Aren't you a little short to be a stormtrooper...

I like kids. Really. And I definitely do not condone the trafficking of kids to provide circus midgets for the enjoyment of the uninformed. Have a great picture Tuesday and don't forget to watch your kids.

L-O-Y-A-L-T-Y

So I got an informal offer to work for Macaroni Grill this past week. The restaurant is located in a nicer part of town and I would be put on a fast track to become a bartender. They also have a different philosophy concerning how best to care for the guests, a philosophy that I like better than Chili's. It's a pretty amazing offer, and I probably won't be taking it.

My choice has less to do with the fact that I will only be serving for another two and a half months and has more to do with loyalty. I don't know much about being a manager, but I know that I have been blessed with some amazing bosses. They have taken such good care of me as an employee, working with my schedule, treating me fairly and being very gracious and forgiving when I make mistakes. They make the work environment fun and have taken the time to get to know me and my wife and to make sure we feel special whenever we visit the restaurant.

Their kindness has transformed me from an employee into a LOYAL employee. That one little adjective makes all the difference. Because of that loyalty I am going to stick with them, knowing that I am treated well and I am important to them, rather than going to another job which may pay more but may or may not take care of me as well. That one little adjective means that I will go the extra mile when they ask me because I know that they will take care of me when I need that extra day off. That one little adjective means that I'm going to work just a little bit harder, even when no one is watching.

That one little adjective means that I'm going to be sticking around for a while.

98 cents for a limited time only

Yay for picture Tuesday!

A whole lot of not much

So I signed up for Google's AdSense thingy. You may have noticed the ads on the bottom of the page. I figured they would be a little more inconspicuous there and not too much in the way. I'm just not quite sure if I like it yet. We'll see, they are on probation and I can get rid of them whenever.

Tomorrow I'm going to go to the Arizona Science Museum and check out the Body Worlds exhibit. If you haven't read about it in the papers or heard about it yet, it's a pretty cool thing that these people have done. Dead human bodies are dissected and preserved and then posed to show different activities like playing soccer or praying. According to their website, the idea of the exhibit is to help people understand more about their own bodies by showing them in real life situations that they can relate to. I'm pretty excited to be going, and I will have a full run down on the exhibit on Wednesday.

Sometimes you just have to face the music

So I just took a "How much of a nerd are you?" test. It was a pretty fun little test and if you click on the nerd score above, you can see for yourself. I heard about the test from my father-in-law, who is a self proclaimed nerd. I scored higher than he did. This is not good news to me.

On to other news, I promised to keep up the food analogies for the inside of the human body which I'm disecting for class. Today's two analogies are corn and chicken. These are two good foods that most people I know seem to enjoy. I'm going to do my best to ruin them for you. As the disection has progressed up the leg, the fat globules have grown larger. Now they resemble large, squishy yellow corn kernels. Yummy. While digging down below the skin, I stumbled upon the muscle layer in the arm. It definitely looks a lot like chicken. 'Nuff said.

As I look at my post, I can see that maybe my fascination with the internal working of the human body may contribute to my nerdiness. Oh well. At least I don't wear glasses... oh...never mind.

I think this means my keyboard is an unassembled book

Today Picture Tuesday returns. Next week, Picture Tuesday will again be on Tuesday. This is a fairly simple system and it should help me keep things under control here at the Base of Operations. Have a great rest of the day, and hopefully I will be back tomorrow.

A little like peeling an orange...

This blog should have been called "Broken Record." I know, I know, I promise to blog and then I don't. I'm sorry. Sometimes life happens. I think I may have set my sights too high for the beginning of the semester. So here's my new "commitment", and I do use that word very lightly, I'm going to do my best to post every Monday for sure. Also, I should be able to post on most Tuesdays. And that's it. The other three weekdays are up in the air for now. Sorry. They may happen, they may not.

I do however have some exciting news that should cheer up even the most glum of you dedicated few. I started skinning my first person today. I am in a human dissection class this semester at school and I have to say, it was the coolest thing I have ever done. Not to compare it to spending time with Jamie, but it was just like when we go out on a date - time flew by without me even noticing it!

There are six of us to a body and my group got a very old female who has very thin skin. I have been assigned the task of working on the upper right side, so I have the right arm and chest. It is a crazy feeling making that first cut into the skin, but once you do, there's no turning back and you just have to keep going. I got a pretty good chunk of the forearm done today. It's going to take a lot of time, but I have all semester.

For those of you who are wondering, it feels a lot like peeling an orange with a really sharp knife. If you were to try and remove just the peel using a knife and forceps (pinchers) that's the general idea of what I'm doing. There are plenty of other food analogies (like how the subcutaneous layer looks a lot like string cheese and the fat globules under the skin look like little yellow, jello balls...) but I don't want to ruin all food for you. If you keep reading, I may post some more about all this stuff and I'll try to keep the food analogies going.

Hopefully, there'll be more tomorrow.