What happened to the economy? Why did it all crash and burn? Could it have been prevented? You might want to take a look at the following video to see what both McCain & Obama had to do with the economic collapse before it happened.
Those who know me know that I tend to have a somewhat… odd sleep schedule. I swear it sometimes seems like my body follows a 36 hour clock, instead of a 24 hour one.
I’ve read many things that say if you have insomnia, the best cure is to simply not sleep until you’re tired. This does not work with me! I can, at times, stay up for 24-30 hours without getting sleepy at all. Or just barely sleepy, not sleepy enough to actually fall asleep. And when I finally do sleep, my body often needs to sleep for 10-12 hours before I even feel slightly refreshed. It’s maddening.
I’ve seen studies where people’s natural body clocks usually run about 25 hours, in the absence of any way to tell time (no clocks and no windows). Mine feels longer than that and I certainly do go outside.
When I went to Vegas, it took me quite awhile to fall asleep even though I was fairly exhausted from running around and from not really being able to sleep on the bus there.
So what do I do? I’m kinda tired of having such a wacky schedule, but I certainly don’t want to take any drugs for it.
I’ve kind of always had an odd body clock, much preferring to stay up all night than to be awake during the day. So maybe there’s not an awful lot I can do.
I’d almost forgotten that this happened, but here we go…
About ten, fifteen years ago, my mother, brother and I lived in a tiny apartment complex. There were all of six units. The apartments were laid out in a U shape, so that four of them faced inwards towards the driveway and the two at the end of the U faced… the street, more or less. We lived in the middle one on one side, so that we faced the driveway.
This is where it gets tricky to describe… When you entered our apartment, from the door you could see into the dining area (just a vague ‘arch’ there, no real door) and then the sliding glass door into the backyard. The majority of the living room/dining room was to the left of the front door as you entered. The living room was small, so you had to take a detour around the television and turn right to get to the hallway. There was a bathroom to the right, and a bedroom to the left, almost at the end of this 10-15 foot long hallway. At the end of the hallway was the second bedroom. This bedroom had a large window that faced into the ‘backyard’, about four and a half to five feet off the ground. I was somewhere between 4th and 6th grade when we lived there and I couldn’t see out without standing on something.
As for the ‘backyard’, it was little more than a back porch. Every apartment had its own carport (the ones facing each other shared with the apartment next door). So there were wooden gates that led from the carport into the backyard. One side of the gate connected to the apartment wall, the other to a storage area that was outside. So you go through the gate, you’re standing on the back porch, right next to the sliding glass door. It’s not more than 3 feet from the door to the end of the concrete slab. Then another foot or so and then the six foot tall wooden fence that surrounded the backyard. The horizontal slats for the fence were all on the other side, so that there were none on the ‘inside’ where we were.
If you stepped past the sliding glass door (on the other side of the door from the entrance gate), just beside it were the washer and dryer side by side. They barely fit on the ‘porch’. Stepping beyond the dryer, you were now on dirt with a few stepping stones placed (got horribly muddy when it rained) ending at the square clothesline. This thing sat right beneath the second bedroom window and spun so that you could stand in one spot and get all the clothes on the line; or hang them up. The bedroom window was even higher from the outside than the inside.
Now that all those boring details are out of the way…
One evening, we’re watching TV in the living room (from which there’s a clear view of the porch, remember?) and my younger brother wandered off for some reason. Suddenly, he comes back from down the hall and reports that he just saw ‘an alien’ in the back bedroom window! My mom scoffs and sends me to investigate. As my brother seemed genuinely scared, I’m not exactly thrilled with this task. But I eventually go look and see… nothing.
Now there was a neighbor kid who lived across the street and didn’t like us. He did various things, including stealing something from us at one point; I think it was one of our bikes. So my mother said it was probably him, playing a joke on us, wearing a Halloween mask. With the two of us being somewhere between 7 and 13 (I don’t remember the exact date…) this explanation satisfied us.
But, thinking over it now, there are a few things that don’t add up.
My brother couldn’t have gotten the idea of ‘aliens’ from TV, since my mother absolutely forbid any ’scary’ shows. Shows about aliens, ghosts and magic were all out. She let us watch the original Star Trek, but that was about it. And the ‘monsters’ on there don’t resemble what my brother claimed to see. I don’t even remember seeing any alien Halloween masks at that period of time. We lived there for several years, through several Halloweens, and I don’t remember seeing any of the numerous trick or treaters wearing an alien costume. Nor do I remember seeing any in the store before Halloween, though I’ve seen alien masks for sale in the past two or three years.
Whatever it was; prank, burglar, alien or simply an overactive imagination… My brother never saw it again. I never saw it.
And my mother? She never said anything about seeing anyone leave the backyard when my brother and I went to ‘investigate’. Even though the sliding glass door curtains were sheer and the back porch light was on.
Now that I’m writing it out, over a decade later, it gives me the creeps again. I severely doubt it was a kid and, if it was a grown-up, were we about to get robbed when my brother scared him off by spotting him?
Or was it… something else?
It’s been awhile since I visited Wowio.
When I first visited, you had to sign up and you could download five PDFs for free every day. This was great! Then they changed it to three PDFs. Okay. Not bad. Still great! Then it was 3 PDFs for a maximum of 30/month. Not great, but still not terrible.
I went back today, after having forgotten for awhile. It’s changed again. I am sad.
Now half the things on my download list (from last time) aren’t even downloadable. The other half, I can read them online but I have to pay from $1-20 to get the PDF. $20? What’s up with that? I could probably get these titles for half that, used, on Amazon or eBay.
Wowio went from a great place to get things to read when I’m bored to a place to mostly only visit when I REALLY want something. Now.
At least I still have the PDFs I downloaded already. HA! Including the awful Star Trek comics, woo!
I love tortilla chips. And, of course, Dorito’s are some of the best, if not the best. Cool ranch, spicy guacamole, nacho, spicy nacho, etc. Delicious. I never thought that they could do anything that would make a Dorito chip taste bad.
I was wrong.
‘Lemon’, ‘lemon pie’, ‘lemon meringue’, ‘lemon cookie’… all these are ways you might choose to describe the new Dorito’s ‘The Quest’ chips. You’re supposed to guess the flavor, go online and then there’s a contest thingie.
So what delicious flavor are these ‘mystery’ chips? Mountain Dew. Yes, soda flavored tortilla chips. All I can say about them is that they are… unique. And not completely horrible. But would I buy them again? No! If I want Mountain Dew with my chips, I’ll buy some on my own. I don’t need them to be making my chips flavored with soda. And they don’t even really taste like Mountain Dew. One person described it as ‘Gatorade’ flavor. And that’s a pretty accurate description. It’s definitely a flavor that no tortilla chip was ever meant to be.
The last time that they did a mystery flavor like this, it was cheeseburger. What’s wrong with chili dog? Bean burrito? Steak & cheese? Even ‘Italian dressing’ flavor might have been a good choice. Instead, we get… EGH!
I guess Doritos got paid to do product placement and they didn’t bother to stop and think whether or not many people would actually like the flavor.
Riding the buses in the Phoenix Metro area (also known as ‘The Valley’ or ‘The Valley of the Sun’) is a bit like playing roulette. Tempe is not too bad, they seem to pour a lot of money into the mass transit system. Most of the bus lines run on Sundays and even run on major holidays. There are many buses that run every 15 minutes, including the free Orbit shuttles. Plus, many of the north-south buses connect with either Chandler or Scottsdale, both of which are affluent areas. So Tempe gets shiny new buses.
Mesa, on the other hand, you’re lucky if the bus runs every half hour (as opposed to every hour). There is pretty much no Sunday service. No free shuttles. And there is certainly not service on major holidays.
But one thing remains constant, about all the buses in the system. They all break down fairly frequently. And yesterday, I heard something a bit alarming. The bus was stopped at a light and the driver was chatting with another passenger while waiting for the light to turn (better that than a cell phone, which some drivers do). He mentioned rather matter-of-factly that the previous day, a certain part had broken on his bus that meant he couldn’t do his last run of the day.
Pretty routine, yes. The alarming part? He also mentioned that the mechanic noted that many of the bus parts used were ‘illegal’ and ‘not up to state specs’, but that nobody says anything for fear of losing their jobs.
Considering how often buses break down, it sounds pretty realistic to me. And definitely scary.
(BTW, I also passed the ‘expensive gasoline‘ station yesterday and it was up to ‘$41.79′ now. Hasn’t anyone noticed the misplaced decimal? I guess not.)
