One thing I’ve learned in all my traveling is not to ask where to go for lunch. They’re always eager to recommend a place where you can get “the best” waffles or burgers or fried chicken or chili or pigs feet or whatever passes for “the best” where ever I happen to be … but then they try to give you directions.

Waste. Of. Time.

It’s always “Go west on 4th street like you’re going to the old Hansen place, then make a slight right at the house with the cow mailbox — not a hard right, that’ll take you out to the fairgrounds, just make an easy right — and then go straight for awhile until you go under the bridge where Billy Ray crashed his car that one time. Look for the spotted hog and when you see it go left until you see Elmer’s mother’s begonia patch, and there you are. Best cheese curds you ever had.”

Do they not realize that I don’t live here??? That I asked them for directions because I don’t live here??? That because I don’t live here, I probably don’t know where the Hansen place is, who Billy Ray is or where he crashed his car, what a spotted hog is, or who the hell Elmer or his mother are? Because I don’t live here!!!

That’s why I just don’t ask for lunch recommendations anymore. It just isn’t worth the trouble.

The cheese curds, though? Yum.

When I’m out on the road for work, visiting these radio stations I’m converting over to the new software, the staff of the stations tend to see me as the ultimate authority figure and regard any advice I give as being The Word of God. It’s understandable, I guess, since I’ve been working with them for 12 weeks, guiding them through the conversion process and riding herd on them to make sure deadlines are met and being the point person on their Corporate Overlord-mandated conversion, but… well… Me? “The Man”? Come on!

It does come in handy at times, though. Without these people quaking in their boots when I walk in the door, I wouldn’t be able to pull these types of jokes on them…

Chuck enters Lee’s office. She practically winces at the sight of him, afraid to hear what problem he’s found now. She’s frazzled and on her last nerve. If one more thing goes wrong, she might lose it.

Chuck runs for his life down the hall as she threatens him, laughing, with a stapler.

Ha. I love doing that kind of stuff. It sucks the tension right out of a room. And it’s funny…

If it’s Tuesday, I must be on the road again. Posting from La Grange, GA this time, and I’ll be here for the next 10 days. To be completely honest, I’m actually in a town called Newnan, but for some reason the Corporate Overlord calls this market La Grange, which works for me — after all, ZZ Top doesn’t have a song called “Newnan.”

Anyway, the view here is fabulous. Here, see for yourself.

What that view doesn’t show you is the absolute best feature of the area, visible from the front of the hotel: a Waffle House within walking distance. And another Waffle House on the other side of the highway. I’m smack-dab in the middle of a pair of Waffle Houses. It don’t get much better than that! I had dinner there tonight — a Texas Cheesesteak sandwich and hashbrowns scattered, smothered, covered, chunked and topped. Aaaahhhh…

And now I’m back in my room swigging Diet Pepsi, eating a Moon Pie and watching Big Brother.

La Grange is off to a fine start.

Some wit (halfway, at least) scrawled just the cleverest bit of graffiti I’ve ever seen on the toilet seat cover dispenser in one of the stalls in the men’s room at work: John Kerry Party Hats!

Fun. Nee.

I had to respond, of course. I was tempted to go with something along the lines of “GWB Diploma” or “GWB National Guard discharge papers” but that was a little too obvious, I thought. Instead, I wrote: Typical Republican — so used to having your head up your ass, you think these are hats.

Ha.

A transcript of the notes passed between me and a coworker during the training session:

Oh. My. God. This last 30 minutes could have been covered in 5.

Fortunately, I’m sleeping through most of it.

Speed it the fuck up already!

60 pages to go!

I love beta testing in training.

I’m bored. I’m going to start asking questions in a minute. Then we’ll be here all day.

I love that you have to save to delete.

We’re on slide 42 of 114.

Oh Lord, shoot me now, please. I’m on a break from a training session that is about on par, stupidity-wise, with most of the internal training around here.

Example:

Student: “I’m lost. What page are we on in the book?”

Instructor: “Page two.”

Now, to be fair, the stupid part isn’t that the student was lost by Page 2. No, it’s that we were only on Page 2 after 45 minutes!

The trainer is so bad that I want to strangle her, which is nothing new since I’ve felt that way about her ever since she trained me as a new hire 3.5 years ago. Some things improve with age … and some don’t.

I’m so bored that I’m asking stupid questions now, just to make it interesting, stuff like “…and how would I delete that?” right after she’s indicated the “delete” icon and said we can delete something. And of course answering that simple question first flummoxed her and then took her nearly five minutes to demonstrate.

Only 74 more PowerPoint slides to go…

We have three kittens, as I’ve mentioned here before.

Beth and Zoe gave them all cute names that are vaguely thematic in nature, but perhaps bestowed these names a little too soon. (I wanted to name one of them “Knuckles,” but I was outvoted.)

The white one is Nina, because Beth originally wanted to name the three kittens Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria. She was apparently on a big Christopher Columbus kick at that exact moment in time. Why, we don’t know. Or care, really. We gave her Nina, but the other two names stayed in drydock.

The black and gray ones got cartoon-themed, Zoe-bestowed names: Cosmo and Wanda, of The Fairly OddParents cartoon. The black one is Wanda, the gray one is Cosmo.

Cute names all, I guess, but a little bit gender confused. Nina is okay because Nina is a girl. But Wanda? A boy. And Cosmo? Girl. That’s what happens when you name kittens before you’ve checked their packages. And we didn’t get around to checking the packages until the names had sunk in, so now it would feel weird to call Wanda Cosmo and Cosmo Wanda. So the names are staying and Wanda and Cosmo will just have a lifetime of neuroses and psychiatric bills to look forward to.

And yet… Beth has decided one kitten’s name must change. Nina, the only kitten with a name that doesn’t need to change, well, Beth thinks it must change. According to Beth, Nina must now be known as Princess Fluffy Cuteness. (“PFC for short!”)

I got yer Princess Fluffy Cuteness right here. Dangling.

Damn, but I’m organized. Or… maybe not. As I was poised to begin writing this entry, thinking that I would start with “…and of course we saw fireworks,” I had a vague memory that maybe I had planned for this year last year. So I searched my own stupid blog for the word “fireworks” and found this. Reading the last line there, you’ll see that I know myself very, very well. Ha.

Anyway… So I obviously didn’t let last year’s fireworks advice get in my way this year. This time around we again viewed the Radford Studio show but from a different location — we went with Zoe’s friend Katie’s family and set up camp at the east end of Moorpark Park, which was the perfect spot. Great view, nice setting, not too crowded, etc. And if you’re a lazy bastard like me and let Beth and Zoe go in the car to stake out a spot ahead of you and then you show up an hour later on the motorcycle and park where ever you want because traffic and parking isn’t a hassle on a motorcycle, then it makes it that much better. For you, at least.

So as a note for myself next year: do it that way again. If, you know, you read this. Beforehand.

We also went to a barbeque at the home of the owner of my local dive ship. There were a lot of people there, many I knew from diving already. And they had scuba gear there too, so the instructors and divemasters in attendance were giving sample dives to everyone who wanted them. Zoe and Beth wanted them.

Zoe kept coming back for more — she suited up and bubbled her way around the pool four times and would have kept going if they hadn’t almost literally peeled the tank off her. Beth went around twice too and pronounced it “fun.” I think pretty soon now we’ll be a scuba diving family … which will not be cheap.

I need to find some more frugal hobbies.

The scuba curse has lifted! I finally got to go diving again yesterday.

We (a group of people from my local dive shop) went out on the Magician dive boat. The original plan was to dive some wrecks in San Pedro Harbor but the harbormaster nixed that idea so we went to Catalina Island instead for a 3-dive day.

Dive #1 was at Italian Gardens. I was buddied up with two strangers, Mike and Kevin. Kevin has about 20 dives under his belt, while Mike claims to have lost count. Our dive plan was to drop down to 50 or 60 feet (as an Open Water rated diver my max depth is supposed to be 60 feet) and then head toward the shallower water toward the shoreline and look for the group of Giant Black Sea Bass that have been seen hanging out there recently. We ended up going to the bottom at 70 feet before I realized I was too deep, so I went up to 60 and followed Kevin and Mike from up there. We never did see the Sea Bass, but for entertainment Mike cut up some sea urchins to feed the Garibaldis. I went through my air pretty quickly and we had to surface after 22 minutes.

Dive #2 was also at Italian Gardens. Mike was seasick so he didn’t dive. Kevin and I went down to about 45 feet and just swam around for about 40 minutes (your air lasts longer when you don’t go so deep!). We saw a hint of movement way out at the edge of visibility and as we watched one of the Giant Black Sea Basses slowly swam into view. He was about 4 1/2 to 5 feet long (it’s hard to judge size underwater) and was totally unconcerned with us. We followed him for about five minutes, and then it seemed as if he finally noticed us behind him. He paused, turned his head back to look at us, then angled back around and swam over to check us out. He came within about 15 feet of us, we gave each other a good long look, and then he slowly swam away again. That was pretty cool. When we surfaced we found we were about 50 yards from the boat and had to swim against the current to get to it. That was pretty not cool but we made it.

For Dive #3 we moved the boat a mile or two up the coast to Red Lava Point West. There, the captain pointed out a cave at the waterline in the cliff face at the shore and said it was horseshoe shaped and safe to swim through. Mike was still sick and didn’t dive again, so Kevin and I decided to start by swimming through the cave and then just explore along the coast at about 40 feet. The cave turned out to be a dead end — we went in about 30 yards as it got narrower and narrower with the surge bashing us up against the rock floor and sides of the cave. Kevin was leading and went so far in that he was practically crawling before I called him back because I wasn’t wearing gloves and my hands were getting torn up on the rocks as I tried to hold my position back in deeper water. After the cave we loafed around for about 40 minutes, varying between 40 and 15 feet before we surfaced literally right next to the boat. After the dive the captain announced that, oops, he had anchored at the wrong spot and the horesehoe cave was actually about 100 yards away. He drove the boat past it so we could “at least say you’ve seen it.” Ha.

All in all, it was a good day of diving. I got to go deep, got to see a Giant Black Sea Bass, and got to bleed. But the main thing is that I got to dive. Finally.

Aaahhhh….

Cue Carol Burnett singing “I’m so glad we had this time together…” My time in Centralia has come to an end and now I’m heading to the airport to fly home — and doesn’t that phrase sound just lovely? But lest we forget the magic we’ve shared, Centralia and me, here are a few local links we can click on and use to reminisce…

Local news
and the radio station’s nemesis, King Chuck
I particularly recommend checking out King Chuck’s rants against the station’s talk show host on his John Panesko is an Ass page.

Ah, good times, good times…

And with that, I…Am…OUTTA HERE!!!

Ladies and gentlemen, the Elvis tattoo has left the building!!!