Rounded up the youngins and we broke bread at Amy's place last night. It was the first time I had been there in ages and omigod it was so worth it. I don't what kept me away for so long, but I won't make that mistake again. I had a business lunch on Friday that left my digestive tract in a state and thanks to Amy's Place, my insides are speaking to me once more. Chicken Kabob breakfast nearly put me in a state of afterglow.

My lovely middle child wants to see Star Trek bad enough, that she is even willing to come to the Imax expedition on Saturday and be seen in-wait for it-in my company. So, I snagged another ticket at Fandango's stupidly marked up prices.

So, I can't be doing all that badly.

Should I be a little concerned that a tv show hostess went through a lot of time and effort to make really sure that I got an autographed picture? Probably reading too much into that. It just seemed like an unusual gesture, but again, I'm thinking too hard.

Hey (e:paul) , if there are 100 estrip bumper stickers left over, I can utilize them for some grassroots promotion if you like. My office is having a small intimate gathering of 2400 people at the Zoo in July. 100 of those will be VIPs who get goodie bags along with their larger admission fee. We can put the stickers in if you are interested in promotion.

Not sure why this fascinates me so, but it does

The caller-id on tv from Time Warner can be a mixed blessing. I do most of my calling with my cell phone, but when the TW phone rang and displayed my older sister's number on Tuesday night, I couldn't help but cringe. Love her dearly, but she makes me nuts. It's a call I knew I had to deal with but I wasn't looking forward to it.

She is in epic streak of bad luck. She is in the graphic arts/printing industry in Manhattan. Her firm got sold and the new owners started running the business into the ground by bouncing her in late 07. The industry is both changing and rapidly deserting NYC. She hooked on with another firm for a while and booted around this time last year. Since she is by herself, that wasn't an immediate source of panic. This was before the economy took its current swan dive.

Unemployment and 401K draws later, so drastic steps have to be taken. She was busy holding out for the miracle offer and associating way too much with coming back to our parents house. It's for a few months and a chance to attack the job problem from another angle and a little more support, not to mention some relief from the pressure of looking for work around NYC while living in New York.

She had herself wrapped up that coming home meant the end, that she envisioned returning to Buffalo to take care of an ailing parent (which we don't have) or our disabled brother. He has a job and his own place. Somebody had to be an asshole and tell her to prioritize, that those past couple of sentences don't exist as issues, that our younger sister lives in Harlem and has all kinds of experiences in subletting, so she keeps the place, she had their place to stay for interviews as the economy improves and yields more chances. She just needs to accept the offers.

So, a little respect as I took one for the team. She got rolling today and enable my dad and younger sis to get the ball rolling with local storage of her stuff in NYC, getting going with a sublet, prioritizing what to bring to Buffalo for the summer, and more.

I'm still tired from the one man intervention, but if you need a short term sublet -- I know a 2 bed room in Chelsea that could be had for the summer for a comparitive steal.

Sometimes it pays to be the jerk.

I LOVE MY JOB

Rob is a commercial saturation diver for Global Divers in Louisiana. He performs underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs. Below is an E-mail he sent to his sister. She then sent it to radio station 103.2 FM in Ft. Wayne , Indiana , who was sponsoring a worst job experience contest. Needless to say, she won.

Hi Sue,

Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother. Last week I had a bad day at the office. I know you’ve been feeling down lately at work, so I thought I would share my dilemma with you to make you realize it’s not so bad after all.

Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with a few technicalities of my job. As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office. It’s a wet suit. This time of year the water is quite cool. So what we do to keep warm is this: We have a diesel powered industrial water heater. This $20,000 piece of equipment sucks the water out of the sea. It heats it to a delightful temperature.. It then pumps it down to the diver through a garden hose, which is taped to the air hose. Now this sounds like a darn good plan, and I’ve used it several times with no complaints. What I do, when I get to the bottom and start working, is take the hose and stuff it down the back of my wet suit. This floods my whole suit with warm water.. It’s like working in a Jacuzzi. Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my butt started to itch.

So, of course, I scratched it. This only made things worse. With in a few seconds my butt started to burn. Â I pulled the hose out from my back, but the damage was done. In agony I realized what had happened. The hot water machine had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my suit. Now, since I don’t have any hair on my back, the jellyfish couldn’t stick to it. However, the crack of my butt was not as fortunate. When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into the crack of my butt.

I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the communicator. His instructions were unclear due to the fact that he, along with five other divers, were all laughing hysterically.

Needless to say I aborted the dive. I was instructed to make three agonizing in-water decompression stops totaling thirty-five minutes before I could reach the surface to begin my chamber dry decompression. When I arrived at the surface, I was wearing nothing but my brass helmet. As I climbed out of the water, the medic, with tears of laughter running down his face, handed me a tube of cream and told me to rub it on my butt as soon as I got in the chamber. The cream put the fire out, but I couldn’t poop for two days because my butt was swollen shut.

So, next time you’re having a bad day at work, think about how much worse it would be if you had a jellyfish shoved up your butt.

Now repeat to yourself, ‘I love my job, I love my job, I love my job.’ Now whenever you have a bad day, ask yourself, is this a jellyfish bad day?