Draculitos

I have a co-worker at work named Arturo. He is the utility man as I like to refer to him as. He scrubs the floors on a Zamboni and empties the trashes. He basically does all of the work that no one else wants to do at all. Arturo is an interesting man, he has nicknames for all of the workers in the warehouse, I am referred to as Florencio, there is no rhyme or reason to many of these pseudonyms, but they are really funny. The nicknames that strikes me as the most odd is Draculito. Arturo refers to two Polynesian guys as "Los Draculitos". I suppose it is because they are both half Polynesian and rather white in appearance. Whenever Arturo sees one of these two guys he says in Spanish that "los draculitos estan buscando sangre" or the draculas are looking for blood. I always found this rather funny and played along with his joke, chiding his once in a while about the draculas wanting to suck his blood and other vampire references. On Monday of this week when I entered work I wandered over to Arturo's cleaning station where he keeps most of his supplies.Much to my bewilderment I happened upon a clove of garlic sitting on a barrel. I thought it was strange but didn't think much of it. When I saw Lupe, one of the other Mexicans, about an hour later I asked him why Arturo had garlic by his equipment. He told me that it was to ward of the draculas. So apparently this whole time Arturo really has believed that these two workers are legitimately vampires. I loved it! When I questioned Arutro about this garlic he verified that it was indeed because of his fear of the draculas. I don't know whether he is afraid of Polynesians, or he really thinks they are draculas, but either way I thought it was hilarious.

Swiftly Seeking Swift

I have always loved "Love Song" by Taylor Swift. I think it is an incredible song! However, that was about the extent of my Taylor Swift knowledge until last week. As some of you may know, Kanye West went a little crazy and hurt this young girl emotionally. This caused me to do some song searching on Taylor Swift and I must say that I am in love with her. "You Belong to Me" describes how I feel when I really like someone so well. If you've seen the music video you know that she tells her crush she loves him with a note she pulls out that says "I love you", well guess who is now walking around with that same note in his back pocket all of the time?!? That's right, this guy, and I do mean guy. Speaking of notes, Taylor hits them all. She has the voice of an angelic song bird. I know I'm not so "swift" to jump on the ol' Taylor Train from Awesomeville, but I'm on board now. I only have Mr. West to thank for this. But before I finish I must say that the Taylor Train is going full steam ahead and the sun happens to set in the West, could this be a slow decline for Kanyeezy, let's hope not, but I don't see him winning public approval for quite some time.

Mannerly

An old gentleman at my work tried setting me up last week. He referred to the girl as sweet and mannerly and that she was abused as a youngster. Oh great! Now I'm well aware that beggars cannot be choosers, but they can be cautious. So, this cautious cat decided to take the low road and lie. Sure, I know that is bad and I probably should give it a chance, but I'm going to dodge the ol' bullet before the gun goes off and make up something about being out of town every single day for the next month

Oh no Kanyeezy

Oh no, why did you do it Kanye? You promised us you were going to be good, you promised us you weren't going to run your mouth no more, you promised us that you would smoke cigars with three fingers instead of two, you promised us that you wouldn't publicly humiliate 19 year old country singers, you promised us you would leave the crazy designs out of your hair, you promised us that you wouldn't damage your already questionable reputation, you promised us you wouldn't deliver unsolicited shout outs to Beyonce in the middle of other people's acceptance speeches, you promised us that you would glow in the dark during your glow in the dark tour, but we couldn't even see you, you made so many promises and now I will make a promise to you. I promise to never listen to your promises anymore unless you make promises in your songs and I happen to listen to them because I still think you are a great rapper, but I will not promise to listen to your promises about promising any more.

Soda Sales

I was not too excited for work this morning after getting five hours of sleep last night. I do not understand why, but sometimes I lie awake thinking late into the night and cannot fall asleep. Last night was one of those nights and it set the tone for work today. I arrived at work and I was noticeably chipper and feeling very happy. Every two weeks my work does employee soda sales where all the employees come to the back and get the products that they have ordered. I am usually put in charge of this adventure because no on else wants to do it and I enjoy it (this may be why I was so happy or maybe because I'd talked to an old friend the night before, I'm not sure). Anyway, one of the first things that happened was Lupe's arrival. He was picking up product for his son and his friend and ended up with 18 cases of soda. There was no way to accommodate all of that soda in his little car, so he brought a huge truck to work and directed me and another co-worker to dump it all in back of his truck. We did so and I could not stop laughing. Below is a picture of Lupe sleeping in a chair. Lupe then had me check to make sure he had all the right product and I gave him a hard time because it was all mixed up. I was about to take the papers, but he indicated he wanted them so that if the f------ cops found him he could prove that it was his soda. I really could not stop laughing and allowed him to take the papers in case the law came after him for soda stealing. So Lupe left and it was on to a certain employee who does the exact same thing every fortnight (two weeks, the period of time in between soda sales). She can never seem to find a certain product that is usually right in plain site and always beckons me to help her. Then she plays the long face card and asks me to help her take the stuff out to her vehicle. I wonder if this is her idea of flirting or just to be annoying, but it has the same effect on me. We are not usually supposed to help people take product to their cars, but I usually cave and do it anyway. Later today I was given a young Polynesian apprentice named Emmett. He is a way nice guy and quite large, he could smash me into pieces but he is nice so he doesn't. Anyway, I was showing him the ropes of employee soda sales and began to introduce Emmett to all of the females who came to pick up product. I would say, "this is my friend Emmett, he is more than willing to pick your order and help you out to your car with it" The strange thing is that no one took me up on my offer of offering Emmett. I think it was fear because of his stature. One lady looked at him and shook her head, it was hilarious. Emmett would later say, "man, I don't think that any of these people like me." It did appear that way. That was mostly everything that happened. It was a really fun day and I enjoyed doing soda sales and talking to everyone at the office. Here is a picture to show how happy I was.

Trick knee

Last week I was playing in a recreational basketball league. The week before this game I had dunked it three times and was eager to have more opportunities to slam it home. We were playing the best team in the league and I had a little bit of trepidation, but was still excited to try and dunk it on someone. Within four minutes in the game I was wide open on the right side and streaked to the hoop, as I went up I put all of my weight on my left leg and it gave out from under me. I looked like a fool! To avoid any embarrassment I grabbed my knee as if I had tweaked it to give the impression to everyone present that I had hurt myself. My friend Mike called from the bench, "oh my gosh, are you ok?" I indicated I was and continued to play the rest of the game as if no injury had occurred. You win some you lose some I suppose.

Lemons

Sometimes life gives you lemons and you just say, "screw the lemons"! I know that may sound weird, but I am finding myself guilty of not taking all the opportunities that come my way and oft times I don't recognize the lemons when they are in front of me. I took the gmat a few months ago in preparation for graduate school. I did not get the score that I thought I needed to get me in and was quite distraught about it, especially because I'd studied so hard and had a blessing indicating that everything would go great. Well, I overreacted a little bit and found myself a bit bitter. Fast forward to last week and I met with the admissions director at the U of U to see what I needed to do to get in to the program. She asked me what I got on the gmat and my g.p.a., to my chagrin she told me that I had more than enough to be accepted into the program. She then said she felt like she should tell me about another new program that the U just began offering focusing on global enterprise. I asked about the requirements for that and she named three upper level economics classes and proficiency in a foreign language. I found that I met all of the requirements and will be able to start as soon as January in the program. I learned a great lesson in patience and trust through this experience.
In other aspects of life I find the same things hold true. Like a friend will mention someones name and it will happen a couple of times and I feel like I should call them and it turns out that is just what they needed. Sometimes I also ignore these feelings though and feel like I missed out on something by not following through. There are certainly two ways to live life, make something of the opportunities that come our way or just let them lay by the wayside. A part of me definitely did not want to make anything out of the gmat and give up and take the test again to get a better score, but everything ended up working out. I wish I would be more trusting and go with promptings more, there have been times when I wanted to ask someone out and I just didn't because I believed there was no chance it would work out. I've had a fundamental paradigm shift and a greater desire to be trusting of inspiration that comes my way. I'm happy that lessons can translate to all aspects of life and be beneficial no matter what the experience.