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BewilderedAndBefuddled
CarnivorousDanus
DapperDave
Itsmekris
KnowledgeNOW
Matt
MaybeItsABaer
Mondry
Our family portraits alwasy end is laughter and bad picutes, but here's a good one from not too long ago.
We swung open the wide, brown wooden door of Juanita's. Any second it could fall of the hinges; it's notched and beaten all to hell. The windows are disgusting. I can see three old men sitting by a window smoking.
Inside, there are maybe 10 tables. There's only one employee. She's an older woman, gray-haired and over-weight. Her hair is plastered to the back of her neck with grease, held in place by a faded yellow visor. She wears shorts and a T-shirt even though it's 20 degrees outside. We pick a table, my friends and I — one of the few that isn't littered with crumbs.
The hostess/waitress/cook walks over. We place our order for drinks as we eye the menu — a concession stand-style one, little black letters mounted on a large Pepsi sign-board. Home of the Big Boy Burger, which is one of our orders. Pancakes and French Toast round it out, because who can resist breakfast for lunch?
We wait, sip drinks, study the place. One of the old men gets up and walks to the counter. There's a sign stating no one is allowed behind the counter. He goes behind it and fills his coffee. Apparently it's more of a suggestion, not a rule.
There are only seven of us in that tiny restaurant, and I'm sure the other four were studying my table closely, trying to figure out what we were doing. I spent a lot of time considering the "picture" about the door: It showed a drawing of a mansion, helicopter, yacht and two nice cars. All of those were lit up by little Christmas tree-like lights set behind the photo. At the top it said something about what the owner wanted in life. Stapled to the bottom left-hand corner of the photo was a head shot of a pretty blonde woman, circa the mid-1980s. She looks like a pin-up.
On the other wall are two holographic pictures of New York City, pre-Sept. 11. The bell hanging above the door is tarnished and dull; the door has a piece missing so the bell doesn't get stuck outside. It's rather ingenious.
A younger, lower-class white boy walks up to the window the old men are seated by. He knocks on the window. One guy gets up and walks outside and returns moments later.
Our plates are brought over. My three pancakes were fluffy and huge. Plates were not cleaned, stomachs were filled.
One of the old men, this one sporting a number of prison tattoos on his arms and hands, stands up to leave. He closes a plastic bag, full of blue Equal packets. His friends continue their discussion.
A young black man comes in and walks up to the counter. He asks the waitress for a pat of butter, because, "they're making oatmeal down the street and they need butter." I believe he got it.
A foreign girl, college-aged, comes in and orders some lunch. She has a gift bag and a backpack with her. We pay our bills — less that $5 each, and step outside onto a street corner surrounded by run-down buildings and boarded-up windows. The daily newspaper box has "LIES" scrawled across the window in blue permanent marker. Juanita's has been there for over 50 years.
Sorry. Bad word play. Point is, LEO wants at least three of my stories and wants me to check out all of last year's special sections and figure out what else I can contribute. And Louisville Magazine finally got my clips and said they really like what they saw and want me to come in next week and pitch some stories. Yay! Now I've just got to call Des and Velocity.
For those of you who don't know ... I now work for South Carolina Snitch only. I may start working for San Diego, but nobody knows yet. I also applied for an AP program and a C-J summer internship.
The Cardinal is going swell and if you want to find links to my stories, you can check out my new "Published Pieces" blog. Link on right.
Update: Good story in the NYT about a strip club chain.
Also: A good editorial ... And I'm not a fan of political commentary. However, Maureen Dowd's column today is good.
A few days ago, my internet was working fine; I was connected at home and at the cardinal. Then, suddenly, Tuesday night, it stopped. "There is no ethernet cable plugged in," System Preferences said. I disagreed. I tried everything. Multiple cables. Restarting my laptop, cable modem, router. Everything.
Thinking it might be my service at home, I try the cardinal Wednesday morning. Still a no-go. I'm beginning to panic. I had finished the Snitch site, but had no way to get it online (I had forgotten about the wonders of a CD burner).
Laptop and I went to Mactown, my local Apple store. (Not an official one, but the only all-Mac place in town.) They're great people. For free, they checked out my laptop and did everything possible to fix it. All to no avail. The pins in the jack looked fine; a clean version of Panther was used (via an iPod w/ a huge hard drive) to boot up, in case of a software problem ... Nothing. They concluded the port was dead. This is especially bad because the port is part of the logic board, so there's no easy fix. They recommended I buy an Airport card and Airport Express, which I want anyway, because it would be cheaper than replacing the card. I agreed. Then cried in the parking lot. Seriously. Ask Eric.
Today, at the cardinal, further inspection by fellow-Mac user and photo guy Ben concluded the pins were in fact off. It's pretty hard to tell. I had to look really hard to see what he meant.
I begged (kind of) my family to contribute to my laptop-fixing fund. I raised enough money, and while picking up the last of it, and my sister, my dad inspected the pins. "You want to know how to fix it?" he asked. "Er, not really," I said, expecting my dad to propose opening up the case and sodering something. Then I caved. He said, "Get a sewing needle." Skeptical, I said I'd let Mactown check it out first.
Well, Mactown closed before I could get out there, so I sat down and thought about it. I figured it was worth a shot. Armed with a safety pin, I pushed the two stray pins back up in the groove. After five minutes of tedious work with one eye closed, I thought I had it. "If this works, I'll cry — again," I told my sister.
I plugged in the cable. Eureeka! (treats!) And now I'm online again.
And that's my story about the time I fixed my laptop with a safety pin. The end.
My first story came out today. Yay!
I stole this idea from Alana. I took all the entries from 2004 and found the first entry from each month. Following is the first couple of lines from all of those first entries:
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*Haha, suckers! Sadly, everything except for the transfer part is true, tho'. | |
