I thought I knew debt. I lied. I’m now in over a hundred grand…. but on the bright side, I’ve PURCHASED A CONDO!!!

Just thought I’d share.

So I went to Billings last week for 5 fun-filled nightmarish days. It was a disaster from one end to the other, the only bright side being that yes, come the end of the month, barring some wild and unsavory turn of events with the inspector, mortgage, and/or natural disaster, officially own my very own house, one nobody can just make me leave one day on a whim. Not that anyone ever *has* just kicked me out on a whim before; I’m just sayin’.

That’s the good news. I have a place to live when I move at the end of the month. Bad news? College is a bust. MSU College of Technology is a fucking bitch. They’ve lost my transcripts (more than once), they’ve failed to give me vital information, and now my classes are 100% full with a mile-long waiting list. Their fault, mostly, but I take some responsibility in not having been a little more on top of things and just trusting that everything would work itself out even if they were being incompetent asshats over there.

So, it’s on to a job hunt now. And a lot of therapy knitting. And steroids.

Seriously. I’m on steroids. For hives, of course, because this nightmare involving mortgages and house hunting and college fuckwads kicked my stress (and therefore, my on-again-off-again hives) into overdrive. I just couldn’t take it anymore, and after I told my mother I’d MURDER to get rid of the hives, she and her friend Ella strongarmed me to the doctor for what I thought would be another ass-shot of steroids, but instead is a nice course of prednisone pills. That’ll look real great on any upcoming pre-employment drug tests, no doubt.

I have no idea why my camera decided that all 20+ pictures of this rainbow on July 4 needed to be set against a hellish sky, but I swear, it was a normal gray sky when I took them! Enjoy.

In my e-box today, came this seasonal reminder from a spammer bitten by the christmas bug:

Ain’t that just sweet? So… anybody got some Christmas Tail to spare? I seem to be all out.

That’s how my immediate supervisor communicates. ALL CAPS, VERY STERNLY. When on paper, anyway. In person, she stutters and bumbles and looks panicked and gets flustered all over the place, but on paper, hoo boy, does she sound like she means it.

Today, I went into work to find not one, but THREE gigantic notes typed up in all caps, threatening doom if we watched television or surfed the internet, or dared sip a cup of coffee (haha, just kidding on that one) before we had all of our office complaints typed up in a terribly outdated log. For those not in the know, I work as a dispatcher at a sheriff’s office, so our “complaints” are literally complaints from the public, wanting us to take action in a) unlocking their cars, b) dealing with stolen gas, c) removing pesky trains from the tracks, or d) bringing peace and goodwill to all men (except that weirdo across the street who looked funny - could we please escort him out of town a.s.a.p.?). We take these complaints and handwrite them onto little slips of paper, and type up all the information in our daily logs, and then, at the end of the year, my supervisor FREAKS THE FUCK OUT and tosses all the year’s closed and cleared complaints at us in a panic, wanting them typed up in a separate complaint log YESTERDAY, because HOLY GOD IT’S NOVEMBER ALREADY!

Now, what she wants done here is for the complaints to be categorized, then put into numerical order, then typed up into categories (in numerical order, obviously) so someday, some poor sap can hunt through a billion binders full of logs and hopefully have a better chance of finding the specific complaint where Joe Blow called Jane Doe nasty names on the telephone. There’s a category for that - Telephone, in fact - but if Joe Blow was actually Jane Doe’s hubby, it might be filed under Domestic, or maybe Harassment, or maybe something else entirely. Now, you might be thinking to yourself: aren’t there computer programs that can do this sort of thing?

Why yes. There are. But we’re not going to use that new fangled shit, no way. We like paper. We like typing shit up ten thousand times in ten thousand ways. We like not having a fucking clue, and sitting in a paperific firetrap, thank you very much.

So anyway. Today, I walk into work, and she’s got this BIG SCARY NOTE taped up on two computers AND the foot-tall stack of complaints themselves. You know, in case we miss it. Or something.

More likely, because she’s a fucking psycho who is trying to be big and intimidating and scary, and really, she doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing and is trying to cover her ass with BIG LETTERS and REDUNDANCY.

Gah.

And then, she has this HORRIBLE microsoft word table document that’s fucked four ways from Sunday with weird boxes of text announcing that these are complaints, and gah, just much weirdness and badness, with margins that slide off the edges of the pages and all… and I am supposed to USE this?

Er. No. First thing I do? Hop on the internet to bitch to pals about my supervisor’s idiocy, and then draft out a new form that isn’t filled with bizarro. She’d gotten about 35 complaints typed up in her shift. And of course, her BIG SCARY NOTE. I got about 100 done, perhaps more, mostly during commercial breaks of Law and Order: Criminal Intent, and I didn’t even start really, until my shift was halfway over, because my egocentric deputy (yes, egocentric, not eccentric) wouldn’t leave until FIVE A.M. He normally goes home at three. There was nothing going on. He just wanted to talk. And talk. And talk. About himself. And his thoughts. And his dreams (literal ones in his sleep, not “oh, I dream of going to Ireland one day!”). And his politics. And bitch about everyone but himself. And gah. Shoot. Me. Please.

So yeah. There you go. I told my supervisor in the morning not to touch the complaints, thank you very much, and to tell Ellen, who I work with, not to touch them either; I will type the damned things up myself so at least it looks professional, and not like a kindergartener was playing with the computer.

Tell me… why the hell do I work here?

Why?

So night before last (that’d be Sunday night) A. came over and thought she’d utilize my kitchen, mixer, ingredients, and “expertise” to make a coffee cake for my mother’s (belated) birthday. Now, A. is no Martha in the kitchen, and to be honest, she’s lucky to boil eggs without disaster, but everyone’s gotta start somewhere, right?

Well, after searching the internet for ages at work searching for a recipe, she came up with what is probably the world’s only coffee cake recipe that requires one of the few kitchen gadgets I do not have - a pastry cutter. It’s called Brown Sugar Crumb Cake, and you can get this recipe (with its rather unappetizing photo - holy god, could it look any more ick?) here. Now, the last recipe I made from about.com was a complete disaster. Let’s say sugar cookies that tasted like pure flour, okay? So I was skeptical from the start - I mean, bad photo, and About.com ‘certified’.

But, it sounded good. I mean, how can you go wrong with an ingredient list that doesn’t have much more than a lot of brown sugar and butter?

Hahaha.

“How could you go wrong?” is the sort of thoughtless thing Murphy (of the “Murphy’s Law” fame) catches you thinking and giggles madly at. Because what went wrong? Oh, just about everything.

The problems started when it became apparent that A was not exactly sure what “packed” meant in relation to “two cups brown sugar, packed”. She is, granted, a novice baker, and we got that straightened out. Then the lack of a pastry cutter (which we remedied thanks to a trip to my mother’s to borrow hers). Then… well, it’s possibly that A measured out a tablespoon of baking soda and powder, but neither of us think that’s likely. (Well, she denies it vehemently, but she also denied doing anything wrong that time she totally ripped up the directions to the tacos and added like, a lake’s worth too much water, and she also denied doing anything wrong (”You’re just skeptical, Katie!”) the time she dumped two packets of seasoning for our Rice-a-Roni into one dish, which, by the way, tasted like a giant mouthful of salt, and I do give her kudos for choking down several bites in an attempt to prove just how ‘wrong’ I was at being completely sickened at the first bite. So, make what you will of her denial, folks.)

But seriously, I watched the baking soda and baking powder measuring, and I didn’t seem too alarmed by the size of the spoon she was using, so I think she’s telling the truth this time around. Honest. ;-) Well, then… you see, there’s this line in the directions, which I did not read, because hell, A. is an English genius, I didn’t expect to have trouble with her reading them - carrying them out, perhaps, but not reading them, and it says:

Reserve 1 scant cup of crumbs and set aside. Combine remaining ingredients and whisk until smooth; stir into the remaining crumbs in bowl.

She read it line by line. “Reserve 1 scant cup of crumbs and set aside.” And after a minor discussion on what was meant by ’scant’, she removes some crumbs and sets them aside.

Then she reads: “Combine remaining ingredients and whisk until smooth.”

Did you see that? I didn’t, because i didn’t read the instructions. Read like she read it to me, it sounded like they wanted us to add the rest of the damned ingredients and mix it all up until smooth. She thought so, too. So that’s what we did. We did not combine the remaining ingredients separately. We mixed it all up together with the crumbs we had not reserved, and… mixed it smooth. This, ladies and gents, may have been a big problem.

Then she read: “Stir into the remaining crumbs.”

Yep. You bet. We stirred in the remaining - the reserved crumbs, even as we asked: “I thought there should’ve been a topping!” And even as I (and mind you, I’m no master baker either, but I’m not a novice) thought: “Funny that we did all that bloody work with the pastry cutter just to mix it all smooth like this and then add in the rest just like so… what a waste!” Did anyone re-read the instructions? Nope.

Would’ve been too late anyway.

The batter, by the way, tasted great. A. left some in the pan and ate a bunch by the spatula-ful. You think I’m kidding. I kid not.

So, that done, she poured it into a newly greased and floured pan, and popped it in the oven, while I, relieved that it was over, checked my email and told my online pals that we’d just finished mixing up our coffee cake. Thirty minutes later, D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R!!!!

A. opens the oven door to check on the bloody thing, and smoke pours out of the oven, and she starts freaking, going: “K! We have a big big problem!” I was a bit concerned that the oven was on fire, I must admit, but she assured me it wasn’t. Instead, it was…

Yeah. Picture that, in my oven, except worse, because at the time this photo was taken, a whole lot of that goo had spilled all over the damned place. For a couple minutes, we just sat there looking at it, alarmed and baffled and distressed and not at all sure what to do. Finally, A. grabbed my spiffy halloween mitt and another one, and hauled the giant mass to the dump.

And I was left pouring salt all over everything in the oven to quell the smoking. It now looks the Nevada Salt flats have just been hit by a giant asteroid.

And the house? Smelled like burnt coffee cake for hours.

Now… if you want my honest opinion, we farked the whole damned thing up from the start, and I should’ve vetoed the recipe the moment I realized you needed a bleeding pastry cutter, which is usually outside my culinary skillset, or at least read through the directions completely so I’d have a clue what was coming…. But I think the real problem lay in that the directions called for one 8×8 pan, and even all mixed up together wrong, I think it needed TWO 8×8 pans. I think A. filled it too full (I do recall her saying how heavy the pan was, several times, as she put it in the oven.), because after all, it said to only use one 8×8 pan, and we baked away. A, of course, insists she did not fill it too full, but you read the above examples of her denials, yes? Even if she didn’t fill it too full, clearly, it was too full (for whatever reason) by the time we yanked its scary ass from the oven. No denying that.

Well anyway, it could’ve been anything - measuring wrong, or whipping the batter up far too much, or adding the extra crumbs in instead of on top (but honestly, it all had to fit in the same pan anyway, right?), or being too full in the pan and needing two instead of the one it called for, or hell, it could’ve just been a terrible recipe. I don’t know.

But damn it all, I want to try again.

But maybe in A’s kitchen this time, eh?

There’s been lots of holes being put into things lately around here. Like this.

And this.

Yep, that’s the mystery stole - or chart A plus a few rows! Woohoo! It’s a lovely knit. This yarn is thinner than the Knitpicks Shadow I used last year, and I feel like I’m going to rip/hurt it with every stitch, but hopefully that feeling will fade the more I knit! The beading was difficult at first, but I’m getting the hang of how to do it without it being a huge hassle.

Here’s another hole.

That one’s in my garden. In the middle of what’s left of my rabbit-eaten lettuce, and… a bunch of weeds. Gophers are thick this year. Like flies. Seriously. For a while, you couldn’t get two feet down the highway for 60 miles without running into yet another dead one killed off by traffic. I wish something would get this bastard….

And here’s one last deliberate hole for you this week:

Weren’t expecting that, now, were you? Yes, it’s a bullet-hole - in the window at work, where some lunatic fired at A.’s head [she’s okay, wasn’t hurt at all, save a healthy, heart-pounding dose of mind-numbing terror] as she covered a shift for me.

Actually, said lunatic also fired shots at 8 other businesses (that we know of) in town, including my parents’ bar. Eight businesses, plus the freaking sheriff’s office. A. was the only real live witness or victim, though at my house, I heard shots being fired. A. handled being shot at like a champ, after the initial dive for cover on the floor, and did everything right, from locking the front door to crawling to the back office to use the phone were it was likely to be safer. Since, you know, our freaking desk is right there in front of the freaking WINDOW. Who knew working in a small town sheriff’s office could be so bloody dangerous?

Evidently, A. called up the deputy on duty, shaking, and in a very calm, subdued voice (if you knew A., you would’ve known right then that something was terribly wrong, because A. is not calm… or subdued… EVER) said that someone had shot at her (or at the windows, whatever). And our bright and shining hero asks: “With bullets?”

Way to win the Dumbass Question of the Year Award, pal! That said, he and our undersheriff spent all night looking for the guy and collecting evidence, and after daylight, all the reports of damage around town flooded in, and the Giant Rumor & Gossip Machine that fuels this town roared to life.

Wanna see some more?

Above is the window right by our desk in the dispatch center, where A. was sitting when she was shot at.

This window is on the other side of the counter - only a few feet to the east.

This is what happened to that second window.

Here’s a window at The Roadhouse Bar - which my parents own. The door was also shattered completely, but it was replaced within hours, so the damage isn’t visible in this photograph.

And here’s another window at the bar. I’d have taken pics of the other businesses, but I didn’t want to sneak all around town at 6am snapping photos like a bloody tourist, you know?

For anyone wondering… no, we didn’t have bulletproof glass, and yes, we are getting some, though the fucking moron county commissioners are still balking at getting bulletproof glass over the counter in our reception area. WHY? That’s where I’d be most concerned! We have psychos IN the office all the freaking time! Drive-by lunatics are rare! So it looks like I’m going to have to write up some sort of petition. I’m pretty sure most everyone in town will sign it. Clearly, the emergency dispatchers need to be safe, you know, in case of emergencies.

Anyway, we caught the guy within 48 hours. [Note: The media got everything wrong… There were 9 shots fired AT THE SHERIFF’S OFFICE ALONE - and more fired at all the other businesses, for example, and the windows at the bar were not shattered, just shot, and the doorw as shattered - there was no hole in it…] He’s in jail now. But we’re all still a bit jumpy down at the office. I mean, the windows are still all riddled with holes and shit. This is the first time any such thing has ever happend in our county. Deliberate attempted homicide just isn’t a common hobby around here. Of course, everyone’s saying, of the culprit: “Gosh, that’s just so out of character for him!” Don’t they always say things like that about psychos?

Now I’m off to make some more holes with my knitting, and maybe look into personal handgun prices. For protection.

Or more likely, that gods-be-damned gopher.