Posts

Showing posts from November, 2011

Uncertainty & Smiles

So last week at work I returned from my two day Thanksgiving break to find the day room smothered in Christmas decorations. There was one lone driver sitting in the day room when I arrived. I went to the dispatchers office, checked in and then made my way into the day room for a minute to get my things in order before heading out to the bus when I commented on the decorations. "Looks nice, but I wonder if they plan on adding any Hanukkah decorations?" The other driver looked up at me over the brim of his glasses, pulling his nose out of his newspaper long enough to say, "I never too you for a Jew, a Nazi maybe, but not a Jew." I was too shocked to come back with anything clever. All I said, after a long awkward pause was... "Who me? Really?" And then I exited the building. I really am still not sure how to take it. Compliment? Insult? or was he just trying to be funny? My husband thinks it was his way of just making a joke. I tend to think it's a...

Forget Epic

Ugh. I'm about to go off the deep end. My epic decision has stalled and is nearly dead in the water. Time for plan b... Which sucks. But whatever.

The Night Runs

I am T minus 4 hours away from another night run. I need to take a nap but I'm not tired enough to sleep. I need to eat but my stomach is in knots. And I also need to shower... but honestly I don't really care how I smell when I have to deal with these idiots tonight. Plus, I just did something I wasn't sure I actually would do and I'm both nervous and excited about it. It's HUGE. Epic even. And while it's gonna cause quite a few waves, it'll be so worth it. I hope. BTW, if you know my secret please don't comment about it. When the time comes I want to be the bearer of such news. I love leaving folks hanging in suspense. :)

Stress

Seriously stressed out. I need a vacation but can't take one because of my job. I don't have any time to take off yet. I won't get any time until April. If I live that long. The stress is seriously killing me. I am not really cut out for this public service shit. I had a long night last night when I got short notice thrown into a night run. I was two hours into protection when I got the news that I was gonna have to do the night run. And that I had less than 15 minutes before it was due to start. I was hungry and angry from the get go, which isn't a good combination. I HATE night runs. I am not a night owl, I'm a morning person. I prefer to be in bed no later than 9 pm. Driving past that hour is a huge risk for me. I have terrible night vision, I have a terrible tendency to have "micro sleeps" strike after that hour and fatigue sets in heavy once I get past the 10:30 mark. I will be straight up when I say I'm not a safe driver after that ...

Floaters

Image
No, no I've not found a dead body in the river. Although, if I ever do I'm totally poking it with a stick. But I digress.... No, the title line is referring to the little annoying piece of crap floating around inside my eyeball that is making quite a nuisance of itself lately. Below is the best representation of what I "see" that I could find on the internet. Crazy isn't it? Unlike the photograph below, I usually only see one, it's in my right eye and it changes shape constantly. At one point earlier today it was shaped like one of those "remember" ribbons. At another point it was more like a knotted up shoe lace. It's pretty annoying to be moving along doing daily things like driving, walking, watching TV, playing Angry Birds....whatever... and this little stringy thing pops into view and gets all up in my business. It's distracting for one thing, and just plain annoying for another. I was driving to Huntington today to have lunch wit...

Please remember....

I am a storyteller . There is not now nor will there ever have been 100% accuracy in my stories. For one thing I do not remember exact exchanges so quotations are generalized at best. And for another thing, I have to embellish for entertainments sake. :)

Conversations

"Hey bus driver what's your name?" he asks. "Bus Driver." I say with a polite smile on my face. "Really a bus driver named Bus Driver?" he asks as seriously as he could. "Yep." I reply continuing to smile. "No really sweetie what's your name?" he pushed. "I told ya, first name Bus, last name Driver." I chuckled. ....and he continued the conversation by trying to guess my name for 6 miles worth of driving. He got close once with "Michelle", my middle name... but no cigar. Same guy referencing another time another place: "I know you young lady." "I dunno, you sure?" "Yeah I think you've drove another bus I've been on before." "Oh, well, that's possible, I'm all over the place." "Yeah I remember now, you picked me up at the dirty book store down in Jefferson... CuhhhRAaaaaaZY Mitches!" "Oh yeah now I remember, you were visiting your "g...

Fun times...

Yesterday I had an incident with a passenger at work that took every ounce of my energy to get through. The situation, while irritating and day-ruining, could have been MUCH worse had I not had a particularly special passenger on board. But the ridiculousness of the situation just zapped the life right out of me. And it only took about 3 minutes from start to finish for the ordeal to play out. I was running a route for a regular driver who had taken vacation for the week. Of course, being that it was Monday I was the first "fill-in" driver to cart around the regular riders on the route. Things were going pretty well I thought even though I was running fairly late because of a few snags along the way. I had a lady get on the bus headed downriver to one of the high schools on the route. She was a little loud with her conversations with other passengers, enough so that I wished she'd utilize an "inside voice". I never said anything, I rarely do unless someo...

Craft Ideas

I'm itching to be crafty. Anyone out there have any cute crafty ideas that don't require sewing? I'm open to anything involving hot glue, regular glue, paint, glitter (oooh yeah glitter!), embellishments of any sort.... etc. I just can't sew and prefer not to try to learn on the fly. I was thinking about getting into scrap-booking but man that's an EXPENSIVE hobby. But I want to do something to better utilize my time than watching TV every spare minute.

Really?

I make a choice to pursue something and I get nowhere. Today I made a few phone calls but all I got were voice mail inbox's and my hopes up. I really had hoped to speak to a real live human regarding a few things today but alas, it wasn't in the stars. So I will have to wait for returned phone calls, which of course will probably lead to a game of phone tag since I am almost always working and can't answer the phone when someone finally calls me back. I might get lucky tomorrow and be able to accept a return call depending on what happens in the morning at work. I am not scheduled to work a run but instead will be required to suit up and sit at the garage for three hours while on "protection". Basically the duty of protection is bullcrap, but I get paid for it so I shouldn't bitch. I am supposed to be there to be available should someone not show up for their shift on time or at all or if they call in at the last minute. Then I'm a already there and ...

Celebrity Downers

Image
I was just browsing pictures over at Yahoo! OMG and saw a few celebrities that I'd never seen before. I'd heard about them, most of them musicians whom I've heard on the airwaves for ages. But had never actually seen them. I hate it when I picture someone looking a certain way and then when I finally see them I get deflated with disappointment because they are sooooo not what I expected. One of them today was David Guetta. Did NOT expect him to be a 40+ guy who looks like a rocker wanna-be. Of course I also spotted a dude in a trio group that looks eerily like a friend I've known since childhood. And while I'm not gonna point out which one of the group Thirty Seconds to Mars it is that looks like that friend, those of you who have been in my life since childhood will probably know which one it is and just who he looks like. And I'm not gonna bore you with a picture of Justin Bieber but I AM gonna say that he bears a striking resemblance to a girl I knew in ...

Bridesmaids

I had received my monthly freebie code from RedBox via text message on Monday. So after work I stopped by the closest kiosk to choose my free rental. I didn't know that Bridesmaids was out on DVD, primarily because I don't keep up with that sort of thing. But when I saw it on the list of available movies I selected it and proceeded to type in my promo code. I was annoyed when I tried twice to enter the code and have it rejected each time. Still not sure what that was all about but I figured that since I'd made the effort to stop by the Box to rent a movie I may as well rent it whether it was free or not. I didn't get to watch the movie until the next day because by the time I got home I had to get to bed so I could wake up for a 4 am run at work. And when I did sit down to watch it I only got to watch about 80% of it before I had to go back to work. But even at that point I was highly unimpressed with it. There were only a few moments where I actually LOL'd. ...

Moulin Rouge

I seriously love this movie. I needed some background noise so I turned on my Wii and tuned in to Netflix and there it was, staring at me in my "recommended" list. So of course I figured why not. I remember the first time I ever watched this movie. It was all the rage. Everyone said it was the musical of the year, maybe the century. My ex-husband and I had just PCS'd to Goodfellow AFB in San Angelo, Texas and were staying in temporary housing. As we explored the base we found the movie rental section at the "shoppette" and decided to rent a couple movies. He picked one and I picked one, which was usually how we did it. I can't honestly recall his choice, but I remember clearly deciding to rent Moulin Rouge. Of course we also had a thing where he would shuffle the movies behind his back, one in each hand and I'd pick "left" or "right" and that was the movie we'd watch first. That evening Moulin Rouge was the first to be pla...

Oh Deer...

Forget whack-a-mole. I prefer to play whack-a-deer. Yup, killed myself a deer this morning. Dumb buck. I had two passengers who were neither bothered by or impressed with my deer killing skills. I'd seen it coming, I knew it wasn't gonna get out of the road in time. I slowed down from 55 MPH to probably around 40 MPH by the time I made impact. After the deer and the front of the bus met for the first and last time I found a safe place to pull off the road and inspect the bus for damage. All I found was a little blood splatter but otherwise, the bus was unharmed. I called my dispatcher to alert him to my plight. He asked me to verify that there was no damage and to get a "courtesy card" from the passengers just for the "record" of it. And then he told me to keep on route if all else was okay. The two passengers I had filled out the cards I offered them, kindly. And I continued on my merry way. The passenger sitting closest to the front wanted to talk ...

Flusterated

I'm going thru a bit of a crisis. I'm being pulled in different directions. An internal struggle waging full on war, one desire pitted against another, being flanked and attacked from all sides by yet more desires. Oh why can't we just have it all?! Maybe it's just the changing of the seasons, personal stresses, creating these waves of insanity. I'll give it a few days, maybe a couple weeks to see how the tides of war turn. But for now, I'm a woman on edge.

Please Put Those Away

Today, amid lingering ickyness from a stomach bug that struck me hard yesterday, I forced myself out and about for at least a part of the day. I spent the morning making a stop at the local urgent care to get a confirmation on the virus I was dealing with and a doctors excuse for having had to miss work thanks to it. After that I went to see my step mom for a clean-up cut and color date. She is a miracle worker and managed to cut my hair into an even cuter 'do, which I will show off when the puffy dark sickly circles under my eyes have disappeared and I can photograph myself without scaring off my readers. She also gave me a good coloring that evens things out and makes me look AB FAB! After that I came home for rest and relaxing, as that little bit of doing got me wore plum out. I cat napped and watched some television and ate a small bowl of plain cooked macaroni, which didn't settle well and reminded me that I'd spent most of my day yesterday running between bed and b...