A day of w00tness is declared!

Kirsten and I have now been married for nineteen years.

Considering we got engaged after our second date, I don't think we're doing too shabby here at Offhand Manor.

Happy Anniversary, Boo Kitten!

Forklift neepery.

There's a ad campaign aimed at getting people to quit smoking. It shows people doing things that they used do while smoking, but without a cigarette they are comically inept. By the end of the commercial, they are starting to get back in the groove. A good message, and i applaud anything that helps people quit smoking.

But... this commercial features a forklift operator working at what appears to be a garden supply place. He can't control the lift, pushes a pallet of pots off a rack instead of lifting them, etc. At the end, he gingerly puts a pallet with a single ceramic sheep onto a truck bed successfully while the voice-over talks about being able to this without cigarettes means being able to do anything without them.

The problem is this voice over happens as the driver is driving the forklift away from the camera. With the forks raised to chest level. This is a disaster waiting to happen. You always drive a lift with the forks as low a possible. You can kill people with those forks at 5mph.

Just one of those little things. But it should be a lesson to me and all my fiction-writing friends: if you're writing about something that's in real life, or could be related to a real life activity, do your research.

So, how was my day?

In a moment of supreme irony, I had to cover the East Bay route because Victor is out. He's getting multiple teeth pulled so he can get dentures. I loathe the EB route. I spent a good hour at a massive site in Fremont doing three deliveries and one return.

Ah, the return.

This site is a factory under construction for a big solar power company. It's been rocking for months, and the company involved is a heavy-construction company that has been there from the beginning. They also have a bad habit of grossly over-ordering and then at the end of a job returning tons of crap. Today, it was my turn to take back their overages. To make everything fit, they had stacked the pallets and wrapped them.

Alas, they stacked one extremely heavy pallet on top of a lightly loaded pallet (yes, these people build buildings. Tremble in fear.) The results?

( Not quite an Earth-shattering kaboom, but close. )

Each of those boxes weigh 40 lbs. And there were about fifty of them. As you can see, the collapsing pallet fell across a bundle of Unistrut and all-tread that I still had to deliver. Which meant that I had to pull all those boxes out and re-stack them on an empty pallet. Did I mention that all these boxes had been stored out in the open for our long, wet winter? 40-pound, wet, moldy boxes.

The best part? When I got back in and unloaded, Adam looked at some of the stuff they had loaded me with and stated that he didn't think we even sold those items. Great. They're dumping their garbage on us.

I ended up doing eleven hours.