No Celery Please

Without a Prayer

Pete opened his eyes within eyes and searched the battlefield for soldiers calling out to god. It was important to find ones looking for god with a small g – ones who didn’t believe in any specific god and were calling out in the end of their lives for anyone to comfort them.

Their prayers were fair game… Pete knew from bitter experience not to mess with the prayers of anyone looking for a big-G God. Those guys were rough if you tried to siphon anything off the top of their cut.

The battlefield was a nasty place. It saddened Pete to have to resort to picking up prayers from poor bastards who had gotten themselves blown apart. But… he needed the prayers. Needed them bad right now. He hadn’t had any in quite a while and he was starting to feel it.

Some of the Hindu gods would sometimes let him hang around in their temples and pick up some of the less devout offerings; rotten fruit and such from people who were really just going through the motions. Ganesh was always generous that way, but second-hand prayer doesn’t have much power to it, and he needed something stronger now. He was weak.

He was always weak… had been since the universe brought him into existence because random mutterings of “for Pete’s sake” and “for the love of Pete” seemed prayer-like enough to require a god to answer them. What did the universe know? It just did these things as the circumstances warranted.

But nobody really meant those prayers. They didn’t do much good for Pete. They weren’t worship, after all, just substitutes for people who were too afraid to say “God” when they meant it.

So Pete was a god without a following; no worshippers, but just enough cosmic force out there to maintain his existence in a constant state of needing the prayers. Just a little prayer.

So, the battlefield.

Ah, there was one. He was calling out to god – any god – to help him. He hurt, but wasn’t on the edge. Not yet.

Pete went over to the man who was lying, his leg mostly hanging off, in mud made from dirt and his own blood. He was praying. The power was pouring out of him. Pete took a deep draught of it. Ah, man, that was some high quality prayer. It filled Pete, took him up and dusted him off and made him feel, well, like a god.

With the power of the man’s prayer in him, Pete could help him. The soldier needed to move to the other side; Pete knew a few small cracks in the wall that the big guys hadn’t locked up with their rules and laws. He could smuggle a guy through now and again without getting noticed.

The last of the man’s life and prayer died away. Pete slipped him through to heaven.

Pete opened his eyes within eyes to search the battlefield once again.

1. I am 33 years old and have never had the chicken pox. I am sure this is going to catch up to me one day.

2. I plan to never, ever, ever visit any country run by zealots. I have very little sympathy for people who go to countries run by zealots and then act all shocked when they end up getting their limbs cut off for offending the locals.

3. I have to go to King of Prussia, PA on Monday and Tuesday for some training. Monday was going to be a vacation day. Oh well… someone in the department REALLY NEEDS to learn this program.

4. I am not passionate. You know… Sunsets? Yeah, they are fine. I do not get all worked up over them. Same with sunrises (although I don’t see a lot of them), cute bunnies, babies, etc. I do not get deleriously happy about much of anything. Neither do I experience crushing lows of sadness. If you ask me how I am, the answer will be “fine” if things are good and “ok” if things are not good. That’s about the extent of my mood swings. Well, unless it involves cheesecake.

5. I am making scarfs for a couple-few people for Christmas. I am crocheting them. I think they are turning out nice. But you never know with home-made stuff like this. That’s OK. It’s the thought and all that, right?

6. I have an outline for my Wordsmith’s story for November, but darned if I can make myself sit down and write the thing.

7. Happily, I did not gain any weight despite my enormous turkey intake over Thanksgiving. The SB and I did hours of extra-curricular hiking and walking over the weekend, so it all worked out. Hopefully I can keep this up. But I WILL be having a cheese steak while in Philly, so we’ll see.

8. Sheesh, who’s idea was this whole “thirteen” thing? You know what also is alliterative with “Thursday”? Three… yeah, how about the “Thursday Three”?

9. I like the word alliterative. Also, Onomatopoeia.

10. Crap. I have just gotten on a 2 hour conference call and realized my water bottle is empty. Maybe we’ll get a break in here somewhere.

11. What the heck am I going to get my mother-in-law for Christmas?

12. Our new neighbors turned out to be Perfectly Normal People (as they appeared to be). Not crack-heads at all. This is nice as I can now stop looking for new houses.

13. I am off work tomorrow. I plan to sleep.

Ya’ll have been some productive little bloggers out there in blog-land over the holidy.

I pretty much didn’t touch a computer over the weekend. Yay! But that meant I had a mighty big blog-pile to read up on this lunch hour (but I made it). I sacrificed commenting for getting through the back-log. These are the trade-offs one must make, I suppose.

So, Thanksgiving was fairly uneventful.

— belated edit—

In other news… those of you who have been around for a while will remember the spring pond-building extravaganza.

Friday, the SB comes back from a trip out of the house and says to me… did you drain the pond?

Did I what?

Yeah, so, in the hour he was gone, all the water left the pond. The plastic liner must’ve sprung a leak or something. The thing was empty, but kind of floating on top of about 20 gallons that hadn’t soaked into the soil. Bad.

So, taking this as a lesson, I have decided to add ponds to the list of things that sound like a good idea but are really just a giant pain in the ass. (the old 50 gallon fish tank was the first item on this list).

I filled in the pond hole with the dirt that was previously the hill for the waterfall.

I am now back to having just a little rock garden with a couple of plants in that space.

Oh well, didn’t even last a year.

So I have been tagged by Monsieur Ron with this 6 things meme that’s going around.

I am way too lazy to play properly, so I am not listing the rules (egad – you mean you haven’t seen them somewhere else?) and I’m not tagging anyone (because I don’t think there’s anyone left who hasn’t done this) and I don’t have anything I can really call a “secret” because, hey, you know, this is an anonymous blog and what kind of secrets do I have anyway… all I do is work and exercise anyway.

So really, I am just going to list the numbers 1 to 6 and type some stuff after them and call it good to go.

But don’t say I didn’t play along!

1 – I am lazy (as you may have noticed from this post) but I am also a perfectionist in many ways. This duality causes no end of conflict in my psyche where I am too lazy to do something (oh, let’s say, sweep the floor), but I am constantly berating myself for the state that whatever it is I am not doing is in. I already feel guilty that I am not playing along right with this meme.

2 – I want a lot of stuff. I have a huge list of things I want. On the other hand, I hate debt. I love to have money in the bank. I simultaneously want to pay off my mortgage as quickly as possible and own my house free and clear AND want to buy my dream house (which, incidentally, does not actually exist anywhere).

3 – I do not now, nor will I ever, want kids. Well, except when I do. You know when I want kids? When I am in the mall or Target and I see these ADORABLE little outfits for boys with slacks and sweater vests and little ties – stuff I cannot buy for my sister’s kids because she would DIE before allowing them to dress like tiny college professors. Lucky for me, I am aware that dressing kids in adorable (to me) outfits is an exceedingly bad reason to breed and so I am able to resist. I would be an appalling mother. I am barely willing to feed the dog when I get home at the end of the day (see #1) and I don’t want to see to anyone’s needs but my own. Plus – kids are expensive (see #2).

4 – I had extremely low self esteem in high school. It kind of followed me through college. I thought it was just a part of me. Yet, I cannot pin-point it, but somewhere in the last 5 to 10 years, I have somehow come to see myself in a different light. I like me. I am a good person. Snarky, amusing, polite to strangers (although I will totally make fun of them where they cannot hear me and be hurt) I have a job and a life that I enjoy. I wouldn’t have expected it, but I am glad I have come to this. I am not “hot” or “gorgeous” and I never will be, but I have come to see what I could not in HS – I am pretty cute, fine just the way I am, and clean up OK when I have to and people are not going to puke walking down the street and looking at me. I think that’s enough.

5 – I have a rockin‘ outfit on today. Boot cut jeans and chunky black shoes. Burgundy shirt and a velour jacket that comes just down over my waist. Stacey and Clinton would not have ANYTHING bad to say about this in the 360 mirror. This does not happen very often. I mostly dress like a boy in cargo shorts and t’s / sweats unless I am at work and wearing khakis and some random shirt. I felt like I should share.

These listy things are harder than one might expect.

—belated edit—

Phew.

Ack. I am forcing myself to shut down IE after reading only 1/4 of my blogs. No reading yesterday at all.

Blog withdrawal… imminent.

But… I save up a lot of my vacation until the end of the year.

Now, with the two new free days, I won’t be working a five day week again until the second week of January.

3 days
4 days
3 days
4 days
4 days
2 days
3 days

Then back to the real world.

But what does this mean?

Oh, yeah, I guess I actually have to work while I’m on the working days… have to get something done, after all.

I had originally planned to take vacation days on Christmas Eve and New Years Eve because both days fall on a Monday before a holiday.

But my company just sent out an email…

They decided to give us those days as holidays!!!

So now, I have two free vacation days to take.

I b’lieve I’ll have a long weekend the weekend after Thanksgiving.

Hmmmm, maybe we’ll take a little trip… The couple of weeks after thanksgiving are cheap to travel because no one is going anywhere until christmas.

Yay!!

So where I work, we have an employee… I guess you’d call it a “morale team”… that’s in charge of stuff like organizing the holiday party and summer picnic, and other events through the year to keep people wanting to work at our glorious establishment.

This team is also in charge of doing charitable “feel good” stuff.

The fundraiser project for this season is “support the troops” – only we are going to be a little more specific and support our troops. Across the country, we have about 70 people deployed on active duty through the National Guard or whatnot.

So, we want them to know that the company is still thinking of them (you know, more than the legally required – you have a job when you get back).

So, our little morale team is going to send those 70 folks care packages full of goody goodness (no don’t know what yet, becasue first we need the cashola).

To the point. We need to raise some fundage.

So, I need to make with the ideas of how to get people at the office to part with their money with this NOT being a tax deductable charity or anything.

Another department is already doing a bake sale and setting up change jars in the cafeteria.

Anyone out there a fundraising whiz? Any suggestions?

So, I was over at Renn’s and she had a quiz, which link I followed, and did the quiz, but I didn’t like the answer, so I didn’t copy the code.

But something else on the page did catch my eye. The “Booby Name Quiz”

Seriously… I thought, “My God, what kind of questions are they going to ask to generate these?”

I wasn’t sure what personality traits they might want to review to come up with this answer.

So, being curious, and also at work, with very little to do today, I clicked on the link.

Turns out, all they wanted was my name, which I entered.

The results were so apropo that I thought I would go ahead and share. Maybe they take your name and run it through some sort of algorithm to come up with these (they are not anagrams), or maybe they do a lightning quick google and come up with your favorite things.

Either way…

Your Boobies’ Names Are…

Dessert and Dinner

In a completely typical continuation of my voting record…

The guy that I specifically wanted to win a seat on the city council and the main reason that I went in to vote yesterday… came in dead last.

Oh well, at least the transit thing passed, so I’m not 0 for 0.