Randomness...
Those who know me know I'm not a fan of elevators. It's not so much the thought of falling, but being moved without seeing where I'm being moved.
Okay, yeah...falling would suck.
I'm okay with glass elevators. When I went to Seattle, I was fine in the Space Needle elevator. I could ride in the thing all day. Hell, it could go faster on the ride down and I'd be all right. But close it up so I can't see out, and I'm not gonna be happy.
I dream about elevators. Sometimes they go up and sometimes they go down and don't bother me; other times they go down and scare the hell out of me.
Just so everybody's on the same page: I'm not a fan of elevators. But I am a fan of the occasional thrill. Sometimes my fears and that craving for adventure collides, like when I went to the Grand Canyon and the urge to see how close I could come to the edge without falling in beat out my fear of falling.
I read an article after dinner about a bigass tower for testing elevators, and the first thing I thought was, "I wonder how to get a job being a human elevator test pilot?"
I'm not a fan of elevators, but that would be a cool job...
typsygypsy is learning Spanish. I think she needs this.
Wonder if there's a Spanish translation for Mxyzptlk. It couldn't be any more difficult to pronounce than the English version.
This also made me think of typsygypsy, who plays fiddle for Spriggan.
I wonder if the creepy robot is programmed to play any Irish tunes...
A friend at work e-mailed a photo of an 8-cylinder snowblower. Yeah, like a snowblower with twin exhaust stacks and a friggin' car engine. People up north do things like that when it gets cold. Somewhere after the effect of an ice cream headache, people just get goofy. In the 70s (and probably today, still, for all I know), it was all the rage to put big block car engines in customized snow mobiles.
The picture of the snowblower my friend sent reminded me of a story when I was a kid.
I used to live up north, and while I moved down before turning 16 and driving, there were mornings my step father woke me up to shovel the driveway. It wasn't all bad; I liked waking up when everything was dark and blue. I liked watching new snow fall, and I didn't mind the cold (the way our house was situated, the driveway never got the brunt of the north winds). I just hated that I was expected to shovel for a guy I was never too fond of, especially since I didn't drive!
A couple friends and I decided to shovel driveways for money. We wandered the neighborhood with shovels, knocked on doors, and offered to clear driveways. On snowy days, we offered to shovel and come back, so there would be no snow pack for us to contend with. To wait for the snow to stop meant competition when other kids hit the neighborhood; we worked extra hard to get the jump on business and keep it.
We were the crew some diehard fans of our shoveling abilities relied on. It didn't matter if you had a paved drive, rocks, pebbles, or grass--we took care to consider what was underneath the snow, we made money, and there was always the extra reward of hot chocolate and cookies. We were the kings of the northside...until the kid up the street took out a loan from his father, bought a snowblower, and put us all out of business.
While one side of my Italian roots go back to Sicily, home of the Mafia, it was my friends--northern Italians--who suggested we arrange "an accident" to put the kid up the street out of business. The younger brother even said something like, "We gotta defend our territory. We can't have some fuckin' Mick bastard coming in on us like that! He's nothing a shovel handle won't cure..."
I talked the brothers down, and we found that while we didn't have as many driveways to shovel, we still had the two best houses in the neighborhood for hot chocolate and homemade cookies.
I learned at a young age that even a snow blower can't crush determination and customer loyalty...