a million little pieces...of a puzzle

I was really burned out after I returned to the states after working overseas. I was put on this horrible project. I hated going to work every day, so I decided to leave the gov and go work for a commercial company.


I went to work for a company that made ERP software. I was responsible for coordinating our software with Oracle, the database the ERP software was based on. Idiotically, unbeknown to my company, Oracle was creating a duplicate of our software with the intention to compete head on with us when they got it done.


Anyway, the company, we'll just call it ERP, was really cool. Every day at 3 PM they would bring a snack cart around to our offices and we would get free snacks. They also had parties all of the time.


I had been working there for almost 6 months when the biggest party happened. It was to celebrate our year end (in June). The president of the company was going to be there and everything. People were excited because at the party they always gave out great schwag. The year before everyone had gotten clocks from Tiffany's. I love Tiffany's.


The day before the party mysterious white boxes, the size of a smaller Tiffany clock, were placed on everyone's desks. We were told not to open the boxes until the party the next day because it was going to be a great surprise. I did not get a box, as I had just been moved to the headquarters building and mine was apparently lost in the mail.

I was bitter. The morning of the party, I arrived at 630 am to get some work done, and decided I was going to open my manager's box. I was sure it was going to be a great present from Tiffany's. Instead, it was three stupid puzzle pieces. I was like, what the hell is this? I closed the box and went back to my office, where I spied a large container of now stale animal crackers. Hm, I thought.

I went back to my manager's office, took the puzzle pieces out of the box, and filled it with animal crackers. Then, in what would prove to be a poor decision, I decided to replace all the puzzle pieces of every box on my floor with animal crackers.

Fast forward to the party. Everyone is sitting in a conference room. There were 600 people local, and then another 1,400 people on video monitors from Australia and Europe. The president walked in and said "We've had a hard year this year. We need to work as a team. Everyone open your boxes." The Van Halen song "Right Now" was cranked up over the speakers. People opened their boxes. I snickered in anticipation.

"So, to emphasize how we need to work as a team, everyone has been given three puzzle pieces. We'll use that to build a puzzle (it was the company logo). When your name is called, please bring your pieces up here." Uh oh, I thought to myself.

The first few people were called and had puzzle pieces. Then an engineer from my floor was called and showed up with his animal crackers. The president of the company glared at the VP of Marketing and said "What are these cookies doing in this box?"

Pandemonium ensued. The president asked "who got cookies in their boxes?" One of the engineers from my floor stood up and said "I got cookies AND they're stale". The VP of Marketing was in tears and saying over and over "I don't know HOW this could have happened". I was trying not to laugh, when suddenly my manager looked over at me. Busted.

The team building exercise came to an abrupt halt. I admitted I had the puzzle pieces in my desk, but I didn't know what pieces came from what box. The VP of Marketing said there was no way they could put the puzzle together and that I had ruined the party. Apparently they spent about $500K putting together the whole puzzle thing. She told me I was going to be fired.

But, I wasn't. The president, in the end, thought what I did was funny, especially after I explained that I hadn't gotten a box. The VP of engineering was a woman who really liked me, so she spoke on my behalf. Though I was called into her office and yelled at for over an hour, and only at the end did she start laughing.

From that point forward, the marketing and sales people HATED me. They would go out of their way to avoid me. To the engineers, though, I was a hero. Someone took the puzzle pieces I had stolen and glued them as a border around my door frame. Software engineers would randomly stop by my office to congratulate me.

In the end, the company went bankrupt because Oracle released their software the same time we released ours. Oracle fired the entire product development team at ERP except for me; I was supposed to go work for them. Instead, my old gov manager called me and asked if I could be ready to leave for Greece in two weeks to take a 3 year assignment. I took it.

trash with cash

I thought about this story last night because I was watching the Chappelle DVD and he did this skit called "the niggers", about a white family. He said that he thought it was funny until white people came up to him and started saying racist stuff, figuring it was okay because he had done that skit.

I dated this guy for a while in Colorado, I'll call him A. He had a "best friend", I'll call her R, who had inherited a bunch of money when her father was killed in an elevator accident. She personified the term "trash with cash", having horrible manners on top of being pretty stupid (she completely destroyed her house by turning off the power but not the water one winter while she was out of town; then she lied to the insurance company about what happened so they would rebuild her house).

A left his wife and went on a road trip with R about a year before I met him. There were questions about whether or not he left his wife for R. He was in love with R even though he refused to admit it.

I'd always found R to be an asshole. She treated A like shit, only spending time with him when she needed something. She always complained about money, even though she was rich. If there's anything I truly despise, it's rich people who lack generosity.

R ended up getting married to a guy named Paul, an obnoxious New Zealander who drank a lot. In October of what ever year it was, they were flying to NZ, and asked to stay at my house. I agreed to let them come, thinking if I spent some time with R I might like her better. Paul wanted to go see some DJ playing in downtown dinner, so we planned for them to come to my house, go out to see the DJ, and the next morning they would leave for the airport.

They showed up at my house with a bunch of alcohol. That's strange, I thought. They were drinking in the guest room, I guess because they didn't want to share, although I had no interest in getting trashed drinking the shit vodka they had. Then Paul decided to build a fire in my fire place while I was in the shower, even though I had told him numerous times it didn't work. I got out of the shower when the fire alarm went off and we had to open all the doors to air my place out.

Paul also decided to crank up my stereo to an ear splitting level, pissing off my neighbors. I finally took the batteries out of the remote so he couldn't turn it on since every time I turned the stereo down he would turn it back up. We ordered dinner, and when it came they didn't give me any money for it. I thought that was shit manners, but not unexpected. And, I usually pay for dinner when I have guests; it just pissed me off they didn't even offer to pay.

Fast forward to us arriving at the club. Paul was seriously intoxicated and kept trying to climb into the DJ booth. R was no where to be found. I ended up on the dance floor by myself, and ran into some guys who, oddly enough, had just been transferred out to Denver by my old 3 letter employer. We had friends in common so we talked for a while.

I then went outside to smoke and ran into this guy M. M had just told this girl to fuck off. I looked at him and said "you're a dick". We ended up hanging out the rest of the night. He was a climber and we made plans to climb together since I didn't know any climbers in Denver.

While I was hanging out with M, R came down and told me that Paul was getting kicked out of the club. Her reasoning is that he hadn't bought any drinks. I was like uh huh, it has NOTHING to do with the fact that he's totally drunk and annoying the FUCK out of everyone.

M went with R and I up to the bar where Paul was arguing with the bouncer trying to throw him out. Paul was so out of control they got this huge african american bouncer to help get him out of the club. That's when the horrible thing happened.

Paul called the bouncer a nigger. I was appalled. Having many african american friends, and seeing what they go through on an almost daily basis because of prejudice, I wanted to say something. I wanted to kick Paul in the balls. But I did nothing.

The white bouncer was going to have Paul arrested but M stepped in and stopped them from doing that. As we walked out of the club, Paul called the bouncer a nigger again. I didn't do anything except apologize to the bouncer. The bouncer said "you know, it happens, it's okay". But, it wasn't okay, and isn't okay. Had it been anyone else I would have done something. But I was afraid to cause a conflict since R and A were "best friends". I to this day regret not saying something.

We got home and Paul broke a dish, lost his balance, fell backwards on the floor and hit his head. That's how drunk he was. Then he took my phone and called the club about 14 times cursing and swearing at them for kicking him out. I ended up going to bed because I couldn't take being around Paul and R any more.

The next morning they didn't apologize for the way they acted. They packed up their alcohol and shit and went to the airport. I called A and told him what happened. A said he was going to confront R, and I told him not to bother because it would just cause problems.

But A wanted to confront R because he was jealous of Paul. So when R got back from NZ A told her that I had said that Paul called someone a nigger. She TOTALLY denied it and said I had lied about the whole evening. Even when I got M to send A an email verifying that everything I had said was true, A still accused me of lying. His reasoning: "I've known R for 6 years. I haven't known you that long".

I should have broken up with A then, but I didn't. We went on a break and then got back together. But, since A and R live in a small town, everyone was gossiping about what happened, and I was made out to be the bad guy. I sometimes wished that M had just let them arrest Paul. By trying to protect people that weren't even my friends I had inadvertently fucked myself.

After that, I decided I will never again date a guy like A. I can't deal with people who lack integrity and who have shitty friends. And I will never again stand idly by and let someone call any minority a derogatory name.

they were surprised to discover, among them, a dancing ant

I wanted to paint a picture for my nephew, so I painted this. I was walking around downtown tonight when I got the idea for the painting. He's only 5, so I think he'll like it.

all the other flowers were embarrassed when the tulip showed up drunk again without her stem

This is the painting that some of my friends said looked like a floating clit. I started it on Sunday, and added some stuff to it to try to make it look better.

It's a throw away, but at least I got some practice painting flowers.

I was painting it for my friends Eva and Dan, but I'm too embarrassed to give it to them (they own 2 Peter Maxx paintings). I'm going to paint something else for them.

pails

This is a painting I was going to give to my mom for mother's day. It turned out kind of suck so I might repaint it, or just get her something from Tiffany's like I usually do.

The painting was based on this photo of me and my sister playing on the beach at Martha's Vineyard. I'm sitting down and my sister is standing up. The picture was taken right before she dumped her pail of sand on my head.

The figures turned out suck, the beach was the wrong color, the rocks look like turds, and when I initially painted it the water was way too big. But, I think I'll try to paint it again.

trimming the bushes

Now that it's getting nice outside I took a look at my yard. It's a disaster. All of my rose bushes look like they're dead.

So, after I whacked all the weeds in my yard, I decided I should trim the bushes. I later found out from Jeffy I was supposed to do that in the fall. Oops. Fuck me.

I started out just dead heading the bushes. But that was boring and tedious. So then I decided to just cut off the dead stalks. Things went south pretty quickly. It's kind of like when you go to get waxed and you ask for the tiffany. Then the waxer keeps waxing until finally you hear an "oops!" and you look down and see that now you have a brazilian. And then the waxer says "well, I'll just charge you for a clean up". And you start thinking "my chop chop is going to be soooo cold if I'm wearing a skirt and there's a breeze".

Why do I even have a yard at all? I need to get some rocks.

Speaking of rocks, yesterday when I was on a bike ride, it suddenly occurred to me that the stamp logic puzzle has to have a pretty simple solution. I can sort of formulate what the solution is but haven't had a chance to write it down. That's the nice thing about logic puzzles. They give your mind something calming to chew on instead of worrying about, say, the decimation of the shark population.

would you get to drive the porsche?

Back in the day, after 9/11, I moved from San Fran to DC to help out this 3 letter collective on a project.

I didn't do a good job of ingratiating myself with the team. They were trying to foist a bunch of bullshit work off on me. I was not having it. Then I stood up in a meeting and told a bunch of contractors they were all terrorists because they were more concerned with how much they would get paid for their work than actually doing their work. I was summarily fired and then before that could actually happen rehired because the head gov guy liked that I did that.

I was put in the architecture group, working for a guy named Barry. Barry looks like yoda, if yoda only weighed 70 lbs. We made sure that, for every award he won, they spelled his name "Berry" on the certificate or plaque. He never noticed.

Barry wanted less than nothing to do with me. So he tried to annoy the ever loving shit out of me every day to get me to quit. I finally decided a detente at the local watering hole was in order.

As we sat there with our beers (back when I could drink beer), Barry asked me if I liked logic puzzles. I had never given them much thought. He gave me a simple puzzle (the old "cannibal which village do you go to") and I solved it pretty quickly. We then moved on to the bags of marbles, candle fuses, etc. Before I knew it, it was really late and Barry was running out of puzzles. I discovered then that I love logic puzzles, and that being good at solving them raised my street cred with Barry.

Next happy hour, Barry told me that he was going to give me a really hard puzzle. It had taken him 4 years to solve. He wondered if I could solve it faster. I countered with an incentive to solving the puzzle faster. I said that if I could solve it in less than 4 years Barry would have to let me drive his Porsche. It was a beauty, fuck me red, 1,500 miles on it, and just screaming for action.

I solved the puzzle in 4 weeks. Barry had to let me drive his car. Barry thought I was going to take a lap around the parking lot with it. Instead I drove it to Annapolis (about 40 miles from our office). I got it up to 120 MPH on a lesser highway in Maryland, in the rain, while Barry kept commenting, in a high pitched voice "Uh, you can see how fast you're going because there's a digital display of the speedometer on the windshield".

So here's the puzzle. I figured out the crux of the question you have to ask within a minute of getting the puzzle, but it took me a while, and many truth tables, to figure out how to formulate the question.

If you want to solve it, you have to do it without cheating and looking the answer up on the net or in a book.

You are in a room with a knight, a liar, and a knave. For those unfamiliar with logic puzzles, a knight always tells the truth, the knave can lie or tell the truth, and the liar always lies. In three questions you have to correctly identify who is who. The puzzle solution is the three questions.

If you solve the puzzle, I will paint a picture of what ever you want me to paint. You've seen my skills at painting. So yeah, it's kind of a shit reward. But, you will get to tell all your friends why you have such a crap painting hanging in your bedroom. Or where ever you put it.

Game on.

bitch, you just got served

I just spent the past hour at small claims court filing a suit against the stupid fucking bitch who hit my car.

I'm not, by nature, a vindictive person. I tend to get mad at people when they try to fuck me over, and then I usually let the matter go after talking to them. I can't help having a strong sense of justice. I am, after all, a gemini.

And I would be less pissed at that stupid bitch right now if she hadn't been such a shit head. I had to get a copy of the accident report to get her (hopefully) correct information since everything she gave me was wrong. I tried to call the number listed on the accident report to talk things out with her before taking her to court. It was apparently the wrong number. I am hoping the address on the accident report isn't fake too. I was also REALLY PISSED to discover she had not been charged for driving without insurance because she gave the cop the same fake shit card she gave me.

After I filed my papers at small claims court (which was really easy, thank allah) I went over to the sheriff's department. The guy there was super nice. I told him what happened and he said "what a bitch". They're going to try to serve her with papers three times. I'm so glad she's going to have a sheriff showing up at her house. I want her neighbors to know what a fucking cunt she is.

Then the sheriff told me that if they can't find her because she gave me a fake address, I can use the VIN number to track down who ever owns the car she was driving. He thinks I'll have a good chance of finding her. I hope he is right.

The sad thing is, I would have just asked for the money that I spent fixing Jake. But now she's going to owe $105 more because of court costs. Also, I technically could charge her interest for not paying me immediately after she received my car bill. I could charge her for the time I've spent dealing with this bullshit. But I decided not to do that.

All I can say is, she better pay up. I'm going to donate the money to a women's homeless shelter that just lost their building (they used to be right down the street from me but they can't afford their place anymore so they're moving).

My court date is 1 June. And I'm pretty sure if she doesn't show up, they are going to arrest her bitch ass.

Joe makes me cry, Gadd makes me laugh

I am SO mad a Joe right now.

The reason, you might inquire? Well, a few weeks ago he sent me a link to this vid that he heard about somewhere, called sharkwater. I procured it immediately (http://www.sharkwater.com/). Then I watched the trailer for it, which showed this guy swimming around with sharks having fun and stuff. I thought it was going to be the best shark vid ever.

I didn't get the vid until yesterday. I had told Joe that I would try to wait until he was visiting or I was visiting him to watch it. But, having the will power of a 4 year old, I ripped off the cellophane and stuck it in the DVD player the second it got dark enough outside to watch it. Then I sent Joe a text saying I was watching it so I would feel less guilty.

The beginnings of the vid are great. This kid goes off swimming with sharks and even some whales. He holds the sharks like cats and pets them. He even swims right up to a great white who just ignores him. It was really cool. It made me want to go swim with sharks this weekend (hard to believe, my last shark encounter was way back in 2004).

But then, the vid went horribly, horribly wrong. The guy in the vid went to cocos island in costa rica and noticed there were no sharks where there should have been a ton since it's a marine sanctuary. Then he found this boat that had strung out all this fishing line to randomly catch shit in the sanctuary! Which is TOTALLY illegal! And the equivalent of randomly shooting up the woods to see what you can kill, and then leaving 90% of what you killed to rot in the sun.

So the guy tried to tell the fishing boat they couldn't fish there and to take in their lines and go away. They refused. So then he called the authorities, who told him to bring the ship in. The ship refused. So the guy started firing water cannons at the illegal fishing boats. Do you know what those mother fuckers did? They started pulling up every shark that was alive on the fishing line and cutting its fins off and leaving the shark to die. They said they were going to keep killing sharks until they were left to go back to fishing. Mother fuckers.

The vid footage just got worse and worse. I guess for the non-sharky types out there, imagine this: a vid of a little cute tiger playing in the grass. Suddenly, some fucking fuck of a fucker comes up to it and sticks a huge hook in its mouth and starts dragging it along the grass while blood gushes out. Then the fucking fucker cuts the little tiger's paws all off, and leaves it in the grass to die. The equivalent was going on in this vid, but with sharks instead of tigers.

I started crying because I was so horrified and angry. I wanted to join this guy's boat and become a pirate and seriously fuck up those fishermen. I wouldn't kill them. I would just cut off a few of their limbs and let them go the same way they definned sharks.

Then Joe called. I tried to pretend I was not crying but then he was like "dude, are you crying?" I was trying to tell him about the vid and he said "yeah, I started thinking, after you told me you were going to watch it, that maybe there would be some bad stuff in it, and that's why I called you". I was like FUCKER, why didn't you call me earlier BEFORE I started watching the vid to tell me that???? And he said "oh, because I had some people over for a barbecue and they didn't leave until just now".

Gee. Thanks. Fucker.

So now I've been a little bit bummed out all day about the stuff I saw in that vid. I didn't even finish watching it because it was too sad.

But luckily, Gadd sent me a very funny link so reading through it has cheered me up. One of my faves:

http://xkcd.com/253/

Though, I am a little insulted because he called me a nerd, and said:

I was laughing away at that site even though I only get about 75 percent of the nerd jokes. I thought, "Who do I know who could possibly relate to and enjoy this more than me?" Your name topped a list with one name on it.

Fucking smart ass. If he thinks I'm going to explain the jokes he doesn't get (probably the ones relating to Perl), he's wrong.

art critic

After climbing at clear creek yesterday (it was nice to be outside after being trapped in office buildings for weeks) Dr. Jay dropped me off at my house and came in to see my paintings.

First I showed him the planet exploding painting. I explained to him that some people thought it looked like a giant white anus. Dr. Jay said "Yeah, I can see that". I showed him where I had to paint over the man with the triangular head. He was like "Hmm. Well, it's your first painting." Even though it actually wasn't my first painting. I think the problem with that painting is it's really hard to paint an explosion when you don't know how to paint.

Next I showed him the picture I did of Jamesy, and told him how someone said that it looked like a lesbian. He said the painting made Jamesy look like he had some kind of skin disease. That's because I hand made the color I used for his face, and then I ran out before I finished painting his head. I tried to remix the color but I couldn't get the same shade. So I tried to blend the new color in with the old, which had already dried. I asked Dr. Jay if I should send the picture to Jamesy and he said "Well, um, you know him better than I do". So now I'm all paranoid if I send the picture to Jamesy he's going to get mad at me because he looks like he has a skin disease.

Then I showed him the picture of my fake co-author, and then the photo that I used to paint it. He said "Why is the smoke all over the place?" I had to explain that I couldn't paint the hood on jacket so I just painted smoke where the hood should be. Then I noticed that some of the hat got smeared on his face, so he has a weird grey streak right on his cheek. Dr. Jay looked at the face and said "Well, no one can really paint a face...." I asked again if I should maybe not send the painting. He said "I can't really say. I mean, you know him better than I do. You could just send the pictures and they could always throw them away."

I showed him the paintings I did on Sunday. He said "That's weird" and "Maybe you should repaint that one".

I think I need a painting lesson.

in the interest of keeping the reading public happy

No more comment moderation. Please spell check your comments and don't write anything that will make you appear too insane.

And, I washed my hair today. I hope you're fucking happy.

what to do about those damn pirates

Deprived of my paint brushes on the road here in Toronto (trying not to laugh every time someone says "proe-cess" or "eh?"), I resorted to reading the news:

"Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Robert Gates says he expects to spend long hours in the White House situation room in the coming weeks trying to figure out what to do about pirates."
(http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103055945)

some suggestions:

• Exterminate all parrots. How could someone be a pirate without a parrot? Oh sure, greenpeace will complain, but fuck, they're kind of like pirates too. So better exterminate greenpeace.
• Arrest Johnny Depp and put him in Camp X-ray because once he played a pirate in a movie and that might have encouraged others to be pirates. Use the usual torture methods to find out if, in fact, Johnny Depp might be behind the current "pirate craze" in an attempt to get people to watch his boring and crappy sequels.
• If anyone says "yo ho ho" in line at the airport or is wearing an eye patch, arrest them. Of course, a pirate wouldn't be taking a plane you might point out. Well, smarty pants, TSA knows a lot more about airport security than you do, and there are many pirates on planes, you just don't know it. TSA will protect you, don't worry your pretty little head about anything. I wouldn't wear anything that looks like a pirate hat at the airport though. And no jokes about pirates while you're in line for security screening. That will result in someone you aren't attracted to sticking a gloved hand up your ass.
• Oh, and that makes me think of another good idea - parrot sniffing dogs at the airport. And a machine that everyone has to walk through that blows air all over them, to dislodge parrot dander, to identify pirates. Gee, I feel safer already, don't you?
• Reinstatement of scurvy. To aid in this, all future care packages sent to Africa will have only M&Ms and coke in them.
• A super secret, multi-billion dollar program run by the CIA to invent super great white sharks that attack only pirates. They will be under CIA mind control. Unless, of course, something goes horribly, horribly wrong...
• Special breeding program for wood peckers. They could perhaps be cross bred with pigeons so they breed quickly, like the ocean and boats, but still peck big holes in wood.
• Ha, what pirate ship could survive an onslaught of woodpeckers and super great whites?
• Super beavers...yeah, and let's throw some super beavers in there. Super beavers could build beaver dams across major shipping lanes to keep pirates from getting in there and stealing ships.
• Female super beavers...they could keep the pirates at home...

Robert Gates, if you're reading this, I'm available to consult on project plans for any of the above mentioned suggestions.

happy birthday sunshine (don't read Jamesy)

Jamesy, this is a painting I made for your birthday (coming up soon in June, didn't know how long it would take to dry or how long it would take to make it not suck so I finished your painting early - check me out never missed a deadline and you know :). It's called "happy birthday sunshine" because James is one of the most positive people I've ever encountered in my life.

So...Jamesy...I always associate him with my move to Colorado because he's the one that pulled the strings to get me on the project out in Denver so I could move. He also took good care of me when I was sick from the c. I associate a lot of memories with him, sitting in McFinn's, watching boxing matches, him smoking a cigar while I smoke cigarettes, but the thing I most think of when I think of Jamesy is music. We used to sit in his car while we smoked and listen to all kinds of things, jazz, rap, big band, whatever as long as it was good.

Reminding me of a side story...one day I got into Jamesy's rental car and wasn't paying attention. I sat down, went to lean back in the seat, and ended up laying on the back seat. I sat up and noticed foot prints, fucking FOOTPRINTS, on the glove box. I was like "uh, James?" and he just giggled and said "long night".

We actually got to share an office for about, oh, a day, on our project, until someone maybe got nervous about allowing the two of us to hang out behind closed doors. We could have taken that project over so fast it would have made everyone's head spin. But, instead, we decided to be good.

Jamesy, I miss hanging out and talking with you.

Here's the picture I based the painting on (sort of) http://frankiflowers.blogspot.com/2008/05/proust-questionnaire-james-justifiably.html.

Then I found a web site with music notes on it and just copied some. I know jack shit about music notes so I have no idea what any of them mean. I painted him with his eyes closed because I don't know how to paint eyes yet.

my cigarette talks better than I do

This is a painting I made of my fake co-author called "my cigarette talks better than I do". It's based on a picture he sent me taken by Andrew Querner (I am probably not allowed to even post it, but it's always easier to not ask permission). He had gone on a trip, and I hadn't heard from him for about a really long time. So when he got back and sent me pics from his trip I kept saying "the pictures didn't come through" even though, ha ha, they did. I wanted to see how many times I could get him to send me the same email with pictures because I was pissed at him. After 5 or so times I finally fessed up.

I should give it to him. It would serve him right to have to find a place to hang it. It's my first time trying to paint a face. I should note that I spent 4 hours on Saturday at the Denver MOMA getting ideas for paintings...

they need a cop at copper

To add to my list of bizarre occurrences, today I went up to copper late morning, after I finished most of my work, to ski. The snow was slushy shit except where it was ice, but still, a day of skiing is better than working.

I got in line and the guy zapping passes said "uh oh, you're on the hot list". The three snowboarders next to me snickered. I was like "what do you mean?" and he said "this pass is reported as stolen". I was like dude, I lost my pass in January, I was just up here Tuesday, how could my pass be stolen? Luckily he recognized me and said "Go ahead and take a lap, and then go to customer service".

The 17 year old boarder sitting next to me was like "oh, you're an outlaw" after we got on the chair. I was like yeah whatever. Jokes about being on "the hot list". I ignored them. Then he asked me if I stole the pass. I told him the whole story but I don't think he believed me. Then he said that I should meet him at the bar for a drink when I was done skiing. I was like "are you old enough to drink?" (that's when I found out he was 17). He said "dude, they don't card me because they've lost so much money this year they'll sell to anyone". Then he invited me to a high school party tonight if I didn't want to drink illegally with him at the bar, assuring me he didn't want to get me in more trouble.

I was like "dude, not only can I drink legally, I'm old enough to be your mom". He thought I was 18. His friends were like "maybe I could see 20" but they didn't believe my real age. They thought I was fucking with them so then they started making fun of me. I was like will this lift ride never end.

I get to customer service after a run, and find out from the woman behind the counter that my pass has been pulled because I supposedly lent it to a friend of mine on Wednesday. I was like this is insane. I argued with her for 20 fucking minutes before she got a manager who re-instated my pass. I know now for a FACT that the person who found my pass has been using it all winter, and even though they assured me that my new pass had a different number I know they are full of shit. I would bet $1,000 they never deactivated my lost pass.

I was like dude, first of all, if I had my pass pulled on Wednesday, why would I come skiing today when the snow is in such shit condition? And if my pass was pulled, why did they not physically pull it? And if my new pass has a different number, why do I have the same number for my old pass stored in my crackberry (from when I got it 3 years ago)? I kept asking sensible questions until the manager re-instated my pass. They kept looking at me like I was a criminal the whole time though. There's no talking common sense with some people, even when I offered to pull up my copper account on the web and show them that I was never re-issued a new pass number.

Then, I was headed down a black run near the super bee lift, going pretty fast (for me anyway), when I stuck a ski edge. I went cartwheeling down the slope, which was ice, and ended up sliding about 30 feet away from my left ski. It was right under the chair lift, by far my best crash yet at copper. People were yelling "OUCH!" from the lift.

A guy skied up to me with my ski and said "wow, you were going way too fast". Anyone who has ever skied with me knows I don't go "way too fast". Ever.

Then he said "don't move, maybe we should call somebody" (I was trying to stand up still at that point). Except for my left shoulder, I was feeling fine so I said "no need". He grabbed my helmet with his huge black gloves, and looked into my goggles (still slightly crooked from the crash) and said "but you might have an aneurysm and then you'll die".

I don't even think I hit my head, so I backed up and said "I'm pretty sure I don't have an aneurysm". The guy said "But that's THE PROBLEM! You won't know UNTIL YOU DIE!" He was getting scarier by the second. Then he said "Promise me you'll go get medical help immediately when you get down". I was like "sure dude" just so he wouldn't grab my head again.

This old dude came up then and said he would ski behind me the rest of the way down. Scary dude left. The old dude shared a chair with me going back up super bee. He asked if I had hit my head in the accident (he only caught the tail end of it). I said I didn't think so. He said "that man who was talking to you was acting strange" and said that's why he skied down behind me and then followed me onto the lift.

Old dude started talking about going to a Rockie's game tomorrow, and said that I should go because "if you're 12 and under you can get in for $1". I looked at him and said "I'm older than 12". He laughed and patted my leg because he didn't believe me.

Okay, now that I think about it, I wear a kid's helmet because I have a small head, and I decorated it with girly stickers. Maybe that's what's throwing everyone off about my age. I don't know. It's not like I'm short. I'm pretty tall.

To end my copper odyssey, I got back to my car only to discover someone tried to I guess break into it. The driver's door handle is pried up and the lock cylinder is knocked back into the door. Good thing I have to leave my car at the airport for a week and can't get the door fixed until I get back. I wonder if someone can just open the door even if I lock it.

Sigh.

the danimal

The past few days have been, even for me, strange.

It all started last night. I was at Wahoo's picking up fish tacos for dinner (my favorite fish tacos ever). I was standing against the railing, and, to set the scene, I was wearing climbing pants, a baseball hat, and a t-shirt, the same outfit I've been wearing all week, I hadn't showered for two days (working at home so why bother) and worse, I hadn't washed my hair in almost two weeks. And my hair was looking especially ratty since I had put a hair mask on it the night before and hadn't rinsed it out yet.

Suddenly this guy comes walking towards me from outside. He was dressed in really expensive clothes, including his shoes. I'm pretty sure they were hand made. That song "walking in memphis" was playing. He stood RIGHT next to me and said "will you dance with me?" I was like "whaaa?" and he said "please, I really, really want to dance with you".

I was like "dude, I'm just waiting for my food". There was a couple waiting in front of me for their food. I had ordered blackened salmon tacos which take a while to make. I was like please don't let them get their food and leave me with this maniac. Wahoo's was deserted, and the two idiots behind the counter were just staring at me as if the hamster turning their thoughts couldn't keep up on the wheel.

He said "Well, if you won't dance with me, come have a drink at the bar. I would love to buy you a margarita". He crooked his arm out like some old fashioned guy escorting me to a dance. I just looked at him. He reached out to grab my hand and I said "don't fucking touch me". He said "What's wrong???? I'm not hitting on you! Look, I'm married and have two kids." He held up his hands, palms facing towards me, and waved them around like a homecoming queen. He was not wearing a wedding ring.

Then he said "You coloradans are so cold. I miss California." The couple waiting for their food said "You can buy us a drink" so they sat down with him at the bar and he bought them drinks. He bought me a beer and tried to give it to me. I said "I don't drink beer". Then he bought me a bottle of water and I said "I don't drink that because it's bad for the environment".

By then the two guys behind the counter were laughing. The guy said "Look, my name is Daniel. I'm not a stalker. I'm not going to kill you. I just want to share the love." Uh huh. The couple started talking to him. He kept edging back over to me and trying to include me in the conversation. I was like where is my fucking food? I think the kitchen was being slow on purpose to see what would happen.

Daniel told the couple that he had a house in Redondo beach, on the water, and a house in Colorado, that he was starring in Spike Jonzes' movie "where the wild things are" (googled his name when I got home, that was a lie), that his friends call him "the danimal", that he loved to surf until he broke his back (surfing was playing on the tv behind the bar) and that he had a scar on his leg from getting bitten by a shark. Around then my food came, so Daniel turned to me and said "I can't believe you want to sit home alone when you could hang out with me." Right. Then he said "I'm sure I'll see you again. What is your name?" He held out his hand as if I should shake it.

I said "why do you think you'll see me in here again?" even though, ha ha, I eat there a lot. He said "because you live really close to here". That gave me a chill so I left.

dark arms

Last night I had a dream that I showed up for my consulting job in Toronto and was put in this small windowless office. Outside the door I could see this woman dressed like Lara Croft rolling bee hives around on the floor. Then she would pick them up and juggle them. I went to the door of my office and watched her for a while and decided she had the coolest job I'd ever seen.


So I told her I wanted to learn how to juggle beehives too, but that I was afraid because I'm allergic to bees. She showed me all these pieces of white tubing sticking out of her arms, and said that the tubes had anti venom so if she got stung there was no effect. Then she showed me, in the crook of both of her arms, that she had a spider, that looked like a tarantula, that ate any bees that were trying to sting her. The spiders kept running up and down her arms eating bees while we were talking.


I was like cool, put some tubes in my arms so I can juggle the beehives and she did. Then she gave me two spiders for my arms as well. I picked up a hive and started throwing it around like she was doing. But then both of my arms were in serious pain. I looked down and saw my bee eating spiders were dead. I yelled to the woman to help me. She came running over and was like "oh no, you picked up a hornet's nest instead of a beehive! that's why your spiders died!"


My arms were burning and I fainted (in a dream, I know, weird). When I came to she was putting new tubes in my arms to try to get the poison from the hornets' out of me before it killed me. And then she said "I'm going to have to give you a shot" and she stuck these two huge needles right into my abdomen.


I fainted again, and when I came to I was sitting back at my desk. My arms were covered with little squares of white gauze that were totally bloody. I couldn't lift my arms up at all because of the pain. The woman was like "you'll be okay" and then she ran away. Then my customer, this kind of bland looking guy, came in to my office and said "we need you to do a software demo in 15 minutes". I was like fuck fuck fuck, I can't lift my arms and I'm covered in blood. But I told him I would do it because I didn't want him to know that I was juggling hives.


Then I woke up.


It was around 230 in the morning so I went back to sleep. I dreamed that I was asleep in bed when my old housepest Ryan walked in the door. He was wearing a paper plate over his face with these jagged eye holes cut out. I was like "what the fuck are you doing here?" and he said "oh, I was just bringing in your mail, and then I was going to take a shower". He came up the stairs towards me and I saw he was holding a huge knife. I knew he was going to kill me with it.

I started yelling at him to give the key to my house back. He kept coming towards me so I grabbed a pair of nunchucks that my brother Bob gave me (that's true, they were from when he took martial arts, and he gave them to me 6 months ago) and threw them at his head. It knocked the paper plate crooked, and he dropped my house key and started running down the stairs. I was going to chase after him to get his knife but when I got to the front door I realized I was wearing my robe and couldn't go outside.

Then I woke up and decided that was enough sleep for one night.

one day, for no reason, our planet suddenly exploded

Having had a perfectly horrible day at work, and having bewailed my situation on the phone with my dad for 15 minutes, he suggested I, and I quote, "have a glass of wine...and, um, maybe paint another picture". I think because he didn't want to hear me complain anymore.

So here it is. It's called "one day, for no reason, our planet suddenly exploded". The colors and texture of the exploding planet didn't quite come out in this photo. There's some green in there that you can't see. Also, there's a white epi-center on the star that didn't come out.

That weird blob at the bottom is a person I painted with a triangle for a head. His hands came out pretty good but his feet sucked. So I painted over him. Didn't work like I thought it would.

The white blobs were inspired by me accidentally spilling a white blob on my painting when I was trying to put the epi-center on the star. It looks cooler in real life than it does in this photo. Because, I think in this photo, it looks like it sucks.

Oh well. It's my last small canvas. Now I have to paint bigger.

worse than a big fluffy beaver

So I painted my second painting ever. The painting was done from memory. It's of a fox that I saw on Friday afternoon while I was hiking at Roxborough. I was walking down the trail, looking for more puddles to jump in (it was really muddy and wet, but warm out, and there's nothing I love more than jumping in puddles) when I suddenly saw something running towards me. At first I thought it was a dog, but then remembered that dogs aren't allowed at Roxborough.

As it got closer to me I realized it was a fox. He was about 25 - 30 lbs, so, not small, and he was brightly colored with a little brown beard and a huge tail that was white on the back. He ran almost right up to me, realized I was human, and took off into the bushes. As I was standing there amazed, he turned around, looked at me for a minute, peed, and then ran off again.

For whatever reason, a fox has always appeared at a pivotal point in my life. I thought it was a good sign. Plus, I've always liked foxes after reading the little prince.

Anyway, I tried to paint the fox. But, I was given a bit of bad advice from my friend Neil, who told me I should drink while I was painting. After one glass of wine I decided to touch up the fox, and made him all blotchy. Then, after the second glass of wine, I accidentally put my thumb down on his tail, so it smeared. Thinking I could fix it by adding more paint (thank you, wine brain, for that suggestion) I ended up making his tail bigger and bigger. I tried to add the white at the end but by then he was just a shit show. And accidentally I stuck him with my pinkie when I was trying to move him to the wine shelf to dry (if you click on the picture to look at it in a bigger format the pinkie stick is obvious).

I meant to give the painting as a gift to someone. But, how can I give it as a gift when I know it sucks?

Comments from Neil:

"It doesn't suck. I like everything but the fox. The color of the fox is fine, he just looks trite and out of place in the expressive but still realistic landscape. I guess you could say he's expressive as well. If his shape were more realistic, like the all the other shapes, and you used the same color, I think it would have blown me away."

He looks trite, and out of place, and like someone was drunk when she painted him.

Joe didn't say the painting sucked. He was a little more polite. He wanted to know why the fox's tail was so big.

Jeffy said "I think modern art would accommodate alcohol consumption much better than landscapes with animals." He then suggested I paint an abstract ice fall, and glue a GI Joe doll to it.

Guess what you're getting for your birthday, you fucking smart ass.

did he mean what he said?

I called my friend Neil last night to let him know I finished my first painting, and to tell him I was going to send it to him if he liked it. Below is pretty much word for word our conversation, with my interpretation of what Neil was thinking in italics.

Me: So, I emailed you a picture of the painting. If you want you can look at it or be surprised when you get it in the mail.
Neil: I better look at it. We can reduce our carbon footprint by you not sending me crappy paintings.
Me: So what do you think?
Neil: It's surprisingly good. For a five year old. Who's a retard.
Me: Should I send it to you then?
Neil: Well, it's your first painting. Don't you want to keep it? And have that piece of crap hanging somewhere in YOUR house instead of mine?
Me: Since you were the one who inspired me to start painting, I thought you should have the first one. I'd really like to send it to you if that's okay.
Neil: Sure. Damn. Maybe it will get lost in the mail. Though if it's just damaged, I wonder if I'll even notice.
Me: Should I put it in a frame?
Neil: No, don't worry about that. Because then I'll feel obligated to hang it up somewhere.
Me: Is there anything else I should do to it?
Neil: Throw it away. Make sure you sign it. I don't want people thinking I painted it. And put a date on it too. So people can see how old you were when you painted it. And laugh.
Me: Cool. I'll do that. Are you going to hang it up?
Neil: Yeah, I am. Somewhere that no one will see it.

my first painting

This picture was the inspiration for my first painting.

Thanks to my friend Neil for taking me to a gallery and teaching me the basics of painting.

I also found some great painting tips on http://www.about.painting.com/. If you ever want to learn to paint, it's a good place to start.

The picture is of my hand after I broke it, and my pointer finger. The accident happened in Ouray when some asspipe was climbing off route above me and knocked a cinder block sized chunk of ice down on me without even yelling.

So this is the painting. It's called "I broke my hand and now it hurts".



It's not great, but it's my first painting...

posts updated with pictures

Because there are some doubters out there about my stories, I've added some pictures:

http://frankiflowers.blogspot.com/2009/03/hott-tomato.html
Pictures of the John Lennon guy fondling my feet, Christian and I dancing on a table, our driver, Christian, Rita, and I with one of the germans who bought us drinks


http://frankiflowers.blogspot.com/2007/02/commodal-concussion.html
Me being pulled out of the resort swimming pool by Gus


http://frankiflowers.blogspot.com/2008/04/kidnapped-by-pirates.html
My brother and I on the dive boat, me handcuffed to the pirate my brother got into a duel with, me and my brother with the Captain Morgan spokesmodel, my brother passed out on the beach (behind him you can see the bag of schwag CM gave us)


http://frankiflowers.blogspot.com/2009/04/why-i-dont-have-dog.html
pictures of Forest


http://frankiflowers.blogspot.com/2008/04/ballet-lessons.html
a picture of me in my ballet costume

and, speaking of sticking things up people's asses

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

looking back, maybe I should have stuck it up his ass

Reminding me of another office prank...

I was working on this declassification project for a three letter agency. We were designing a system to scan in all classified documents 25 years or older (EO12958) and make them available to the public. This is the project where I met Rita.

I worked with the team that did the initial survey of the archives. We uncovered approximately 60 million pages of material that needed to be scanned, reviewed, tagged with key words, etc. Our project, it was clear, was woefully underfunded. So we were sitting in a room one day trying to figure out how to create a slide to show how much paper 60 million pages consisted of, with the idea of presenting it to congress to get more cash.

There were a bunch of dumb ideas floating around the table, when I sarcastically said "60 million pages has got to be as tall as the washington monument!" That ended up being our slide (60 million pages = about 27 washington monuments when stacked up). We got more money.

Then the gov got shut down because Clinton refused to sign a bill to keep the gov going because the bill had something in it he didn't like. We were out of work, unpaid, for 2 weeks. We didn't get back pay for those two weeks even though almost everyone on the team had worked through the shut down. Then there were staff cuts. Just when it seemed the morale of the team couldn't get any worse, some bureaucrat decided to give us all "awards". Normally an award is a slap on the ass, free lunch, and a check. This ass pipe instead gave us each a 6 inch replica of the washington monument, with one side having a thermometer glued to it.

Everyone was pissed we had worked so hard and not gotten money. One of the guys on the team, Gordon, turned to me after he was given his monument and said "stick this in my ass and take my temperature".

Instead, I thought it would be funny to glue the monument on the ceiling tile above Gordon's desk. I waited for two days, but he didn't notice it was missing, much less that it was now suspended above his head. So I started taking more stuff off of his desk and gluing it to the ceiling. I glued his stapler, scissors, staple remover, pencils, pens, paperclips and finally his coffee mug. He didn't notice.

Then, at 3 o'clock one morning, my manager got a call because the alarm in our SCIF had gone off. It was triggered by the motion detector. They went all through the SCIF but couldn't find anyone. So the SCIF was on high alert. It was a HUGE security deal. I rolled in around 7 am to find all this happening. Then Gordon came in, and moments after going into his office came out and said "You are in so much fucking trouble".

It turned out the washington monument had finally, due to its weight, detached from the ceiling tile. The tip of it was embedded in the soft wood of Gordon's desk. There was no doubt that the fall was what set off the alarm. He started screaming at me that it could have fallen on his head, and then looked up and saw everything else I had glued to the ceiling, and started yelling more. My manager came in at that point and got to see my little ceiling art project.

I received a security violation (the only one I've ever gotten), had to write a letter of apology to Gordon, and was yelled at by my manager for two solid hours. I wasn't worried about getting fired, as I was the only female engineer on the project, but I realized my life for the next few months would not be pleasant.

All glue was eventually banned from the SCIF because first Gordon launched a return attack by gluing my chair to the top of my desk, and then I glued a banana to his desk, and then one day when it snowed and I was working late he and another engineer completely buried my car in snow, so I glued the shovel I used to get my car out across Gordon's desk.

I miss that place. And that group of people.

white elephant

Well, I've gotten no less than 10 complaints today about my sad Forest story, so here's one that's a little on the lighter side.

After September 11th I rotated back to the east coast from San Fran. I wasn't happy about it. I arrived in November and didn't even have a winter jacket.

To make matters worse, I ended up working with a three letter agency other than the one I was expecting to return to. My new employer was staffed with people that I quickly dubbed wall scrapers. They were all pasty white, and when I would walk down the halls they would mash themselves against the wall until I past. That agency employs mostly math and engineering types, all fucking socially retarded.

I was working in this grim little SCIF with a guy who had been fired from another company for trying to kill his manager with a copper head (that is a story for another time). Then this guy Bob started coming by to talk to me.

Bob was a retired coastie, a ginger kid, and a midget (sort of, he was 4'11"). But, he was really nice to me and invited me out to happy hours so I could meet people (though, they were all military types so nothing ever came of any of his attempts to play matchmaker). Bob was also an epic story teller, and if you could suspend the concept of truth his stories were amusing. At least the first 40 times he told them. The endings occasionally changed to give the story a new spin.

Anyway, his cousin, or some other relative like that, was supposedly married to the lead singer of Depeche Mode. And, it turned out, Depeche Mode was his favorite group ever. Because of this he had pictures of them all over his cube. One day he brought in a close up of what ever the lead singer's name is in to work. He said his cousin had sent it.

Around that time it was becoming the Christmas season. We were scheduled to have a white elephant party to celebrate (this was my employer's way of trying to make up for us having to work Christmas day - not that I personally cared). We had to buy a joke gift that was $10 or less, and then we were to pile them up and each person got to pick a gift.

So, I decided to buy a picture frame. Then, I stole Bob's Depeche Mode picture, put it in the frame, and wrapped it for the party. Bob was absolutely hysterical over the loss of his picture. For two weeks after I stole it I would find him going through people's drawers in the SCIF (a huge no no in that environment) trying to find his picture. I told him I thought that I had seen the janitor throwing it away. Then other people joined in on the joke, and we tortured him mercilessly, even causing him to one day move the big, disgusting refrigerator in the break room to see if it had fallen back there.

A week before the party I drew a stick figure picture of a guy playing the guitar, just like his Depeche Mode picture. I put it up in the same spot where the picture I had stolen had been. Then I went by his cube and was like "Oh, you found your picture". He started ranting and raving that he actually hadn't found his picture, and that he suspected someone was playing a joke. I squinted at the picture and said "are you sure that isn't the one you had?" He was like "THAT is a stick figure drawing. My picture was a PHOTO. Don't you remember?"

Other people stopped by his cube because he had posted a bunch of signs all over the SCIF demanding his picture be returned. They all said the drawing looked a lot like the picture he had lost, and couldn't he possibly be mistaken.

The day of the white elephant party I arranged with a woman that had just joined our project, Debbie, to pick my gift. She opened it up and was like "Oh, nice, a picture frame." When she turned it around to show to everyone Bob starting yelling "THAT'S MY DEPECHE MODE PICTURE!" Debbie was like "No Bob, that's just a picture that they put standard in all frames." His head was about to explode, and I couldn't take it anymore, so I started laughing. At first he was pissed at me, but then he laughed, and likely is still telling the story, only his version is probably even longer than mine.

why I don't have a dog

Shortly after I moved into my house, I became friends with my neighbor. I didn't know at the time that he was insane.

He had a dog, named Forest, a boerboel who weighed about 140 lbs. So, not a small dog. Since my neighbor was pretty sedentary, and more likely to smoke pot than walk his dog, I started taking Forest out with me when I went on my walks. My favorite thing he did on one of our walks was either the time he unleashed a huge stream of drool on the cheeseburger of a girl who was petting him, or the time he decided to stop in the middle of crossing Broadway, a major street with 6 lanes, to drop a deuce.

After a while my neighbor started leaving Forest at my house when he went on travel. We would get up early in the morning to go for walks, and then do the same when I got home from work. Then we would lay on the floor, because at the time I didn't own a couch, and watch movies. He would always try to climb into bed with me when I went to sleep, and I would never let him because I'm allergic to dogs. But it seemed like every morning I would wake up and find him laying next to me, drooling on my head and farting. Also, I would find dog snot all over the house from when he sneezed. I admit I spoiled him. After a while when my neighbor would come home he would have to physically pull Forest out of my house because Forest wanted to stay with me.

When ever Forest, my neighbor, and I went out together he would never put Forest on a leash. I always kept him on a leash though. One day, for fuck knows what reason, I decided to take him up to a park in Boulder to do a hike. By this time Forest was in great shape because we were walking about 6 miles a day in the city. My neighbor was in Arizona getting drunk and watching football.

The hike went great, except that Forest was getting a little freaked out because I had him on a leash and everyone else was letting their dogs run free, even though there were signs all over the park to keep them on a leash. Dogs get a thing called leash aggression when they are leashed and other dogs aren't. It's caused by them feeling vulnerable to the other dogs since they are on a leash and the other dogs aren't. I know that now.

As we were walking down this wide fire road, less than a quarter mile from my car, a family was approaching in the other direction. They had a german shepard, unleashed, and two kids, one 6 and the other 11. The 6 year old was obviously tired and throwing a temper tantrum. He threw himself on the ground and refused to get up. His dad tried to pick him up, and he did that thing kids do where they fold up their legs and refuse to stand up. The dad let go of the kid and he fell on the ground again, screaming and crying.

I was about 10 feet away from them, and had Forest pretty tight on the leash because of their dog. I was standing between Forest and the family because I was worried about their dog. As we walked by the mom said "Oh, look at the dog" and called Forest over to her. I guess she was trying to distract her kid from crying.

The next thing I knew I was on my knees and Forest was dragging me across the fire road. I tried to stop him but I couldn't. Boerboels are very strong, and can pull 1,500 lbs easily. Since I weigh about 120 lbs I didn't stand a chance.

He grabbed the kid by the shoulder and pinned him down on the ground. The parents were yelling but didn't do anything. As luck would have it, the day before I had been talking to Jen, the ex lesbian, about dog bites (her dog had just bitten someone at a party) and she told me that if you grab a dog's nose and twist it they'll let go. So I did that and Forest let go of the kid. The whole incident happened in less than 30 seconds.

The mom picked the kid up and at first said he didn't need to go to the hospital. Then a female ranger came out (the ranger hut was just across from where the incident happened) and they started yelling at me. Forest was hiding behind my legs and shaking because he was afraid. Then random people coming down the fire road started coming up and screaming at me for not controlling my dog, even though every fucking one of them had their dogs unleashed.

They ended up calling an ambulance to take the kid to St. Joseph's children's hospital. He required three stitches, and Forest had broken his collar bone. A male ranger came out as a mob descended on me and walked me back to my car.

As I drove home I called my neighbor. He sent me on a wild goose chase going to almost every vet in Denver trying to find Forest's shot records. It turns out he hadn't gotten a recent rabies vaccination. I was like great. I called the ranger every couple of hours to find out how the kid was, and to ask if I could call the parents. She told me she couldn't give me their contact information because they requested I not contact them.

I called the breeder from whom my neighbor had bought Forest. He was as surprised as I was when I told him what happened. He hypothesized that Forest was already on edge from leash aggression. He saw the little kid laying on the ground crying as some kind of threat. That's why he tried to pin the kid to the ground.

When my neighbor called later the ranger gave him the family's contact information and he called them. Because I didn't own Forest I could have washed my hands of the incident but I didn't. I went to every court meeting, and every meeting with the rangers. I paid to have Forest put to sleep and cremated. I agreed to split the cost of the law suit that soon showed up.

In court I was eviscerated. "Witnesses" who were no where near us when the incident happened said that the attack lasted at least 15 minutes. The mom said that Forest dragged her son 1/2 mile down the fire road. I think the parents were upset that they had done nothing to help their son so they were taking it out on me. They said the whole family needed therapy to get over the incident. I couldn't help but think that if a fucking dog bite sent them into such a tail spin they could never survive the real world. The mom also said I never called the family to see how the kid was doing, an utter and outright lie. It was also the worst lie for me because everything else she had said to that point, I could chalk up to adrenaline and mis-remembering things. But to say I didn't care about her kid? I wanted to kick her in the fucking cunt for that.

The male ranger spoke on my behalf and said that I was the most cooperative person they had ever dealt with. He said that I could have left the scene (which is true) but I didn't. And I found out, doing research, that the park where the attack happened has one of the largest number of dog biting incidents in the entire country. Probably because none of the fucks who live in Boulder leash their dogs.

To which I would also add, of all the places I've lived, Colorado has the worst behaved dogs and dog owners. In the past year, I've been to three parties (and I don't go to many parties anymore) where a dog bit someone.

It took two years, but the law suit was settled. My neighbor not only doesn't speak to me - he does shit things. He used to have his friends call my land line at all hours of the night and say things to me like they were going to come over to my house and rape me. He tried to have my now ex-boyfriend's truck towed, saying it was an abandoned vehicle. He did that three times in one week. He pulled my hummingbird feeder off a branch of his tree that hangs over my yard, broke it to pieces, and threw it on my patio. He smashed the hood of housepest1.0's car and ripped the Honda logo off of it. Let all the air out of the tires of my car when I had parked it in front of my house. Among other things...

I still have nightmares about Forest biting the kid. For months after I played the incident over and over in my mind, wondering what I could have done to prevent it. And I remember driving Forest home after. He was sitting in the back seat and he put his head on my shoulder and refused to move it even if I tried to shove him back. When we got home he wouldn't leave my side and would run after me if I broke contact with him.

I had to drive him to a shelter the day after he bit the kid, where they quarantined him to make sure he didn't have rabies. When we were driving there I think he knew. He put his head and front paws in my lap the whole ride there, which he had never done before when we were driving around.

The night before he was put to sleep I went over to my neighbor's house to hang out with Forest one last time. He crawled into my lap (as much as he would fit into my lap, anyway) and stayed there until I left. I finally left because I couldn't stop crying. It wasn't just because Forest was going to get put to sleep. It was the whole shit situation.

Oddly enough, the kid that got bitten was also named Frankie.

I was advised by my insurance company, who settled the lawsuit, not to get a dog. I have a cactus instead. His name is Gunter. He hasn't bitten anyone. Yet.

Kandy S, better rehire your lawyer

This total cunt knocking twat of a human being hit Jake 2 October 2008. At the scene of the accident she gave me her insurance card. It wasn't until I got home and contacted my insurance company that I found out she didn't have insurance.

A month later I was contacted by my insurance company because Kandy had hired a lawyer who contacted them. They told to get an estimate on fixing Jake. I was on the road so I asked my house pest 1.0 to make my car available to the agent. The stupid fuck nut left my car parked in a zone where they ticket, even though I reminded him to move my car, so I ended up getting a $25 parking ticket. HP1.0 said he would pay it, but didn't, so the cost of the ticket ended up being $40, with a late fee, that I had to pay.

The cost to fix Jake was $500.03. I sent the estimate in to the lawyer, as requested via a letter he sent me. I should have known, after calling them 5 times to make sure they got my paperwork, that things were not going to go smoothly. I got another letter saying I needed to get the car fixed, and show the bill as paid, before the matter could be considered further. I got Jake fixed and sent the bill to the lawyer.

Then...nothing.

So I called my insurance company back to see if they could do something to help me. No, they said, because I didn't file a claim with them, because the cost of the repair was equal to my deductible. Because Kandy had not done enough damage to my car, I was basically on my own instead of having an insurance lawyer following up on the accident.

So I started a phone call campaign to the lawyer's office. I called every day, assuring them that I would continue to call until the lawyer talked to me. He finally took my call, after 3 weeks, and said he was contacting Kandy, and would let me know in a few days what was happening.

I waited. A week went by. No word from the shit bag lawyer.
I guess shit bag and lawyer are redundant terms so I could have just said lawyer.

I called again. This time the receptionist told me that the lawyer was out of town. She couldn't tell me when he'd be back. The next day I got a letter from his office saying he no longer represented Kandy.

I was livid. I called the office and asked for her home address and contact information. They wouldn't give it to me. I researched her on line and found out that, although there was no address listed, she had an account on linkedin. I contacted the place where she said she worked on linkedin and they said no one by that name worked there. I'm not sure if they were lying or not, but I decided I was going to track Kandy down if I had to hire a professional investigator.

I paid $4 to have a search run on her on ussearch.com. The results were shit. I knew they knew she had an address in Denver, but it wasn't listed on the report they sent me. When I inquired how to get the Denver address they said I would have to pay additional money ($20) to do a further search. I was like I don't think so fucko. So I sent them an email saying I wanted my money back. They refused to refund it, so I called them on the Denver bullshit. I've been wrangling with customer service for a week. I got an email from them today with her Denver address without having had to pay additional money.

Further, I've requested a copy of the accident report from Denver PD. The bitch is going down. I've researched how to sue her in small claims court, which I am going to do as soon as I get the accident report. A sheriff will soon be knocking on her door to serve her papers.

The reason I am so pissed is that she hit my car, then lied to me about her insurance, then sent me on a wild goose chase with the lawyer, and has had no repercussions for her actions. If she had been honest with me at the scene of the accident, or contacted me to explain why she wasn't going to pay for my car, honestly, I would have written it off. But now, no. I don't even care if I don't recoup a dime from her. At least I will know that my judgement is sitting on her credit report for at least the next 7 years. Every time she tries to do anything that has to do with money, she's going to think of me. Fucking cunt.

And if I do get my money back, I'm going to donate it to a school fund that helps buy books for public schools, on the off chance that the reason Kandy is such an irresponsible, stupid lying asshole of a human being is that public education failed her.

The moral of the story is never piss off a jew. We're vengeful.

Hott Tomato

The story of what happened the night I got a concussion in St. Maarten...

After Rita and I had dinner at Mezzanotte's we headed back to our hotel. We were trying to figure out what bar we were going to go to. We were tired of the resort bars and we were also trying to avoid three Canadian guys, one of whom bit me on the head before cutting off one of my corn row braids. The other two guys were nice, but boring.

There was a close bar that we could have gone to, but our new friend Gus had been thrown out of it the evening before and we decided to never go there again. I can't remember what he did, but I think it involved taking his clothes off. Anyway, we decided the best course of action would be to find a bar that was far enough away that the Canadians couldn't find it and that there was little chance that Gus had been thrown out of it.

We went into the lobby and found the resort driver, a tall guy from Jamaica (I think he was about 6'4"). We had met him three days before when we were walking back to the hotel from Cupisco beach (about 3 miles from the hotel). As we were walking down the side of the road we saw a bus coming towards us, and then the bus turned around, and then pulled up next to us. A guy with dreds was yelling something but we couldn't hear him. I was like "Rita, do you think the bus guy is trying to kidnap us?" We were debating running when suddenly we recognized the bus driver as an employee of the resort. He gave us a ride back to the hotel and that's when we became friends with him, and he would drive us where ever we wanted to go.

At this point it was about 1030 at night. Rita and I were a little buzzed. We asked the driver to take us to a good bar. We were both somewhat dressed up so he decided to take us to Hott Tomato, the coolest bar on the island. We asked him to come get us around 130 and went into the bar.

There we were assaulted by Germans who kept buying us champagne. They tried to talk to us even though they didn't speak English and we didn't speak German. We moved from a table to the bar, thinking that they would lose interest if we were not as geographically close to them. Plus, the bartender was hot. His name was Christian.

As soon as we sat down Christian handed us two drinks. We were puzzled as we hadn't ordered drinks yet. Christian said a guy bought them for us and pointed to a corner of the bar where a guy who could have been John Lennon's twin brother was sitting. "He's a famous artist" Christian said when Rita commented on his looks. We were like great, a famous artist bought us drinks and we tipped our drinks to him to say thanks.

After settling on my bar stool I had kicked off my sandals and had my feet resting on a rung of the bar stool. I was sipping my drink, flirting with Christian, and starting to have fun when I suddenly felt pressure on my foot. Then Rita screamed. I looked down at my feet and saw the John Lennon artist guy examining my sole.

I pulled my foot out of his hands. "What in god's name are you DOING?" Rita asked him. "I am an artist" he said. We were like "We know". And then he said "She has beautiful feet. I want to sculpt them".

At that comment Rita started laughing so hard she almost fell off her bar stool. My feet are ugly. They're wide with strange looking toes. And back then I was running 6 miles a day at least, so all my toe nails were either missing or in various shades of grey black. I started laughing too, but that's because my feet are ticklish and he was caressing the bottom of my foot. I looked at Rita and she said "Oh, let him rub your foot. He did buy us drinks." There's a reason she gave me the nickname Bait.

After a few more seconds of having my feet man handled, and Rita laughing at me while taking pictures, I pretended I had to go to the bathroom. I gave Rita a signal to meet me outside on the beach, where Hott Tomato had tables set up. The tables were all empty because it had been raining lightly on and off all evening. I figured we could sit out there by ourselves and not be harassed anymore by the bizarre patrons of the bar.

Christian brought us drinks, and that's when Rita looked over at the parking lot and noticed that our bus driver was sitting in the bus. So we went over to the bus. "I thought you were going back to the hotel" Rita said. He told us he couldn't because he was off work and as soon as he went back he'd have to turn in the keys for the bus. He had been dozing in the driver's seat waiting for us.

We were like "You can't wait here in the bus. Come into the bar with us." He protested but Rita doesn't take no for an answer so he reluctantly followed us into the bar. There was dead silence as we walked in with him. And that's when I noticed, hey, there's no black people in here.

We sat outside on the beach and bought our driver drinks. It started raining so we went inside and cleared out a whole section of the bar because apparently some Europeans are afraid of black people. I don't remember too much about the rest of the evening except that Christian grabbed me during a tango and pulled me up on a table to dance.

Shit, now I remember. That's why Gus got thrown out of that bar. He was trying to dance on a table and broke it.

The driver took us back to the hotel around 330 in the morning. Christian showed up at our hotel room a few minutes later. I didn't know what to do so Rita was like "Oh, just go for a walk with him". So we went for a walk, albeit a short one, from my hotel room to a secluded hot tub on the beach. We got in and he started trying to kiss me. I was like "dude, what are you doing" and he was like "I want to make love to you". So I was like "do you seriously think I'm going to sleep with a guy I just met?" and he said "we're sitting in a private hot tub and you're in your underwear". Good point. But I decided it was time to put on my dress and go to sleep, so I told him good night and went back to my room.

I should mention that Rita and I had to catch a noon flight, and here it was 5 in the morning. Plus, I hadn't called my boyfriend the whole week because I was busy flirting and kissing random guys in bars, and I thought maybe I should give him a call so he couldn't say later in a fight that I hadn't called him my whole vacation.

Ech. I called him and left an unintelligible message on his voice mail.

Well, you know how the rest of the story goes. I ended up with a concussion.

Here's a pic of Christian, me, one of the Germans, Rita, and our driver. I told you he was tall.