msbelle, I'm so glad that mac is home safe, and I just echo what everyone has said about the hard work you do every day. I'm in awe.

{{Suzi}}

Good luck, Amy, with the transition.

"Big things are easier to see than small things! Think about it! ;-)"

Someone would have to die.

Departure time keeps getting pushed back. BAH. Fuck you, Tino!

For me, the biggest bad memory from junior high was the fact that my nickname for those three years came from one of my classmates saying when we were in 6th grade that I was "as big as the Caspian Sea," so my nickname became "Kaspee."

Remember when BK came up with the fish sandwich named the Whaler?

I do, because that was my nickname for years. t edit And I still avoid eating at BK out of habit because of that. I don't even know if they still have such a sandwich (AND BEFORE ANYONE LINKS, I DON'T WANT TO KNOW SO KEEP YOUR LINK TO YOURSELF).

I'm not real sure why those nitwits from grade school keep requesting to be friends on Facebook. (Though I'm impressed that more of them seem to be not currently in prison than I thought there would be.)

I wonder if there was a precipitous drop in babies named Katrina.

[link]

Oh, yeah, that could be called precipitous.

I was skinny as fuck in high school (6' 3", 125#) so my nickname was "Slim Goodbody." I hated it, but that doesn't seem as bad as Kathy and Teppy's nicknames....

There was one bully who would grab my wrist to show how skinny it was....

I was bullied pretty significantly in middle and high school.

In middle school it was the typical middle school girl evil mental warfare because I broke up with the darling of the preppy girl crowd. And also because the girls I went to elementary school stopped hanging out with me. They called me "Fly" - short for "McFly" since my lat name was "McVay". Pretty innocuous. There was also a guy that was in 7th grade when I was in 8th that was pretty ... I don't know - out there. Big time into heavy metal and wore these upside down pentagrams and stuff. I told one of my "friends" that he kind of scared me. He came up behind me at lunch one day and tapped me on my shoulder and asked me why I was scared of him. I was still pretty shy and couldn't answer him. That was when he started slapping me on either side of the back of my head. No one stopped him, including me. He didn't quit, even after I sat there crying.

It's sometimes amazing to me, when I think back about middle school and how horrible it was for me, that I'm not more fucked up. Having almost no friends and even having teachers humiliate you on a daily basis is pretty awful.

t is suddenly quite thinky

High school was a daily name-calling thing, but nothing really physical and the couple of times that it was, I got physical too and that put an end to that.

The two memories I have of a kid named Brian Jones from elementary school are him teasing me by calling me "Skinny legs" and him getting his penis stuck in his zipper and running out of the bathroom crying for the teacher.

Ah practically instant karma!

ION, Man in hot tub calls 911 seeking cocoa

A homeless man having a hot tub soak at a suburban Portland home allegedly called 911 requesting "a hug and a warm cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows in it." Police arrested him for criminal trespassing and unnecessarily calling 911. I really hope they brought him the cocoa though. From AP News:

Beaverton police say Mark Eskelsen called 911 from his cell phone, identified himself as "the sheriff of Washington County," and asked for medical help. He later admitted he wasn't the sheriff but informed the dispatcher he'd been "yelling for about an hour and a half."

The man said in his Sunday morning call that he'd been in the water about 10 hours and his towels had gotten wet.

We got the best all-staff email about a new vacation policy -- they are cutting down the amount of time you can carry over (to a reasonable amount, I think). The email opens with all this bs about work-life balance, and how that's so important to all of us, and people should have time off...and then transitions into the real fact that having all that leave time on the books is a financial liability.