The Great Navel Ring. There have been a few requests for better pics of it. Kent was kind enough to take this one.

I've had a somewhat strange day, with nothing really going wrong, but all sorts of things going not really right. Not enough to kill my good mood, but enough to tweak me back into slight touch with reality.

Started out this morning when I overslept. (Note: When I say "morning" I'm referring to that period of time just after waking. Most people think that 9-11:59pm is evening, but if it's right after I wake up, then it's my morning.) Oh, I set my alarm clocks properly, and there was no power outage. But my boss had asked me to come in early to do the count***, so I had to leave for work (and of course wake up and get ready for work) an hour earlier. And apparantly my body didn't want to exist on just four hours of sleep (instead of the five I usually give it per night during my work week) and so I kept slapping the snooze alarms without really waking. Somewhere in there my body decided it was ready to wake up, so I looked at the clock, and said, "[expletive deleted]!!" The clock said 10:36, and I knew I had to be out the door by 11:15 to be there on time. Somehow I managed to shower, do my hair (with full hair-goo treatment), apply face-spackle ... er ... makeup, iron the skirt of the suit I'd planned on wearing, and even get dressed in 34 minutes. (It was cold outside; I couldn't skip that last one.) I skipped coffee and breakfast (Aiieee!! No coffee!), grabbed a Nutragrain bar, and dashed out the door.

So, I was doing good on time at that point, and even knew that I'd have enough time to stop and get gas. I was fairly sure I could make it to work on what was in my tank, but I don't care to test the gods too much. However, I was still peering at my gas gauge and deciding whether or not to stop, when my truck started making an Odd Noise. Not too terribly ominous, but it sounded awfully like the sound that a car I used to own made when it was very low on oil. And I know my truck has a slow oil leak, so I figured, fine, I'll go ahead and stop for gas and while it's pumping I'll throw another quart in.

Couldn't get the hood open. It's always been somewhat ornery, and most of the time it ends up being a two-person job--one person to pull up on the little lever inside the cab of the truck, and one person to release the catch on the hood and lift it. But most of the time I've been able to get it to open with just a minute or so of fiddling. But this time it wouldn't budge. I banged on the hood. I called it filthy names. I went back and forth between the stupid lever (which is broken, by the way--actually I had to pull on the wire that is normally attached to the lever) and the front of my car, struggling with the damn catch. Minutes ticked by. I was afraid to get on the interstate in the middle of the night in a truck that was possibly low on oil.

And then for no reason I could figure out, it opened. I shoved the oil into the truck's maw, grabbed my receipt from the pump, (Thank the gods for pay-at-the-pump!) and skedaddled.

Work was no more surreal than usual (which isn't saying much) and one of the good things about going in early is that you get to leave early as well. So I made it home by about 9am, walked in the door, dropped my attache and my purse and flipped on the living room light.

POW. I heard a lightbulb-going-bye-bye noise and the three bulbs in my overhead ceiling fan/light fixture went out. (There are actually supposed to be four bulbs, but a couple of weeks ago one of the bulbs burned out rather dramatically, and when I went to change it, the base of the bulb remained in the fixture ... and I've been too occupied/chicken to try to remove it.)

So, silly me is thinking that it's weird for all three bulbs to fry at once, but I looked at the fixture, and could see a broken filament in one of the bulbs. Okay, I shrugged, I'll change them. I walked into the kitchen, got new bulbs, changed them out (except for the one that had the broken end in it), and then flipped on the switch.

Nothing. Hmmm. I went on pulled on the switch cord at the fixture, thinking that maybe I'd turned it off there accidentally. Nothing. So, I gathered up the three used bulbs, walked into the kitchen, threw them into the trash can ... and then noticed that the kitchen light was out too. And I always leave that light on, night and day.

Gee, Diana (you dork!) maybe a circuit breaker makes more sense than all the lightbulbs in this section of the house frying at once? Of course the next step was to find the circuit breaker box. Finally found it outside, flipped the breaker that looked like it needed flipping, went back inside, and was relieved to see that my lights were now on. I then retrieved the lightbulbs from the trash (although one actually was burned out, which was what had thrown me off in the first place.) Oh, but the cool thing was that before I flipped the breaker, I took a pair of pliers and finally got the broken bulb-portion out of the fixture, so now I have four working lights again!

Oh, and putting oil in my truck made no difference in The Noise as far as i could tell, but I made it to work and back just fine, so who knows. Maybe it's just some valve flapping around or something. (Diana demonstrates her total lack of knowledge of internal-combustion engines with that last statement.)

***The Count. No, "doing the count" is not sex with foreign nobility. About an hour before every shift change in table games in the casino (i.e. three times every day) all of the cheques (chips) have to be counted on the tables so that the Pit Bosses can do their paperwork, tally up the numbers, estimate how much cash has been dropped (spent) by players in the pit during the shift, and figure out if the pit won or lost and by how much. At this time the lock-boxes on the tables that hold the cash are changed out and replaced with empties, and the ones with cash in them are then taken downstairs to the secured room (Soft Count--so called because they count the "soft" money, i.e. bills, as opposed to coins) where the money will later be counted.

So my job (or the job of whoever does the count) is to get the key from the office for the lock-box in the vault, get a security guard (who calls on the radio to surveillance to notify them that we're signing out the A5 key) and then go to the vault, give them the key which they then use to open a box which contains other keys, then sign the new set of keys out in the appropriate binder, retrieve both sets of keys from the person in the vault, then get a second security guard who then produces yet another key (another call to surveillance to let them know we're entering Soft Count) and we then use a key on the set that I just signed out and the key that the security guard has to open the door of the Soft Count room to retrieve the rolling cage that contains the empty drop boxes that will go on the tables upstairs. Sign in and out on the sheet in Soft Count, then exit the room, lock the door (call surveillance to tell them that Soft Count is locked and secure) then follow the guards to the elevator where they put the cage on the elevator. I go up the stairs and wait for it to arrive. Once it arrives and they've pulled it off, I use another key on my Ring 'O Keys, and unlock the cage of empty boxes. The guards then take the boxes and put them by the appropriate table (each box is labeled with a table designation/number) and I go and make sure that the previous shift's Pit Bosses have filled out the paperwork for games that are closed. At 1AM I go to Pit One. The Swing Shift Pit Boss and I go to each and every table in the pit, where I call out the count of each denomination of cheques on the game and write it on a triplicate-form slip after the other Boss has verified my count. We then add it all up for a grand total on the game, and once we agree, we both sign the slip, I tear off the top two copies, the dealer drops the white copy in the drop box, the guard unlocks the box from the table, puts the new box in, the dealer drops the yellow copy in the new box, I save the pink copy, and we proceed to the next table.

Lather Rinse Repeat for every table. When all the table have been counted, the boxes with the money in them are loaded onto the rolling cage, then taken downstairs to Soft Count. (By the way, there are lots and lots of calls to surveillance throughout this whole thing, but if I included them all here this thing would be 20 pages long.) Same procedure of signing keys back in, and locking doors, and then I'm done.

Side note: The elevators are not big enough to hold the cage and a person, so the cages are loaded onto the elevator, and then one of the guards runs to the next floor on the stairs (which are fortunately right beside the elevator) to push the button. And since there are only three floors that the elevator will go to, it's not that big of a deal. But once, a couple of years back, we finished the count, loaded the cage onto the elevator, went downstairs, pushed the button, waited for the elevator doors to open... and when they opened, all we saw was an empty elevator. No cage. The security guard had a total ditzy moment and suggested letting the doors close and open again, to see if the cage showed up. I just kept looking at the empty elevator and thinking that it was like a bad David Copperfield trick and I'd just made a Big Whopping Pile of money disappear. Frantic call to surveillance. "Uh, we've lost the cage."

Turns out the elevator had gone up instead of down, and some slot workers on the next floor, instead of allowing the cage to go back down, had thought it was one of theirs and had pulled it off the elevator. We eventually got the cage to its proper destination, but it was a weird few minutes.