It’s time for a complete change now folks. UPDATE YOUR BOOKMARKS to point to the web address above. THIS BLOG WILL NO LONGER EXIST in 30 days, it has all been moved to the above address and THAT is where it will be updated.
Major improvements, enhancements, and other things can be found at www.leelanauwhippersnapper.com including an explanation of why that name was chosen. Go check it out.
Well, it’s been an interesting week. Pretty busy this weekend at work, people have spring fever so they are coming out to shop which is fine by me. I need it to be busy or I get board.
There are going to be some changes ahead for this blog. I am likely going to be moving it from a hosted service over to my own domain/web service if I can get the site to do what I want it to do. I have had a hosting account with godaddy.com for a number of years now and have never really developed any sort of web site. Turns out that WordPress (the host of this blog) has a standalone application similar to this platform that I can host on my own web site. I’m going to test it out and see if I can migrate everything over there. If I can, it will allow me a LOT more flexibility in so far as design, features, and fun things that I can make the site do. We’ll see what happens, if I do move, I will try to keep it seamless.
As I’ve been writing this I’ve been playing with the new web site and it looks like there will be a switch over very shortly. I’ll put a referring link up here once that happens. I’ve got to make sure it’s going to be something I want to spend the money on. Stay tuned!
Well I finally made it. A month now where the money will just keep flowing. This is the only time of year when I get three big bangs all within 3 months. Tax returns, Profit Sharing Bonus at work, and Management Bonus at work. The first wave this year went to pay off my folks for being ever so generous in helping me keep my head above water this fall and winter. I seem to have this problem of every time it rains it pours. It spent a LOT of time pouring this winter. Today it was profit sharing time at work. I can’t elaborate much but employees of my company get a certain percentage of their gross earnings back each year as a bonus IF the store you work at is profitable. We were so I got my bonus. By the time you get to be a manager this bonus can add up to several thousand dollars. I got Three.
The first grand went to uncle sam. It seems that you can’t avoid the luxury tax on this type of bonus. The second thousand has been set aside and earmarked specifically for credit card debt and car related expenses. The third thousand is MINE. I didn’t get to spend any money this year on myself or Jirar at Christmas because money was so tight. Everything I had went to gifts for other people. No biggie, that happens a lot. I buy for everyone else before I buy for myself. This is my turn.
Today I purchased a new camera that I have been looking at now for a few months. I take a LOT of pictures and after Jirar dropped our Sony Cybershot into Crystal River last summer, its never worked the same so this is the replacement. It’s a huge step up as far as features and quality and it will NOT be going canoing with us this summer! We’ll save the Sony for that. There is a story to this but it’s likely only interesting to me but I’ll post it anyhow.
Like I said, I’ve been looking at this camera now for a few months. I’ve researched it on-line, I’ve gone to Best Buy and played with it, I’ve asked other photographers I know what they think of it. Everything I read and everyone I talk with has said this is a great camera. So today after work, I went to Best Buy to purchase it. Now, if I were not so damm impatient, I could have purchased this camera on-line and had it shipped to me for less money than what I paid today but I’m impatient. I went into Best Buy and waited for a sales person to help me. I waited, and waited, and waited, and…
Clearly Best Buy was not interested in my business. Multiple employees passed me, not a single one of them asked if I needed help, not one of them appeared to be doing much at all. Since I’m a sales manager by trade, I never miss an opportunity to test our competition. My actions were obvious, I made eye contact, gestures etc that would have suggested to any attentive sales person that I was at the very least in need of some help. I tend to make people work for my business. I don’t think it’s rude and in fact the residual payoff for YOU the sales person is quite great if you give me the time of day. Too bad Best Buy, you didn’t and YOU lost a sale today.
I strolled out of the store, got in my car and left. I headed over to Ritz Photo in the mall. I had done my research you see and Ritz was the same price as Best Buy. I didn’t go there initially BECAUSE I HATE THE MALL. I’ll be going to Ritz now for my photography needs. I was greeted, asked how I was doing, what I was looking for, etc. etc. Because I already knew what I wanted the guys there didn’t have to work very hard at all. They knew I had done my homework and they were eager to help. I purchased the camera, a new memory card, and a new set of rechargeable batteries and a carrying case. I also purchased something that I don’t normally purchase. I got a SERVICE AGREEMENT (EKKKKKSSSSSSS!!!!!!).
I am usually very hesitant to purchase service agreements or extended warranties. In fact, nearly everything I read about these for digital cameras said DON’T buy them, you won’t use it. This one is a little different though and it takes into consideration how I use the camera. This agreement actually covers normal wear and tear from NORMAL AND ABNORMAL USE including UNINTENTIONAL abuse, shock, or trauma! That means that if I am hiking pyramid point this summer and drop the camera down the 500′ vertical cliff and it comes apart in the sand, I will get a new camera. I purchased a 2 year plan because in 2 years, I intend to go back to Ritz and purchase a D-SLR camera as I increase my knowledge and skill level as a photographer. The next step in equipment is the big leagues. This camera will teach me how to use the manual settings and it will prepare me for the challenges (and big pay-offs) of the professional level D-SLR cameras that I will eventually purchase. See what I mean about residual pay off? The sales person at Ritz has a customer who will come back because he took a minute to give a shit about making a sale.
Anyhow, this was a LONG post to not really say much. Here is a photo take with the new camera and slightly edited in Photoshop. The detail and closeness of this picture was not possible with my other camera. There will be plenty more to come and there will be more posted at www.leelanauphotography.com as well. This is Pooh.
So you all know that I have just a wee bit of libertarian blood in me. I mostly believe that the government has it’s place but it’s not in my house. I don’t like government intrusion into my life and I don’t like random people having information about me, my life, my family, my health, etc. etc. Seems the ACLU agrees. The ACLU is a strange bunch. The left loves them for their positions on free speech. The right loves them for their positions on the second amendment. Both sides go back and forth hating them and loving them. They are sort of like the supreme court. The only time you can stand them is when they make a decision you agree with. They are a creative bunch and they know how to make a point. Check out THIS web site, those of you with dial up will need to just sit there and let it load. It’s worth the wait. It will open in a new window.
I’ve been laughing VERY hard at some of the exchanges on the Not Always Right – Funny and Stupid Customer Quotes web pages over the last couple days. It’s a good release for me because I get to see that I’m not the only one who has to deal with dip shits, liars, cheats, fools, and idiots on a daily basis. I’ve posted one below that I think is particularly relevant and also quite reflective of our lazy entitlement society. The idea behind price matching is to promote same store sales and guest service. Margins in retail are not significantly different between competitors so if we need to price match, we don’t loose any more than they would gain by doing so. What is funny however is that customers somehow think that WE must prove the other store is lower in price. I can’t tell you how many people do not understand that just because you say it’s cheaper at some other store does not mean that it is. YOU need to prove it! If you can prove it, hey, I’ll take care of you. If you can’t, fuck you, drive back across town and buy it from them. Don’t get all up in my face because you are too lazy to carry through on your end of the deal. Here’s an exchange from this web site. You retail bitches should visit this site. Some of them will make you cry laughing.
Me: “Yes we do.”
Customer: “Ok, well Wal-Mart has this vacuum on sale for $27.99 and you have it on for $34.99. Will you match that?”
Me: “Yes, that’s no problem. I just need to see a copy of the Wal-Mart flyer with that vacuum.”
Customer: “You don’t have the flyer?”
Me: “…No. We don’t carry Wal-Mart’s flyer.”
Customer: “You want me to drive all the way home to get Wal-Mart’s flyer and come all the way back here? Are you sure you don’t have it here?”
Me: “No, we don’t have Wal-Mart’s flyer.”
Customer: (angrily) “Well, you SHOULD! Jesus Christ, do I have to do everything?”
(Customer mutters and walks away.)
I was doing some reading tonight online and I visited the Obama campaign web site. I’m still undecided as to who I will vote for 10 months from now but I did take the opportunity to learn a little about Obama. I’m pretty impressed with his talking points although, in reality, they are not that much different from Clinton’s points. I think it’s pretty safe to say that Clinton will offer much the same thing her husband did in the 90’s with a few twists. On a side note, my bias right now is that I would really like to see a woman as our president because I think the white male establishment needs a good swift kick in the ass from a hot headed woman! What I don’t see from her though is an indication or understanding of the importance of technology or youth culture. Now whether Obama truly gets it or not is a matter of judgment I think. I’m sure the creators of his web site are good spinners of his general generic messages. I was struck however by the amount of time he spent detailing his plans for technology. If you’ve read this blog much you know that certain things piss me off. One of them is the lack of choice I have when it comes to technology access out here in red-neck land. Obama appears to acknowledge this problem and he offers some policy points for consideration. I’ll post them here and you can read the full list here.
I obviously spend a good deal of time on-line and I am a hard core broadband advocate. When the “internet was invented” I was in collage and I was able to immediately take advantage of high speed access at school. At home I had to suffer with dial up access and today many people still have to deal with this ancient technology but I was a very early adopter of high speed cable internet and subscribed even when it cost me over $100 a month to do so! Even today a MAJOR factor in deciding where I live is whether or not there is access to high speed internet. If there isn’t, I will not consider living there, end of story. Dial-up is DEAD. I knew it then and I know it now. To do anything online anymore you need to have speed and it should be available to anyone, anywhere in the country. CHINA is further ahead on their broadband initiatives than we are and they are barely considered a developed nation! What I’m seeing in Obama’s pledges are a connection to young people and some of the things they expect to have available to them. As a young person (well mostly) I expect certain things to be available. I don’t care about cost, I care only about availability. The internet in many ways keeps people connected. I expect to be able to move anywhere in the country and still be able to connect with people through use of the internet. The world has become smaller thanks to the internet and I (and many others) do not think that is a bad thing!
I’ll keep reading about Obama, maybe I’ll even vote for him. Certainly this issue alone won’t decide what I do but his acknowledgment of something I care about does matter. Just think, if we didn’t have the internet, would we be able to make fun of dip shits like the owner of this store?
Why do I always have to work and be around dip shits? Some readers will say – loose your fucking ego David, you’re nobody special and you’re working in retail what do you expect? OK. Now tell me why, when you have the opportunity to make a sale – you don’t- but rather you send the customer on a search through the store to the WRONG department (mine) so I get to deal with their attitude at having to walk BACK to YOUR department because you don’t have a fucking clue what you sell. You know, sometimes it’s just too much drama to even be interesting. Grow up folks, this is the real world now not fucking high school. If you can’t do the job correctly, don’t fucking do it at all. I REALLY hate having my time wasted by idiots.
I expect dumb ass, inconsiderate, and stupid behavior from kids. I don’t understand why I’m supposed to expect it from 30 year old adults too.
Well today sure was an intersting day. It started actually last night when I fell asleep on the couch and woke up with with a horriable back ache around 1am. I transfered that to the bed where the dog had been keeping my spot warm and decided I needed to get up at 4:30 so I could leave early for work. I don’t have to show up for work on Sunday until 7:30 but becuase it was 30 below zero with the windchill and snowing like a bitch, I figured I had better give myself lots of time. Good thing I did.
I managed to get all the way out of Leelanau and over by Traverse City West High School before out of nowhere (well not really) I could not see anytying in front of me on the road. I was going quite slow to begin with so I did as I would normally do when you can’t see, slow down more and keep the wheels on the car straight. As I slowed down, I must have hit some ice in the road becuase within 5 seconds the front of my car was heading over the side of the road and into a ditch. There was no way I could stop the situation at this point so I kept my hands on the wheel, put my foot on the break and just let the snow stop me. For the first time since I’ve lived up here, I ran myself off the road, or Mother Nature did anyhow.
No airbag explosion, no damage to the car, just a big fluffy pile of snow with my car burried under it. I had to get my balance since I was sitting at an angle. I flipped on the light in the car and started looking around for a phone number for a tow service. This would be interesting I thought at 7am on a Sunday morning out in the country. Called Mom and Dad, thankfully not to inform them that I was calling from beyond the grave, and they got me a tow truck phone number.
I sat there in the ditch with my car running for about 45 minutes before the tow truck came to haul me out. In that time I’d say about 10 people stopped to ask if I needed any help. I’m very grateful that people actually stopped but I could not help but notice something about those who did. 80% of them were women and of the 2 men who stopped, 1 was a county snow plow driver who was not allowed to use his plow to tow anything and the other apparently lived near where I was. Again, I am thankful for those who stopped, if I had needed help, I know I would have received it. My question though is for all the people who just kept on going. Why did you slow down, look, and then speed away? Next time, do people like me in this type of situation a favor. Don’t stop, don’t look, don’t gawk. If you have no intention of helping or asking if anyone needs help, get the hell out of here.
Anyhow, by the time the plow arrived it was light outside so I was able to take a look around. I’m actually lucky to be alive and writing this. About 10 feet behind where I went off the road the ditch kept right on going….down about 50 feet. Had I been going any faster and that white out happened any sooner, I would have ended up parked in the top branches of several old cherry trees. They might have broken the fall but they would have never been able to support the weight of my car and thus I would have ended up at the bottom of the ravine, likely in pretty bad shape and out of sight of the road. Call it what you want but I call it luck.
So tomorrow, I get to wake up again at 5am and do it all over again. I just love working for a company that doesn’t care what happens to you on your way to work, only that you get there on time. Like I said in my previous post, I’m about done risking my life just to get to work and sit on my ass because EVERYONE in their right mind is at home and not out driving in the first place. This is the reason I need to be closer to town. This is the reason I will not be saying at this house past August of this year.
Seems all I do on this blog is complain. Oh well, this is my outlet to bitch since I’m too nice to actually hit you in the face. Up here in the north woods we are hunkering down for another winter event. More 50mph winds and blizzard conditions and yet again I get to wake up at 4AM so I can allow 2 hours to get to work on time. This is why I am moving closer to town after this lease is up. Not only are the people who live out this way HORRIALBE drivers (more on that in a minute), I have to get up way too early to get to work. When you get up at 5AM, drive 2 hours to work, THEN work a 12 hour shift, drive another 2 hours home (assuming the bad weather has not changed but only gotten worse) thats 16 hours I have tied up in a day where I might only see 5 people in my department at work. NOT WORTH IT. I need the sleep.
Back to the dip shit fucking drivers up here. Right now the roads are all passable but all the intersections everywhere are solid ice. I’m driving down 669 towards Maple City and out of nowhere this jackass in a WHITE MINI VAN races up to the stop sign sliding most of the way up to it and nearly into the intersection. It’s past 5PM and he/she/it IS DRIVING WITH THEIR LIGHTS OFF, no turn signal indicating which way they are going, talking on a cell phone, kids UNBUCKLED in the back seat far to young to NOT be in a car seat. This driver scares the piss out of the guy I’m following and then has the audacity to glare at me as I drive by next as if this person is somehow better than everyone else on earth. He/She/It peels out behind me, clearly out of control on the ice and not going anywhere at all becuase like I said the intersections are all solid ice and that van wobbles back and foth a bit and eventually catches up to my bumper. So for the next 5 miles up to Maple City this van is riding my ass, again with no lights, he/she/it clearly more concerned about her fucking phone conversation than about the kids in the back seat of her/his car. I keep my distance from the guy in front of me because I know that as soon as we get to the stop light in Maple City there are going to be problems.
I slow way down mainly to piss this person off at this point. We roll into maple city and I’ve been able to pull ahead several feet by this point. The guy in front of me slides right through the intersection but maintains control of his car and continues on. Fortunately, the other people one the road are paying attention. I was going slow enough to come to stop at the light and then I proceed on. The WHITE MINI VAN screams up to the light, hits the break to stop, slides right through the intersection, spins around in the road and ends up on the OTHER side of the road facing the WRONG WAY. STUPID FUCKER. I got a laugh out of it, I don’t know what happend after that, he/she/it didn’t follow me the rest of the way home.
Now you wonder why I’ve taken the time to write this all out. THIS IS BUT ONE EXAMPLE OF HUNDREDS OF DIP SHIT DUMBASS DRIVERS IN LEELANAU COUNTY.
Driving is a privilge, it should be harder to get a license, and it should be a LOT harder to keep it once you get one. I’d like to see mandatory classes every 10 years for ALL drivers to keep their licenses and if poor driving skills are demonstrated, that jumps to classes every year before you can renew your tags. YOU fuck ups are the reason I have to pay out my ass for insurance. You can bet that if there were consequences for poor driving people would take the responsibility a LOT more seriously than they do. I think it’s just fucking funny because I went to the Sears driving school. Pay $200 for a 2 week class and bang you are done. I consider myself a good driver, knowledgeable, able to read conditions, and I know what it means to be a responsible driver. Most of my peers and really most everyone else has spent nearly an ENTIRE SEMESTER in their public school taking drivers ed and they SUCK. How can you have MORE time to practice and learn than me and SUCK so bad at driving?????
Are you bad drivers because you are living examples of the picture below????
Finally, a copy of the Rutter Requiem has surfaced on YouTube that is not utterly tragic. Those of you with high speed connections will be able to listen to this, the rest of you, just think back to my days at GVSU when our top choir tried doing this for a PBS television show. We did it and it exemplified the difficulty of the piece and the reason it should only be attempted with care. That’s not a slam on the music program at GVSU (hey, you can only work with what you have right?). Just enjoy. Like I’ve said before here, I am not a huge fan of John Rutter but there are certain things I do like one of them being that he has the ability to truly challenge not just a choir but also a director. This piece, due to the changes in time, is quite difficult to direct correctly. I had to do some of this on one of my conducting exams.
