crazy work hours

Blog 11/10/06


Got out of work early last night so I got home at 3am instead of 7am. They were doing a shutdown for the weekend since for us workers, Friday (today) is the holiday instead of tomorrow which is the actual holiday.

I got to bed around 5am and here I am at 1:36pm. Looks like and awesome day out there. It certainly hasn’t felt like November over the past couple of days. I swear the temp has been in the sixties! Even when we walked out at 2:30 am last night it felt like it was 55 or higher. I’ll take it – makes for a cheaper heating bill.

Going to the casino later today. Because I left 4 hours early from work I need to make a $40 or $50 profit to off set the loss of income. Of course, I’d prefer a lot more. Instead, I’ll probably spend and lose the $100 I’m taking with me. But as long as I have fun it’s okay.

Had weird dreams. I know I had two. At the moment I’ve forgotten one. Part of the other one had me at my parents’ house. The wild turkeys came into the side lot where all the wood was. Then a ton load of animals started coming into the yard. I’m talking all sorts from Africa: zebras, bulls, giraffes, lions, and even a tiger. The tiger was trying to catch some other animal and eat it. Most of the animals were almost oblivious to this as if they were going – ‘hey, as long as it ain’t me’. Then the lions started harassing some animals but this huge giraffe chased them away. Then the lions started on a plains bull. But the bull started flopping around on the ground like a fish out of water. This one lion seemed dazed or something and the bull rolled over it for apparently a second time. Since the bull weighed like a ton, the lion staggered off deciding it had had enough.

I was heading up stairs and my brothers were there and the bull came into the house through the open front door. I had this huge metal flashlight like the cops have and started beating the bull on the nose while it was on the stairs. Then it started talking! It was like a smart animal from Narnia or something. It didn’t attack me back and it left.

I remember looking through my dad’s rifles trying to find a powerful gun to kill the lions since they were around the house. I was talking with my brother’s friend Dean about how to shoot the guns and which was the best. I don’t remember much after that so I must have woken up.

The first dream was kind of weird too. Unfortunately, I’ve pretty much forgotten it.

The Necropolis Chronicles Companion Guidebook is just about done. The colors are done unless I go back and play with some small details like hue and saturation. I need to drop in the logo and some title stuff and then it’s done. Then it’s burn a CD of the files and place the order with the printer and send in the copyright for that issue. Since my weekend’s kinda jammed up I suspect I’ll place the order on Monday since I’m not due back to work until Tuesday night.

Still fighting my addiction to IMVU. It’s just so neat seeing other people’s avatars. Some of their homepages suck though. Many people apparent feel that a homepage doesn’t look good unless it has SO many images on it that they cover up other images and even links. Sheesh.

I shouldn’t watch PBS’s Frontline tv show. It’s a sort of news show that has hour long subjects. It almost never fails to piss me off or get me worried. LOL! They tackle things like credit card companies, the cable and phone companies screwing over America, and the most recent show I saw was on 401k retirements. Turns out, the 401k was put into law about 1978 to help protect the income of CEOs in tax shelters. How typical. But someone found out the little guy could too. So the 401k which was suppose to be a supplement to a pension plan has essentially replaced pension plans. The jury is still sort of out in a way on the 401k. A lot of people aren’t making it with just social security and their 401k. Pretty much, the experts said a couple of things. One was you need to put away about 16% of your pay to a 401k. Not 6% or even 10%. You also want about 8 years worth of yearly wages in your 401k by the time you retire. So if you make $50,000 a year – you want at least $400,000 by the time you retire. Most employees that haven’t been in the 401k for a long time are getting kinda screwed. In fact, a lot retire just to find out that they have to go back to work at some sort of job just to make ends meet. So for a lot of people, even people making middle class incomes of $30,000 to $50,000 a year, retirement isn’t an option. And this is really sad about America.

It was also interesting to see how much companies and even the government is dropping retirement on the shoulders of the individual. This one 401k rep made an interesting comment to a CEO. He asked the CEO of a company if the CEO would trust the employee that serves him coffee to run the financial aspect of the company. When the CEO said essentially ‘are you kidding?’, the rep responded, ‘then why are you forcing him to forge his retirement on his own?’.

Another kickers is that pension plans usually work. Unfortunately, a lot, maybe most companies, don’t bother putting enough money into their pension plans which then gets the company in financial trouble because of the pension plan. So these companies dump their pension on the government crying poor. What happens is that someone like me partially bails out these companies with my tax dollars. For the pension plan members though they get a reduced pension maybe as much as having it slashed by a third or maybe even more.

I can’t help it. The more I hear about most big companies, the more I hate them. They have little to no interest in their people. It’s all about profits at almost any expense. Just ask any person that’s lost their job to cheap, virtually slave labor foreign markets.