero Uno, she’s discerning the location of her credit card.
She ended up reporting it lost or stolen, too.
The End.
Because of my mishaps, my parents currently lack a debit card and are one credit card short — but they do have a big chunk of my money in their bank now. I’m not touching anything short of cash for a while, and nothing of theirs, lest they disown me/take money out of my check for the grief I’ve caused them.
I feel utterly ditsy. Both ordeals stemmed from totally dumb mistakes. Maybe several years’ worth of monthly exposure to ammonia really has done a number on my neurons.
But who am I kidding? As soon as I get a bank-free evening, I’m totally doing my roots.
06.27.08
Gaelic…
I always knew it was out there, and a wee bit odd. But until tonight, I never really paid it much mind.
I stumbled across a site with various handy Gaelic phrases. It’s now abundantly clear to me why Irish accents sound the way they do. You can’t help but develop that particular twang when speaking Gaelic.
My friend Erin (go Bragh!), after reviewing the list, decided the Irish just started speaking jibberish one day to confuse the bloody hell out of the Brits.
Although no Wikipediable historical evidence supports this, I think she might be on to something.
I can’t list all my favorites here. They’re all great fun to yell across the room at somebody. I had a real blast kicking my brother out of my room with this one:
PHRASE: Imeacht gan teacht ort. PRONOUNCED: Im/ockt gon chock/th urt. MEANING: May you leave without returning.
This one inspired a few lol’s. Replace bean with fear? … Okay?
PHRASE: An bhfuil bean sa chistin? PRONOUNCED: On will ban sa khish-tin? MEANING: Is there a woman in the kitchen? (replace 'bean' with 'fear' (pronounced 'far') to ask 'is there a man in the kitchen?')link:
http://www.ireland-information.com/irishphrases.htm
I got so inspired, I had to turn on Flogging Molly (the greatest band in the entire universe). And I’m back to obsessively planning my England/Ireland tour next year.
http://www.ireland-information.com/irishphrases.htm
06.25.08
Sleepover babysitting…
My sister and her friend (ages 11 and almost-11) enjoyed a sleepover last night. I served as cool older sister/primary chaperone.
I remembered sleepovers at that age. I guess they were fun, but they mostly just drained me of any remote trace of energy. I was just one grumpy little camper the next morning.
Things haven’t changed. I don’t do mornings; I love staying awake all night for absolutely no discernible reason. It’s my favorite pastime. But sleepovers kill me. Maybe there’s something about caking tons of makeup on (because all good sleepovers involve extravagant makeovers — last night we were zombie chicks) that induces excessive drowsiness the next day.
I don’t know. But my brain’s currently a plate of gelatin.
Wiggle.
06.23.08
If you’re looking for a dog…
The Harnett County Animal Shelter starts new construction this week, and many of the animals need to be adopted, soon (like, tomorrow). Space will be limited in the kennels for a while, so adopting an animal now will really help the shelter and the animals!
Adoptions are only $20! The shelter is open daily for adoptions from 1-4 except for Wednesday.
For more info:
Physical address:
1100 McKay Place
Lillington, NC 27546
Phone: (910)-814 3926 or (910)-814-2952
http://raleigh.craigslist.org/pet/729776247.html
http://raleigh.craigslist.org/pet/729335550.html (recent list of dogs in shelter)
http://blogs.wncn.info/shelterdogsspeak/
I spoke with Tino Medina, the supervisor at the shelter. Unlike a lot of the hype circulating on blogs and such, 4 p.m. tomorrow will not ring in a mass euthanization of animals. Nonetheless, they need people to adopt animals to free up space!
A local volunteer takes pictures of animals at the shelter and posts links to the albums on Craigslist.
Here’s the most recent batch of pictures:
http://www.kodakgallery.com/BrowsePhotos.jsp?UV=390249420708_538957061112&collid=235030531112.270857061112.1214102548002&page=1&sort_order=0&navfolderid=0&folderid=0&ownerid=0
PLEASE!
06.21.08
Voldemort can’t stop the rock!
I’m in ecstasy.
Harry and the Potters, a band whose lyrics exclusively center around Harry Potter, is coming to the Cat’s Cradle in Carborro next Tuesday night.
Life is amazing.
06.19.08
Microwaves and more instant messaging.
As a first-year college student, I lived off microwaved stuff this year. Microwaves, rock. Period.
I recall being a wee little kid, nonchalantly standing in front of the microwave, completely innocent of its horrors.
“Get away from that, you’ll get cancer!” my grandmother shrieked on one occasion.
Experience generally limits the average six-year-old’s perception of cancer. Though I had absolutely no idea what cancer involved, the word evoked sheer terror to me. I wanted nothing to do with it.
So, I spent the next few years steering clear of active microwave ovens. I’d pop something in, press start, then scurry away until a full 10 seconds after it finished cookin’.
After a semester alone in a 9X9 cracker box of a room with the microwave running for a good twenty minutes or so a day, I think I’ve been exposed to enough microwave radiation to haphazardly mutate the cells of all my major organs, then send them into an absolute frenzy of replications, if indeed microwaves are really capable of all this. I stopped fearing the microwave after elementary school, but sometimes I wonder… What if?
Anyway, this whole blog stemmed from this:
friend: microwaves were originally designed to be weapons, lol
me: omg that is so weird lol
friend: the waves that is, lol, not the devices. my mass comm prof told me this and the docu reminds me of it
friend: according to my prof, chocolate was left in a room that was exposed to the waves and when it was discovered it melted, they changed the blueprints
me: hmmm
friend: haha, yeah. when i was little, anytime i’d pass by an microwave in use, i’d duck so the rays wouldn’t hit me, lol
me: lol i pretty much did the same thing
friend: lol, good then. i wasn’t the only one, ha
me: at first i was nonchalant
me: but…
me: then my grandmother freaked me out
me: so i kinda steered clear
friend: lol, the news is what affected me. i used to be terrified of watching it
friend: i wanted to be blissfully ignorant before i even knew what that meant
So, microwaves stemmed from radioactive weapons testing? Creepy. Too, too creepy.
06.18.08
Schnoodles and Scotties and Shih Tzus, oh my!
If you’ve held any face-to-face conversation with me in the past few weeks, you’ve inevitably heard me ramble on about dogs. I used to despise the idea of pets… But… My sister’s toy poodle Leo has me sold. I now spend hours looking up various breeds, trying to decide what sort of dog I want when I get my own place. I am always looking up animals in the local shelters. There are about two right now I am seriously considering adopting… I just want so many different little dogs right now, it’s insane.
A friend of mine sometimes thinks she’ll be an “old cat lady” when she grows up. You know, the spinster with 40-some-odd cats in the big Victorian house at the end of the lane. Well, I think I’m just going to collect miniature dogs when I grow up so…
17:23] friend: i’ve always been convinced i was going to be the crazy cat lady
[17:24] friend: lol we can live next door to each other and throw them at each other and say its raining cats and dogs
[17:24] friend: lol
[17:24] me: lol omg yes!!!!!
[17:24] me: that might be a quote in my blog lol
[17:24] friend: …i’m really bored btw
I love random instant message conversations. And no, I would never, ever throw animals around like raindrops… But the image of a few calicos and cocker spaniels bouncing around in the air is an amusing one.
… Maybe if we put a trampoline underneath them…
I’m kidding.
The Happening
… Happened, to say the most.
Granted, I don’t care for horror movies of any description, and in the grand spirit of procrastination, arrived at the theater a solid half-hour late. I buckled down in my seat, Diet Coke in hand, finding a stressed-out Zoe Deschanel arguing with her man in packed train station.
The laughs soon ensued. This quasi-apocalyptic thriller seemed more like a tounge-in-cheek spoof on modern society, namely our cell phone fixation. As Julian clutches his daughter in his arms on the train (fleeing this happening-thing, I guess, I missed the beginning), he frantically phones his wife. Bad reception interferes with this life-alterting conversation, and he shouts into the reciever, “TEXT ME!”
… “Text me?” The world’s quite possibly ending, so… text me? “Text me” is the kind of thing I shout out my car window to a friend I bumped into at Walmart. You know, we should make plans, but I’m too lazy to verbally converse with you, so text me. I understand the merits of texting in stressful situations — texting usually requires fewer signal bars, it doesn’t matter how noisy things are, multi-tasking is much easier, you can be clear and concise… Okay, I get it. But it still made me laugh.
A bit later, another character (or maybe it was Julian again, I’m bad at this movie thing), starts freaking out. He hasn’t heard from somebody in two hours — no emails, no texts, no voicemails. Two entire hours have elapsed without an email from somebody? She didn’t stop fleeing death long enough to text you? She must be seeing somebody else.
I won’t give away all the cell phone incidents, there was another memorable one involving a gory iPhone video (“Who bothers to send something like that to somebody?” my friend Kate whispered as the camera zoomed in on the phones crystal clear, 3.5 inch widescreen. I don’t know, Kate.)
Although a few scenes forced a sharp intake of breath or two, I derived more amusement out of M. Night Shyamalan’s first R-rated flick than I did terror.
And, courtesy of a funny little military policeman who died at the happening’s whim, I have a new substitute-swear-phrase: “Cheese and crackers!”
Altogether, not exactly worth nine bucks. But if you catch it on Starz or Netflix and approach it with a cynical-enough mindset, it might pep you up a bit.
06.09.08
Tomato-free
Because slaving over the stove was completely out of the question this stifling evening, and because I am babysitting my seven-year-old brother, Liam, who eats like a full-grown man, I decided to eat out tonight. Although the Western Harnett area is expanding, dining options are still sadly limited.
I decided to branch out slightly and try the new-ish Subway at the Exxon at the Buffalo Lakes/ Hwy 27 intersection.
Before leaving the house, I asked Liam exactly what he wanted on his half of the footlong. If you’ve ever ordered with kids, you can probably appreciate why advance knowledge is invaluable.
“Oh, I just like turkey, and salad… and tomatoes!” he said. His face really lit up when he got to the tomatoes bit.
“Well, uh,” I articulately begin. “We can’t have tomatoes… because… some tomatoes are bad.”
Yeah, I’m off to a fabulous start here. How do you explain the salmonella outbreak to a kid without permanently altering his opinion of the fruit? I don’t want him to get the wrong idea, and think that tomatoes are permanantly off limits.
“Some tomatoes in the United States right now have a really bad germ on them called salmonella. The tomatoes at Subway might not have it, but we’re not going to take the chance of getting sick,” I offer.
“You mean, all the tomatoes? At all the Subways? Even the one by Food Lion? AND the one at the gas station?” he replies.
“Maybe. We’re not sure. But we’re not going to risk it, okay?” I tell him. He agrees without any complaint.
Sure enough, when we get to Subway there’s a notice about recalled tomatoes. We get our tomato-free food and head home to enjoy it in the comfort of our own kitchen.
Liam keeps referring to the sad lack of tomato slices on our sub. The Subway wrapper, adorned with fat and juicy tomatoes, mocks us. Grrrr. We want tomatoes.
Nonetheless, we made it through the meal all right.
“Well, that was a good meal. Tomatoes would have made it a little better… but everything was still good,” Liam concluded.
Link:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/812069/fda_updates_tomato_recall.html
(still very new to word press… so putting in a fancy hyperlink seemed out of the question… good ole cut and paste works, I guess)
Summer…
Despite the fact that I’ve suffered through a dozen or so sticky and stifling Southern summers, they never fail to shock me when they sneak back around each year. I somehow forget all about them in the brief reprieve November through April offers.
Sure, I never forget how hot they get, but all that really means is I remember my the numbers emblazoned on my computer’s dashboard. A row of five numbers, never less than 90, sometimes a whole three digits long, each adorned with a blazing sun icon.
I forget pretty much everything important.
I was home alone the other night when my dog started getting a little squirmy, clearly ready for a tinkle break. I unlocked and opened the back door, then tentatively pushed the storm door open. A wave of heat assaulted me — sweat oozed from my pores, my hair poofed itself into a style rivaling anything the 80’s ever knew, and a fuzzy and dull feeling overtook my brain.
It was then I saw them, floating above the patio. Three, maybe four. Tiny, bright lights. Just floating there, completely nonthreatening, but what the heck were they? Pinpricks of light don’t singlehandedly position themselves eight feet above my patio swing… Should I be concerned? Should I go in the house? Call somebody? Close the curtains?
Oh. They’re fireflies. Hah. They’re actually quite sinister little devils if you forgot all about them.
Summer also ushers in a plethora of frogs, or toads, or maybe both, I don’t bother to discriminate between the two. But these springy and croaky amphibians terrify me more than any other creature I’m likely to encounter in the confines of my yard. They’re always around, plopping themselves on my doorstep, taking a dip in my dog’s water bowl, floating eerily in my pool. Every time I leave the house after dark (usually barefoot), my whole body tenses up, and I watch the ground with every step I take. What if I stepped on one? The thought’s too much for me to seriously contemplate. They’re just so darn nasty.
Then there’s North Carolina’s unofficial state bird, the mosquito. Forgetting about these is actually quite dangerous, yet I do it anyway. It always goes something like this: I’m innocently sitting on the patio one evening, chatting away to my mother (whom mosquitoes seldom pester), when an itchy and fiery demon infests my skin. Few things can irritate me so instantaneously. My limbs usually resemble those of a seven-year-old boys’ during the season, because I voraciously scratch my mosquito bites. It makes me quite self-conscious whenever I don a pretty skirt and sandals; the little scabs don’t exactly enhance my stark-white calves and make me look even less like the golden-tanned Southern gal I’m apparently supposed to be.
Tanning — what a lost cause. I decided a few years ago that I’m abandoning that summery pastime in favor of a snobbish melanoma-free-me attitude. It annoys my attractively bronzed friends, of whom I harbor a slight and secret jealousy. But lying in a pool of my own sweat for hours on end, waiting for my skin’s last-ditch attempt to shield itself from the sun… Well, it just doesn’t really float my boat, that’s all. I’ll stick with my glow-in-the-dark fair skin.
And though I cherish the thought of my future, somewhere in the hear of Appalachia, or maybe Germany, or quite possibly the United Kingdom — basically, somewhere nice and pleasant and damp — there’s something about stepping into my black-leather pressure cooker and heading to work, watching my dashboard thermometer drop from 117 degrees to a comfortable 96, scratching my bug bites and praying for a thunderstorm.
It at least provided me with a long-winded first blog entry!
