i may be misremembering but i seem to recall someone mentioning somehting about a way for US players to d/l the stars client if they want to obs, anyone know anything about this?
so last night was fucking bizarre, it reached 82 degrees F during the day and there was a fucking hail storm at night. it was really brief, only a few minutes, but the most intense fucking hail i've ever seen. i looked out my window and literally couldn't see more than maybe a foot out it was so thick. there were also a couple funnel clouds that never got close enough to the ground to be officially labeled tornadoes. weird fucking shit all at once. maybe volcanoes tomorrow -.-
anyway, good news: the river has crested about 2 feet lower than they previously predicted, worst appears to be over.
bad news: town still got annihilated, still smashed the old record of from 1881, thousands of homes ruined, and they announced the tap water is possibly infected with parasites so we can't/shouldn't use it for 24 hours minimum without boiling it (longer if they confirm it is indeed infected).
tbh the videos give a better idea than pics, but here's some pics anyway (not mine)
this one probably doesn't seem unusual for someone from a larger city but this road is usually not busy at all so it's pretty weird for me
dump trucks lining up to get more clay for the dikes...
worth noting that i remember seeing all of these a couple days ago which means they were taken well before the river crested, exception being the last one which might have been taken yesterday.
edit - just found this photo montage someone made:
my town is about to get annihilated =o don't remember us making national news before (only 35k people) but we're going to turn into a lake for a couple weeks (i'm just outside the city so i'm not going to be affected but i've been helping family evacuate their homes during the last couple days). my sister isn't even in one of the normal high-risk flood areas and she's supposed to get like 8 feet of water above her main floor o_O - some areas are going to be much worse
the local news guy was on the cbs early show too but i can't find video online. national guards posted everywhere, town is total chaos, feels like armageddon. mandatory evacuation for danger zones was originally supposed to be 10pm(cst) tonight, but mayor just went on TV and said there's problems with the levees and flood sirens are likely going off in less than 1 hr from now... anyway, wish us luck!
alright so, this entry is about how i can save $$ so i can travel, but i'm going to post a brief recap of the past month or so to give it some context:
in early april i got a full-time job delivering furniture. i had actually decided quite some time before that i was finished playing poker for a living, i was just slow/lazy in transitioning out of it. my plan was to use the job to at least breakeven with monthly expenses, and play a little poker here and there to put in savings. once i got to a certain figure (around $10-20k, depending on some things), i would go travel the world, which is something i've been dying to do forever.
well, as we all know the very next week happened to be "black friday". so, life goes on...in a way i guess i was lucky i decided to get the job when i did. the job is whatever, it's a small store, 10 employees total, i like everyone pretty well. except the one other delivery guy, who i have to spend most of my day with, who happens to be a total shit head. i am a very laid back person irl, and routinely went of my way to cater to this downy who literally spends half the day talking about how much he hates his parents, and freaks the fuck out (in front of customers no less) at me when i don't already know how to do something that he was instructed to train me how to do -.- we are both 23 btw
one day when we were delivering to some guy's trailer home, as he was backing the truck into the guy's driveway he side-swiped the bumper on his car. he's a pretty hot-headed hypersensitive freak so it never occurred to me that he wouldn't notice it since it was pretty obvious (although the damage was minor, just a bit of paint scraped off the car), and i assumed he would do whatever he deemed to be appropriate. usually if i make some kind of suggestion he just gets angry (not that i care, except for having to listen to his bitching). so after we finish carrying the furniture in and headed back out towards the truck, i say quietly to him "ummm, you know you hit this guy's car right?"
then he goes ballistic and goes in and tells the guy that i failed to report the "crash" that he made (lol). the guy takes it surprisingly well, later that day the store's insurance contacted him and everyone lived happily ever after. on the way back to the store his face is beet red but he doesn't say a word to me, then when he walks in he yells in front of everyone "i'm done with you!!" with some drool running down his bottom lip and storms off...the manager (and everyone else) is understandably confused, so i explain things to him, and later he talked to the other guy once he cooled down.
the manager is a good guy and i respect him, we get along fine. he told me that even though it probably seemed unfair given the circumstances, that if both of us couldn't work together and it came down to it, he would probably have to keep the other guy because of his experience, he has a CDL license, etc. he said if it came to that he would have me do some BS work around the store until i could find another job, i told him i understood completely.
that was on a friday. fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, mr. schizo was over it by monday, and it was back to business as usual. a couple weeks went by filled with awkward silence, but relatively trouble-free. then came the doomsday. it was a thursday, which meant we were doing out-of-town deliveries. this day was a particularly long route, we were going to be covering about 500 miles. we'd just finished our second delivery. it was only 9:30am (we started at 7), but i asked him if he wanted me to drive to give him a chance to rest, but he said he would be fine.
about 10-15 minutes later i notice the truck heading over a bit over the line to my side on the right. this happens all the time and is pretty much unavoidable when you're driving 8 hrs/day on boring country roads, and i didn't think anything of it. but instead of correcting like every other time, it kept going and pretty soon it was on the grass which slopes down towards the ditch/slough and i turned my head to him and yelled "DUDE! HOLY SHIT!"
i guess he must have dozed off or something. he swung the truck back over to the left where it careened on its left wheels, then re-corrected back to the right. the momentum was too much, and we rolled over into the slough. as it was rolling over it just felt like the most insane rollercoaster ever, i couldn't really see or comprehend anything, just my own body vibrating rapidly. then for a few seconds water rushed into the cab and everything was black. i felt like i was going to die at the time, but it was weird. i was kind of scared, but mostly my feeling was "out of all the people why does this moron have to end my life", more of an annoyance than anything. maybe i was in shock or something, idk.
then everything stopped and i could open my eyes again, and i realized all my limbs etc seemed to be fine. the water was up to my chest. the front window was broken so i crawled out of that. we were heading west, but somehow the truck managed to end up facing east. the truck was sort of semi-floating at a 45 degree angle in the slough. after i got out i checked to see if the other guy was ok. he was delirious at first with a bunch of incoherent mumbling, but eventually he was able to tell me that his leg was trapped between the steering wheel and the gear shifter (his leg was underwater so i couldn't immediately see it, but the steering wheel was still visible. i started yanking on the wheel as hard as i could until he was able to free his leg. the wheel was actually bent like halfway around his leg lol.
there were a couple vehicles that had already stopped and an ambulance was on the way. the whole time i felt, miraculously, almost completely fine. i had some scrapes and bruises, but they seemed like nothing, i guess because of the adrenaline. the other guy was clearly in worse shape than me and when the paramedics came they were focused on him for the most part. he was a total dick to them, which can probably be excused given the situation, but i was still put off by it.
when the doctor came in to check on me in the ER, he told me i had an abrasion on my head that i hadn't even noticed, but other than that i seemed to be fine. they didn't even do x-rays, just hooked me up for some blood work, gave me a tetanus shot, gave me some pain meds and sent me on my way. despite the other guy having the worst of it, it turned out he wasn't seriously injured either, just that leg that was bruised up a lot.
the accident happened on a thursday. i took friday off and was back to work on the following monday. he took the entire next week off. on wednesday of the week after the accident, i noticed my right side hurting around my ribs. it felt fine most of the time, but if i tried lifting anything, or even bending a certain way, there was a pretty sharp pain. it hadn't bothered me at all on monday and tuesday, and i only noticed some minor pain there on the day of the accident. i told them about it and for the rest of the day i stayed in the shop and just did whatever was needed. i checked back in with the doctor, he told me it was probably something from the accident that was starting to heal and got re-injured from lifting furniture, so told me no heavy lifting for a week. he also had me get x-ray'd, although i wasn't sent the results until this past Friday (the 20th), over a week later (???). x-rays said there was some curvature of the ribs near the spine but didn't sound like anything serious.
so for the rest of that week (Wed-Fri) i stayed in the shop and did whatever, assembling tables and chairs and shit (which i would actually prefer doing instead of delivering but it's not an option). with wed-fri being light work and having all of saturday to rest, i felt fine on sunday and decided to go to the gym for the first time since the accident. maybe not the best idea in retrospect. my side started acting up again. i called them monday morning and told them i wouldn't be coming in to work. same thing tuesday. tuesday night i took some pain meds, which i hadn't taken since the day after the accident, and they completely knocked me out and i didn't wake up wednesday until like 4pm. same thing happened thursday and friday, which were kind of a blur. that was this past week.
i'm sort of surprised they haven't called me yet. i guess this either means that they're very understanding, or that they fired me and i don't know it yet. guess i'll find out in a few hours when i go to work today! i'm pretty torn about it anyway, i'm not really excited about going back to work with that other guy, i'm surprised they didn't fire him but i guess having someone who's worked there a couple years and knows how to do everything is a pain to have to replace. i was considering quitting anyway, i just don't look forward to having to apply and wait for another shitty job and wait for a response while my bank account gets drained in the meantime.
anyway i still just want to make enough money to do a bunch of traveling and don't really give a shit about anything else atm. right now i'm thinking about using couchsurfing.org to save on travel expenses. if i could save up 10k and somehow generate a passive or semi-passive income online while traveling (even 1k/month would be better than nothing) i think that would be enough if i'm frugal. after that, i'll go back and finally finish me degree and go on to something more productive, but i need to get this travel bug out of my system. if i can't get that to work i'd probably want to save more like 15-20k (i have like 4k now -.-)
during the past couple weeks i've been looking into internet marketing/e-commerce and trying to see if there's any viable options for me to make some money there (as a side-income, i would still keep a full-time job for now, whether it be my current one or something else). so far i've written some articles at textbroker.com just to see what it's like. i made like $40 for a bunch of articles, probably avg like $5-6/hour -.- i don't really see how writing freelance articles like this can be used to make a living, but i know there's people who do it. part of the problem with textbroker is just that there's not enough article requests most of the time.
i've looked into SEO and starting a website but it seems like once you get past the basic principles, there's just all kinds of books on the subject, lots of different opinions, it's hard to know what's legit and what's not, but maybe that's just my perspective since i'm new to it. i've considered trying to find some kind of niche to target, but i just don't know if there's enough of a chance to succeed to make it worth the effort since i'm starting from ground zero. idk, if anyone has experience making monies on the internet outside of poker feel free to share your experiences.
well that's about it, thoughts on what i should do wrt the job situation, or how to make monies online, or fml are welcome.
im trying to fry an egg, i put some olive oil in the pan and turned heat to low-mediumish, but the oil was fucking exploding everywhere, as in like, i was scared to get close enough to take the egg out. there was oil landing on the floor 3-4 feet away from the pan.
i have fried eggs before in my life but it has been a while, this has never happened to me before though wtf is going on?
i am trying to get some pictures loaded from my camera on to my computer but for some reason it's not working so well. basically when i plug in the usb cord nothing happens except for a little icon that pops up on the toolbar that says "safely remove hardware"
i remember doing this before without any problems and when i plugged it in there was like a folder or something that came up immediately, although that was a different computer and like 2 years ago -.- same camera tho.
i'm on windows vista fwiw. pm me your msn/aim info if you want, or just post here. person who leads to successful picture uploading gets $15 but only $10 if you make fun of my computer illiteracy too much
today i was going through the drive-thru at arby's and i ordered the beef n cheddar combo with a jamocha shake. when i pulled up to the window the girl there had to be one of the hottest i've ever seen, like 10/10 even with the goofy uniform. so i take a deep breath and become focused on not doing anything stupid.
i take out my wallet and give her a $10 bill, she gets my change and hands me my shake. i'm feeling pretty good about my performance so far, breathing is normal and i acted pretty calm and confident imo.
i roll up my window and take off..then just as i'm about to turn on to the road i look in my rearview mirror and see the girl sticking her head out the drive-thru window with a confused look on her face, holding the bag with my sandwich and fries. i hit the gas and drive away asap
Contact Users: 844 Active, 0 Logged in - Time: 22:32
,
,
,
,