An excerpt from something else I'm working on tonight:

I took over as manager of my first gas station on a cold weekend in February 1993. The previous weekend, the station had been robbed, and on Sunday evening my boss requested that I go and sit with Jay, who was working at the time of the robbery. Jay was grateful for the company. We served the occasional customer, and listened to the Sunday Night Sex Show on the radio. Len, a man who had once sold me a van, came in and wanted to talk to Jay about the robbery, but Jay didn't have much to say about it. At about 10:45, while we were counting the cigarettes, someone wearing a black hooded sweatshirt burst into the store and poked a gun under the glass partition. I thought, for one wild minute, that it was Len, trying to be funny. Then it hit, it was real. The person with the gun was demanding that we open the door. While Jay opened the side door to let them in, I ran out the back door, planning, somewhat fuzzily, to head for a payphone at the strip mall behind the station. Someone grabbed me and dragged me back inside. Since I had disrupted the script by trying to leave, they felt it necessary to make me lie down on the floor in the back, and the one with the gun held it to my head.

The little group, probably four in all, cleaned out all the cigarettes and money, and left. Jay fell to bits, pacing up and down, repeating, �Not again. I don�t believe it happened again.� My own relief at still being alive made it possible to deal with the police and to call the owner and tell him. Later, on my way home, my calm broke, and waves of adrenaline kept cresting and breaking over me, and I put Pink Floyd in the tape deck and turned Comfortably Numb up really loudly. It was a ritual I was to repeat numerous times over the next month or so. It reminded me that I was alive, and that they couldn�t do anything further to me.

I'm procrastinating. Control Balance theory and Coercion theory: how they explain burglary. (my original, laziness theory still stands: don't want to work, ergo will steal your tv and sell it. beats working at MacDonalds.)

What Kind of Drunk Are You?

well, not really. but it was fun anyway.

The doctor says: it's your ears. If things are spinning, it's related to otoliths. He was talking about it being like a snowglobe, and the otoliths like the snow, and that mine are floating too much, if I understood correctly. He gave me a set of exercises to do to try and shake them back down where they belong and he wants to see me in a month...

Yesterday in Vancouver, after my class, there were extremely high winds. 100 mph, apparently. Skytrains were going slow, but I managed to get a bus (full of German schoolchildren) out to Horseshoe Bay to the ferry terminal just before the 7oclock ferry. Sitting upstairs in the departure area, and suddenly they announce that there will be no more ferries to Nanaimo.

After an abortive attempt to get my money back, since I had somehow lost my ticket, I headed off to the one motel in town. There were a number of people in the lobby, including one that I recognized as being attached to the German school party.

He got up to the counter, about 5 would-be motel-stayers ahead of me, and tried to persuade the proprietor to give them all the rooms that were left, for 28 kids. Without changing expression in the slightest, the proprietor told him there was only one room left. Although this man desperately wanted to make his problem the motel-owner's problem, Mr. German Schoolteacher ended up leaving with a brochure for the Holiday Inn in West Vancouver. The motel man then gave out five or six more keys to all the rest of us waiting. I don't know if I've ever been so happy to know that someone was telling lies......

The room was very clean, and the water was hot. I had a bed, and in the morning the winds had died down and I took the 6:30 am ferry. I even made it to work on time. If the school party had managed to book the whole motel, I would have been forced to go back into Vancouver, and I wouldn't have made the 6:30 ferry...

Kirsten is dealing very nicely with a current situation, but it's driving me nuts... She has two little girlfriends, Caitlin and Brooke, who have started tormenting her in subtle and not-so subtle ways. A few weeks ago she approached me with the idea of having a Halloween party at the house. I said ok, and she went off to start planning it with her friends. They soon fought over the preparations, and to make a long story short, cancelled the party as far as Kirsten knew. Then, suddenly, it was back on, at Brooke's house, but they were refusing to let Kirsten take part, and on Thursday at school invitations were ostentatiously handed out to most of the class except for Kirsten. Yesterday the party happened. Next door but one. Kirsten was resigned, and fished out Mad Gab and made us all play it. This morning, the phone rang, and it was the girls who had stayed overnight at the party, making prank phone calls to upset Kirsten.

Ok, so don't invite her to the party. But then don't call and taunt her, that's just cruel.

Kirsten, predictably, doesn't want me to talk to parents or teachers. I'm respecting her wishes. These girls are going to grow up to be the office bitches somewhere, I'm sure....

frogs, I've decided, should be green. so, a color change.

I'm still supposed to be researching armed robbery, but the search takes me off on bizarre tangents. Did you know that it's been scientifically proven that your personality at 3 is exactly the same as your personality at 26? So if you tormented the cat and crayoned on the walls at 3, you'll be prone to much the same behaviour at 26. Within age-appropriate limits, of course. You'll probably have a girlfriend to torment, and your own room to stencil.

Yup, armed robbery. Apparently, surprisingly, it has to do with wanting money but not wanting to work towards getting it. Never would've guessed that.

Work is still busy, but I'm settling in. I'm hoping not to have to work tomorrow, as I worked all day today so Liz could go to a wedding in Vancouver. I ran an ad in the human resources website and got a whole bunch of hopeless folk looking for work. Just a tip for anyone looking for a job: smile and say hello when you approach your potential future employer. Don't walk up and interrupt a customer to say "Are you hiring?" I'm serious, the woman I gave the job to was the only one out of 35 who smiled at me and said hi. I had already decided to hire her before I read her resume. Even though the ad specified "Experience preferred", I got folk who were in their fifties and seemed to have never held down a job. One woman described her last five years or so as "artist with limited success". People are funny.

good books today. On how people are made violent. Why they commit armed robberies. People tend not to want to sit next to me on the bus, however.

hoo, boy. lots to do. Roy was here. Unfortunately, while he was here, someone broke into his house and stole his computer, tv, and dvd player. He suspects the cable guy. kidding. luckily they didn't let his cat out, and Robyn wasn't home at the time.

well, lots of work got done today. Happily I will be able to hand in my six short papers tomorrow for the Restorative Justice class. That means, however, that I've got not much time left this weekend to do anything holidaylike, as I spent yesterday working on a presentation for my criminological theory class, and Saturday I worked. Oh well, at least I got to sleep in...

my mother is being her usual provoking self. What's wrong with me that I let her push all my buttons all the time? she's got email now, and she sent me one last week saying that she wondered if I remembered a playdough recipe that she could use with the 18 month old twins that she babysits. I poked around on the net, and came up with a few, but they all involved cooking the dough in a saucepan, so I wrote back and said, "I don't remember, did we used to cook it?" Her reply was, "No, we used it like play dough. Never mind, you obviously don't know what I'm talking about".

Huh?

So I wrote back, saying, "no, silly, I mean do you cook it to make it?" and got no reply. Apparently she also emailed Kim, her former secretary, and Kim, she told me on the phone, "being Kim, went straight on the net and sent me a recipe the same day".

She also told me that being with the twins is just like being with her grandchildren. Strangely enough, her grandchildren live 20 minutes away, and she shows little or no inclination to be with them. The last time I invited them over, they said, "We don't want to drive all that way just to sit with kids and dogs."

Time to move to Arizona. Me, I mean.

good things today:

three people won the super seven, which now goes back down and we can all relax...
getting to go home early from work
walking home in the rain
subsequently, hot shower, hot coffee, warm dog
quiet, with opera (not Oprah) and laundry when I got home
new friends at the lottery booth, one who brought me white chocolate
Roy's coming soon
leftover potato salad
Halloween preparations
the Saturday crossword from the Globe and Mail awaits
laziness............................................

yesterday on the way back from class in Burnaby I caught a ferry by jumping onto the cardeck from the rapidly rising ramp... had to walk through a barricade with flashing red lights to do so. And I got home early. (don't worry, I was in no danger, the ferry workers gave me permission, and someone helped me down, and I Did have a ticket...) Next I want to try driving my car over one of those bridges that folds up. Oh, wait, I don't have a car. probably for the best.

I have a doctor's appointment. I've had vertigo nastily since August, it's probably time. However, it's not until the 30th.

I'm sad today. Don't know why, exactly, just wanted to share that. I think it's because I've been so busy. I want to curl up in bed with the dogs and watch the rain. Instead I'm working on all my papers. Rachel's gone to Brownies, M and Kirsten have gone to feed Jane's cats, and Ian is meeting nice people online and shooting them. Warcraft. I can hear the gunfire, intermittently, from the basement.

Despite my self-induced panic, the transition has gone quite smoothly in the new booth. The new owner took over my old one on Wednesday last week, so I got my staff back. Liz likes the tvs at the new booth, although I'm not sure how she's going to like how busy Saturdays are. At least at Rutherford now (my new mall) we have two lottery machines so I can come and help her, which I did on Saturday.

ack. I'm tired. I don't know if I make any sense any more. I just keep wanting to say, "You've won a free play. Would you like to buy the extra?" Last night I dreamt about lottery tickets. endlessly. Oh well. eventually the superseven will go back down to a reasonable number and people will stop being so gaga about it. Kirsten was reading something in a magazine recently that said that last year two people in Canada were killed by being run over by lawn tractors. She figured it out, and your odds of winning the superseven, at 1 in 62 million, are worse than being run over by a lawn tractor...

things seem to be moving along. My new booth is cosy, and not surrounded by video games and people looking for Wal-mart. as a matter of fact, there is a Telus store right next to me with four televisions hanging from the ceiling, with closedcaptioning on. I watched the Simpsons for a while last night when it got slow, and the little cutie who works there brought me a remote, so I can change the channels if I like, as they can't see the tvs inside the store. Today was the busiest lottery day I have ever worked... I literally stood in one spot all day and dispensed tickets. For a good portion of the day I had a line up of about four people in front of me at all times. By the time I finished with one, another had added to the end of the line. All pretty good and happy, though, as I'm fast and I laugh at all their jokes. Anyone who started questioning me about the old owner, I just looked sympathetic and said, well, Wednesday was his last day, I'm sure you'll all miss him.

There is also a comfy chair, and the security guard is a woman I know from Woodgrove, and lotsvof my old customers came and said, "What are you doing here?" and when I told them I've moved, they all said, "Oh, we'll come buy from you here". Now I just have to deal with my homework...

So, just for fun, the fire engines showed up in the middle of the night. Seems the neighbours had a bonfire, and when they were done they put the embers into their compost heap. At 4am, the compost heap was burning away merrily, along with the fence in the back right-hand corner of our yard, and two trees that were in the same general area. Firemen came and chopped down the fence and drenched the area, and then everyone went back to bed.

Bonfires, in this town, are illegal. Backyard burning is banned. And even if it weren't, what species of idiot puts the remains into the compost heap?? We had to put up orange safety fence this afternoon to prevent the dogs from running mad in the neighbourhood. Which is also illegal. But perhaps we should let them anyway. Perhaps I'll give them little fire hats. They might need them.

Strange thing is, the neighbours don't seem to think it's nearly as funny as we do. Although I often find that to be the case.

I don't know how people who have seven or so kids manage... we used all the dishes in the house making pancakes for seven children this morning. Every room seemed to have at least two children in it for most of the day. I hid in my room (gotta love laptops) and tried to write my paper on exhibitionism. It's not due for three weeks but I get the idea that the next couple of weeks will be a bit scary.

To recap:

I have seven papers and a presentation due by Oct. 11.
I take over a new booth on Thursday this week, but I have to run my old one until someone is found to take it over. Lottery folk say this will take 2 weeks, tops. we'll see.
Two of the people I have filling in for me at my current booth are on call for the ferries, which means that if the ferries call they will abandon their posts.
M's job is teetering as usual on the verge of collapse. The major shareholder has maxed out the company AMEX card buying groceries, as no money is coming in. The government has given them an ultimatum, Sept 30, pay up or else (they owe more money than I like to think about).
wheeee.

somehow I have managed to end up with all the children's friends sleeping over tonight, Rachel's friend Jade, Ian's friend Llewellyn, and Kirsten's friends Caitlin and Ted. Yup, Kirsten's friend Ted is sleeping over. His mother is apparently ok with this, although his dad did, I'm told, have something to say in the background about it being Ted and Two Girls...

I'm tired. I'm apprehensive about this week, I hired someone to help out at the Woodgrove booth while I'm doing the other one on Thursday but I have to train her on Monday. I hate training people. And the Super 7's gone to 20 million dollars. Ack.