Friday Five

Okay, there's been some shenanigans around here. Dear Willow Tree informed me of a little buggy making it's way around blogs which originated in Myspace. If your blog has been hanging up, (or mine for that matter!) that seems to be the issue. You'll find the malignant code in your template and it refers to d5d1 . com Notice I made sure that didn't come out as a link. You can get it by commenting on infected blogs, or, if someone who is infected comments on your blog. You can apparently find the script if you click Edit HTML under your Template settings. If you then hit Ctrl-F, you can find the script by typing in d5d1. You can find some info about it here, in the Google forums. My template appears to be clean now, and I'm not having anymore issues. But it appeared widespread yesterday.

Okay, on to the list:


My Five Favorite Jobs (in no particular order)


1. Tutor

I worked briefly as a tutor during high school, helping elementary school kids to read. Sometimes I became a glorified baby sitter, and sometimes I had kids who just refused to do anything. And there were a couple of parents who blamed me for tat. I did have one little girl who went from not being able to read at all, to being at the top of her reading group in the second grade. I loved that kid.

2. Frederick's of Hollywood clerk/asst. mgr.

I've never been a girly girl, but I really liked this job. It was the best retail job I've ever had, and it got better when we added the plus size collection. It was so wonderful to help women who felt unsexy realize that they were beautiful, and help their husbands see them that way, too. And it wasn't about "dressing up sexy". The lingerie was just a tool to get people to see themselves a little differently. We had one girl who was so happy that we outfitted her wedding trousseau (and that we carried pretty things in her size), she brought us cookies for a month. And all it took was being helpful, and caring about making people happy.

3. Linco, processor/gluer

One summer while in college I worked for a small local company in Michigan that made cardboard products: boxes, tubing, that kind of thing. I used to cut raw cardboard to make boxes in the morning, and then I'd glue up the sides in the afternoon. It doesn't sound nice, but the people I worked for were great and the job required very little thinking. The best part: they fed us lunch every Friday, usually Chinese. I also learned a lot about people who do "blue collar" work. Ken and Linda, who owned Linco, cared a lot about the people who worked for them. In their eyes, we weren't grunts. We were intelligent human beings who deserved to be treated well. Ken always made me listen to Rush Limbaugh with him while we worked, but he also loved Garrison Keilor. When my summer was up, they tried to convince me to stay, but gave me a big party and a huge cake when I chose to go back to school, anyway.

4. Capital Broadcasting, Raleigh, NC Part-time air talent

This was the best company I've ever worked for, hands down. As a part-timer, I still accrued vacation and sick time (paid!!!), and they were always throwing parties for the employees and their kids. The Easter Party was wonderful, and TFYO got to go twice. All paid for out of owner Jim Goodman's pockets. Capital is privately owned, which is a rarity in the media business today, and it allows the company to be actively involved in employees lives on an unheard of scale. I also worked with some fabulous people there, including my APD Jim, who taught me more about programming in three months than I learned in seven years of radio. I can honestly say I truly liked everyone I worked with. It was the toughest job I ever left.

5. K-mart, receiving dock grunt

I did a lot of temporary light industrial work early in my college career, mostly because it paid better overall than working as a file clerk. I also don't like wearing dressy clothes. I wasn't supposed to be assigned to the receiving dock, I was supposed to be sent with the other women to "repack" where boxes were unpacked and goods repacked for shipment to stores. There was me and one other girl who accidentally got sent down to the docks to unload import trucks. We did it by hand with the help of a mobile conveyor belt called "The Goose". Hence, we were called "The Goose Crew". The first couple of weeks, we had a lot of traffic down our end of the warehouse, as every guy seemingly had a reason to come talk to me and Amber. I even had a company VP ask me what the hell I was doing there and if I wanted to transfer up to the office. I told him no. Even though the floor foreman hated me (and tried to give me some of the dirtiest jobs), I loved the guys I worked with. I loved the fact that they never cut me slack because I was a girl. I lost twenty pounds on that job, and I also learned to drive a forklift. If I'd stayed and become union, I would have been making $50,000 a year driving that lift, but I went back to school.

Okay, there are my five, have a great weekend!

PS I've been thinking about a new template fo rmy blog, but I'm rubbish at HTML. If anyone has any suggestions or would like to help me attempt to write a new template, I'd be most grateful.

Seven angels seven plagues...

That lyric from Joydrop's Strawberry Marigold, which coincidentally seems to be the only song I could find with a "seven plagues" reference in it.

Several folks around the blogosphere have been very "list-y" lately. They've all been making lists for camping, visits from the Mother-in-Law, getting ready for back-to-school, etc. Now I always do a list on Fridays, but after almost stepping on a tree frog last night, I have a new list to share.

The Seven Plagues of Guyton, GA

(kinda catchy, eh?)

1. Sand Gnats

The little buggers are everywhere down here. They even named the local baseball team after these tiny, winged biters. This was the first pest we encountered when we bought our lovely, new rural home. They swarmed the window screens and doors first thing in the morning. They got so bad that I was literally sweeping piles of them out the front door. Eventually, they died out, only to be replaced with....

2. Spiders

We started off with your garden variety brown web-spinners, but recently moved on to Black Widows. Yes, those creepy big black spiders with the red hourglass. We killed four in the garage. Let me amend that, my husband killed four in the garage, and one almost landed on his head in the kitchen. We sprayed and stomped them out of our house, and they moved on to our next door neighbour's place. He did the same, and the neighbor on the other side of him started complaining about them. I don't know where they are now, but they aren't here. (If you'd like to read more about my run-ins with spiders check this entry) They spiders were replaced by...

3. Ants

Yes, I know. If we hadn't killed off all of the spiders, we wouldn't have ants. That's not true. Generally, the spiders around here don't get to eat ants, because the ants aren't dumb enough to walk into a web meant for a flying insect. They are, however, dumb enough to eat ant bait, stagger away, and kill off all of their brethren. Kind of like "The Manchurian Candidate" for ants.

4. Buzzards

I encountered these guys fairly early, and they really didn't bother me all that much, except for that first week when they kept landing in my yard. I think they were looking for the neighbour's chihuahua, who spends a lot of time in my yard relieving herself. No, they weren't a problem, until I almost ran one of them over on my way to work as it was picking clean what was left of an armadillo. (You can see my early ode to Armadillos here.) Most people hate buzzards. I think they serve a necessary function, one that the county appears loathe to deal with, anyway. They get rid of road kill, and they do look pretty in flight. On the ground, not so much.

5. Frogs

Every time it rains, we hear the lovely sound of tree frogs. And I do love it. I just don't love it underneath my bedroom window when I'm trying to sleep. Or stuck to my front door, where the cat is just itching to eat one. After a hard rain, I go out, and they are covering my house, sometimes one frog per two or three square feet of siding. We've also found them hiding in the grill. Oftentimes, they end up dead because we haven't checked the grill closely enough before finding them.

6. Flies

Especially around the trash cans. I think flies just come with rural living, but it still grosses me out to see something trying to crawl out of the trash can. I make Ray bleach the thing. I wish our neighbours would bleach their cans, too. At least so they're flies would stay out of my house. I've thought about trying the plastic bag of water trick. It's really prevalent in the deep south, where you hang a big plastic bag of water from the ceiling. It's supposed to get rid of flies. Or drown them. Or something. I have no idea if it works. I'm afraid to try it, because I'm pretty sure said bag would fall on my head during dinner preparation. Just a guess.

7. Dump trucks

The scourge of our quaint country lanes. I can't go to work, can't go to the grocery store, can't frantically drive all over the county looking for quality pre-k, without getting stuck behind one of these monstrosities. I shouldn't complain. One helped build my house, but they're also at dozens of construction sites all over the county. They just seem to be waiting outside my subdivision anytime I want to go somewhere. I haven't met a soul in this county yet who doesn't have a ding in their windshield (windscreen, you UK types) from a pebble launched from a dump truck.

So that's it, the Seven Plagues of Guyton, GA. Not as interesting as some other plagues, perhaps, but we all have our own peculiar regional problems to deal with, I suppose.

Oh, and for those who missed my note yesterday, there is an audio clip up in my profile now, for those who were interested in what my "radio voice" sounds like. It's the demo I threw together in an effort to get work *grin*

They got a name for the winners in the world

I was going through my blogroll, and realized there was someone on the list who doesn't have an award, so I decided to pass along my award from yesterday on to:



Flutterbot (although the actual title is Flutterbots and Roboflies, either way, very cool)

So Flutterbot, here ya go...

She has one of the coolest profile pics I've ever seen, and she's a very talented graphic artist. I know y'all have seen her over her a few times, and she never hesitates to leave a nice comment. She was also one of the first blogs I discovered when I signed on here. Go on over and see her!

I've got more to write, but it will be later. Stay tuned for "The Seven Plagues of Guyton, GA".


Quick update: For all y'all asking for audio clips to hear my voice, you can now go to my profile and hear my voice. A couple of people have had to download the clip to hear it, but at least you've got access to it. It's my generic demo that I've been using to try to get commercial work, so it's a mishmash of promos and commercials I've done. And yes, I've done all the editing on these myself.

....and I bring you...FIRE!

With thanks to the Crazy World of Arthur Brown for the lyric. Go find this song and listen to it. My Dad used to scare the hell out of me with that 45.


I'll get to my main post in a minute...



But I've been given another blog award! I'll have to redesign the sidebar to make all this stuff fit. This one comes from Poetess with Humour:




I am now a Thoughtful Blogger Times Two. I'm still not sure where I'm going to put it, or who I would pass it to, as I think just about everyone on my blog roll has this award from someone. Either way, thank you Poetess! If you haven't checked out her blog, head over there. She writes some amazing poetry, and has a gift for putting almost anything into rhyme.


A little while back, Rotten Correspondent had asked for some radio stories, and I've been wracking my brain trying to think of one that might be even remotely interesting to someone not in radio. So, gather 'round, my children and I shall tell you the tale of ....

The Great Wake Up Crew Fire of 2004

A few years back, we were living in Memphis. I was sort of the all-around part-timer. I did production (commercials to the layman), I did traffic reports, sometimes a newscasts here and there, and I filled in for vacationing and sick air talent.


One of my gigs was to fill in for the female voice on our classic rock station's morning show, "The Wake Up Crew". It was fun. The guys were obnoxious, but in a sweet DJ kind of way. There were lots of boob jokes, jokes about sex, and jokes about the mayor of Memphis who was affectionately referred to as King Willie. I liked doing mornings with these guys, although I was acutely aware of my "role". My role was to read a sixty second news cast at the top of each hour for three hours, and to aurally nod and laugh at whatever anyone else said. There was no star billing here, and I was cool with that.

Our group of stations had recently moved into a new building outside of downtown. We were up on the top floor, the fourth one. One of the elevators kept getting stuck, and they'd been testing the fire alarms all that week. It was really annoying, especially because they'd beep for a second and then stop. I had just finished doing my 8 a.m. news when the damn things went off again. Now, in a studio, we don't hear the screaming of the alarm (makes for bad radio, y'know), but we do have an annoying strobe light that flashes fast enough to send any epileptic into a seizure. So it flashed. And flashed. And flashed. And it wouldn't stop.

I started to get nervous, throwing Tim these "Shouldn't we be doing something about this?" looks, checking over my shoulder. During a commercial break, I poked my head out into the hall, and the sound was deafening. No one knew what was going on, so we started talking about it on the air. "Bad Dog" (second guy on the show), took his cell phone and volunteered to find out what all the hubbub was. "Bad Dog" called back in a just a few seconds from the bottom of the stair well.

Turns out, the elevator was on fire. The elevator that kept getting stuck. The elevator I had ridden up to the fourth floor at five o'clock that morning.

"Dog" had already taken the advice of management and evacuated the building, leaving me and Tim, and Brian our producer/phone screener upstairs, on the air, with the fire alarm blaring in the background. Once it had been established that there was in fact a fire, I yanked my headphones off, told all our listeners to have a nice day, and got the hell out of there. I think I had made it to the bottom stair before Tim had managed to put on Peter Frampton "Do You Feel Like I Do?" and the station into automation.


We were eventually given the all clear, and made it back up in time before Frampton was over. I then got to be heckled by Tim and Dog for being so scared (fire and elevators are two of my biggest phobias), but I was not the object of derision for long. It turns out, one of our Traffic and Continuity people, Judy, was stuck in the elevator where the fire had happened. The fire was actually in the elevator shaft, just below where she was. It was a minor fire, just some scorched insulation and wiring, but the elevator was stuck just shy of the fourth floor. So what does Dog do? He walks down there and calls her cell phone. She wisely refused to go on the air with us. Judy wasn't a small woman, but they managed to get her up through the hatch in the roof of the elevator.


I took the stairs for the next six months.



If you want audio of this, I have it saved somewhere, and I'll be happy to e-mail it to you, since I still haven't found a reliable audio host yet. If y'all find one, let me know.

Get on Back to School

Lyric courtesy of Jimmy Buffet and Dan Fogelberg from Domino College

There are some things I love about living in a place like Effingham County. I love the small-town atmosphere. I love how my hair dresser knows a really good local place to get a sandwich, and how they know a really good local place to get mulch for my garden. Everyone knows everyone, and everyone looks out for everyone, in a very down home, "Hey, I brought y'all some fresh biscuits" manner.

There are also some things I don't like. The schools here are fabulous, which means everyone is moving to this area to take advantage of the cheap land and good schools (we're part of that group), but the schools aren't ready for it. Not by a long shot. So much so, that my daughter was on a waiting list three months ago for a slot in the state funded free public pre-kindergarten program, and was still number eleven on the list yesterday as school started.

To say I was in a panic would be putting it mildly.

Ray and I spent most of yesterday calling every state funded program we could find in the county, and everyone had waiting lists a mile long. I looked at churches, but most of the ones in the area that we could afford to pay for were way too conservative for us. But finally, some of those phone calls paid off.

Ray called a bunch of places listed in the local phone book. Most of the day-cares and private pre-kindergartens had been put out of work by the elementary schools getting into the pre-k business. One phone number led to a woman who used to work at a pre-school in Springfield, up the highway about ten miles or so from where we live. She just happened to have the number of a woman whose daughter was opening a brand new state funded pre-school in Old Guyton, not far from where we are. So we called the woman, who gave us her daughter's cell number, which went to voice mail, but had the number of her new pre-school listed. And we hit the jackpot. They had three slots left open.

The building isn't much to look at. It's an old county building across the street from the Guyton Volunteer Fire Department, and half a block up from the county sheriff's building in town. But the folks were nice, and the Four Year Old loved the classroom, even if they hadn't finished putting everything up yet.

And so now she has a place to belong. She's one of only six girls in two pre-kindergarten classes. Truthfully, she's probably not going to learn anything academic from her new school. She can already read, she can print simple sentences, she knows some addition and subtraction, and her multiplication tables. But she's going to learn about dealing with other kids, which makes me happy.

And all because a woman knew a woman who had a daughter with a business. I love Effingham County.