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I’m steaming. Quinn works at a dry cleaner part time, after school and Saturdays. Her boss is a total bitch. This fat, lazy, nuerotic, holier than thou Christian bitch who drives the high school kids who work there away within a couple of months of their hiring. Quinn put in her notice last week because she wasn’t going to let them off on the day of prom.

Awhile ago there was a squabble with a customer over some damage to a shirt. Quinn was there when he came in to complain. They told him there was no guarentee on damaged buttons, but they took the shirt back with the understanding that they were going to fix it. According to Quinn, there was no mention that it was going to be done for free. The customer assumed that it was, the store assumed that it wasn’t. There was a manager from the plant in the store at the time. The customer came to get the shirt and refused to pay. They wouldn’t give it to him. A month passed. He came in when Quinn was working and asked for the shirt. There was an invoice on it that said “No Charge.” It was stapled over the invoice for alterations. Quinn didn’t see it and assumed that the manager and customer had come to some kind of agreement.

When Quinn came into work today, bitch woman tells her that she’s docking her paycheck $30 for letting him have the shirt. And that she’d just cash her paycheck and pay her in cash out of the till, minus the thirty. From my bartending days I knew that was totally illegal in Minnesota. If I’d had to pay for breakage, I would have owed the bar money. It took about two minutes to find the law on the Department of Labor Website. Not only that, for that woman to “cash” her check and pay her out of the till smacks of check fraud to me.

I’m just furious. I think the bitch isn’t doing it as a representative of the business, but simply planning on pocketing the thiry herself. Or is afraid to tell her boss that the shirt left the premises and was just going to ring it up as a cash transaction to make herself look good. My first temptation is to go in there tomorrow and plop the printout from the Website down in front of Jabba the Manager and ask her to read it out loud for me. And then if she gives me any “I’m just doing what I’m told” bullshit, I’ll ask her to get her boss on the phone so I can explaing the law to her.

But I suppose a wise parent would just let the kid work it out for herself.

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I’ve never lived in a placed that required a water softener. Well maybe a couple of summers when my parents moved across the Red River to West Fargo. Moorhead, the town I grew up in (I know everybody loves Moorhead) had an artesian well that pulled pure, great tasting water from the limestone below the valley. Minneapolis, where my little burb buys it’s water, gets it from the Mississippi River. I know that doesn’t sound too good, but remember we’re upstream. Not much industrial crap gets in before it get here. Probably plenty of ag chemicals though. Anyway they run it through whatever processing they run it through and it comes out tasting pretty good and doesn’t need to be softened.

When I was a kid I couldn’t drink the water in Fargo. And my wife’s hometown…gross, you can’t even make coffee with it. I don’t know where the water at work comes from but it tastes like iodine. I’ve been trying to drink more water and less coffee at work but it’s tough to choke that crap down. A couple of days ago one of the women in the office pointed out a source of filtered water. Much better.

Wow, that was interesting. I never rode a school bus to school either.

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So someone left out a bag of Life Saver Gummies in the office today. Cheryl pointed out to me that they contained carnuba wax.

And they say you can’t polish a turd.

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Out in the garden today. Pulling off the mulch and cleaning out the beds. Everything seems to be ahead of schedule this year, it’s been a much warmer spring so far. There are already lots of spring bulbs coming up, hyacinths, iris, tulips, bloodroot, and several things I can’t identify. Every year I say that I’m going to do a diagram of the garden and record the locations of what is in there. I almost did it last fall, but I never finished and lost the paper I was working on. And even when they come up and bloom, I can’t always figure out exactly what they are.

Lucia went to South Bend this weekend for a dance at Patrick’s dorm. She was all concerned about spending the money but we told her to go for it. You only get to go to college once, so you might as well take advantage. She deserves it, she works hard, is getting good grades and doing a great job of budgeting her money. She just called she’s on her way back to ISU. I guess she has someone to pick her up in Des Moines.

Quinn has grown up so much. She seems really happy and adventuresome and has lots of friends. She went through that period where I was afraid she was very unhappy, but I think she’s gained a lot of confidence in the last year. She’s really blossomed into a beautiful young woman too. They’re both beautiful but in very different ways. And they’re smart as well.

Did you see that Janel was the first pick in the WNBA draft. Hooray!

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Today I was on a two hour conference call about stock photography. The guy doing most of the talking pronounced the word “picture” as if he were discribing the person who puts the ball into play in a baseball game, or perhaps something you would pour milk from. I think that, for me, is the most irritating affront to the English language there is. It’s like nails on a chalk board. And I think he said it at least a couple of hundred times in the two hours.

AAAARRRGGHHHHH!

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OK, I promise, this is my last basketball post until Lindsay Whalen starts tearing up the WNBA, but I forgot to mention one of the most interesting things about the Women’s tournament. Kim Mulkey-Robinson’s wardrobe. Kim M-R is the coach of the national champion Baylor Bears. She’s kind of a pit chihuahua, Meg Ryan on crystal meth. In the finals she wore a bright baby blue suit. She had to know that she’d be seen from a high camera angle all night long. She likes to crouch down in a squat while coaching (when she’s not running up and down the sidelines screaming at everyone that moves). The blouse of the suit had one of those loose collars. I haven’t ever seen that much cleavage on TV outside of Baywatch. Thanks, Kim, you’ve made me appreciate the woman’s game even more.

Another thing I notice about KMR was that she had her three kids with her while being interviewed after the semi-final victory over LSU. I think she was trying to make a definitive statement. “I am NOT a lesbian.”

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Will the coughing ever stop. I feel fine but snot boy just won’t be evicted from my left lung. Beck has it now, and she must feel really bad, because she even admitted that she’s sick. Norwegians.

Did you read about the guy who escaped from prison in ’94 with the warden’s wife and has been living in the East Texas woods with her until they found them this week. I can’t wait to find out what the rest of the story is.

We raised over $2000 dollars for the woman who’s house burned down. We may be dysfunctional, but we are family.

I finally met the mystery nieghbor last night. Penny. She’s a horticulturist and consults on plant patents. I feel a strong case of garden envy coming.

This morning on the way into work, just as I was approaching my exit off the freeway, some guy came up on my tail like he was in a big hurry and was going to ride my ass around the exit ramp. I decided that it would be a good time to put the new wheels to a test. I dropped it into manual mode, downshifted, set an aggressive line and put the whip to my 220 ponies. I blew his doors off, I was 200 yards ahead of him coming off the ramp. Damn I love that car.

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Note: This entry was started on Wednesday, the day when I was the sickest and I ran out of steam and just haven’t felt like writing since. I’m much better now, although I sound like a walking tuberculosis ward.

Have you seen the commercial about the little snot blob that takes up residence in some guys lung? The guy takes some medication and snot boy gets blown out like a cow in a tornado. The bad part is that snot boy must have seen a vacancy sign in my bronchia. It started about a week ago with intermittant head and body aches and then a mild congestion in my chest. By Friday I was saying to myself that I had a mild chest cold and it had probably peaked and I would soon be feeling fine.

Not so, Poncho. By Monday I felt like death warmed over. Snot boy was raising a family down there and I had one of those it hurts my eyeballs to read kind of headaches. With my insect like span of concentration, the distraction of coughing, sneezing, fatigue and achiness makes me pretty much useless. I took Tuesday off. Today I’m not much better and it’s invaded my sinus cavities as well, so I took today off as well. I think that today I will hit the club and do the old steam room-sauna-shower and repeat routine and see if it loosens things up enough to hack out a lunger. That’s all I really need. I wish I could remember what that snot boy eviction elixer is called, but I can’t. So much for name recognition.

Rebecca and I have been talking about getting rid of her 2000 CRV and my ’92 Accord Wagon and going down to one car. Our intention was to not pay much more than what we could sell the other two for, so we were going to look for a used vehicle. We did some research and decided we liked Passats, Accords, and Mazda 6s.

First we stopped at the VW place to look at Passats. We were greeted by Vad. “Brad?” “Vad.” with a ‘V'” He had a mild Eastern European accent, was wearing a sweat suit and when we asked him where the prices were on the cars, he pointed to his head. Although he quoted a price on one car and one of his associates was walking by and breezily contradicted him. For some reason I couldn’t stop thinking of him as “Vlad the Impaler.” After all everyone knows that used car salesmen are bloodsuckers. We took the road test, he let us take it out on our own, and liked the car, roomy, comfortable and even with the four cylinder it had plenty of pep. We thanked Vad and headed for the Mazda dealership.

Mike was our next guy. Remember Medevoy from NYPD Blue. It was him, I swear. Looked and acted. He had some used 6s, the loaners from the lot. We took one for a test drive, of course I loved the car, but then he showed us some new 2004 Mazda 6 wagons that were going for less than the used ones. We agreed that these were by far the most car for the money that we’d seen. But this was just supposed to be a preliminary expidition and we still wanted to check out the Honda dealer.

The guy at the Honda dealer was one of those types that give polyester a bad name. I mean I’m an old white man, but this guy was an Old White Man. He didn’t listen, made assumptions that we were low ball customers, and made continuous condescending remarks about women. We love Hondas, have owned them all our lives, but we couldn’t get out of there soon enough.

OK to make a long story not too much longer, we talked it over, I did my due dilligence, discovered that the price on the Mazda’s was about $8500 below sticker price, convinced myself that Medevoy wasn’t gong to dicker, decided the difference between the trade-in and a private party sale wasn’t worth the hassle, dragged my sick sorry ass body out and bought the car.

WooooHoooo! A new car! And a sporty one at that!

That’s pretty much it, but no spoiler lip on the back, we have a roof rack and a moon roof. It’s an automatic which is a departure for me, but it has a five speed shifter that functions much like a manual.

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She grew up in Spooner, in Norheastern Wisconsin and was working in the advertising department of the local newspaper when we hired her. I hired her. I did the interviewing and made the recommendation that she was the one. She was a cheerleader in college and the Girl Scout equivalent of an Eagle Scout. She’s also a motorhead, a major car enthusiast. My first clue that she was the choice, was that when she took the computer graphic competency test, she admitted to me that she hadn’t used Illustrator much, only FreeHand (MacroMedia’s version of Adobe’s great drawing program) but she finished the test in plenty of time without ever looking even slightly flustered. She said all the right things in the interview and had a proven track record in a similar, high volume production environment. It wasn’t until she was on the job that I realized she also had a great mind for process and a head for detail,something not all artists possess, including me. The day she walked on the floor out of training, she was producing 133% of the minimum. In short a great employee.

Yesterday morning she called me, in tears. “I won’t be able to make it into work today, our house is on fire.” She said it started in the garage and the fire department almost had it out and she didn’t know how much damage there was. She didn’t say that she’d been taken to an ambulance because the smoke and excitement and sobbing had set off a major asthma attack. Or that her contacts were still in the house and she’s pretty much blind without them. She left me the number of the cel phone a neighbor had given them to use. She called back later and left a message that she and Dan were unhurt but the house was “gone.”

They were getting ready for work in the morning when they heard noises in the garage. They thought someone might be breaking in. Dan went to check, as he worked his way to that side of the house he saw smoke. He yelled for her to call 911 and grabbed a fire extinguisher. Then he made a mistake. It’s obvious when you hear it, but who knows what any of us would do in a situation like that. I’m not sure I would stop to ponder thermodynamics. He opened the garage door. The air rushed in and the smoldering fire exploded. The house started to fill with smoke, he ran to the front door and pounded, yelling for her to get out. She couldn’t get out that way, she was cut off by the smoke. She opened the window and began screaming for help. He ran around the house and caught her as she jumped from a story and a half. I’m sure that her cheerleading experience contributed to a gracefull defenestration.

The house burned to the foundation. The two collector Mustangs melted in the garage. Their work cars, parked in the driveway, caught fire and burned. They were left with nothing but the clothes they were wearing. Thank god they got out. When I called later in the day to ask if there was any way I could help, she had calmed down and seemed amazingly positive. It sounded like they’d already gotten things under control and had a plan to get by in the near future. Such level headedness and resiliency from such a young woman. Them Cheeseheads are tough.