You’re Awesome! [NOT 31/12/23]

31/12/23 brightersideoflife 22

Happy New Year’s Eve! May 2024 be less shitty than 2023!

It has been brought to my attention that we need to have a “Brag About Yourselves” post, so let’s end the year on a high note of hell fucking yeah we’re fucking awesome!

I’m bragging about how today I woke up for the second day in a row with no fever and feeling pretty damn good! Suck it, covid.

Also, feel free to make up cool shit about other people. Because why not!

avataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravatar

22 Comments

      • I just came back from a party at friends up the street, and they’ve seen that fox. They confirmed it walks around the street like it’s in charge, and in a some ways it probably is.

  5. All right, so as some of you may remember, I took a trip to Miami a couple of months ago. I went there to attend to the American Translators Association’s annual conference, and one of the main reasons for going to that was to knock out some CEUs for my medical interpreter recertification. To that end, I was more than successful, yeah: I have a bit more than four years to recertify (I’d just done it earlier this year), and I’m already halfway there.

    But another reason I went was to take another crack at the ATA’s certification exam for translators, and that I didn’t really feel like revealing to too many people if I could help it. For one thing, it costs a bit more than half a grand to take and has a passing rate of a bit less than 20%. I’d already seen both of those points for myself when I went for it a couple of years ago in Minneapolis and didn’t make the cut. Besides that, I took one last practice test during the summer (I’d already taken three, plus a course and a couple of seminars on how to pass the real thing) to gauge my readiness and ended up failing it for the first time since the very first one I took. I figured that if I had to slip my tail between my legs one more time, it’d be better not to have to remind myself each time I fielded someone else’s questions about the whole matter.

    (By the way, I almost didn’t go for it this time, either, because while I was nursing my shock over failing the practice test, the spaces for taking the exam sold out. But I happened to check one more time about a month before the testing date and saw that a spot had opened back up again – either because someone got cold feet and cancelled or decided to take the exam via the online module, which to me just seemed more trouble than it was worth – and went for it. I mean, I’d already changed my hotel reservation to start the day before, and made a $10 “free” change to my flight itinerary on Southwest, when the conference schedule went live and I realized that the exam sitting was before instead during the conference like it was in Minneapolis. Hey, what the hell else was I supposed to do with 24 extra hours in Miami? Go to the beach? Go clubbing? Like, speak Spanish with people. . . ?!?)

    Anyway, a couple of days before Christmas I happened to log into my profile on the ATA website to dig up an old webinar I’d downloaded for free earlier this year. (I still hadn’t heard back about the exam either way and wasn’t necessarily expecting to.) But before I got to it, I found a notice that my CEUs with ATA – which I’d never had before – were current until New Year’s Day 2027, along with a Seal of Certification that had a verifiable ID number. So, I went and verified it, and there I was, certified for Spanish-to-English. Not quite being satisfied with this, I looked myself up in the ATA directory and found my listing with the same certification highlighted. Then I looked up the latest edition of the ATA Chronicle, which had a listing of “New Certified Members” – and I was there, too! (That one’s password-protected, by the way, so you can’t check unless you’re a member.) And all of this was without having received the official notice in the mail.

    Anyway, after I inquired, the lovely certification program manager took time out of her holiday sabbatical to assure me that it wasn’t just a clerical error and that I was, in fact, ATA-certified. She also said that the notices were sent out after the first week of December, so mine must’ve gotten lost in the mail. I’ll write her tomorrow to confirm that my address hasn’t changed so that she can send it out again. But, yeah . . . this is a nice little feather in my cap, and I’m glad as hell that I don’t have to worry about it anymore.

     

  7. Here on the farm we stayed up all the way until midnight.  Now I’m heading off to bed.  2024 is already shaping up to be a good one.  I hope it is for you alls.

    • Glad you made it back. I hear Chicago is filled with all kinds of unsavory types from the Capone mob, and bluesmen from the Mississippi Delta looking to lure people like you in to a life of liquor and really good music.

      Now that I think about it, I need to get a ticket on the next train to Chicago.

      • Geraldo Rivera was telling me that Al Capone had a safe…never mind.

        To get from New York to Chicago you will want to take the Cardinal. Why it was called that I don’t know. In the heyday of train travel there was no such thing as a quiet car, there were bar cars, and you could smoke wherever you wanted. This was all within (my) living memory. What the hell happened to us? Although I did once take a first class Acela train, and there was table service, and I had a good meal and a couple of belts, and I think it was all included in the price of the ticket.

  8. I’m going to bury this here because you must be getting tired of these recaps, but:

    On last night’s thrilling episode of “Hawaii 5-0” a deranged sniper has holed up in an abandoned hilltop or mountaintop fortification. Who knows what it was supposed to have been? Something from WW2 probably. That’s good as far as it goes, but the real star is the Hawaiian Police Department (HPD) helicopter. I don’t think we’ve seen it before. First Danno takes it to get to the crime scene. There is a road at sea level, so how remote could it have been? Then Komo takes it to get the sniper’s psychiatrist, and Steve blows up at him for releasing from the mental institution, and he explains that there aren’t enough beds so they have to do a form of triage. And Steve yells, “You’re telling me that there are more dangerous people in your institution than a man, a Vietnam vet discharged for his unstable personality, who has already killed two police officers and gravely wounded a third…” Does this sound familiar? It does to this 21st century New Yorker.

    Then Steve goes up in the chopper to get a good look at the ly of the land, andfinally Chin Ho is dispatched to Maui to retrieve the sniper’s mother, in the hopes that she can talk him down, because, the psychiatrist tells them, when people snap like this and begin picking people off at random it’s usually men who have a Mommy fixation (!) Why? Where did that come from?

    But Mom wants nothing to do with this and refuses to believe that the deranged sniper is her son. We learn that she doesn’t really allow him to visit her and she never comes to Oahu because it’s a rat’s nest, or something like that. I guess because of Honolulu and urban problems and it’s 1970. Who knows.

    So we get to the climactic conclusion. Steve is wearing standard issue bomb-proof vest* but Danno is kitted out with the sexiest camo ever portrayed on TV.

    *This just reminded me that to flush out the sniper we see the HPD chopper again, this time dropping explosive tear gas canisters, and loads of police officers firing at will. It was like a scene from “Apocalypse Now.” I can’t imagine that happening in a domestic setting nowadays, especially to capture a lone gunman, but I suppose at the time people were seeing the Vietnam War being played out in front of them on the nightly news and figured, “Yeah, that seems about right.”

    I cannot love this series more. Obviously.

    • Oh, by the way, for dinner last night, I didn’t exactly make @hammerzeitgeist ‘s Marry Me Chicken but I came close. The biggest difference was I didn’t use the cherry tomatoes, because I don’t like them stewed, and I used my beloved Herbes de Provence rather than fuss with making my own seasoning. There was something else I did but, as @blue dogcollar put it, lingering brain fog has taken hold. Anyway, it was delish.

      And did I tell you what I make for desserts now? You go to an upscale supermarket with a decent bakery. You buy their huge, rich, gooey chocolate-chocolate chip muffins. When it’s time to roll out the dessert cart, you warm them up, cut them into bite-size pieces (you’ll create a lot of crumbs but that doesn’t matter) and then serve them with a vanilla/chocolate ice cream blend that the upmarket grocery store also sells. As you’re eating away the muffin crumbs will blend with the melting ice cream, which is scrumptious, truly scrumptious.

  9. i’m currently not hungover and still in possession of all of my digits and most of my hair and eyebrows!

    house isnt on fire either!

    good start to the year this

Leave a Reply