Today's rambling: The Wanton Angel
Written on Monday, Dec. 16, 2002 at 9:01 p.m.
while feeling a bit

I had to write an entry after reading a post at Hogwarts where one girl used the phrase "pregnant pause". It just brought to mind an event from earlier today, which I am now going to share with you, Diary!

Had to go into work with Mom again today because I had to get my rehiring papers filled out. Well, that took all of like 2 minutes, and so the rest of the day was spent helping Mom put out various Christmas-oriented stuff. One of the things we had to put out were these cheap-looking fiber-optic angels. All the angels had the same blonde-ish hair set in these really awful-looking curls (it looked like a girl who'd just gotten a perm and had vast amounts of mousse and gel and such in it). Anyway, I plucked one of the angels out of the box and immediately burst into a fit of laughter. The manufacturers had put a clump of those fiber-optic thingies under a layer of her dress, right at her belly, and it was done so poorly that her dress popped out in a very obvious way. Add to that the fact that her breasts were quite large for a doll (even larger than Barbie's), and we had one very pregnant-looking angel on our hands. I think it was the most amusing thing I'd ever seen before. Mom took it up to Dave (the store manager), and the expression on his face (almost like a Ron expression) was just priceless! Needless to say, we didn't put that particular angel out on the shelf...but unfortunately, we forgot to take her back out of an empty box and she was crushed in the baler! Such is the punishment of wanton angels.

I think I'm going to be starting back on Wednesday. Mom's schedule is so wacky that I probably won't be getting many hours, but a few is better than nothing (especially considering I started back on my old pay rate, yay!). The craptastic part is that I'm going to have to split my time between the bakery and the food service department (salad bar, oh joy of joys), but with any luck Mom's hours will stay wacky enough that I'll be in the bakery more often than salad bar! I still don't really look forward to going back anymore...other than the fact that I get to see Geoff, ha ha! Come on now, you didn't REALLY expect me to talk about my job without mentioning him, right? ;) And now that I've already brought the subject up...

Mom only worked 'til 12 today (she went back in tonight and won't be home 'til early morning), so while she and Lynn were cleaning up stuff in the back I wandered out to talk to Geoff. It was like old times, him being in the frozen food section and me hanging around him, hehehe...Anyway, as I walked up to him I was like, "'Allo, love, when's your next day off?" (Amanda's constant use of that word--not to mention her pseudo-British accent--have become contagious, lol) Geoff replied that he was off on Thursday, and then he asked if I was off. I said yes, then continued, "Let's go trip the light fantastic!"

"Only if you want to come out Christmas shopping with me," he joked. So nothing's going to be happening Thursday, hehe... :P Oh well, at least he'll be there Wednesday, right? And before I leave, I'm going to be like, "Well, have fun shopping tomorrow! Remember: Seventh Sojourn." *giggles* That's a Moody Blues album, just in case you were wondering about the significance of that remark. ;)

I ordered The Canterbury Tales online tonight, heehee...I got him a serious gift for his birthday, but since I couldn't think of anything worthwhile for Christmas, I thought that book would get an amusing reaction. And it was only $9, so how could I not get it? I also bought Eddie Izzard's "Dress To Kill", because that guy absolutely cracks me up and I love that particular performance. Well okay, that's the only performance of his I've seen, but it was enough for me to know I like him! :P The two items together qualified me for free shipping at bn.com (Amazon didn't have "Dress To Kill" in stock), so my total was a low $24-something! Yayyy! :P

Speaking of money (Lola, I'm getting almost as good as you when it comes to segues!), Mom came back from the Bistro tonight and handed me a $50 bill. I immediately knew who it was from: Charlie. See, he bought these two huge tanks, but he insists that all he wants to see is the finished result; in other words, he apparently doesn't want to go through the work of putting all the gravel in the tanks and decorating it. So he's decided he's going to pay me to do it! I swear to you that I haven't even SEEN him since Thanksgiving, much less put the idea into his head to pay me. While it's true that I've used rich people in the past (ha ha ha), that was only because they were wretches anyway. Much as I dislike Charlie, I know that he's a good guy and I keep refusing stuff from him purely because of the fact that since I dislike him, accepting stuff from him would feel like using him. See, I've gotten morals as I've grown older! ;) But I think I'm going to decorate his fish tanks anyway, because I really enjoy aquarium landscaping. *giggles* Some people like landscaping yards, but I like landscaping on a smaller scale. ;) I wonder what kinds of decorations he's got up there. The hardest part will be washing all that new gravel. Rinsing off enough for a 29-gallon tank (even a 10-gallon) is enough of a pain, but 55-gallons worth? I shudder to think at how long that will take!

The next step after that will be to get fish, and I offered to help with that as well since he knows nothing about fish. My worst enemy could come up to me and ask for help with a fish aquarium and I'd be like, "Sure!!" Heehee...Anyway, the only down side to all of this is that our only real choices for buying fish are Petco and Pet Supplies Plus. I've only been into the latter store two or three times, and I've never looked at their fish stock so I have no idea what condition their tanks are in. Petco's tanks, I know, are already filthy and disgusting. Mom and I went into a Petsmart today, and their store was horrible too. I think their two large parrots were in need of having their beaks filed down or something, because they were both eating in very strange ways. But I have no knowledge whatsoever about birds, so maybe that was normal. It still disturbed me, though. There was a sign over their small animals section which said that none of the small animals were for sale (so I'm wondering if there was a disease going through the cages). I guess the fish tanks weren't all THAT bad--at least, I didn't see a whole lot of dead or diseased fish), but it was still just...ugh. I'm really getting disgusted with large pet chains. Sad, really, because when I lived in Massachusetts I used to LOVE going to the Petco in Nashua. My dream was to work there someday, lol! Actually, I still wish I could work at the one near me, because I'd attempt to fix up the fish department. People shouldn't be able to work in a live pet department unless they actually know about those particular animals. It makes me sick and angry the way places hire stupid morons to run these departments. I wish I had business sense, because it would be something akin to the fulfillment of a lifelong dream to open up my own petstore! It would focus primarily on fish, because I know the most about them, but at least it would be well cared for. I wonder how much it would cost to open up a small store...

Alright, done with my tangent now! :P I know I'm not the best animal caretaker in the whole world, but I don't like seeing the horrible conditions in places like Petco and Petsmart. I originally thought that maybe it was an 'individual store' thing, but I'm really starting to believe that ALL these big pet chains are like that. It's disgusting. If that little family-owned petstore was still in operation, I would just boycott the big chains entirely.