9/28/2005 - “Why Me”, “Panda cams”, “Freelance”

Segments in this episode
“Why Me”, “Panda cams”, “Freelance”

Wow, busy, busy, busy! I’ve been sort of out of touch with all I’m doing. Let’s see, where to start.

I went to Disneyland a few weeks ago with some friends. On the way home at about 12:30am on the 5 North a car, going about 95 mph, zipped past us on the left (we were in the second lane because said car flashed his lights at us). A fraction of a second later a multi-tone gold car zipped past us, going about 95 mph in the slow lane. They proceeded to weave in and out of traffic and I thought to myself “this looks like trouble” and sure enough about a half a mile ahead of us or so we saw the puff of smoke/dust/debris. I was sitting in the back seat so didn’t have the best vantage point but what I saw was break lights through the dust flashing on and off. When we got to the accident we were surprised to see just one car involved and no sign of the driver. Immediately we pulled over and jumped out of the car to see if we could offer assistance. Since the driver wasn’t in the car when we passed, I worried he was ejected. When we arrived at the scene we found a young kid, maybe 17-18 kneeling on the ground, hands to his forehead grabbing his hair in his hands screaming “Why meeeeee, why did this have to happen to me” along with other expletives. He didn’t appear to be too badly hurt, but quite shaken up and probably in shock. Luckily, an ambulance was passing by and pulled over to help.

From the look of the car, I suspect he lost control, hit the wall or barrier and flipped and spun (that would explain why I thought I saw break lights going off and on). It was pretty amazing that he wasn’t seriously injured. We hung around for about an hour or more waiting for the cops to come and take our statements, etc. During that time I found 2 things very interesting.

My new addiction is this:
http://animal.discovery.com/cams/pandavidr.html
It’s a panda cam at the Washington DC zoo. It’s a live feed of the pandas 24/7. Most of the time they’re sleeping, but sometimes you catch a tender moment with mom snuggling baby, or baby calling out to mom…or, not so tender, mom pooping over the ledge. (For some reason, whoever monitors the cameras loves to show this! ACK.)

I've recently started a freelance job. It's the same job I did last year. It's a lot of hours, well when we signed on it was a lot of hours, now it seems that some of the hours and going away...but it's extra money and it can be fun.

I say "can be" because frankly, sometimes it's just not. Sage has a standard template that they use for all sessions being offered at the event. Our job is to edit the presentation for content, graphics, grammar, spelling and template usage. Speakers sometime just flat out ignore the Style Guide and choose their own templates. So far I've had 2 of these. My understanding is that most sessions are around 75 minutes long and may go as much as 2 hours...2 hours is 120 minutes right? I just edited a presentation that was 155 slides long. ONE HUNDRED and FIFTY-FIVE slides. Oy! These people, what are they thinking?!

Anyway, that's what I've been doing in my free time, working.

The foster kittens are doing well. When Scooter got adopted they laid 2 more on me. The lady in charged asked if I could take them and I agreed...before she said "they have a bit of diarrhea". Um, by a bit of diarrhea I think what she meant to say is, poop falls freely from their bums. That's been a real challenge, but they're getting better and feeling better, too. At first I named them Doody and Shapoopie, because that's all they ever did. Now, however, I have real names for them. One is Tom (Thumb) and the other is Ernest (Hemingway).

They are both polydactyl which means they have an extra toe on each front paw. It's the cutest thing, they look like they're wearing boxing gloves or oven mitts. Adorable. Anyway, I selected Ernest because polydactyl cats are also known as Hemingways.