My Morning In Purgatory

I had to bring in the urban assault vehicle (with apologies to Stripes) to get the oil changed on Saturday. I had an appointment for 8:30 in the morning on the theory that the shop is much like the airline and that my chances of being delayed would be much lower the earlier I was there. It was a futile hope.

Once again, they didn't get me in right away. They only had two guys working, you see. This is endlessly frustrating to me. If you know you're only going to have two people working, and if someone calls for an appointment and you're full, why don't you tell me to come in at 9am? Or 9:30 or whatever? Instead, I was trapped in the waiting room and it was exactly two hours before I could get out of there.

That made me crabby enough--shouldn't an oil change be about half an hour?--but what really pushed me over the edge was Saturday morning television.

I did bring a notebook and a book book with me to entertain myself while I waited. I'm used to being delayed at this place. But I finished making notes for the chapter I'm working on and the book was the final one in a series. I'd read the first two at least 6 months ago, maybe longer now, and I had trouble getting into the third one because I couldn't remember the others real clearly. The magazines didn't appeal, but I read the local newspaper and the Wall Street Journal.

That took me through the Strawberry Shortcake cartoon without my hearing it. The only reason I was aware of it was because one of the guys who works there walked by and commented on how he couldn't believe that cartoon was still on.

However, by 10am, I was done with the papers and there was nothing left to do--except watch the television. OMG! When did Saturday morning TV get so bad? I only saw one show, something I think was called Cake TV and it was hideous!

(Okay, I know I'm not the target audience, but I can still watch Scooby Doo Where Are You? and enjoy myself.)

The laugh track on this Cake show was annoying, the acting was awful and overplayed, and the "jokes" (and I use that term loosely) were so horrible that I would sigh loudly and mutter to myself. Fortunately, I was alone while I was doing this. :-)

Chaning the channel wasn't an option and neither was turning it off. The buttons on the television that do those two things had been removed. I was trapped!

All I have to say after that half hour in hell is: Parents, I feel for you! I'd be homicidal if I had to listen to that every weekend.

Movie Review Sunday--Kind Of

Last night's movie was The Butterfly Effect. I'd love to give you a review, but unfortunately, I didn't make it through the movie. I found it confusing and disturbing and turned it off early. If it had only been confusing, I would have hung in there because it was confusing in an intriguing way, and I believe, that's what the director was shooting for--to have the audience wondering what was going on. However, I found aspects of this movie so incredibly disturbing to me personally, that I shut it off. I lasted until the little psycho kid was going to burn another kid's dog alive. On top of the other stuff that had already happened, that was too much for me.

However, I was intrigued enough to want to know what the heck was going on and I did a search online. I found a great Movie Spoiler Site and it explained everything that happened in a concise way.

Anyway, I found the premise for the movie intriguing from reading the spoiler, however, the execution didn't work for me. People who don't mind dark, grim and disturbing might like it, but I give it 1 star.

On a more fun note, I was reading Leiha's blog this morning and she had a link up to a cool Avatar Generator website, so of course, I had to create my own.

Notice the jacket and the hat--it's winter--and the laptop and coffee cup are perfect for writers. At least this writer. Caffeine is my friend and the laptop has become part of my body. :-) Leiha has more cool examples of avatars up on her blog for today.

Speaking of perfect for writers, a while back, Joely Sue blogged about a Demotivator poster that was absolutely spot on. Sorry, I'm too lazy to actually look up the post and link directly to it. :-) I finally went over to Despair.com and ordered it. Here's a link to the poster. For those of you feeling lazy like I do, it shows a Mayan temple (at least I believe it's Mayan) and it says in large letters: Sacrifice. Then below that, it says: "All we ask here is that you give us your heart." If that isn't the most perfect poster ever for a writer, I don't know what is.

The power went out at 4am this morning. I know because I sleep with an air cleaner on and the sudden silence woke me up. Of course, I didn't have a flashlight handy, but I figured I better call this in so that I can have power back by the time I wake up for real on Sunday morning. I managed to find a battery-powered mini lantern and I found the phone number for outages. A transformer was smoking, they said, and they'd have it fixed by 9am. I went back to sleep--tried to anyway--the air cleaner came back on at 5:15. Yea!

Made good progress on my edits yesterday and I'll finish the first run today. I'm fixing all the small stuff and tagging the stuff I need to think about or that will require time to work on. After I finish the first run, I'll hit these bigger items.