The Pickle Thingie

It is with a modicum of certainty that I say everyone has a commercial that makes their skin crawl. Right now mine is a Big Mac radio spot that is literally called the Pickle Thief.

Every time I hear the guy start his little tirade about her being a pickle thief and maybe he should rethink their whole relationship I begin screaming, “Run girlfriend, run.” I know you’re thinking, “Cele, change the channel.” But you have to remember I’m a DJ I can’t change the channel, I can’t turn off the radio, and worse, I can’t open the Mic and scream, “Run, girlfriend, run” (in all truth that is what I am dying to do – but, like my job. A lot.)

I write commercials, I know that comedy sells, but who at their ad agency thought, “Oh, let’s do a commercial where a young man berates his date for STEALING the “Big Mac” altering pickle,” who? Not only did they think this would sell burgers, but they then sold the concept to someone who said, “Great, run with it.” (Well okay that is kind of an assumption, but when I write a commercial, I have to get customer approval before it runs.) Honestly, if they start selling their Angus Bacon Cheeseburgers that way the whole face and make up of my Fast Food Fridays will change.

Having been in an abusive relationship or three, attempting to sell me products with a self important brat heaving around his caveman tactics is friggin stupid. If you’re already married to a person who throws fits you learn how to deal, but if you find out about the abusive tantrums or worse before the I Do's (because really you shouldn't have)… run run run – do not pass go, don’t stop for cash – hie thee to safety. And you certainly don’t buy his hamburgers.

Sith,
Cele

March 11th - Or A Day In The Wake Of A Disaster

My world goes round, my family is safe, my home is whole –dry – stable, and there is food on my table. My heart goes out to the Japanese people.

In total ignorance of the growing crisis in Japan (I was watching cable not network TV – so no information crawler) I took two sleeping tabs and went to bed at about 10:30. At 11:30, Beady Dee Dee called me. We are on Tsunami watch, after we checked out CNN together and her husband the Chief gave me some info through her I got dressed and was at work by Midnight. Yes, she chatted with me that long.

The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration or NOAA has an amazing array of informational sites for professionals and the public. KCST began disseminating information and Tsunami watch information. Phone calls began coming in. CENS (Community Emergency Notification System – or reverse 911) called me at the station (WTF) at 2:30AM or 3 o’clock to let me know I needed to be at the newly opened EOC (Emergency Operations Center – aka the Siuslaw Valley Rural Fire District’s main station.)

Thirty minutes later I was called by incident command that they were going to sound the Tsunami siren in 15 minutes.
This gave me enough time to write up and record a new dissemination and air it. It went something like this….

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The National Weather Service has issued a Tsunami Warning for the coastal areas of the Pacific Northwest.

At approximately 9:36pm PST an earthquake registering an estimated 8.9 struck the eastern coast of Japan. A Tsunami wave is expected to hit the Northern California and Oregon coast at approximately 7am (7:15 – 7:20 – 7:25 – sometime between 9 and 10am [seriously it changed that much.)

The Tsunami siren has sounded – please do not call 911.

Residents living near the beach and those in the Tsunami inundation zone are advised to evacuate to higher ground. The Florence Events Center has been opened as a relocation center (as was Three Rivers Casino, the Florence BiMart and Fred Meyer’s parking lots.)

Please do not call 911, do not go to the beach

Again, the National Weather Service has issued a Tsunami warning for the coastal areas of the Pacific Northwest. Stay tuned for further information and updates, you’re tuned to FM 106.9 KCST.

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And the phone calls began. I don’t call it the headless chicken republic for nothing. Excerpts from actual phone calls I answered (and for a while I was the only one at the station – so I answered them all) –

“What’s that siren? Can they turn it off I’m trying to sleep?”

“What’s that siren?”
“The NWS has issued a Tsunami Warning ma'am.”
“What should I do?”
“Well ma’am where do you live?”
“On Siano loop.”
“You need to evacuate ma’am. They have opened the Florence Events Center as a relocation center. That or higher ground would be where you need to go.”
“But how do I get there?”
“You drive ma’am” (Siano loop is just over the dune from my house – which is not in the Tsunami inundation zone and take my word this woman could hear the siren it’s less than a block from her house.)
“But I don’t have a car.”
“Ma’am, I suggest you call a taxi then.”
“Oh.”

I had several phone calls in the same vein. One lady wanted to know if they would let her take her pets - see has dogs, cats, and birds. I really didn’t know the answer to that one. Several phone calls, and I mean several wanted to know if their house was safe. They lived at least a mile outside the Tsunami zone.

What frustrates me, and I imagine the EOC too, is that since the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami that killed tens of thousands, the City of Florence and other communities along the Oregon coast have been neck deep in educating residents in disaster prevention and preparation. You can not drive anywhere in Florence west of Highway 101 and not see signs that either tell you you’re in a Tsunami Inundation Zone or that road you are driving is
designated as a “Tsunami Evacuation Route”.

Monthly free workshops teach residents how to be ready in the event of a multitude of disasters – but they all focus on earthquakes and tsunamis. So how can you be in Florence for any amount of time and not know 1) If your house is in an inundation zone 2) what you should do 3) what emergency supplies and equipment you should have on hand in preparation 4) HAVE A FUCKING PLAN!

We kept our listeners up on where they could go, what schools were closed for the day or just on two hour delays. Sadly, at least one of the valley TV stations reported that Siuslaw schools were closed for the day, when in truth, until 8am they were just on two hour delay with morning kindergarten canceled. But of course at TV station 65 miles away would know better (according to phone calls) than KCST, even thought we get phone calls directly from the 97J Superintendent of Schools. Yes, they did finally cancel school for the day – the “I told you so” phone calls were delightful.

Then finally they called us at 10:30 to say in 15 minutes they would ring the all clear. It was a delight for me to make that announcement – Being a mile away from a Tsunami siren inside a building I didn’t get to hear the chimes. Several times before my airshift was over I made sure to invite people to openly say thank you to the officers, firefighters, city and county employees who made their Friday safer. Being a Friday, I still had a full day of work to do (I hate Fridays) and didn’t get to go home from work until 6:30 – over 18 hours after I arrived. But it was a fulfilling day.

I demanded pizza for dinner, ate three pieces, brushed my teeth and was in bed by 8:45. I didn’t get out of bed until 9:30 this morning. Yes, I did not go to yoga.

This afternoon I went and had to settle for kelp with 400mcg’s of iodine, because the two pharmacies I checked didn’t have potassium iodide (my friend got a bottle but it was expired) I need to go buy some potassium to go with it – no bananas won’t work, Ducky hates bananas. One pharmacist looked at me and the guy who asked for the potassium iodide like we were idiots. Do I have to worry about fall out from the Fukashima Meltdown? You betcha – check out the Unisys satellite image. Be safe, be educated, be smart.

Now I’m going to go have ice cream (Umpqua Dairy's Chocolate Brownie Thunder,) read the high wind warning one more time, say a prayer for the people of Japan, and go back to bed.
Sith,
Cele

Welcome Twenty Eleven, Nice To Meet You

Now get off my toe. Yesterday Harley made a comment on air about December 31st being the Feast of Sylvester (I kid you not) and if an east wind is blowing it bodes calamity for the New Year. Yesterday’s weather forecast for the central Oregon Coast: Partly Sunny (it was cloudy) East winds … through Tuesday – highs 40 to 45 degrees…. Clear skies, east winds, lows 30 35 degrees. We had clouds all day and 47. Rain last night 33 degrees. And Friggin’ east winds. What the Frell is that about?

I actually made midnight and a few before I went to bed this morning. This morning began at six after six with dead air on my FM dial. I called the Smurfette got a run down and went back to bed until she called me at 9:30. I spent the next forty five minutes at work rebooting computers. And then treated Ducky and myself to mochas and chocolate chocolate chip muffins. It’s not crispy hash browns, but it works.

So to close out Two ought ten I had one part timer out for a week because he was having trigeminal surgery. He’s now out for four week’s because in English, he had brain surgery, I’m not bitching, he talked his doctor down from six weeks out. My main hand man, the ying to my business yang, had a nasty ass ear infection to close out two thousand ten, he’s now kicked off twenty eleven with nasty ass ear infections in both ears. My third part timer, who has a full time job at the local Kroger, is helping with part of the basketball games, but we cover three teams… ouch.

So I tried to hook up Ducky’s Wii. I’m the techie of the house. I apparently don’t speak Wii. I hate when I have to call my bro inlaw for techie support, it’s what everyone else to who he is related does. I feel like I’ve failed – really it can’t be that difficult. I hooked all the appropriate cord to the appropriate Wii orifice. Took the appropriate audio/video RCA plugs and put them into the appropriate DVR audio/video Inputs – Nada. Yes, I sync’d the remotes. Despite being preloaded with Wii Sports I have no menu. I put in a game disc ( Link’s Crossbow Training) hit the home button. Nada. I punched every button on my remote. Nada. I stood on my head and spun three time to the east. Nada. I walked away and cooked dinner. Still nada, but I’m feted.

Ducky got me these kewl Christmas socks in my stocking.
Pandas. They totally rock. I’d gotten Burp monkey socks for his stocking, and Ducky got Psam frog socks. I really wanted a picture of all three pairs of Christmas feet. Drats that didn’t happen.
I pulled my Christmas Panda socks out of the dryer, to find out they’d begun coming unsewn. I whipped out my needle and repaired my socks. But oops, I got one of the feet wrong. But the socks fit even better than they did before being washed.

My Christmas tree is still up, my Christmas decorations are still up, and my roots are two weeks past due. But I’m good. I burnt my has browns, but TCU won and I’m good. Go Uconn.
The wind of twenty eleven is calm right now.

Sith,
Cele

The Stars are Falling, The Stars are Falling

Stars intrigue me, captivate me, and mesmerize me. Anyone who knows me for long, knows this – I can stare up at the stars for hours on end. I can’t talk a lot about them knowledgeably (thought that hasn’t stopped me) but I love listening to people who know about stars. And Sky and Telescope’s Sky At A Glance is a weekly stop for me on the internet. I want to know what star is brightest where in what part of the sky. I’m hooked since childhood.

So earlier this week I’d heard a program, or maybe it was last week, that said when something is hurtling through space (think asteroids, comets, and other large propelled objects) but you see it in the sky as stationary, that means it’s hurtling towards earth. Oh joy. It gives pause to thought on the gazilla…trilla…bazillions of stars out there that seemingly don’t move (unless you go in the house for an hour then come back out.)

The street I drive off highway 101 to get to and from work logically runs west to east and in the evening back again. Duh! Tonight the sky was clear and dark with hundreds of brilliant stars twinkling (in their stationary mode) in the sky. Beautiful. I could see Venus hanging in the southwest a mere five degrees to the upper left of the sickled moon that was low towards the ocean’s horizon end.

I drove west towards 101 and watched the moon and Venus seemingly fall out of the sky. So rapidly that I had to stop for a moment (slow road) and get my bearings. Watching Venus and the Moon fall from the sky momentarily side swiped me and I had to regain my bearings (whoa dude, unhinged vertigo) so I could drive the remaining nine tenths of a mile home and climb in my hot tub.

Thank God the Moon and Venus are still in the sky. Well okay the Moon has gone to bed, but if I were rowing towards China, it’d be there. Now I need a Kahlua.

Sith,
Cele

The photo is from Spaceweather

Victoria’s Secret …The Business of New Math

I am one of those people your accountant told you about: I do not balance my checkbook. Sad, but very true. While in the past this has caused me much woe, I’ve learned to compensate.

During my second marriage I always buffered my balance by rounding every thing up to either…
1) the nearest dollar… or
2) five dollars

The latter was actually the best method when you consider at the time I always paid more bill than I should have, which meant that something would bounce somewhere, some time. My mother, I am sure hangs her head in woe and angst.

In my third marriage (yes I get better with age and repetition) I have learned to just make sure I have a bumper in my accounts. I still over pay my bills. Which is the point of this whole blog.

America is in a financial crisis. Yeah, I know you had no clue until I told you.

While the bra industry is not sagging (pun intended) to my knowledge, I have to question how some companies remain in business. I was a diehard Victoria Secret customer. Their Emma line was smart, sexy, and affordable. Sadly I can no longer be an Emma Line diehard, the brand just doesn’t make their bras big enough, and yes woe is me, no one else makes affordable, sexy bras for women with large breastesesss. I’m sure Ducky would offer to walk around supporting me, but it would get in the way of my typing. And really, manly hands holding up my ponderously, obnoxious bosom is just a fashion faux pas (or wardrobe malfunction) waiting to happen, plus it’s not like I need to add rear cargo. You try typing when you’re being fondled, I have a hard enough time staying on task without diversions.

Yes, and no I was off task. I paid off my last Victoria Secret bill with sadness and began looking for a new brassiere. Last Friday in the mail I receive a check because I over paid my bill. Now I maybe wrong in my calculations, big companies do buy in bulk and therefore trim the pork off the edges of their bills, but really this is ridiculous.

Now keep in mind I am mathematically challenged being the product of the 1970’s “New Math” Fiasco. Ergo my calculations could be flawed…but not by much. Here is my estimates for Victoria’s Secret to refund my over paid bill (which I paid electronically) are as follows…

1) Envelope - .09 cents
2) Check - .12 cents
3) Office time – this is already a wash so let’s say 1 minute @ $10 an hour is .166 cents
4) Bulk postage .26 cents

Therefore Victoria’s Secret spent approximately .63 cents refunding my over payment of six cents. And I can’t even shop there anymore. If they kept my six cents maybe they could invest in someone to figure out the dimensions of a size “too big, old woman ponderous boobs” so they could keep my business. Maybe I should send them a plaster cast of Ducky’s hands.

Sith,
Cele