Indeed, another day has come to a close this week. And it was good. Beth and I made a trip this afternoon to Alex (without Kirstin, who was left with the neighbors for a few hours) with my pickup. This ended up being a multi-faceted trip. Of all things, I ended up getting a new pair of black dress shoes (which was about time as my old pair had been getting quite nasty).

Anyway, after a few stops, we [I] loaded up about 650 pounds of gravel for the sump basin hole. As it turns out, I’m still about three-and-a-half cubic feet short of a full hole (that’s not a euphemism for anything, either). So I’ll have to go get more, but that’s alright. The basin cannot move anymore, and there’s only about 10 inches left to fill in the hole before the concrete patching will take place.

So that’s nice to have done. It was also nice to spend some time with Beth sans Kirstin. Don’t get me wrong, I love the little creature, but it was different to be back to just the two of us. Refreshing for a little bit.

During our trip, I paid cash for our late lunch (no big deal). We were thinking Arby’s — that’s right. 🙂 Anyway, our bill came to something like $12, and I handed the clerk (a middle-aged gal) $25 in cash. She was quite stumped at this (usually this doesn’t happen to people over the age of, oh, 22), looked at it, paused, looked at it again, paused, then looked at me and started handing me the $5. She made a comment like ‘you can have this back…’ which I interrupted (relatively politely) and informed her that I wanted a $10 bill for change (a practice I use frequently — paying in strange amounts so as to not get handed a wad full of $1 bills)

It was at this point in time the light went on in her head, but she was very much caught off guard. In fact, it was obvious that even though I’d explained it to her (and her till informed her the correct amount in change to return), she wasn’t sure if what she was doing was correct.

I don’t think that it’s odd for me to do something like that, although I will note that (from my days working at Subway) what I generally do is in the minority. But you can tell she had to think on her feet, and that immediately placed her outside of her comfort zone. That’s unfortunate and wasn’t my goal (or intention), but it does illustrate another abstract point — we all get very accustomed to ‘the norm’ in any occupation in which we hold (particularly for the routine tasks) and breaking that norm can really throw someone off. When I say it like that, I immediately think of those Visa commercials where someone pays cash or writes a check (as opposed to doing the ‘speedy thing’ of using his/her Visa check card).

We also made a stop at Wal-Mart. The first business at Wal-Mart was a visit to the restroom. When I walked in, there was a dude at one of the urinals who was ‘one-handing’ it. While that’s not necessarily unusual, his posture and pose were. His free arm was laid out on the divider with hand by his temple, and he was leaning against said divider.

Now, perhaps that guy has a ‘problem’…I didn’t ask (although I have to admit I was tempted). But I don’t see why it was necessary to pose as though he was spending a lot of time at the urinal. I’m an ‘in and out’ sort of dude, so to me that sort of action is nothing but wasted time and effort. After all, the entire process rarely takes longer than a minute. So I fail to see the need to ‘rest’ in that position.

Perhaps someone can fill me in? The only logical things I can think of off hand are 1) he was just plain lazy, or 2) he was feeling the need to ‘show off’ in a sense.

In other news, I think I’ve finally worked out the last kinks in the navigation system for the new MZ Online site. With the exception of handling the footer content and doing a little header tweaking, it’s to the point now where I think I can focus on creating the master template and actually start creating real pages. With content.

So that’s progressing nicely. I still really enjoy the look. I’ve been doing a lot of random stumbling lately, and while I periodically see things that are similar in design, I have yet to see anything that’s really close to what I’ve got going on (short of the site from which I originally obtained the principal design ideas). At this rate, there should be no problem getting things ready to go by August 5/6.

But, all that said, it’s now quite late again (nearly 12:30). I’m going to have to back-post this to Friday (since it’s technically Saturday now) so it shows up correctly in the archive. Ah well, until next time…

“Every day I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I’m not there, I go to work.”
– Robert Orben

–MZ