The answer is not much! Besides my everyday work I must get done, I have been spending time visiting different boards. This one of course, but also Most Haunted Fans and Tom Nevers Field. I have been trying to get Tom Nevers Field going because only 3 of us post there. It is a board for the fans of the show "Wings", but we talk about other stuff, too, in case anyone would like to drop by. My name there is AeroMess, like it was on the old TV Tome. Of course Most Haunted Fans is self explanatory: it is for fans of the UK show Most Haunted which airs in the US on the Travel Channel. I also have become hooked on a game called Aloha Solitaire, which is a cross between solitaire and mah jong. I downloaded and bought the full screen version for my birthday and have been playing it everyday! Something bad happened here on Halloween night. I heard a noise under the floor and one of my cats meowing under there, but I didn't really think much of it, until days later when I realized two of them had crawled up in between the insulation and floor and died. Believe me, this was really horrible and I can't imagine why it happened, but there wasn't really anything I could have done even if I had realized what was going on at the time. I have heard since then that poisoning of animals is going on in the neighborhood. One of my neighbors across the street found a dog that had died under her house and she said it didn't appear to have been hit by a car or injured in anyway, so she suspects poisoning. I don't know if that is what happened to my cats or not. But I am keeping a close eye on my other cat and of course my dog Sadie never gets out alone without being on her leash. And you know I think my next door neighbor might be the one responsible for this if it is happening. Several years ago, poisonings were going on. Some puppies from across the street were killed and some cats. The best cat I ever had, Tabitha, died at this time and I was so sad and missed her so much. So we called Animal Control out here and they took some of the bodies of the puppies and autopsied them. They discovered that the poison that had killed them was a chemical used on farms that could ONLY be obtained by farmers. My next door neighbor worked on a farm and I am reasonably sure he did it, but of course there was no proof. And even if we did find out the chemicals came from his house, he could have claimed the animals got into it accidentally. Another reason I suspect him is that he is practically the only person on the whole block who does not have pets of his own and doesn't seem to like animals. And they try to pretend they are so religious. His wife is an evangelist at a church downtown and they run half way houses and such in the area. You may not agree with me, but I think if someone is truly a godly person, then they would be kind to God's creatures and not do harm to even the least. Well I wrote much more about that sad situation than I intended to. Maybe I just needed to get it off my chest.

The last two days, I have been having so much trouble everytime I get on TV.com. I go on many different boards, but this is the only one that was doing this. As soon as I would open it, my hard drive light would start flashing constantly and the pages would take forever to open. Sometimes the whole page would black out except for a few rectangles. I wonder if it was because they were stealing information from my hard drive? Anyway, it is better today. I haven't been posting because it was just too frustrating waiting and waiting for the pages.

Reading about Purplepaws pets and Wolf's cat inspired me to write about my Sadie. She is more than just a pet to me, she is a friend. I first got her 2 years ago. She had belonged to someone who used her for breeding and sold her puppies. Chihuahua puppies can go for $250-$350. But then her "husband" fell into the pool while the owners were at work and like many animals, could not pull himself back out, so he drowned. His name was Sox. I think one of the people who owned Sadie had abused her, since when we got her she was terribly afraid of people's feet and also she has a place in her ribcage where a rib sticks out at a strange angle. Anyway, they gave her to me. She has the sweetest personality of any dog I have ever had. When I went to my parent's house last month for a couple of days, they couldn't get over the fact that she wags her tail almost constantly. She loves attention and to be petted and loved. One of the most important things in her life is food! She is always checking out the floor to see if someone has dropped anything. I call it "vacuuming". When she vacuums the floor, she gets little fuzzes in her nose and they make her snort. So that is one of her nicknames, "Snort". She has a little stuffed Taco Bell dog that we call "Grunt". When you throw him, she will run after him as fast as she can and come back carrying him in her mouth. Her little feet sound so funny beating on the carpet as she runs! She is very sensitive, and if there is any arguing going on, she will hide under her blanket. She is also very smart and I'm sure she understands a great percentage of what I say to her. She gives me her "wise" look, with her huge ears in a relaxed position. She hates to be cold and she hates to be hot! When it is the least bit cold, she shivers, and of course when it is hot, she pants. Then she gives you a "you're the human, why don't you do something about this" look. She is the world's best companion and would stay plastered to my side all day long if she could, but of course I sometimes have other things to do. I consider myself very lucky to have a sweet animal friend like Sadie.

Here is a list of some things I have always wanted to do, in no particular order. 1. Go to Hawaii. It is so beautiful that I have always wanted to go there, but for some reason I don't want to go as a tourist. There is just something about being a tourist that I don't like. Maybe someday I will meet someone who is from there and they can show me the real Hawaii. 2. Learn to ice skate. This is a strange ambition for someone who lives where I do, but we do have ice rinks here. I really think I will probably never do this, because I have an ankle I have torn up on two separate occasions and I'm not sure it could stand the strain. I like to watch figure skating on TV because it's so graceful. 3. Be in a movie. Even if it is just as an extra. This could happen as they do film movies in this area on occasion. 4. Become fluent in a foreign language. I know some words in Spanish and German, but could never carry on a conversation. Most of the Spanish I learned at work and they are food related words! I learned some German from a computer program, but didn't stick with it. 5. Become friends with a famous person. This will probably never happen, but it would be cool, wouldn't it? 6. Sing/Act in a stage production. Even a local one would be great. I have sang on stage many times, but I would really love to be in a Broadway type musical. 7. Grow another 5 inches (upward, not outward). Okay, we know this will never happen. 8. Get a really nice classic car and take it to car shows. Could happen someday, who knows? 9. Move away from where I live. I don't want to move out of AZ, but I would like to move to a better area. Maybe back where I came from. I hope this will happen someday. 10. Be in a position to help others. It's a wonderful thing to be able to do.

Weezie_Y commented that he would blog more often if he had something interesting to say, but I don't let that stop me, I just say whatever comes to mind. So here are some everyday things that I did today. I had three bananas that were kind of black, so I made banana bread out of them. I left it in the oven a few minutes too long, so it is slightly too brown, not burned, just toasty looking on top. I haven't eaten any of it yet. The reason I left it in too long was that I was watching an old movie from 1966 called Madame X on Turner Classic Movies. This was a pretty good movie and I would recommend it to those of you who are interested in classic movies. I watched another movie before this one, also on TCM, called How to Murder Your Wife. It was interesting, also. Movies from the mid '60s are great. I adore the fashions and hairstyles. I am going to make chicken enchiladas tonight. Everyone agrees that I make the best ones around! But I am going to cheat. I am not going to fry the tortillas in oil so that I can roll the enchiladas, I am just going to put the tortillas in the baking pan, put some filling over them and more tortillas on top. This saves times and also saves calories and fat, since you are not using the oil to fry the tortillas. I have a new pet, now. It is a cute little turtle! It is only about 2 inches long. I haven't really named it yet, but sometimes I call it Turtle Wax. I still have my chihuahua and my cats. I would really like to have a horse. I used to go riding once a week when I was a kid. But they are rather expensive. Well, that's about all the uninteresting things I have to say at this time. Maybe tomorrow I will have something better!

What should I write about today? Actually I haven't done anything interesting at all, but I want to keep blogging to raise my level faster! Who says they have to be interesting? Really they just have to be wordy! Well, I found a website for Mesa High School alumni, of which I am one, so I joined that. It cost $5 to get the premium membership, which is not at all bad considering the cost of Classmates.com and Reunion.com. And these are just people who graduated from MY high school! So when I looked at the names of members who were from my class (I won't tell what year it was, so don't ask!), there were only 5 and I only knew one of them. So I sent her a private message and she wrote me back and it was great because I had not seen her in a good many years! There were members of this site who had graduated in the 50's and 60's (not me, ha ha!) and there was even one who had graduated in 1920! Can you imagine how old this person must be? About 102 or 103, I would say. They are probably the only surviving member of their graduating class! Well, I am hoping more of my high school friends join the alumni site. It would be great to know what they are up to now. Well, how are all of my TV.com friends? Some of you don't blog very often, and call me nosy but I like to know what you are up to also!

That's what I did with my day today. I finally got rid of the big pile of tumbleweeds in my front yard that I mentioned in an earlier blog. They are even already burned for the most part. I also dug up a lot of other weeds and piled them in the back lot for burning at a later time. I just hope it doesn't rain now. Rain will just bring more weeds. I'm pretty tired. I'm not used to this kind of work because I avoid it whenever possible! I'd rather do housework any day!

I used to be the assistant manager of a particular restaurant. When I was first made the assistant, the manager was a woman who did some things I found rather unethical, such as stealing time etc. I won't go into all of that. Ultimately she ended up being terminated. I was left with the store, which I had long considered to be MINE! I had been there the longest and worked my way up the fastest and now the manager was gone and this was my store. I was the sole manager for 5 weeks after her termination. I kept the customer counts at or above what they had been during her tenure and my profits were at or above hers. I thought this store should have been given to ME! Because I thought of it as MINE and the employees were MINE! But do you think they gave it to me? No, they did not. Instead they gave it to the assistant manager of another one of their stores, a really young guy, we will call him J. I absolutely could not believe that they thought J. could be a better manager for this store than me. And I have not gotten over that in the 1 1/2 years that have gone by since I left. I will never get over it as long as I live. So, here he was and there I was, trying to get along with him, even though I was really, really angry at my bosses, the powers that be P. (supervisor) and B. (owner). We had problems right away because we both wanted Sunday off. I wanted it off to go to church; he wanted it off because he played soccer. And of course P. thought playing soccer was more important than going to church, so guess who got the Sundays off? There were other things, too. I had a close male relative working for me as a maintenance person. Actually P. had hired him herself. J. didn't like him, and antagonized him until he got angry and started yelling, then J. fired him. I almost quit that day. He did other stupid things like doing a half ways job cleaning the shake machine so that the scorched pieces that had developed during the heat cycle were down in the machine. We had a new flavor that day, so I was drawing samples for the employees. So one of my employees ended up with burned shake mix in her sample and it actually was a good thing I drew the samples or a customer might have ended up with this. I managed to stay in this ridiculous situation for 8 months. Around that time, we had an employee with a bad habit of No Call No Show (which was supposed to be an automatic termination) and being late. I had given her a written warning telling her the next time she was late, she would be terminated. So the day came when she was late again and when she finally did show up (it must have been at least an hour after she was scheduled) J. let her off the hook. So basically what he did was undermine my authority. Now any employee I wrote up would think they could just go to him and he would get them off the hook. This was the beginning of the end. We got a new computer system and the very week that we opened with it was the week they sent J. out of state to complete his manager's training. So I was stuck for a whole week alone with a system I was unfamiliar with and with employees who had barely been trained on it. By this time, J. didn't even want to speak to me, because I had given him a piece of my mind after the situation with the girl who was late all the time. BTW, I terminated her the week he was gone, because she did another no call no show. He already was telling the employees that another girl M. was their new boss, but of course my employees were loyal to me, because I always had their best interests at heart, so they didn't appreciate him doing this. One of them even told him that I was their only boss. At the end of this horrible week with the new system, I just couldn't take it anymore, so I gave my set of keys to "M." and left. I have only been back in this store twice in the past 1 1/2 years and one of those times was to get my last check. (At which time J. tried to get me to come back to work - as if). And now to the point. Today I was at Walmart and the girl who checked me out was one of my former employees who had quit right after I did. She asked me if I had heard what had happened to our Ex-boss. I said no. She told me that he had been pulled over driving drunk. He had no license and was now in jail. They had taken away his green card and he is to be deported back to Mexico. I know it is wrong, but I couldn't help feeling sort of happy. I don't really feel happy that something bad happened to him, but I feel happy that now B. and P. must surely know that he did NOT make a better manager than me. So he is gone, I don't know who is managing this store or the new one that was built in a nearby town. I don't really care. I just feel vindicated. I know this is really long and everything. It just made me feel better to write it down. I hope now I can get on with things and quit being angry about what happened, because a year and a half is a long time to be angry. I have often thought of confronting P. and asking her exactly what it was about my work that was so bad to make them give my store to him, but I never had the courage. There are a lot of parts to the whole story that I didn't write down here. If I did, you probably wouldn't believe them because they are so weird, they don't sound like they could happen in real life. Such as: The original manager who hired me was P's husband, he also was terminated. The female manager who promoted me to assistant was the lesbian lover of B's daughter. I told you it's just too weird to believe, but really I didn't make it up. If I could make up stuff like that, I would be a famous novelist!

Last night I opened an email from my brother-in-law. It was about a commercial that a car company had filmed and afterwards they noticed a white film that crossed in front of the car and then followed it down the road. The mail said that the commercial had never aired because of the unexplainable paranormal activity. It also said that there was a strange noise along with the appearance of the white mist, but you had to have your speakers on loud to hear it. So, since I have an interest in the paranormal, and since I believed my brother-in-law, I downloaded the commercial and proceeded to watch it. The film clip showed a car driving through a nice countryside and there was some nice peaceful music playing, and then, just when I was at the place the mist was supposed to appear and I was paying particular attention, this horrible face leaped into the screen, screaming! And of course I had my sound turned up loud as per the instructions in the email. Let me tell you, I just about knocked the chair over, trying to get away from my computer screen and the horrible entity that was in it! So much for trusting an in-law!

Every year on Halloween, we watch the movie "I've Been Waiting For You". Do you celebrate Halloween (some Christian Home Schoolers I have met think it is evil) and if you do celebrate it, what do you do? Trick or Treat? Stay home and pass out candy? Go to a party? Throw a party? Turn out all the lights and pretend you aren't home? What? We put up decorations. Does anyone else do that? But we don't carve pumpkins, we have fake ones.