This week’s prompt at Skittle’s Heads or Tails is “Any Tom, Dick or Harry”.  I have to say, it’s an unusual topic…probably one of the most unusual thus far.

Nonetheless, the topic is slightly easy for me.  My grandfather’s name was Harry.  And so, today, I will share all that I know about him.  Fortunately for all you readers, I know…well, not much about the man who fathered my own father.  Actually, I’m using this as kind of a challenge to see how much information I managed to gleam from my Dad and my Aunts and other family members.

• Harry was born in Scotland.  Not much is known about his family as he was an orphan.
• He came over to NYC when he was still a child.  I believe I was able to find his name in the registry at Ellis Island, though, it’s not 100% confirmed.
• Although his name was Harry, he was better known as Scotty due to his heavy Scottish accent.
• He settled down in Brooklyn and met and married a Russian girl.  Together they had three children.  Two daughters, then much later down the line…a son.
• Harry’s wife died during a surgery not long after the birth of their son.  He sent his son to be raised by his wife’s mother and other family members while he married off his two daughters (quite successfully).
• According to my father, he worked at the docks and had connection to the Italian Mob.  My father has a memory of his father bringing him to a party in which the mob was in attendance.  Despite the connection however, no one in the family suffered from problems with the law, nor mob.
• He passed away when his only son was still a teenager.  If he was still alive today he would be a grandfather to 13 grandchildren, numerous great grandkids and a few great great grandkids.

My laptop, once again, decided to stop working.  It was working perfectly fine yesterday afternoon before I left for work, but now…something is up with it.

It seems as though perhaps Windows is not working properly; as the computer will make it to Windows…but then once it gets there…that’s it, I can’t do anything else with it.  My internet connection does not show up.  I can’t seem to get my AIM sign in screen to exit out-it’s frozen there on the screen.  When I try to go to start, in order to power down properly it either does not come up at all or comes up very slowly and I can’t seem to get anything to work properly on it.

This is just total bullshit.  I paid good money for that laptop, and ever since I got it, I’ve only received grief.  I can’t even begin counting the amount of hours I have spent on the phone with customer support TRYING to get this laptop working…and each fucking time it’s only a matter of months before there’s yet another problem with it.

I need sleep.  I know I should have gone straight to bed, instead of try checking my email and stuff…but no, I wanted to check some stuff…only to find the stupid laptop malfunctioning again.

Guess when I get up I will be calling technical support.  I guarantee that they will be getting an earful.  Considering it’s still under warranty, I’m considering demanding them to send me a whole different laptop as this one has NEVER been right.  There has always been some kind of problem with it.

Thanks to everyone who offered assistance for my resume.  I am grateful to each and everyone of you.  Unfortunately I am working another double shift today after finishing up my normal Sunday double so I won’t be around until sometime tomorrow…probably late as I will be catching up to sleep after my shift if over.

Definitely was not my intention to work another double in a row, but no one wanted to work today, no one wanted to pick up their phone when I was trying to find coverage and now I will get to have Friday and Saturday off (I had requested Saturday off as I’m hopefully going to NYC that day-if the weather cooperates).

I already know it’s going to be a very long day today, especially as the shift I’m covering….I’ll end up doing everything (and no, I’m not exaggerating) as the supervisor I’m working with tends to think that her fancy supervisor title means that she’s exempt from the majority of work that actually needs attending too.  Instead she sits in the office pretending to be doing paperwork all shift…which honestly is b.s.   I’m only putting up with it today because I REALLY want most of the weekend off so I can have a little fun.

Image from Flickr

Last night after I finished blogging I finally found the motivation to begin tackling my resume.  It’s really rough and not quite finished but at least I finally was able to throw some stuff up on the computer.

Now, I have to ask for a favor…kind of a big one.

See, I bought a few books on resumes as I was (and well, still am) pretty clueless on the process.  While they were helpful in some regards they were geared more towards people working in tradition businesses.  There just weren’t any examples for someone who’s worked in the social service field like I have and so I had nothing to really compare it to.  The closest example was for a recent college graduate, but honestly, my college career wasn’t much to write home about.  I did well grade wise but as I went to a liberal arts school my classes were kind of all over the place.  I didn’t have a chance to join clubs since I was a commuter student and the meeting times were usually on days I didn’t have classes thus, I would usually be working.

The point of all this is…I’m desperate for a set of fresh eyes and a fresh perspective to possibly look over what I have and give me a bit of advice.  My family is even more clueless in regards to resumes as I am so asking them would be pretty much pointless.

So if anyone out there might be able to assist me I would GREATLY APPRECIATE it.  I really hate asking for favors like this, so the fact that I’m sitting here, typing this says quite a bit of the desperation I’m feeling.

• My insomnia is back.  Then, last night when I was actually sleeping pretty well it started thundering which woke me from my slumber.
• It’s raining and miserable and cold outside.
• I’ve spent too much money this week between buying gifts for people and buying books for myself.
• I have to work tonight and I’m tired (which I’m hoping to remedy by napping after I finish this).
• I bought a Mother’s Day card for my Mother and didn’t look at it properly until I got home and now I’m not sure I want to give it to her.  But I REALLY don’t want to or have the time to go back to the mall to exchange it.
• I’ve been feeling kind of anti social this week and I can’t put my finger on why.  So instead I’ve been locking myself in my room and reading and playing on the computer.
• Did I mention that I have NO motivation to go to work tonight?
• I’ve gone from cautiously optimistic to cynically pessimistic in about a week.

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I used to have an old high school friend.  Over the years we knew each other, we had this unofficial on and off relationship.  Our friendship ventured into our adulthood and the on again seemed to be more frequent than the off again.  Marriage talk was thrown about-though, nothing for the immediate future.  More along the lines of if we were both single at X age, perhaps that’s a sign that we should finally get serious.  Despite the fact that we never made anything official, I had strong feelings for him.

Then he devastated me by announcing his engagement to a girl he had only just met.  A few months before the wedding we ended our friendship quite suddenly and have not spoken to each other sense.

It’s been several years but evidently I’m not quite-accepting of the way things went.  The other night I found myself in the middle of a very vivid dream about my former friend.  A mutual friend called me one day to inform me that our friend was having marital problems and it seemed as though a divorce was in the midst.  I called the former friend, with the intentions of offering my condolences and to once again offer my friendship.

We made plans to get together.  Our meeting didn’t go quite as expected and instead of a friendly conversation at a restaurant we found ourselves along together (if you catch my drift).  We both knew it was wrong, as my friend was still married.

I’m not sure what to make of the dream.  Normally I’m not one to read into my dreams and they normally fade away within a few hours, but this one has stuck with me very vividly for days.  I thought about contacting one of our old mutual friends, to see if there was any validity to my dream regarding his marriage, but I felt weird about it.  Aside from feeling weird, the dream goes against the morals I have for myself.

Guess it’s just one more thing to ponder.

This week’s topic at the Heads or Tails meme is “Mother”.  Considering this Sunday is Mother’s Day in the United States (and possibly some other countries), it’s a very apt subject.

I could probably write a book about my own mother and our relationship.  Unfortunately, due to the nasty tetanus shot I aquired recently, my arm is quite sore (much worse than my face actually), so in order to keep the pain level down a bit, I will instead post a video.

“Mother Mother” by Tracy Bonham

Image via Wikipedia

Pretty soon I’m going to start racking up frequent flyer miles at the local ER.   In the past six weeks I have taken two trips there-which as far as I’m concerned is two too many.

The first time I was not the patient.  I was with one of the kids at work, who turned out to be one really sick child (who is doing much better, btw, he truly is a fighter).  For the second visit however, I was the patient.

The only word to describe work this past weekend would be hell.  We had a full house (five kids) and while normally our staffing census per shift would be adequate enough to deal with the amount of kids-it just wasn’t the case this time around.  At the shift change, you could just feel the frustration and stress from the leaving staff.  I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that not a single smile was flashed, nor a laugh was uttered.  It was that sort of bad.

I went into work for my Sunday double shift.  I knew that it would be a bad day even before I showed up, but nonetheless, I was in a pretty good mood.  The end of the work week was in sight and I knew that the craziness would most likely end soon.  I was trying to be optomistic.  That lasted…oh, about half  of one shift.

Not long before bedtime one of the kids began acting up…I, very stupidly attempted to calm him down.  For my trouble  I found myself getting hit in the face, full force, by the kids knee.  Needless to say, it hurt like hell and the only thing I could do was rush into the kitchen to grab an ice pack and have a good cry.

I had gotten hit in the side of the nose and the eye area.  My nose wasn’t bleeding or anything so I didn’t think I broke anything but as the area started swelling up pretty quickly I decided (with the supervisor’s prompting) I should go to the hospital to get it checked out, have X-Rays taken…etc.  Being that the injury was close to my eye I didn’t want to drive home and so I called home to see if someone could come pick me up and about twenty minutes later my mother showed up, fresh out of work (at the hospital nonetheless) and after a quick examination of my face agreed that I should go to the ER to be on the safe side.

A few hours of sitting in the waiting room, I was finally called to the back.  I laid on a bed for another long while as insurance information and paperwork was filled out and signed.  Finally, at long last a doctor showed up.  He determined that I needed a tetanus shot as there was a small abrasion and ordered X-Rays.  The X-Rays were taken and once I returned back to the bed a nurse came in to give me the needle (which truly was the worse part of the entire ordeal).  The X-Rays came back negative so I was finally allowed to leave.  By the time I got home and settled down enough to sleep it was 3am.  I slept until about 10:30am and have spent a good portion of the day on the phone or waiting for phone calls setting up a follow up doctor’s appointment and getting information from my job about workman’s comp.

My nose hurts a bit, but Advil seems to be helping to alleviate the worst of it.  My arm is a little sore from the tetanus shot but not nearly as bad as I was expecting.  More than anything I’m just bored and restless from not having much to do until work tonight (yes, I’m torturing myself by going back to work right away) and being too tired to do much of anything.

Hopefully the guy from work calls me back soon with the info that I need so that I can go take a bit of a nap.

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I was not raised in a conventional “Christian” family. My mother was raised in one Church, and my father considered himself another-yet-wasn’t what you would consider an active part of the Church. When my parents married, and began a family they made the decision to raise their family in the Church of my father’s choosing-the Catholic Church. I can’t help but wonder whether that particular Church was chosen because of any strong feelings on my father’s part, or if it was mostly a decision of convenience as the church was less than two blocks from our home.

For the first nine years or so of my life my religious education was almost completely non existent. I had attended church a few times-my parents did make an attempt on several occasions to begin going and a few times I would tag along with my cousin (my best friend at the time) and her family. But on a regular basis, God’s presence wasn’t exactly felt in our household. At least to me. Eventually I started a formal religious education, but alas, I never took to it. I would go to the religion classes or Church and attempt to make some type of connection between myself and the big Guy upstairs…and it just never happened.

As I got older, I felt myself drifting even further away from Church. I kind of believed in God, or at least a Higher Being but as far as religion or the Catholic Church went…forget it. I didn’t believe all of what I was taught, when I went to Church…it was the same thing week after week, to the point where the “ceremony” lost all meaning. It felt as though I was participating in some over done theatrical act; and not a very good one at that. The interest or connection just was not there…then, to make matters work-the sex scandals started coming to light. That was pretty much it. I felt myself disgusted by the stories and upset that the Church that I was taught to put my trust in faith in could harm people in that way. I didn’t completely stop going to Church, I would attend with my family in order to appease my parents but once there I would just go through the motions with no thought to what I was doing.

Today I don’t consider myself religious. I don’t attend church or even follow a particular religion nor creed. I believe that there is a Higher Being, and I know that my relationship with that Being could be better-but I feel no need to ascribe to a certain Church in order to make a connection. I have morals which I uphold. I enjoy learning about other’s religions and I will freely discuss or debate my own beliefs. I do not enjoy having someone attempt to “sell” me their religion, but I understand why they do it. I know that there are people who honestly do not believe that a person can be content with not having religion in their lives…that’s fine. Religion, Faith and Belief are personal matters and I truly feel that everyone is entitled to their own personal opinions.

Social networking websites-such as Myspace, Facebook and Twitter are steadily gaining popularity.  It seems that everyone nowadays uses some type of social networking service to keep in touch with friends, family and even making business connections.  For most, social networking websites are a lot of fun and convenient.   It’s nice to be able to log onto a website and instantly connect to a wide range of people, and for those who might not get a chance to meet a lot of people in their daily life, social networking websites are a fairly easy way to meet new people to befriend, whether they live in your own back yard, or thousands of miles away.

Like so many things however, social networking sites do have some negative issues surrounding them.   When you sign up to use a social networking site, you are possibly opening yourself up to vulnerabilities.  Those vulnerabilities can be in the form of malicious codes and viruses that may infect your computer and they can also come in the form of other users.  We have all heard the horror stories of pedophiles using websites like MySpace to lure little kids into harms way-however, pedophiles only make up a tiny little percentage of “bad guys” you or your children might encounter.  Instead, there is a greater chance of encountering an individual or group who use the anonymous nature of the world wide web to well, behave badly.  Cyberbullying and cyberharrassment are increasingly becoming a threat to both children and adults alike.  One of the most monumental cases of cyber bullying is the story of Megan Meier, a teenage girl who committed suicide after falling victim to a cruel hoax.

Before a person is allowed to begin using a social networking website, he or she is required to read and agree to a Terms of Service (a TOS).  An example of the Twitter’s TOS agreement can be found here.  One of the TOS states: “You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users.” This rule is not just in place on Twitter, it is in place for any type of social website, whether it be Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, or even a message board.  It’s a good rule to have; however, it will only work if it’s enforced.

Recently a fellow blogger and founder of eMailOurMilitary.com was subjected to harassment while using Twitter.  She summed up the situation on her blog by the following:

“To make a long story short, someone sought me out on twitter and made it their mission to post harassing, abusive and libelous statements about me and my company. I’m all about freedom of speech. I’m all for discussion, discourse and debate but when someone creates 20 or so accounts for the sole purpose of stalking me or posting libelous statements about my company that’s where I draw the line.”

Being a conscientious and savvy web user, she immediately blocked the harasser and his various Twitter accounts and contacted Twitters administration about the breach of TOS.  Instead of Twitter taking action and investigating the matter, they informed her that she should block him and protect her posts.  Instead of protecting her and holding to the TOS agreements, it seemed as it they blamed HER for getting harassed and complaining about it-kind of like blaming a rape victim for getting raped because she was wearing a short skirt.

Like any other business, Twitter offers a service to consumers.  As with any business, they have a responsibility to their consumers to make sure that they are safe-not only from viruses and trojans, but also from those individuals who believe that the world wide web gives them free rein to make other people’s lives difficult.