One too many cheap margaritas

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Originally uploaded by audreahuff.

My best girlfriend and I went out for free chips, salsa, sangria and margaritas earlier this month at a free local street festival called Alive After Five (Doesn't that sound like some sort of AA event?). Anyway, we had fun catching up, ac-TING! (said like Jon Lovitz's SNL character/Subway's "Eat FRESH!" campaign) like goofballs and going back and forth on who is the bigger hypochondriac. We swear we were being stalked by a mariachi band...

Sign of the apocalypse: One in a series

I didn't know until now that not only are there no self-serve gas stations in New Jersey and Oregon, you can't pump your own gas. (I've even driven in Oregon and don't remember that; perhaps I didn't stop for gas there on that trip.) And now a proposal by New Jersey's governor to allow some self-service stations along the state's turnpike as an experiment to see whether gas prices would fall has met with so much resistance, he's backed off. The reactions from some citizens:

It's a rainy morning at the Thomas A. Edison Service Area on the New Jersey Turnpike. Lines of idling cars and trucks stretch through a Sunoco station. But for Ardis De Los Santos, there's at least one thing to smile about - she doesn't have to pump her own gas.

She used to live in New York, where she had no choice. But a move across the Hudson River to Englewood, N.J., freed her from the hassle. She likes it that way. "It's not my cup of tea," she says of filling her tank. "It's the smell."

. . .

Critics of a shift to self-service say pumping their own gas would be especially hard on the elderly, could create a safety hazard as inexperienced motorists try to fill their tanks and cost many station attendants their jobs while doing nothing to lower prices.

. . .

One morning this week, the price for regular at the Sunoco Station at the Thomas A. Edison Service Area, was $2.87 a gallon. Even so, Amanda Darian, 18, didn't think it would be worth pumping her own gas, even if it saved her 5 cents a gallon.

"A nickel? Nah," says Darian, a student at Monmouth University in West Long Branch.

Even though she's going to have to work more this summer to pay her gas tab, she says, "I just don't want to get out" of the car. She has been to other states, and when it came time to fill up, "I didn't even know how."

Louis Rivera, 29, an attendant who has worked at the Sunoco station for three years, says self-service could put "a lot of people ... out of jobs."

"Even some men don't want to get that smell on their clothes," says Angela Fields.

I can understand the concern that many people would be out of work. But first of all, the proposal was a test, at just a few stations along one road. Certainly the economic impact of a few stations losing a part of their staffs would have been negligible. (One angle the story did not address was what station owners think about the possible cost savings in labor.)

Others said the experiment might pose a safety hazard for inexperienced motorists. But if teenage novice drivers in the other 48 states can read a "flammable" sign and operate a pump, "inexperienced motorists" certainly can. And how many of those inexperienced motorists have never operated a gas pump outside of New Jersey? Likely very, very few.

But "it's the smell," and "just don't want to get out of the car"? I suspect this was the actual reason most people opposed the proposal. They may as well have said, "I just got my nails done." Those excuses certainly say a lot about this country. The story above also pointed out that a proposal to raise the state's sales tax by a penny received just a fraction of the response this proposal received. Heck, the student in the above story said she'd prefer to pay 5 cents more per gallon to have someone else hold the pump handle for her. Woe is us.

Wiki this

I'd never thought to look up Orlando, Florida's entry in Wikipedia, but I just happened to stumble upon it tonight while searching for something else. Wow. It's quite comprehensive. And kind of like Googling yourself and finding a page about you. It also got me to thinking whether someone I know had contributed to it. I know at least a couple of history buffs who have contributed to or built Web pages on Central Florida Americana. The Wiki entry, which is very current, has links to one of my current employers, two past employers (OK, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who grew up here who didn't work for The Mouse House at some point in their lives), the college I went to and my high school. Fascinating.

Catching up

OK.

So here's what's been going on.

I've gotten my first wage-earning job as a massage therapist. I was fortunate enough to know someone who knew someone at an orthopedic surgeon's office across town called Florida Center for Orthopaedics. (I'll refrain from linking to it and let you find it in another browser window, because I don't want the site administrator -- whom I'm guessing is the tall, skinny, young techie who I see walking around the clinic bored all the time -- to stumble upon this page by reading the referring URLs log.)

I'm in a little room near the physical therapy department, of which I'm a staff member. I've been there for slightly more than a month, and I love it so far. PIP insurance often covers prescription massage therapy, so most of the patients sent to me are "MVAs" (motor vehicle accident victims) who have whiplash, headaches, some sort of back pathology or a combo of those. A couple are "self-pays," people who are paying out-of-pocket for a regular massage.

The doctor's office doesn't have that many massage clients (yet, I'm told), so I'm only needed twice a week for now -- which is fine, because I'm still working about twice a week at my Old Job. And between those four days of work, we're doing just fine financially. As someone with a short-attention span and who's quickly bored and dissatisfied by repetitive tasks, I've really enjoyed the variety between the two jobs.

The plan is to gradually decrease my time at the Old Job as business at the doctor's office picks up. I've been assured by my boss, the manager of PT (physical therapy; there must be more medical acronyms tossed around than in a military barracks), that it would, but I'm satisfied with the pace for now. I've learned a lot in a short amount of time, I'm getting more confident with my hands, and sports medicine and ortho is the branch of PT/massage I think I'd like to get into.

The other bit of big news is that I bought a sculling single. It's used, and it's been around the block -- er, lake -- oh, about 10,000 times, but I bought it for dirt cheap from the rowing club of which I'm a member. (Ick -- I see I'm front and center in the big honkin' photo that pops up on the main page. The blond woman on my right with the sunglasses on her head is my aformentioned double sculls partner.)

The boat (I'll call it the Red Racer for now; hope the name doesn't stick) has been with the club for longer than I have and has been extensively used and abused, and after the club recently purchased four brand-new singles, I figured the Red Racer would never see water again. But more importantly, an old sculling coach once told me that despite its age and condition, he thought the Red Racer was the fastest scull the club owned.

So those two reasons were enough to convince me to sink my tax refund into buying the Red Racer, a set of sculling oars and repairs. The pictures of the boat are actually those I took for the boat's manufacturer, where I've had it sent for refurbishing and repairs. As a result, I only got to row it once after I bought it before it was shipped away to Canada (which, incidentally, was a sizeable chunk of the repair cost). Hopefully, I'll get it back before the summer, with a new paint job (what color should I have them paint it?), riggers, rudder and finish!

Speaking of short-attention spans, I think I've reached the end of mine. More to come soon.

World tour

One of my favorite sites to read on a lazy Sunday afternoon: BBC News' From Our Own Correspondent

Congratulations...

... are in order for my "little bro," MAP, who just recently got engaged. I love you and miss you, and I can't wait for the big day!

My life so far

I still owe you a long post detailing what's been going on for the past 6 weeks or so. I'm going to have to block off some time for that, so I can't do it right away. I hope to have something up by the end of this weekend.

Age/old

Someone told me today he thought I was 24 years old.

I didn't know whether to be flattered or offended. If I were between 26 and 30, that probably would have been flattering. But I'm 34, which makes me wonder whether I don't act or dress my age. I have no desire to be one of those 55-year-old leather-skinned women who still wears miniskirts and parties with her daughter and her daughter's friends.

Hey there

Huff Stuff's blog has a new home. Tune in here from now on. I'll keep the old blog around as an archive, but I'll be posting here from now on. This is just easier to manage, and hopefully I'll no longer get blog spam.