Ketchup. (you know..catch-up.. darn it, it's not even vaguely funny if I have to explain it..)

The first item of business relates to windshield wipers. In this post last week, I said that our windshield wipers were being repaired, and I requested that people guess how much it was going to cost. Well, this is why I don't do polls regularly--I have the attention span of gnat, and I promptly forgot to post with the correct answer. The repair of the windshield wipers costs six hundred dollars!!!! Six! Hundred! Dollars! For wipers! How insane is that? Now. Before you go and get all crazy logical on me here, I'd just like to say that no, $600 is not at all close to $50, even though I said as much to sweet_pickles. To be honest, I have no idea why I said that, and two separate real-life people were in utter disbelief about it, so I figure I broke some sort of Universal Code regarding how close something has to be before I'm ethically allowed to respond in the affirmative. ;) I don't know if this will make it sound better or worse, but honestly, when she said fifty clams, I thought of literal clams. It did not occur to me that clams is slang for dollars, and it also did not occur to me that you can actually buy clams in the seafood department and the automotive department will most certainly not take fifty of them in exchange for their work. Yes, yes, I'm an idiot, let's move on.

The second task for the day is to mention that said car is still in the bloody shop, where it seems it will be for the rest of my natural life. Or, well, no, it just feels that way. Presumably we can get it tomorrow. Maybe. I don't even want to go into the whole deal with the warranty company's refusal to believe that it's rather necessary to have the brakes in working order, and how they took five days to show up when they only had two days to get there (two of them were weekend days, but I'm not feeling particularly gracious towards them at the moment) and now there have been two and a half additional days since then, and they haven't received the digital pictures from the guy who went to inspect the car so there will be a delay until then. M finally called today to talk to the service people, and they've never seen anything quite like these circus freaks before. They did finally agree to just fix the darned thing without waiting on more input from them--it's going to have to be fixed whether or not they pay for it or we do, and some of us are trying to carry on with our lives here and not having a car kind of makes it difficult to do sometimes. Huh. Seems that I went into it after all.. imagine that.

Thirdly, I won a prize today. The more impressive thing about it was that I honestly knew before they drew the ticket out of the bucket that I had won. I looked at them holding up the prize and sighed, knowing that it was shortly to be mine, and sure enough, she read off my numbers exactly as I thought. I usually don't win stuff, but this is the second drawing I've won since I started working there. Unfortunately, my prize was just this poster, which isn't exactly the most exciting of offerings--hence the sigh of resignation. The woman who won the next prize got a $10 gift certificate. I hung it up behind my desk--I don't know if I really need to look at it all day long, but I've had several scheduled viewings of it already.

Fourth, and last, because I have to change clothes and go pick M up at work (see above about having only one vehicle.) if I don't get my butt in gear regarding Mosaic Minds, I'm going to have an awful lot of people angry with me. ;) I have a lot of stuff left to do, plus all the content for this time, but for some reason I feel pretty confident that I'll be able to get it done in time, possibly with help. Hopefully I won't need it, though. And I do have a few ideas on how to save time if it becomes necessary. Maybe I'll manage to work on that tonight.. I'm not feeling nearly as moody as I did last night so it might happen.