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Top Posts
Week	WAL-MARTIANS! Run for your life…. Convenience Store Etiquette My buddy Max Hall
Month	WAL-MARTIANS! Run for your life…. Of Kaffeeklatsches and JNCO jeans... My buddy Max Hall
Ever	Of Kaffeeklatsches and JNCO jeans... WAL-MARTIANS! Run for your life…. My buddy Max Hall

From now on, you shall call me Greg.

Yeah, so these things are a little hokey and not very realistic, but some of them can be fun.  At least for me, and I don’t mind that I came up as Greg Sanders (Gil Grissom would have been better though).  The guy who blasts hard rock in the lab while he’s checking out DNA, knows Las Vegas casino (read MOB) history backwards & forwards, and in one episode was dancing around the hall in a famous, dead showgirl’s headdress (after he got the DNA off it, of course).

Which CSI Character Are You?

More on CSI. Created by BuddyTV

So, which CSI character are you?  If you care, take the quiz and let me know.  If you don’t give a rat’s ass, then that’s ok too, but don’t let me know. :)

I know I never told any student they were worthless…

Got this in an email a while back.  I have no idea who it came from, except that his name was John. 

Subject: Remember me Rossi?
From: john@……………….
Date: 5/21/2010 1:33 PM
To: slim@srossi.net

Well I think I proved you wrong... I actually did something with my life rather then being a high school teacher or something lamer just kidding, but seriously. I make $4,000,000.00 a year or more in profits. Drive a BMW M6 with twin Turbos, modified dynotuned computer, a body kit and carbon fiber body. I live in a Luxury Loft In Los Angeles (NoHO 14). I have a house in the Philippines. I own a Multimedia Distribution company, co-owner of 100 medical marijuana clinics in Southern California each clinic makes about $120,000.00 (split 8 ways) a year. I also own a cultivation farm in Humboldt county, I own commercial property I lease out. I run raves. Wow who would of imagined a liberal who went to school with a bunch of non-liberals in Utah to make so much money. I have a Russian Girl friend too her name is Alyssa (lyubit sosat). Maybe democrats are better at running business then republicans can imagine. 20 years old no degree and don't plan on getting one. LOL.

The first thing that came to mind was BFD.  Good for you, if any of it is true, I’m glad that you made it big.  Then it occurred to me that this student didn’t know me too well.  Liberal vs. non-liberal, Democrat vs. Republican, with the implication that liberal Democrat kicked butt on the doubting non-liberal Republicans.

Um, glad you’re doing well, but it doesn’t prove me wrong and those political slurs don’t effect me at all.  (If you really want me to feel bad, send me a tenth of that $4 million so I can pay off my mortgage.  Then I’ll feel real bad.)

Oh, and if you wanted me to remember you, might have been nice to have given me a name. 

TR•3 to the rescue.

I’ve been using TR• 3 to shine up my cars since I was in high school.  I never thought I’d be suing it on my headlights.  One of the drawbacks of newer cars is that they have model-specific plastic headlights.  Used to be if one of your headlights got broken, cracked or scratched you would go to the nearest car parts store, cough up $6 and get a new one.  Until sometime in the 80’s there were 2 choices: round 2 headlight systems and round 4 headlight systems.  Whichever system, no matter what car you drove the lights were the exact same.  Exact.  The 80’s doubled our choices.  Round 2 and round 4 light systems, or now rectangular 2 or rectangular 4 light systems.  You needed to know three things maximum to get a new headlight: round or rectangular, 2 or 4 lights and, only if you had 4 lights, high beam or low beam.

Now, they’re a lot more expensive.  Mainly because new headlights (not the bulbs, that plastic outer cover that gets broken or scratched) are car specific.  Model specific and to some extent, year specific.  So for Subaru headlights, you pretty much have to go to Subaru and order them from the factory.  I think mine are only good for the Subaru Impreza, and only good for 2 model years.

Which comes to my point.  You don’t just go out and get a new one when it gets cracked or scratched, or more commonly, kind of gets milky and blurry. (Click on picture to get a good look).  So, I’ve been driving around for 3 years (car’s only 6 years old) with milky headlights and feeling like I can’t afford to fix the problem.

Dat, da da!  The Gearheads and TR• 3 to the rescue.  I found out that you can actually just wax them and they can come back looking good as new.  You can even buy special headlight wax at your local car parts store, but the Gearheads suggested trying TR• 3, and today I did.  Click on the picture and see how well it worked.

The other thing I did today was clean my house.  I hate a messy house, even though it often is.  Today it was bad.  All this week I literally came home from work (Wed & Fri it was 2 jobs) and went to bed.  Despite being annoyed by the mess, cleaning was the last thing from my mind.  Today cleaning had to happen, and here are some more before & after pictures to show you that I didn’t sleep through the entire day:

If you’re going to throw away embarrassing pictures…

make sure they go in the garbage.

I don’t go dumpster diving for things to blog about, which means that I found this on the ground with other garbage that someone decided there was no reason to waste the calories walking the 5 steps to the nearest trash can (there is almost nowhere that is more than 5 steps from a trash can at our Chevron).  Much easier to just let it fall to the ground and leave it there.  Which makes it fair game for my blog fodder.

I’ve heard that mullets are coming back in, according to one of the regulars at Chevron that is a hair stylist.  But what about mullets and the entire denim family wardrobe?

If it took effort to breathe…

right now I’d just let myself suffocate.  Not that the first week with the kids is exhausting or anything…

 

Appropriate for the first day of school.

Convenience Store Etiquette

Being a teacher working part time at a convenience store is not easy.  In my primary job I spend a lot of time correcting behaviors, trying to get students to react to stress and disagreements in a more productive way and how to be respectful of other people and their property.  At Chevron we just suck it up and pass on any cost of these behaviors to the customers. (Note to world: “Oh, it’s a big company, they can afford it” is a load of crap.  Every business has an expected profit margin, and if you think that candy bar you stole comes out of the owner’s pocket you’re lying to yourself or just plain stupid.  No matter how big the company, it’s every paying customer that makes up for it.)

As I worked the last few days I started thinking about a list of things that people do in convenience stores that they probably do without even thinking.  This is my list.  Some of them have just become a part of convenience store culture, some of them are due to laziness and some are caused by the “I’m more important than anyone else” attitude.  If you do some of these, don’t automatically think I’m putting you in the last two categories.  (This is a random list, these are not ranked in any order of cost, annoyance or thoughtlessness.  I’m just writing them as I think of them.)

1. Please don’t fill up a fountain drink and then leave it there because you decided on something else.  It still costs the company the same whether or not you take it out of the store, we can’t pour it back.  And since the cup costs (a lot) more than the soda, it doesn’t matter if you only fill it up 1/4 of the way.
2. Do not park your car across 2 parking stalls, right in front of the store, because “you’re just going to be a second.”
3. The speed limit in a parking lot is not 45 MPH.  Try 10 instead, there are a lot of people walking through them.
4. Trash cans are there for a reason, and it’s not so you have something to put your garbage next to.  I’ve seen people chuck wrappers out their car window, less than 5 feet from a trash can.
5. Cigarette butts belong in the ashtray or trash can, not on the ground.
6. Cups cost money.  It’s not the water we charge you for, it’s the cup.
7. Hang up your phone and talk to the clerk like they are a human being, not an ATM machine.
8. If you have a question, come up to the clerk, wait for them to finish whatever they’re doing and then when you have their attention, ask it.  Do not ask the question from the other side of the store and assume the clerk has been watching you your whole time in the store to see if you had a question.  And when a clerk is ringing up a customer, they’re trying to give that customer the full attention they deserve. (ok, this may not be true for all clerks, but for the most part it is).
9. If you make a mess, clean it up.  Or at least let the clerk know about it.  Yeah, clerks get paid to clean it up, but mostly because if they don’t, nobody will.  Not because they should have to clean up after you.

Just a few things to think about next time you’re in a convenience store (or fast food restaurant and many other places).

This is going to be a good year!

Last day of freedom,

And I have to spend a couple of hours of it under the kitchen sink putting in a new garbage disposal.

Ask and ye shall receive

In response to A Paperback Writer’s comment on my “Impromptu Old Ford Show” post:

The truck belongs to one of the Gearhead’s friends. So here are a couple of the better pictures of just his truck.  As you can see, he has stripped parts of it right down to the metal, so it won’t remain all blue, but the parts that are will stay that way.

Of course,  the other two are almost identical, other than the color and the grill, Ford didn’t change the trucks much for over 12 years.  That was true for all of the big three (Chevy, Dodge and Ford).  In the 60’s and 70’s most cars had overhauls every couple of years, but trucks would remain the same for close to a decade.

I’ll get some better pictures for ya the next time.

Impromptu Old Ford Show

Pedro, his wife, the Gearheads, a few of the Gearhead’s friends and I got together today for a little impromptu Old Ford Show in Sugarhouse Park.  Basically, we just got a whole bunch of old Fords and lined them up along the road.  At first we didn’t get whole lot of looks, on account of the group of Shelby Cobra owners that decided to meet at the park right down the road from us.  It was kind of disheartening having them right there, until Pedro came back and informed us that not a one of them was a real Shelby Cobra, that they were all kit cars.  That made me feel better, after all our lineup may not have been as impressive, but they were all authentic.  That, and they left after about an hour. Then we got some good looks.  We had my 4 LTDs, of course, three late 60’s pick up trucks and one Cougar. One of the friends was on the phone to try to get more people to show up, but that was it.  But that’s ok, it was a good time anyway.  We had a few hours of good car conversation, I got to show off my set, even if it was a small crowd.  All in all, a well spent morning. We did have one other vehicle try to nuzzle it’s way into our group, but I think they realized that theirs did not fit into our scheme:  There is another, actually organized, Car Show up in the Canyon Rim area sometime in September.  I’ll try to give you advance notice just in case you are interested.

Shirley you jest.

I’m going to be heading in to school soon.  We aren’t required to go in today, and I wasn’t planning on it.   But yesterday the secretary came on over the P.A. around 2:00 to announce that the big copier had run out of toner.  If we needed anything copied for Monday we would have to do it ourselves on one of the little machines.

We ran out of toner?  The first week or school?  It’s not like she’s new, and had no idea that one of the busiest weeks for the copier is this week before school starts.  It’s not like if you over order toner at the beginning of the year it’s going to sit around and go bad, or unused.  Aaarrrgghh!

We are used to copier crises this first week, it’s not unheard of.  Several of my 18 first weeks the machine has broken down.  Kinda sits all summer and then all of a sudden is expected to make a zillion copies in 3 days.  The poor thing just has a nervous breakdown. Or if the water had come through the ceiling and shorted it out.   But to run out of toner?  It’s kind of like the time I went to Arby’s and was told they had run out of roast beef.

Raindrops keep falling on my head.

More signs of a well funded educational system.  It poured today.  For about 20 minutes, and it didn’t stay outside.  A couple of classrooms (not mine), the faculty room and one of the girl’s bathrooms became showers.  Of course I took some pictures, and here are a few of the better ones.  You may need to click on them to enlarge them in order to see the rain coming through the roof.

The first two are inside one of the classrooms, dripping straight down the whiteboard.  Good thing school hadn’t actually started, it would be hard to teach with a wet dry-erase marker board.

The rest of these are in the faculty room. Right below you can see it dripping right by the light fixtures.

The picture below here shows a pool of water that is caught in the light fixture itself.  This also happened in the girl’s bathroom, but there it actually shorted out the light.  

 

Here you can see the water pooling up deep enough to be on top of the carpet.

I liked how the camera caught the drops in mid air.

And more dripping from the ceiling in the faculty room.

 

Ironically, since there are very few windows in the building, I didn’t even know it was raining until I went into the faculty room and saw it coming through the roof.

Almost Normal.

According  to my doctor, I’m almost normal again.  Of course he’s a medical doctor, not a mental health doctor, so what does he know.  Just that my A1C levels are doing great.  When I was first tested my A1C was 6.9, where 7.0 makes you officially diabetic.  Through the help of modern pharmaceuticals and a drastic change in diet (low carb, no sugar) I tested at 5.9 today, where 5.7 is on the high end of normal.  So at least blood sugar level-wise, I’m almost normal.  He was also really impressed with my blood pressure and heart rate.  (So, I can have all the salt I want.  Just no mashed potatoes to put under it).

As for mental health, there’s no A1C type test for that so you can never prove anything…

Exactly how I feel.