I had a seven-hour turnaround between shifts at work the other day, which works out to about three and a half hours of sleep in practice. Off at eleven, home to my little apartment, asleep by (maybe) one A.M., back up at quarter to five, out the door at five thirty, for another nine hours on the job.
The guy that came to relieve me wanted to talk a whole bunch for some reason, despite me repeatedly declaring that I needed to get off my feet and get home.
I tried to get a few things done when I got in, but after an hour or two realized I was just too exhausted to accomplish anything. So I soaked in a hot bath for about an hour, ate a cold piece of pizza, climbed onto my futon, and despite the fact that everyone and their mother seemed to try to be calling me, I fell asleep before 8 o’clock.
I wasn’t intending to cash out. These things usually go badly for me: I’ll come home from work and take a ‘power nap’ which ends up being almost two hours, then I’m wide awake till 2 A.M. This time, however, I manged to keep myself more or less asleep until I groggily opened my eyes at four in the morning. I got up and closed the window, and pulled my futon out into a bed, hoping I’d be able to get back to sleep for a couple of hours.
No such luck: turns out I was all slept out. So I turned my head to look out the window and watch the sky get lighter as the sun came up.
Then I walked down the street for a cup of coffee so I could write this post.
As you might be able to tell, I just updated the crap out of my site. Yes, I know, it’s even more exciting and sexy than before.
Keep reading, and I’ll keep hacking away at my site.
One more thing: I’ll mention this here because at least two people have expressed confusion about this in the past. If you don’t like the random password that Wordpress issued you, then just change the damn thing. To do this, log in like your normally do, and click on that ‘Site Admin’ link in the sidebar, which should take you to the screen where you’ll be able to change your settings, including your password.
I’ve lived in Portland for almost five years now. I’ve yet to get to one of the Rose Festival parades. Maybe if I actually attended one, I might be a little more excited about it. Still, most of the time when the Rose Fest rolls around I find myself feeling like a tourist, who’s stumbled across some local festival in the place where he’s visiting that he didn’t expect. “What the fuck is all this?” I think as I push my way through unexpected crowds. “And where did all these goddamn people come from?”
Last year, the start of my vacation happened to coincide with the Rose Parade. I worked a partial shift at my job on the first day of my vacation (yep, I’m a sucker), and Ashley came to pick me up so we could get our rental car and get on the road. What should have been a 12-minute round trip ended up taking over half an hour as we were routed around closed streets and waved into a detour queue of other cars. After I’d finally gotten home, and packed, and walked down to Budget to pick up my rental car (an hour behind schedule) I remember the clerk asking me if I’d had a chance to see the parade at all. While I was polite about it, I’m pretty sure I told her I couldn’t stand parades. That’s not entirely true, but still, I was pretty irritated at the time.
Maybe I’ll go next year, maybe that will give me another point of view on the whole thing. Although I will always regard the practice of setting up a tent along the parade route the night before as being vaguely idiotic.
It’s that “Meet the Fleet” time again, when the Navy floats their boats up the Willamette river so that their sailors can get laid by nice, wholesome American girls, as a nice change of pace from the Thailand brothels they normally frequent.
Seriously, what’s the big deal? Hoo-ra, sailors are in town, men in uniform walking the streets, blah blah blah. Who cares? Not that I’m not all giddy about dudes serving their country and all that jazz, but these navies just aren’t all that. I suppose if I hadn’t seen the guys from the Navy bases around San Diego get their asses kicked in Tijuana clubs time and time again by my friends I might have a slightly different attitude about them. Yeah, right.
I remember one incident in particular where this guy decided to take issue with us in a club because we weren’t moving out of the way to let him through (and also, perhaps, because I was blowing cigar smoke in his face out of the corner of my mouth). Anyway, he decides to confront us. “You know what I got?” he said drunkenly, pulling his dogtags out of his shirt and dangling them in front of us. “I got a fuckin’ Medal of Honor!”
This failed to impress us quite how he thought it would. So, Yoli reached over her boyfriend’s shoulder and slapped him, and then Ernie punched him in the nose and dropped him. The dude scurried away as the bouncers barged over in our direction, since the usual policy for a bar fight in Tijuana is for all parties involved to get roughly thrashed around and tossed out. Since we knew all the club staff, though, they politely asked us if we wouldn’t mind waiting outside for a few minutes while this cleared up. So we went down the stairs out to la Avenida Revolución. I finished smoking my cigar. The bouncers brought Ernie a napkin since he had a little blood on his hand, and then shot the breeze with us for a few minutes before letting us back in. I don’t think we saw what happened to the other guy, but presumably he managed to crawl back to his barracks.
Probably one of my stupider adventures, but still, you’ll forgive me if I don’t get excited about sailors coming to town.
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