Excitement In da 'Hood!

Hmmm...apparently Blogger made good with their threat to switch over to their new format. For many of you, that happened long ago. But for me, I refuse to switch to a new format if the old one is working just fine. Unless they force it on me. We'll see if this is the final nail in my blogging coffin. When FB finally forces the new timeline on me, I might go offline altogether! (I suspect not, but I had to go for the dramatic!)

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Excitement in the 'hood last week! At about 10:00 PM, the fire alarm right outside my door went off. As all good alarms do, it made a very nasty racket, but even more so, since it was right by my door. I've learned over the years that when the alarm goes off, there's something wrong, and it's usually not a fire or smoke. So I do nothing. After about 5 minutes, it dawns on me that there's no one in the building who's going to turn the thing off. The couple who managed the building moved out two months ago. So I head outside to see if anyone else made it out there, and to wait for the fire department. After another five minutes, I call 911 because if the fire department was going to come, they'd have been there by now. Sure enough, they knew nothing about the alarm. Apparently, it's not hooked up to their system (wth???). But everyone had to leave the building while we waited.

It's only events like this where I actually see who my neighbors are. And dear Lord, when did this place become White Trash Central??? With the exception of the guy next door (who's about 50), I don't think there was another person above the age of 30 around. In fact, in most cases, if you added the ages of everyone living in an apartment (man, woman, 2 kids), their ages wouldn't combine to even meet mine. And I use the terms "man" and "woman" loosely. I hate to stereotype (oh hell, who am I kidding?), but there wasn't a single male that looked like he had a job higher than asst. mgr at McD's. I don't think any of the mothers had a job (too young), and probably hadn't finished high school. There were at least two sets of parents/kids who looked like they didn't actually pay rent here, as they both came out with two suitcases each and high-tailed it to their cars. I remember the old days, when there weren't more than two or three kids in the entire building. Now they're all over the place!

Anyhoo...the fire department finally shows, and asks where the fire was... Someone in the basement level had apparently burned dinner. So the firemen get the alarm turned off, and the little girl who burned dinner looked like she thought she was going to be arrested or something, and we all finally got to get back into our own places. Still wondering how long all this would have gone on if I hadn't called though...

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Finally had some bday beers with my high school buds. The three of us try to get together for each of our birthdays, drink beer, play keno, and catch up with each other. These are the same ladies I've posted about in the past.  And just like those times, I'm not the oldest of the three.  :-)

We sucked at keno, did well at the beer drinking, and pretty good with the catching up.  And I should probably note that both of them are squeezing my butt in this picture!

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While I hear that the Northeast might be getting all sorts of snow tonight, we get to look forward to temps in at least the mid-80s. It's about time!

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I had an interesting story about Rick Santorum to share, but now that he's out of the race, it seems irrelevant.

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Do you ever get sucked into the SyFy Channel when they start showing the ultra-low budget disaster movies? "Alien Tornado". "Stonehenge Apocalypse". "Space Twister". Ad nauseum... Movies that appear to be made by film students working on their senior project. Special effects that, 30 years ago, might have looked pretty good. And the actors are either low-budget disaster movie regulars or someone who used to have a career, but hasn't worked in a decade and needs rent money. Ultimately, some major landmark or building gets destroyed by a rogue asteroid or nasty gust of wind. Last week it was the Space Needle. In general, I like SyFy's programming. But do they have to use this crap as filler??

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I think this will be the last of my Pomplamoose video posts. If you've listened to/watched them, you know where to find the rest of them now. I am SO glad I found them! I leave you with a repost of my current favorite...