Staple Remover

This post is shamelessly aimed at one person and is not meant for every person who lives in Australia. If everyone in Australia responded to this, Blogger.com might be a little upset at how much space their servers had left on them.

If there is anyone, (most likely a Geek in a Kitchen) who happens to know how to get a Dahle Scissor-style Staple Remover please do so and let me know. Noelle, (pictured to the right), used to have one and it went missing. Her job has her removing more staples than there are fallen trees in the Amazon

As it happens this item is only sold in Australia and their website doesn't seem to be friendly to international purchases and shipping for something so small. That and we're hoping a friend who is there now will stop by a location of "Australian Post" and pick one up to bring back in December, (saving us the trouble)

Thanks Ted! (Did you get your glasses yet?)

We really should move...

Noelle and I came home last night to a neighborhood in practical lock-down.

There was a shooting 200 yards from our home around the corner from the Quickie Mart. No it wasn't actually IN the Quickie Mart, rather, in the middle of the street. Some 19 year old punk-gang-banger decided to shoot at someone's car and in the process killed the guy. Three shots to the head. Judging from where they had the telltale yellow blanket on the ground, the poor man stumbled from his car, across three lanes to the grass in front of the Quickie Mart where he fell and expired.

All this because of the Gangster Rap, Hip Hop, NOISE and “music” fest called the KMEL Summer Jam at Shoreline Amphitheater. It is widely known that this event attracts violence and this time, for that poor person in the car who, I hear, didn't even attend the event, the violence struck senselessly. What if i had been home, and decided to go over to Costco for some steak at that time?

Shudder the thought...It's things like this that don't make me feel safe in my own home. We live in Mountain View because it's a quiet community with friendly neighbors, (okay, maybe not the people who live behind us). When we hear of things like this happening with more frequency, we get scared.

Here's the kicker - when we finally got to our apartment, our neighbor told us that the fugitive, (whom they have not caught yet) took a shortcut through OUR apartment complex! This just makes a guy feel all fuzzy inside.

So Noelle and I have decided to start looking for better places to live. We're thinking of Colma. The Population in 2002 was 1,179 and there are more dead people there than there are living.

Now that's quiet.

(....for those of you who are interested in the story that the SJ Mercury posted online, I tried to insert the link here, but it redirects to a subscription page, so here is the text from that article regarding the shooting)

Police probe fatal shooting in Mtn. View...

Mountain View police were investigating a homicide Sunday evening near Shoreline Amphitheatre soon after concertgoers had filed out from the annual, daylong KMEL Summer Jam concert.Police received a call about 7:45 p.m. of shots fired in the area of Rengstorff Avenue and Old Middlefield Way.

They arrived to find one male victim lying alongside the road near a strip mall at the intersection. He was later pronounced dead.

Witnesses reported a large gathering and a fight before the shooting at a strip mall on the southwest corner of the intersection. The crowd fled after the gunfire. Witnesses said the assailants left in three, older, American-made sedans. No suspects were in custody, police said, though they were looking for a black male in his late teens or early 20s, about 5 foot 10 to 6 feet tall and 180 pounds. He was wearing a white baggy T-shirt down past his waist and long, baggy blue shorts.

Police said they didn't know whether the victim or assailants had attended the concert, which featured several pop and hip-hop artists and ended about 6:15 p.m. They also didn't know whether the shooter and victim knew each other.

COMLPIANCE!

No, folks, I'm not talking about training hamsters. I'm talking about my job.

For those of you who know me well, there are three things that make my CRAZY.

1. Paper clips
2. Faxes
3. and Excel spreadsheets

I am working at "a client"through "a company", (which, in my opinion is the best company I have ever worked for), and I am helping a woman who is doing a project which has been described as "what Imodium is for" because doesn't seem to have any kind of END in sight...it just keeps coming and coming and coming.....

What I get to do is manage PAPERCLIPS, FAXES, AND SPREADSHEETS all day long, while blissfully tearing what little hair I have left OUT. It's amazing the amount of absolute crap the Department of Transportation requires in order for someone to drive a truck from point "A" to point "B" and back.

To be fair, it's only 13 things, it's just that these things are moved from point "A" to point "B" to point "D" to point "C", BACK to point "A" and finally to point "L9883.Re7".....and back to me.

Naturally, by the time I get a chance to read this fax it look as though a pixel threw up, blew up, and dissolved on a page. fortunatly, I have the originals or the second generation documents from when they went to point "F".

as a wise man said;

That which does not kill us...........

INJURES US!

...at any rate, it's a bear of a project that by the time it actually IS finished, both this woman and I will be regarded at as heroes, if not office Deities.

Back to the trenches....

HOT LUNCH!

I found a new site with lots of fun little things!

Liquid Generation has a odd job finder which asks you a series of funny questions, resulting in an odd job which would suit you best - I'd show you what I got, but when I posted it before, here, I noticed a button up at the top of the blogger page which was not there before...."flag?" was the button, so if you go to this site, and take the test and come up with "Hot Lunch Server", that's what I got. - ...And they didn't know I was a side cook for Marie Callanders!

Hi there,

I'm Ted's glasses! He's has had me for so long, even I can't remember, but this much I do know, If I weren't screwed to his head, he'd forget me altogether...

No wait - he did. He's taken off for austrailia and I remain here with the two freaks he stayed with before he left. They are going to put me in a package destined for Austrailia, first thing tomorrow, (which for Ted, would be a few hours before the first thing the next day, but that'd be Sunday and the post office would be closed.....there, or here....Oh, I'm confused, but at least it'll be an adventure...

It's so funny I had to post this

This is on my wishlist for a very obvious reason. There are a set of 8 cubes, each with their own three-letter named person inside and plenty of stuff to put on the walls.

I highly reccommend going to ThinkGeek.com and buying me at least 1,

Hey, I just turned 39 - I deserve this!

...and on the right side of the car.....more trees....

HI everyone!

...this is what happens when you give a raving lunatic a digital camera on a road trip...

Pooor Noelle......

Cuz I've been BUSY that's why....

A fellow geek who just so happens to be in a kitchen asked why I hadn't updated my blog in a while - See aforementioned title to this particular "bit"...

So...I'm not doing the fire extinguisher thing anymore because it was determined that getting blasted in the face with chemicals once or twice weekly would be contusive to a sick Lewis. I informed my boss that I had a borrowed kidney and they understood - I got my last check from then and went home - relieved. The last thing I need is for my kidney to go bad while trying to "save lives" - Not to sound selfish, here, but ME FIRST!

Noelle's working for Administaff and as an HR staffing solution; they have more than 80K employees. Yes you read that right - Eighty Thousand. As an orientation rep, Noelle gets to fly to Arizona a lot, not to mention L.A. and all parts of the bay area. Seeing as how Administaff has been growing like a weed, they need help - lots of it. Not just your regular help, the administrative crap that takes more time than is necessary. That's where I come in.

My job started as a one-week assignment working with a lady with whom I rode Big Wheels when I was 5 years old. This one-week assignment hasn't ended yet and it doesn't look like it will either. Come the end of August, my "offsite" status at one of our client's buildings (Netflix), will end and I'll be likely nabbed up by the next desperately over-loaded person either in Walnut Creek or San Mateo - there's a third office somewhere in this region, I just haven't seen it yet - give them time, I'll be working out of it soon enough....

Oh by the way - this one-week thing has lasted two and a half months now.

All this "doing the legwork" for labor intensive projects has landed me the self-appointed nick-name of "Company Slave" - which is fine by me because I get to work 7 and a half hours a day for more than most "temps" in my position usually get.

So the long and the short of it is that Noelle and I finally got a weekend filled with fun and frivolity - at long last!

We garage saled, went to a drive in to see Charlie and the Chocolate factory, (damn-good representation with just the right amount of Burton-esque quirkiness), ate out, (a rarity), and Noelle did something that would make most guys faint - she bought a 3 wood and we did the back 9 at Deep Cliff in Cupertino.

It's official, we don’t' suck as much as we thought at golf!

More later because, well, it's supposed to be a blog, right?